Unless you have a genuine interest outside your actual scope of work you can be very proficient in a narrow way like how to write SQL or write a GUI app or a back-end web service without having a clue about much of anything else. These are the people who just want to collect a paycheck and go home, nothing wrong with that really until they need to find new employment and it turns out it's pretty hard to find another position where the glove fits.
All that really matters is if you're capable of the job you're hired for, if you can be a great Oracle DBA that's better than 95%+ of the other applicants. If you know anything outside that scope it's just bonus. There are a few multi-talents around that know next to everything, but they're rare and usually doing something important or what nobody else can. Just be aware of where their knowledge end and use them well at what they're good at and have someone else review their code for what they're not.
Makes it sound like what determines a version bump is somewhat arbitrary, are kernels just too complex for them to fit into a simple versioning convention?
More like the other way around, Linux doesn't ever make changes that break userspace so the first version number is pretty much set in stone, it should be 2.60 or so now really. I don't get it though, the only thing he's encouraging is to just code majorVersion >= 2 and if he ever does decide to break a userspace API everything will break. But since he hasn't done so in the last 19 years (2.0 was in 1996) I guess he figured that just won't be necessary, ever.
Sun was trying to sell hardware, I guess we all know how well that went. My guess is you said exactly the same before Oracle bought them. And you don't want to compete with Intel on economics of scale when the vast volume of x86 servers would never migrate to sparc, it'd be like a swimming contest wearing a lead vest. Oracle has quite rightly assumed that if they want to sell sparc hardware they have to create the market by making it the most cost efficient way to run Oracle the database. For anything else they're just measuring you up to consider what it'll cost to migrate all your code away from sparc and charge you just enough that you won't.
My guess is that if you were one of the 7000 customers considering a custom sparc server that Oracle server would have god-tier support and installed and configured exactly to Oracle's specifications anyway, perhaps even by Oracle experts and it's probably also not the kind of system where you try to fix it yourself before you call support. For anyone that's been played the vendor game having Oracle control the whole stack from hardware to OS to software means you have one company responsible to fix it and fix it ASAP and they can just tune it however they want without caring about the general case. Whether it's sustainable over the long run we'll see, but "semicustom" hardware seems to be a growing trend as we can't just throw more cores with more gigahertz at the general case like we used to.
Back in May 2011 I bought a LG 60LD550, 60" 1080p LCD for about $1050 + VAT. It was on clearance sale because it had no 3D, no "smart" functionality, it was only a dumb 2D screen and that was uncool. Even now in 2015 the cheapest 60" 1080p LCD is LG 60LB561V for about $840 + VAT, that's 20% down in over 3.5 years. I still can't get a similar 65" TV for the same money.
Taking a panel, putting in a cheap box and selling it cheap is a low margin business. I have an uncle of mine who bought into that whole "smart" thing, they sold him a slightly smaller TV for almost twice the price. When you look at Apple TV, Chromecast etc. you realize they added $100 of smarts and sold it for $1000 extra. If I was a for-profit company hell yeah I'd push smart TVs. And lately UHD has been all the hype I have a 28" UHD monitor and I really don't see the point in a 60" TV, I'd minimum have to upgrade to 75" for that to make sense but that's $3500 + VAT for a Samsung UE75HU7505. Maybe when BluRay 4K is established and getting high bitrate native UHD is easy, Netflix is selling hype with UHD streams at less than BluRay bitrates.
You're both right because you're talking about two different things. Investments have return on investment, consumption has utility. If I'm thirsty a bottle of water is very valuable but two bottles are only marginally more useful, even if they cost the same. Obviously the pool consists of the people who bought tickets minus cost and profit so the expected return is negative and as an investment it's terrible.
As a consumable, one lottery ticket lets you dream of winning the lottery - hope is a powerful thing, you can talk compound interest and balanced portfolio all you want but only the lottery gives you the chance of instantly getting $175 million. And the adrenaline rush during the drawing if your numbers come up. You don't get much ROI from a bungee jump either, but you do it for the experience. Buying a second ticket on the other hand doesn't add any utility and it's still a bad investment, but for some reason people do it anyway.
No, rent is a liability with no possible return on what you put in. Renting is for suckers and I wish that I had bought over a decade ago instead of renting all that time. I finally got into the property market and the assessed value of my condo has increased in just 6 months.
Well of course there's no possible return because you don't make any investment, but that's kinda the point. You "rent" money at the bank, use it to buy property and hope your house increases in value faster than the down payment and interest. In some places property prices have gone insane giving huge profits, but there's a ratio of income to house price to make rent which means it won't go on forever. My parents' house approximately 5x doubled in 30 years - accounting for inflation it 2x doubled for a 2.5% annual real increase while undergoing basically no major upgrades except a new roof cover.
