I'm in an office and honestly, I'm not sure it's very productive (particularly not right now, heh). At a former employer we were five people in a fairly large room - IT&Ops. At yet another employer I know at least one sprint team that was placed in their own corner of the open office because they chatted so much with each other, they were annoying everyone else but they were very effective. I'm really not an extrovert and yet the office is lonely. Unless someone explictly tells me, I don't gleam into what anyone else is doing. I can never hear two people discuss and put in a "I have a solution for that" or "No, don't do it that way". And you are really starved for social interaction, I guess you could hover at the coffee machine or water cooler or use Lync but exchanging a little banter is so much more natural.
However, make sure there's enough quiet rooms for people to go to - particular one man rooms for people on the phone or something as it 's often off-topic and loud. Or as a big "Do Not Disturb" sign. Or to just grab when two or three people need to discuss something on a whiteboard. Those that are extremely tight fisted with space and only look at rent per square meter is missing the point, it's like skimping on office supplies which are ultimately petty change when you spend five minutes chasing down a paperclip. Meaningful communication is extremely valuable to the company, noise is just annoying. The point is to get the signal-to-noise ratio up, neither blasting everyone with everything nor to cut it off entirely.
I'm fairly sure prisons withdraw quite a few rights, parole somewhat less but unless it's "cruel and unusual punishment" - sorry, wrong country - the court can do pretty much as they want. I do believe hackers and others convicted of other serious offenses can already be banned from using computers.
Whistleblowing would be reporting to a higher authority wrongdoing within the government. That means that they are reporting to someone within the government that is higher up.
Is that some newspeak definition? Yes, when those higher up in the system are unaware is generally the best practice. But if they are aware and condone, support or ordered the unethical behavior going to others has always been an accepted form of whistleblowing, whether it's the media, law enforcement or other kinds of watchdog agencies and organizations. If you think your company is dumping toxic waste I'd call that whistleblowing no matter if you went to the CEO, FBI, EPA, Greenpeace or the New York Times. Particularly if it's in the dark shades of gray involving exploitation, polluting the environment, destroying historical or cultural items, exterminating threatened species, brutal treatment of animals, dangers to employer or public safety and other such things that may be simply unethical, not illegal.
You're the kind of person who think the waterboarding at Gitmo should have remained a secret. I mean if we only report it upwards and everybody at the top tell you to STFU, then you should just STFU right? This is particularly true when the system is broken or contain loopholes, I wouldn't put money on the Supreme Court finding anything of what Snowden has published unconstitutional. For example the global mass metadata collection, spying on leaders of your allies and such, if it doesn't involve US citizens I assume they'll tell me to shove my human rights where the sun doesn't shine. I don't care what a kangaroo court in the US finds, I say exposing NSA for what they are has been a good thing for the world. At the very least for the privacy of everyone not living in the US.
True, but there's really no telling when money truly changes hands. Okay, so we have account A buying Bitcoins and account Z cashing it and a chain of transactions A->B, B->C, C->D and so on, where M->N is known to be a drug transaction. Is A = M and N = Z or are they ten steps removed? A bought something from B, who spend them on hosting at C, which hired some freelance work D, who gave them to friend E for a bottle of scotch.... you get the general idea. The less old currencies is involved the harder it is, even with data mining.
E-wallets and tumblers make it even harder, true maybe it's hard to make people put clean money in but all the dirty money gets whirled around. Whoever is cashing it has no clue or relation to any crime the money is linked to, which makes for a pretty poor case. I think tax laws are far more dangerous to most, the IRS really don't like it when people cheat them on income tax. If you work for bitcoins and keeps cashing them out, flags are going to be raised.
If LogMeIn had shut down their free service because their main data center had a huge fire and they needed to serve their paying customers I'd have no problems with that, but this sounds like a decision made some time ago in a board room but kept secret until right before the hammer drops. It's not about contracts and obligations, it's about integrity. If I agree with a buddy to go fishing - and no, we don't write contracts for that - and the day before he cancels, that's fine if it's a family/medical emergency. If I learn it's because he's going to a concert that he bought tickets for two weeks ago then you can be damn sure I'd be angry and yelling.
They're often still getting something from you, even if they're delivering a free service. For example I've had a free email account now for 10+ years, seems like they're happy to trade ads for free service. I don't know about you, but I'd consider it very rude if they didn't give me more than 24 hours to let me know that it is coming to an end. I don't expect it to last for ever, but there's nice and less nice ways to end it. Even for a company that's under no legal obligation to be nice.
Yeah, except it takes a blazingly fast line and makes it even faster. At this level of aggregation no single customer is going to notice much, you rarely hear people who have a big last mile pipe complain about the backbone speed. Nice to see the backbone keeping up with FTTH and such, but really the main issue is that fiber is still for the few. Or to turn on gloat mode, I'm not sure what's behind my 100Mbps pipe but it seems pretty damn fast to me.
After the release of next Windows, this little (extremely expensive) Win8 mistake can be swept under the rug just like ME and Vista.
Sorry, but mobile is in a huge bubble right now. Right now saying you want to stick to Windows(/Mac/Linux) is like saying you want to concentrate on brick-and-mortar stores in the middle of the dotcom boom, everybody is scrambling to write smartphone/tablet interfaces for everything they want to sell, even where it IMHO makes no sense. Before the hype dies down, most software wil be ported to Android/iOS and ARM and when the limitations of the hardware and interface become apparent, the obvious solution is to "backport" the hardware. Tired of looking at a 10" tablet? Here's your 20" tablet with a stand. Oh and a full size keyboard so you can write longer text. And here's a mouse for your gorilla arm. And then you essentially have a PC with different innards.
Windows 8 is doing everything it can to sell that this is the future, while simultaniously showing that Microsoft is not very good at it. Yes, ME and Vista were horribly bad but they weren't a change in direction and certainly not in a direction where others are the market leaders. Remember, tablets are powerful enough for 95% of people's computing needs. Heck, with current smartphones I'd almost argue it's purely an interface issue, the actual "computer" most people need soon fits in a matchbox. The main issue today is that your software doesn't run on it, but that's being ported at an incredible rate.
Displaying a firearm in public is an established crime. Owning a video camera and bringing it into a theatre is not. NEXT.
No, but attempting to record a movie in a cinema is a felony. Pointing a video camera at the screen the entire movie is like taking aim at any pedestrian that walks past from your kitchen window, gun loaded and unsecured just in case they decide to become a trespasser/home intruder. Somehow I don't think "I didn't pull the trigger" would be a sufficient excuse if anyone saw you.
How would a cinema enforce a life-time, chain-wide ban? Just keep bugging them and don't forget to lawyer up.
The second time you "bug them" they charge you with criminal trespass? At that point it doesn't matter what you're doing, you're breaking the law just by being there. Even if you're not bugging them, if a security guard recognizes you when you're out with family or friends and have left your Google Glass at home they still have the right to have the cops arrest you.
Why? Because some overzealous pimple-faced minimum-wage snot might call the fucking FBI over it?
No, keep wearing them. And let the idiots keep involving the fucking FBI every time, until they give up with the bullshit nonsense.
You don't want to get into a pissing match with the FBI about who can harass who more. Nor the cinema, they're a private property and you're in violation of their rules so they're entitled to ban you for life. Possibly even in all cinemas in the same chain, the way airlines ban some passengers from all their flights. Actually, on second thoughts... you first, I'll be right behind you.
The games on the Wii were not very impressive either - but you could put the Wii controller in someone's hand and say "swing it like a tennis racket/golf club/baseball bat/whatever" and that was its killer feature. The "in depth" games never sold the Wii much except to Mario/Zelda fans. The only good thing about the Wii U is assymmetric gaming, like one player hides and the others seek. Many of the games to show of the new controller I totally hated, it's like I got a 60" TV here so why am I looking at a 6.2" controller that's smaller than a tablet in a single player game? If I wanted that, I got a smartphone that isn't thetered to my TV...
But that's not where the profit is. That's not what's going to take AMD into the mid-21st century. If AMD sticks to that line of thinking, it'll go the way of Cyrix... and for exactly the same reason. AMD can't invest in a new fab plant because its cash reserves are too low, whereas Intel's pile of gold just keeps growing.
Dude, this already happened back in 2009 when they first spun off and later sold out of GlobalFoundries.
They are trying to claw their way into the mid-range market and undercut Intel.
Again it sounds like you dropped out of a time machine from 2009, when Thuban was aging and Bulldozer was supposed to be AMDs ace in the hole. Since then AMD has done nothing but dodge Intel selling all-in-one APUs using their graphics division and special case architectures for consoles, supercomputers, ARM servers and everything but going head to head with Intel. Their flagship CPU is still a Bulldozer refresh from 2012 built on 32nm, they've got nothing to compete with for systems that use no graphics (CPU crunching) or dedicated graphics (on board graphics irrelevant).