Could it beat inflation to do it again? Extremey unlikely as since it's 200% the real value of the 1970s it's also already 200% as expensive to buy, unless people earn more they can't pay that much more and if wages go up, inflation goes up and beating inflation becomes that much harder. I wouldn't buy more property than I need to live in to rent out, it's just that owning has its own perks. Interest rates are so low here now I've actually started investing instead of down paying my loan, if I can make 3% ROI I'm earning money.
I'm pretty sure I'm being trolled here... and he used a nick instead of his real name, foiled again. Now that you do mention it, it would be useful... what's your name and address again?
What you're trying very hard to ignore is that in the last 20 years of using Windows I've never used their support, not even after I got a legit license. Sure, I download their patches and service packs but they're code and you can't hide code. You could try hiding the documentation, but in practice I doubt that'd work either. I have filed and tracked some bugs on Linux and it's tedious, you get asked to help more than you really care about the bug. I sure as heck isn't a fan of paying on top of it. It's not like I do a lot of mission critical stuff on my PC, really.
On COTS software they care about sales, if they fix a bug for you they can probably add 0.01% to their sales which still works out if you sell a million copies. With OSS software you need your support to be a profit center and I know what skilled people cost, if you give me an outsourced support monkey with broken English and a script I sure won't use it. For $100 bucks you'll get a legit copy of Windows, that's like 15 hours at US minimum wage. Consider the time to understand the problem, track it down, fix it and get signoff from QA, multiply with the hourly rate of a decent developer/tester, add taxes, profit, overhead, downtime, duds they can't fix and you'll probably get one simple function call added to Linux for that price.
If you go to RHEL and look under Desktops the cheapest non "self-service" support option they have is a $300/year workstation license. It's probably a reasonable cost to have people solve your problem for you, but it's far outside what any ordinary home user will pay for an OS in total, much less a year's worth of support. Most people feel they've worked for you when they've written a bug report, like you should be paying me for my time. Trying to profit from that is like trying to squeeze blood from a rock. Unless that workstation is making you big bucks of course, in which case you might feel it was totally worth it but that's the exception, not the rule.
People pay for anti-virus so they don't get viruses, not to clean up afterwards. I think it's reasonably fair to ask them to help fund development so they don't need to call support. It just happens to be invisible effort, maybe they should do something to visualize that... like an ad with a user just using the project with cutscenes to bugfixes/enhancements with "here it didn't crash" and "here it didn't throw an error" and "here that function didn't exist" pointing out how your money goes to "nothing" happening.
If those are your only two complaints, I fail to see the problem. As long as they rank them correctly within the genre and you can apply your own mind to realize whether you'd like that genre or not isn't it simple and great? I mean Schindler's List is a great movie but if you're looking for a romantic comedy you're way off target, likewise I won't suddenly play Portal instead of Skyrim because one got 0.1 higher score than the other.
The greater problem is all the reviews that are basically bought PR where the reviewers got their tounge so far up the publisher's backside and making all sorts of bizarre excuses for things that aren't working but will surely be fixed before release in return for exclusive access or photos or interviews and whatnot. If I could trust them to be even moderately honest I would but these days I always wait until I see the user response first, which can be quite different.
Remember the primary concern when these laws were proposed. As soon as criminals discover a way to maliciously activate the kill switch on a non-stolen phone, there will be serious fallout. Imagine the ransomware.
You can really only threaten to do it, otherwise I'd wrap it in the nearest tinfoil and hook it up to my computer over USB to back it up. If they've already bricked it that sucks but they've also lost their leverage for blackmail. Also there's no telling if they actually can and the situation doesn't really change if you hand money over, so they need to make examples and scare people in rounds. That means there's plenty time to find out how the fuck they're doing it and close the loophole, if they start just mass bricking phones they don't make money. And once you have a signature on it you can block it at the network level or push an emergency patch or whatever, it'll be nasty but I don't see the big profit. The I'd rather bet on the people who just had all their not backed up vacation photos locked down by encryption, would you like to pay for a decryption key?
In an open society, the only solution to protecting oneself against mass surveillance is to permit anyone who has been surveilled by the system to enter the system, on demand, and ask when , why, for how long, and for reasons one has been surveilled.
And what will that give you? We're watching everyone, all the time, looking for terrorists or such. That's the whole point of this bulk surveillance program, they don't need to target it. They don't need an excuse for why they're looking at you. They aren't particularly looking at you. What do you want, every query they've run on the data to check for any suspicious pattern that's hit you? Everybody's probably given some kind of risk score.