AMDs own roadmap shows there's no replacement coming in 2014, the only thing you'll get are Kaveri APUs. And the only thing selling them are the GCN graphics, otherwise they're almost out of the CPU business. Xeons now rule totally supreme over the once so good, but horribly aging Opterons. Sadly you're projecting what you'd like to happen with what is happening, AMD is not turning to fight they're running looking for something else to turn a profit on. It might be the best (or only) remaining choice for AMD, even if it sucks for us.
Actually, this solves nothing. The vast majority of people will never need an organ replaced, and it is something they just don't think about.
Well, I think "If you're in a terrible accident and needed a organ transplant, would you like to be at the top or bottom of the recipient list?" will get more attention than "If you die in a terrible accident, woul you like your organs to help save other people?" Of course a lot could probably be achieved by simply making it required to say yes or no when signing up for a health insurance, which seems a rather natural time for it.
Would you like metered television too? No longer broadcast to you 24/7, now you get to watch 90 minutes a day, and after that you have to pay? Would that make sense to you?
Dude, TV is metered and it's called ads. The TV companies love couch potatoes, the more people watch ads the more money they make.
Bandwidth is already rationed by setting speed levels.
Bandwidth is poorly rationed by setting speed levels. Most people just want really fast Internet in bursts, buy a new game on Steam and you want it downloaded ASAP. I'd have no problem with say a 100Mbps/1TB line, those who want to keep it capped 24x7 can pay for their 300+ TB worth of bandwidth themselves.
People rationing bandwidth at night by not using any isn't going to save anyone anything. It's just dark fiber.
Which is why at least some of the services with caps offer free nightly bandwidth like midnight to 6AM, because their goal is to lower the afternoon peak. On unmetered Internet there's no incentive to conserve bandwidth even at peak times and those peaks define the dimensioning capacity. And that one costs lots of very real money. Or just trying to archieve the Internet adding a huge base load on the system, heightening all other peaks.
The main reason people prefer the flat rate connections is predictability in price and predictability in performance. Yes, you might find that you have to kick your torrent-downloading teen off the net to get your bandwidth back, but he won't have "used up" your Internet of the month nor will your bill be higher. Around here they still have caps on mobile data plans, they all work so that after the cap the speed is reduced to a crawl and you many pay for another block of bandwidth. Seems fair to me, even though "unused" spectrum also in theory doesn't cost them anything.
He goes on to explain that EBTC has 1,057 customers as of Dec. 31, 2013, and serves a 165- mile area. That means customer density is roughly seven customers per square mile. (...) Since 2009, he says, the FCC has decreased access charges by $285,004 and Universal Funding by $282,228, for a total of $566,232 or $531.68 per customer.
These are people in rural areas, where it's not very profitable to deliver service in the first place. Public funding is going down, actual bandwidth going up, a little fiber laid down in the dotcom days is growing old and they're in a short squeeze. These prices smell more of desperation than gouging, it can't be easy to break even with those numbers. I doubt any competitors will move in to take over this gold nugget.
Theo is the same that he's been for the last 20 years, on the one hand he's militant about the BSD license which gives away all the code to multi-billion corporations then a giant crybaby when the same corporations take the code and give him nothing but a cold shoulder in return. Oddly enough he's managed to gather a small following which barely keeps OpenBSD alive, usually by threatening to shut down OpenSSH development which is their only true success but this is neither the first nor the last time he's making such ultimatums.
If Linus is the benevolent dictator for life, Theo is the not-so-benevolent dictator for life. He started OpenBSD so he could run the show and any oppositition is harshly cut down. Don't argue with him about how the project's managed, what costs are necessary, everything is as Theo has decided it should be and he's only complaining that nobody is willing to fund his masterpiece. Your input is not wanted, just your wallet and he treats everyone from the smallest individual contributor to giant corporations the same. He's got balls of steel and an ego the size of a planet, but in the end he'll always be going around with a beggar's cup.
A pin or pattern / gesture lock is useless if the cops have the phone. They DO have tools to render such trivial things useless. They DO use those tools. I have seen the little box with the multitude of connectors being attached to a phone, and then the phone is unlocked, data dumped, and sorted through. Encryption, strong, non manufacturer based encryption, is the only thing close to safe.
Without hardware support you're screwed anyway because absolutely nobody wants to input a 128+ bit passphrase on their cell phone, you need some kind of trusted, tamper proof chip that'll nuke the encryption key if you enter the wrong PIN more than say 4-10 times.