The real question is when are they going to put a RC gun turret on top of it. No, I don't think they'll give it fire control but they can use it to flank the enemy, take vantage points or whatever and if it gets shot, well it's a robot.
I guess you don't know that "Plain Text" is just a subset of binary - one that happens to have a generic class of applications that know how to interpret it (Text editors).
Which is why FTP clients have a "Text" and "Binary" transfer method, sorry this brain fart dates back to the 70s if not further. Data is either analog or digital, digital data is either text or binary implying you can meaningfully edit it in a text editor. The results are not always sane as a Word/OpenOffice file is "binary", an XML file is "text" but that's the de facto jargon in computers.
That is the problem that human language is very ambiguous and context-sensitive, which is the whole reason we invented programming languages instead of trying to express it in English. Either you limit yourself to a set of simple unambiguous commands or you try to parse what we're really trying to say, which is like giving the computer the business requirements document and tell it to program itself. Fortunately for our job security that "valley" won't be crossed any time soon, people imagine it'll be like Star Trek computers who happen to know exactly what we're looking for and provide the essential answers to advance the plot. I guess we're making advances on answering trivia questions and adding appointments to the calendar, but it's not exactly ready to hold a conversation.
Uh, you do realize that if you launch a magnet link the first thing it'll do is download the torrent and connect to any trackers listed in it to find more peers, unless you've really gone out of your way to disable it you still use them. Not to mention that DHT broadcasts it out loud to everybody....
If the IS was trying to keep this a secret it'd be all over the news as exposing their atrocities. When they announce them loud and clear with fanfare we must hide them, because they're propaganda. I'm not sure if they're fucking crazy or brilliant, well scratch that as they're definitively crazy but their PR strategy is now a win if you do and win if you don't. I mean on the one hand I'd really like the rest of the world to realize that these wackos would far exceed Hitler in cruelty and genocide if given the opportunity, on the other hand hell yeah you'll be scaring people and that's the purpose of terror. I'm torn but I think most people have a mental barrier thinking humans can't possibly be this evil, despite all accounts to the contrary and that sadly we might have to smash that barrier of innocence to deal with this threat with the seriousness it deserves. I suspect the people under IS rule are going to find out one way or the other anyway.
I glossed over a lot of details there but the basic point was just to say you can't sell what you don't have or what the market won't buy. In certain cases you don't want to dump product into the market as it'd destroy the margin on your sales and in some cases you don't want short term profit at the cost of long term market share, sometimes you have committed costs and there's all kinds of collusion and game theory to deal with. I was just pointing out that dictating prices doesn't imply you can dictate production with the stroke of a pen. I'm not sure I buy your logic though, you claim pork prices will drop yet that pork is too expensive? You're contradicting yourself. Shortages always brings gouging.
The fundamental idea of socialism was that the state would nationalize and own the means of production like factories so the workers got a fair share of the profits, at least that's the theory. Despite having a large public sector the vast majority is still on private hands and if anything the government is increasingly purchasing services from the private industry rather than provide them itself. For example most the public transportation around here? Contracts with private suppliers. The public garbage collection? Contracts with private suppliers. Building public roads? Contracts with private suppliers.
Yes, there's is a much stronger redistribution strategy in Europe in that we tax the rich and give universal services to the poor, but the way we've implemented it is nothing like Karl Marx imagined. Instead of taking over the economy we've built a welfare state with collective bargaining based on the market economy setting the trend and public sector wages following. It's definitively got its issues, but I feel they're usually far more social in form of a nanny state than economical.
I'm not entirely against showing these type of images or media, but I am absolutely of the mind that the publisher must censor the individual's identification
And how would you meaningfully do that, when every other media is publishing the same story naming the pilot being burned alive? Add 2+2. For example I saw the video of the execution - murder is too kind a word - of Ahmed Merabet, how could you not end up knowing who he is? While I sure you mean well, I think you're asking for something that isn't practically possible.
You (paraphrased): Abolishing slavery infringes on my freedom to keep slaves
The GPL is designed to restrain you from restraining others, you get certain rights and you can't pass on any less. You're right it does make reciprocity ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you") a legal requirement, not voluntary. You want others to be nice to you, but the freedom to be a dick to them. But those people generally don't stay on my Christmas gift list for long. But hey, if it works... I mean GPL projects are free to use BSD code as well, unless you're on a crusade against proprietary software having more code everyone can use is a good thing.
How many failed capitalist experiments are we going to be subjected to before corporations are no longer people, and the fruits of labor are distributed much more equitably here in the US?
The problem is that you always end up trying to compare apples to oranges, how important is an engineer compared to a doctor compared to a plumber? What does job performance mean? Or is it just work is work, it all pays the same? That's one way to make sure nobody wants the hard jobs or to work hard. Same goes for services, what's more important my healthcare plan, your kid's education or my dad's pension? Nobody has an objective standard of fairness and trying to assign value by committee will fail as a thousand special interests tries to drag it this way and that.
Another important factor is that assigned values can't deal with fluctuations in supply and demand, if there's a shortage of pork and an excess of beef prices will adjust to even it out, you can't just demand it keep a certain price by fiat unless you want empty shelves. Which is not to say that the paycheck is the biggest where it's most "deserved" or "useful", but the capitalist system does a pretty good job at directing talent to the well-paying jobs and distributing non-essential scarce resources.
You could do a lot within the capitalist system just providing special tax benefits to the groups you want to support. But chances are you'd have to take them in taxes from somebody else. It wouldn't really work any better or different if you take away the money, somebody would be grabbing compensation from one group and giving it to another saying here, you deserve it more. And then ones who just got deprived would scream bloody murder. It's not hard to find faults with the market economy, but it's not hard to find faults with the plan economy either. In other words, explain a better system that'd actually work in the real world with selfish people who want to game the system.
If I do my math right, in Switzerland the suicide rate is 14 in 100k * 7.8mio people = 1100/year. According to the statistics (PDF) from Dignitas they assist ~10 Swiss nationals/year. What does this mean? That 99% of suicides are unassisted - or at least without official assistance. Almost everybody could find a way to kill themselves. It could be messy, it could be painful, it could fail - one of the people in Terry Pratchet's "Choosing to die" had two failed suicide attempts behind him. The worst are those who end up endangering and causing psychological trauma for others by for example head-on collision with a big truck. These are not your "spur of the moment" suicides, those people are already dead.
You can refuse to get intravenous feeding and slowly and painfully starve to death. You can not get a concoction of drugs to quickly and painlessly end it. How is that merciful? Nobody would blame the gun shop if they sold you a gun you used to blow your own brains out. I realize why you would want "death pills" administered only in controllled conditions though, but then the flip side is you know what it's going to be used for. I understand that's an ethical problem to some even though they don't "pull the trigger", metaphorically speaking.
It's more my life than anybody else's. It's not for you to say if I want to live or not, of course you can advice and suggest but ultimately it is my decision. But then there I'm at odds with many other rules of society that seek to overrule my own opinion and say no, you can't do that for your own good. I poison my body with alcohol on a regular basis, nobody can objectively say it's good for my health. Not to mention addictive, though I'm hardly in the danger zone for alcoholism but of course all alcoholics started out drinking. And it lowers inhibitions for better and worse, I've never been closer to a criminal record than while drunk. Those are all risks I choose to accept. But with a lot of other drugs I'm overruled. If I want to die the healthcare system will overrule me, no I don't. I absolutely hate it when someone claims to know me better than myself.
A 170 euro/$190 phone is cheaper than a flagship, but certainly not third world phone. For that you have manufacturers taking the cheapest SoC they can find, slapping the AOSP on it (free!) and selling it at cutthroat margins.
If H.G. Wells was the granddaddy then Jules Verne was the great-granddaddy. And it seems like Leonardo da Vinci did a lot of speculation on what the future might bring even though he wasn't an author, and so did probably many others. I would think it had a lot more to do with practical matters like literacy and the economics of writing, printing and distributing books than the lack of things to write about. It might have been totally off like the predictions of flying cars, but people has always liked to imagine.
You also have to understand the "compression" of history, what they see evolving over decades with a lot of detail and incremental advances is probably a short summary for us, imagine what they'll say about the late 20th century and computers in a few hundred years. "The earliest Turing-complete digital computer was the ENIAC finished in 1946. During the last half of the 20th century this evolved from huge machines spanning entire halls to small personal computers and wearable devices. During the same time the Internet was built, linking computers from all over the world." That's roughly the level of detail you can expect.
By "people like this", I hope you mean the adrenaline crazed goons who slime their pants kicking in doors looking for someone to shoot.
If I was looking for an allegedly armed killer facing life without parole or possibly the death sentence with nothing to lose I'd be pretty trigger happy too. Yes, certain professions have an increased risk of dying but nobody really wants to sacrifice their life over something so trivial as a job. It's easy to call it "shoot first, ask questions later" when you're not the one at risk of getting shot. I'm guessing it won't be that long until you send in the SWAT drones instead of the SWAT team, operated by remote control/telepresence.
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Unless you have a genuine interest outside your actual scope of work you can be very proficient in a narrow way like how to write SQL or write a GUI app or a back-end web service without having a clue about much of anything else. These are the people who just want to collect a paycheck and go home, nothing wrong with that really until they need to find new employment and it turns out it's pretty hard to find another position where the glove fits.
All that really matters is if you're capable of the job you're hired for, if you can be a great Oracle DBA that's better than 95%+ of the other applicants. If you know anything outside that scope it's just bonus. There are a few multi-talents around that know next to everything, but they're rare and usually doing something important or what nobody else can. Just be aware of where their knowledge end and use them well at what they're good at and have someone else review their code for what they're not.
Makes it sound like what determines a version bump is somewhat arbitrary, are kernels just too complex for them to fit into a simple versioning convention?
More like the other way around, Linux doesn't ever make changes that break userspace so the first version number is pretty much set in stone, it should be 2.60 or so now really. I don't get it though, the only thing he's encouraging is to just code majorVersion >= 2 and if he ever does decide to break a userspace API everything will break. But since he hasn't done so in the last 19 years (2.0 was in 1996) I guess he figured that just won't be necessary, ever.
Sun was trying to sell hardware, I guess we all know how well that went. My guess is you said exactly the same before Oracle bought them. And you don't want to compete with Intel on economics of scale when the vast volume of x86 servers would never migrate to sparc, it'd be like a swimming contest wearing a lead vest. Oracle has quite rightly assumed that if they want to sell sparc hardware they have to create the market by making it the most cost efficient way to run Oracle the database. For anything else they're just measuring you up to consider what it'll cost to migrate all your code away from sparc and charge you just enough that you won't.
My guess is that if you were one of the 7000 customers considering a custom sparc server that Oracle server would have god-tier support and installed and configured exactly to Oracle's specifications anyway, perhaps even by Oracle experts and it's probably also not the kind of system where you try to fix it yourself before you call support. For anyone that's been played the vendor game having Oracle control the whole stack from hardware to OS to software means you have one company responsible to fix it and fix it ASAP and they can just tune it however they want without caring about the general case. Whether it's sustainable over the long run we'll see, but "semicustom" hardware seems to be a growing trend as we can't just throw more cores with more gigahertz at the general case like we used to.
Back in May 2011 I bought a LG 60LD550, 60" 1080p LCD for about $1050 + VAT. It was on clearance sale because it had no 3D, no "smart" functionality, it was only a dumb 2D screen and that was uncool. Even now in 2015 the cheapest 60" 1080p LCD is LG 60LB561V for about $840 + VAT, that's 20% down in over 3.5 years. I still can't get a similar 65" TV for the same money.
Taking a panel, putting in a cheap box and selling it cheap is a low margin business. I have an uncle of mine who bought into that whole "smart" thing, they sold him a slightly smaller TV for almost twice the price. When you look at Apple TV, Chromecast etc. you realize they added $100 of smarts and sold it for $1000 extra. If I was a for-profit company hell yeah I'd push smart TVs. And lately UHD has been all the hype I have a 28" UHD monitor and I really don't see the point in a 60" TV, I'd minimum have to upgrade to 75" for that to make sense but that's $3500 + VAT for a Samsung UE75HU7505. Maybe when BluRay 4K is established and getting high bitrate native UHD is easy, Netflix is selling hype with UHD streams at less than BluRay bitrates.
You're both right because you're talking about two different things. Investments have return on investment, consumption has utility. If I'm thirsty a bottle of water is very valuable but two bottles are only marginally more useful, even if they cost the same. Obviously the pool consists of the people who bought tickets minus cost and profit so the expected return is negative and as an investment it's terrible.
As a consumable, one lottery ticket lets you dream of winning the lottery - hope is a powerful thing, you can talk compound interest and balanced portfolio all you want but only the lottery gives you the chance of instantly getting $175 million. And the adrenaline rush during the drawing if your numbers come up. You don't get much ROI from a bungee jump either, but you do it for the experience. Buying a second ticket on the other hand doesn't add any utility and it's still a bad investment, but for some reason people do it anyway.
No, rent is a liability with no possible return on what you put in. Renting is for suckers and I wish that I had bought over a decade ago instead of renting all that time. I finally got into the property market and the assessed value of my condo has increased in just 6 months.
Well of course there's no possible return because you don't make any investment, but that's kinda the point. You "rent" money at the bank, use it to buy property and hope your house increases in value faster than the down payment and interest. In some places property prices have gone insane giving huge profits, but there's a ratio of income to house price to make rent which means it won't go on forever. My parents' house approximately 5x doubled in 30 years - accounting for inflation it 2x doubled for a 2.5% annual real increase while undergoing basically no major upgrades except a new roof cover.
Could it beat inflation to do it again? Extremey unlikely as since it's 200% the real value of the 1970s it's also already 200% as expensive to buy, unless people earn more they can't pay that much more and if wages go up, inflation goes up and beating inflation becomes that much harder. I wouldn't buy more property than I need to live in to rent out, it's just that owning has its own perks. Interest rates are so low here now I've actually started investing instead of down paying my loan, if I can make 3% ROI I'm earning money.
I'm pretty sure I'm being trolled here... and he used a nick instead of his real name, foiled again. Now that you do mention it, it would be useful... what's your name and address again?
What you're trying very hard to ignore is that in the last 20 years of using Windows I've never used their support, not even after I got a legit license. Sure, I download their patches and service packs but they're code and you can't hide code. You could try hiding the documentation, but in practice I doubt that'd work either. I have filed and tracked some bugs on Linux and it's tedious, you get asked to help more than you really care about the bug. I sure as heck isn't a fan of paying on top of it. It's not like I do a lot of mission critical stuff on my PC, really.
On COTS software they care about sales, if they fix a bug for you they can probably add 0.01% to their sales which still works out if you sell a million copies. With OSS software you need your support to be a profit center and I know what skilled people cost, if you give me an outsourced support monkey with broken English and a script I sure won't use it. For $100 bucks you'll get a legit copy of Windows, that's like 15 hours at US minimum wage. Consider the time to understand the problem, track it down, fix it and get signoff from QA, multiply with the hourly rate of a decent developer/tester, add taxes, profit, overhead, downtime, duds they can't fix and you'll probably get one simple function call added to Linux for that price.
If you go to RHEL and look under Desktops the cheapest non "self-service" support option they have is a $300/year workstation license. It's probably a reasonable cost to have people solve your problem for you, but it's far outside what any ordinary home user will pay for an OS in total, much less a year's worth of support. Most people feel they've worked for you when they've written a bug report, like you should be paying me for my time. Trying to profit from that is like trying to squeeze blood from a rock. Unless that workstation is making you big bucks of course, in which case you might feel it was totally worth it but that's the exception, not the rule.
People pay for anti-virus so they don't get viruses, not to clean up afterwards. I think it's reasonably fair to ask them to help fund development so they don't need to call support. It just happens to be invisible effort, maybe they should do something to visualize that... like an ad with a user just using the project with cutscenes to bugfixes/enhancements with "here it didn't crash" and "here it didn't throw an error" and "here that function didn't exist" pointing out how your money goes to "nothing" happening.
If those are your only two complaints, I fail to see the problem. As long as they rank them correctly within the genre and you can apply your own mind to realize whether you'd like that genre or not isn't it simple and great? I mean Schindler's List is a great movie but if you're looking for a romantic comedy you're way off target, likewise I won't suddenly play Portal instead of Skyrim because one got 0.1 higher score than the other.
The greater problem is all the reviews that are basically bought PR where the reviewers got their tounge so far up the publisher's backside and making all sorts of bizarre excuses for things that aren't working but will surely be fixed before release in return for exclusive access or photos or interviews and whatnot. If I could trust them to be even moderately honest I would but these days I always wait until I see the user response first, which can be quite different.
Remember the primary concern when these laws were proposed. As soon as criminals discover a way to maliciously activate the kill switch on a non-stolen phone, there will be serious fallout. Imagine the ransomware.
You can really only threaten to do it, otherwise I'd wrap it in the nearest tinfoil and hook it up to my computer over USB to back it up. If they've already bricked it that sucks but they've also lost their leverage for blackmail. Also there's no telling if they actually can and the situation doesn't really change if you hand money over, so they need to make examples and scare people in rounds. That means there's plenty time to find out how the fuck they're doing it and close the loophole, if they start just mass bricking phones they don't make money. And once you have a signature on it you can block it at the network level or push an emergency patch or whatever, it'll be nasty but I don't see the big profit. The I'd rather bet on the people who just had all their not backed up vacation photos locked down by encryption, would you like to pay for a decryption key?
In an open society, the only solution to protecting oneself against mass surveillance is to permit anyone who has been surveilled by the system to enter the system, on demand, and ask when , why, for how long, and for reasons one has been surveilled.
And what will that give you? We're watching everyone, all the time, looking for terrorists or such. That's the whole point of this bulk surveillance program, they don't need to target it. They don't need an excuse for why they're looking at you. They aren't particularly looking at you. What do you want, every query they've run on the data to check for any suspicious pattern that's hit you? Everybody's probably given some kind of risk score.
The real question is when are they going to put a RC gun turret on top of it. No, I don't think they'll give it fire control but they can use it to flank the enemy, take vantage points or whatever and if it gets shot, well it's a robot.
I guess you don't know that "Plain Text" is just a subset of binary - one that happens to have a generic class of applications that know how to interpret it (Text editors).
Which is why FTP clients have a "Text" and "Binary" transfer method, sorry this brain fart dates back to the 70s if not further. Data is either analog or digital, digital data is either text or binary implying you can meaningfully edit it in a text editor. The results are not always sane as a Word/OpenOffice file is "binary", an XML file is "text" but that's the de facto jargon in computers.
That is the problem that human language is very ambiguous and context-sensitive, which is the whole reason we invented programming languages instead of trying to express it in English. Either you limit yourself to a set of simple unambiguous commands or you try to parse what we're really trying to say, which is like giving the computer the business requirements document and tell it to program itself. Fortunately for our job security that "valley" won't be crossed any time soon, people imagine it'll be like Star Trek computers who happen to know exactly what we're looking for and provide the essential answers to advance the plot. I guess we're making advances on answering trivia questions and adding appointments to the calendar, but it's not exactly ready to hold a conversation.
Uh, you do realize that if you launch a magnet link the first thing it'll do is download the torrent and connect to any trackers listed in it to find more peers, unless you've really gone out of your way to disable it you still use them. Not to mention that DHT broadcasts it out loud to everybody....
If the IS was trying to keep this a secret it'd be all over the news as exposing their atrocities. When they announce them loud and clear with fanfare we must hide them, because they're propaganda. I'm not sure if they're fucking crazy or brilliant, well scratch that as they're definitively crazy but their PR strategy is now a win if you do and win if you don't. I mean on the one hand I'd really like the rest of the world to realize that these wackos would far exceed Hitler in cruelty and genocide if given the opportunity, on the other hand hell yeah you'll be scaring people and that's the purpose of terror. I'm torn but I think most people have a mental barrier thinking humans can't possibly be this evil, despite all accounts to the contrary and that sadly we might have to smash that barrier of innocence to deal with this threat with the seriousness it deserves. I suspect the people under IS rule are going to find out one way or the other anyway.
I glossed over a lot of details there but the basic point was just to say you can't sell what you don't have or what the market won't buy. In certain cases you don't want to dump product into the market as it'd destroy the margin on your sales and in some cases you don't want short term profit at the cost of long term market share, sometimes you have committed costs and there's all kinds of collusion and game theory to deal with. I was just pointing out that dictating prices doesn't imply you can dictate production with the stroke of a pen. I'm not sure I buy your logic though, you claim pork prices will drop yet that pork is too expensive? You're contradicting yourself. Shortages always brings gouging.
The fundamental idea of socialism was that the state would nationalize and own the means of production like factories so the workers got a fair share of the profits, at least that's the theory. Despite having a large public sector the vast majority is still on private hands and if anything the government is increasingly purchasing services from the private industry rather than provide them itself. For example most the public transportation around here? Contracts with private suppliers. The public garbage collection? Contracts with private suppliers. Building public roads? Contracts with private suppliers.
Yes, there's is a much stronger redistribution strategy in Europe in that we tax the rich and give universal services to the poor, but the way we've implemented it is nothing like Karl Marx imagined. Instead of taking over the economy we've built a welfare state with collective bargaining based on the market economy setting the trend and public sector wages following. It's definitively got its issues, but I feel they're usually far more social in form of a nanny state than economical.
I'm not entirely against showing these type of images or media, but I am absolutely of the mind that the publisher must censor the individual's identification
And how would you meaningfully do that, when every other media is publishing the same story naming the pilot being burned alive? Add 2+2. For example I saw the video of the execution - murder is too kind a word - of Ahmed Merabet, how could you not end up knowing who he is? While I sure you mean well, I think you're asking for something that isn't practically possible.
You (paraphrased): Abolishing slavery infringes on my freedom to keep slaves
The GPL is designed to restrain you from restraining others, you get certain rights and you can't pass on any less. You're right it does make reciprocity ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you") a legal requirement, not voluntary. You want others to be nice to you, but the freedom to be a dick to them. But those people generally don't stay on my Christmas gift list for long. But hey, if it works... I mean GPL projects are free to use BSD code as well, unless you're on a crusade against proprietary software having more code everyone can use is a good thing.
How many failed capitalist experiments are we going to be subjected to before corporations are no longer people, and the fruits of labor are distributed much more equitably here in the US?
The problem is that you always end up trying to compare apples to oranges, how important is an engineer compared to a doctor compared to a plumber? What does job performance mean? Or is it just work is work, it all pays the same? That's one way to make sure nobody wants the hard jobs or to work hard. Same goes for services, what's more important my healthcare plan, your kid's education or my dad's pension? Nobody has an objective standard of fairness and trying to assign value by committee will fail as a thousand special interests tries to drag it this way and that.
Another important factor is that assigned values can't deal with fluctuations in supply and demand, if there's a shortage of pork and an excess of beef prices will adjust to even it out, you can't just demand it keep a certain price by fiat unless you want empty shelves. Which is not to say that the paycheck is the biggest where it's most "deserved" or "useful", but the capitalist system does a pretty good job at directing talent to the well-paying jobs and distributing non-essential scarce resources.
You could do a lot within the capitalist system just providing special tax benefits to the groups you want to support. But chances are you'd have to take them in taxes from somebody else. It wouldn't really work any better or different if you take away the money, somebody would be grabbing compensation from one group and giving it to another saying here, you deserve it more. And then ones who just got deprived would scream bloody murder. It's not hard to find faults with the market economy, but it's not hard to find faults with the plan economy either. In other words, explain a better system that'd actually work in the real world with selfish people who want to game the system.
If I do my math right, in Switzerland the suicide rate is 14 in 100k * 7.8mio people = 1100/year. According to the statistics (PDF) from Dignitas they assist ~10 Swiss nationals/year. What does this mean? That 99% of suicides are unassisted - or at least without official assistance. Almost everybody could find a way to kill themselves. It could be messy, it could be painful, it could fail - one of the people in Terry Pratchet's "Choosing to die" had two failed suicide attempts behind him. The worst are those who end up endangering and causing psychological trauma for others by for example head-on collision with a big truck. These are not your "spur of the moment" suicides, those people are already dead.
You can refuse to get intravenous feeding and slowly and painfully starve to death. You can not get a concoction of drugs to quickly and painlessly end it. How is that merciful? Nobody would blame the gun shop if they sold you a gun you used to blow your own brains out. I realize why you would want "death pills" administered only in controllled conditions though, but then the flip side is you know what it's going to be used for. I understand that's an ethical problem to some even though they don't "pull the trigger", metaphorically speaking.
It's more my life than anybody else's. It's not for you to say if I want to live or not, of course you can advice and suggest but ultimately it is my decision. But then there I'm at odds with many other rules of society that seek to overrule my own opinion and say no, you can't do that for your own good. I poison my body with alcohol on a regular basis, nobody can objectively say it's good for my health. Not to mention addictive, though I'm hardly in the danger zone for alcoholism but of course all alcoholics started out drinking. And it lowers inhibitions for better and worse, I've never been closer to a criminal record than while drunk. Those are all risks I choose to accept. But with a lot of other drugs I'm overruled. If I want to die the healthcare system will overrule me, no I don't. I absolutely hate it when someone claims to know me better than myself.
A 170 euro/$190 phone is cheaper than a flagship, but certainly not third world phone. For that you have manufacturers taking the cheapest SoC they can find, slapping the AOSP on it (free!) and selling it at cutthroat margins.
If H.G. Wells was the granddaddy then Jules Verne was the great-granddaddy. And it seems like Leonardo da Vinci did a lot of speculation on what the future might bring even though he wasn't an author, and so did probably many others. I would think it had a lot more to do with practical matters like literacy and the economics of writing, printing and distributing books than the lack of things to write about. It might have been totally off like the predictions of flying cars, but people has always liked to imagine.
You also have to understand the "compression" of history, what they see evolving over decades with a lot of detail and incremental advances is probably a short summary for us, imagine what they'll say about the late 20th century and computers in a few hundred years. "The earliest Turing-complete digital computer was the ENIAC finished in 1946. During the last half of the 20th century this evolved from huge machines spanning entire halls to small personal computers and wearable devices. During the same time the Internet was built, linking computers from all over the world." That's roughly the level of detail you can expect.
By "people like this", I hope you mean the adrenaline crazed goons who slime their pants kicking in doors looking for someone to shoot.
If I was looking for an allegedly armed killer facing life without parole or possibly the death sentence with nothing to lose I'd be pretty trigger happy too. Yes, certain professions have an increased risk of dying but nobody really wants to sacrifice their life over something so trivial as a job. It's easy to call it "shoot first, ask questions later" when you're not the one at risk of getting shot. I'm guessing it won't be that long until you send in the SWAT drones instead of the SWAT team, operated by remote control/telepresence.