I'm just dumbfounded at the implication here that the rover's ability to flip a small rock is regarded as luck. If it's such a valuable occurrence, should they not have included a rock-flipping function in the plans?
Well, maybe it's not as trivial as it sounds to fit an appropriate robotic arm, the sensors to find a suitable rock, the software to try grabbing it and turning it over and compared to the weight, time and effort it's probably just not worth it. Assuming this is really the first time it's happened in the practically ten years (a week left) it's been on Mars it's somewhat of a freak accident, just the right size and shape stone was caught in the wheels in just the right way to flip it over. It's like a free bonus that you weren't even trying to get, isn't that lucky?
And with kyoto and other nations trying to tie emissions to individuals, rather than to GDP, this will continue to happen. The only way to stop this is to have ALL NATIONS lower their emissions at the same time. In addition, it needs to be tied to GDP, rather than per capitia.
Great, I love it. My country only has about 5 million people so by GDP we should be about to pollute about 60 times as much as the US per capita with its 300 million. I really look forward to the US in total producing about 1/200th (approximate number of states recognized by the UN) of the world's CO2 emissions. Give me gas guzzlers, screw any restrictions on industry and taxes, levies and fees because we're home free baby. Oh wait, did you only want to apply that against bigger countries as China and India? My bad.
I've never understood the moral basis of why it should be measured by GDP and not by capita, what right does an American have to pollute more than me, or anyone else for that matter? And for that matter, I know my carbon footprint is way above the world average but I don't claim to have any moral right to it. I simply have the money to spend on a lifestyle that's more polluting than the people trying to life off a dollar or two a day, the world's not fair and I'm not claiming that it is.
If seven billion people had my lifestyle, the Earth would collapse. I know that, you seem to be in denial about that. That is not to say I try to be an environmental swine, but I like my car. I like going on long distance vacations. I like my large heated (replace with AC if you're down south) apartment, I like my appliances and gizmos and gadgets that all draw power. Trying to cement a situation where the people who polluted first and most get to keep polluting most is probably not very productive. At least I'd say fuck you, first you're the worst of the lot and then you get to reap benefits from it? No wonder China is giving you the finger.
The people that are using ad-blockers are stating "I am annoyed by adds"
First of all, you're assuming the person who did that didn't just get a quick fix because someone said somebody about AdBlock or their tech-savvy kid or classmate or coworker did. I mean, who *likes* TV commercials? Raise your hand. Also, you're ignoring the fact that impressionable people often avoid it as a self-defense, if they get smooth talked by a salesmen they cave so they avoid them. Am I the only one that's ever had a "(%#&% ad, circumventing my blocker.. but that is a damn good offer" love-hate moment?
Not with SPAM, that's just an annoyance... but web ads, there are actually companies out there with products I want, it's just something about the amount. It's like finding your mailbox doesn't just have one flyer, it has flyers stuffed to the top so it's a five minute sort job just to clear it out. Like the urban legend about the manager throwing away half the resume pile saying "we don't need unlucky people", if you throw away 80% of the ads the rest aren't so annoying.
People lie about willingness to pay, they claim they don't want ads but when it comes down to it, they don't want to pay what an ad free service costs. And the advertisers, well they'd rather show an ad to a person who sees ten ads/day rather than hundred ads/day. Sadly despite what/. wants to believe they do have all sorts of incentives to break through ad blockers, the ones who really, really hate ads well they weren't going to bring in any revenue anyway.
Well, I actually feel that is the weaker claim since it is a law passed by Congress, held in court by a judge as a civil lawsuit in open court. Evidence is presented by both sides, witnesses can be heard, pretty much all the formalism of a legal process is present so I'd say you'd have a better chance to argue that the seizure of your property is unconstitutional than the process to seize your property. Largely academic though since we know the Supreme Court has approved the whole process.
Maybe you won't but you know what 95% of the people who want to protest against Obama will vote for, get ready for a third George Bush (if there's any left) in office. <sarcasm>I'm sure that'll sort everything out.</sarcasm> I'd quote the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, but reality has fiction beat. Enjoy your lizard.
His assets are being tried in a court of law, and the constitution doesn't give any human rights to assets
The Bill of Rights was supposed to, this part:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures
Unfortunately all it takes is an unreasonable court to come up with an unreasonable definition of "unreasonable" and you've done an end-run around the Constitution. It's like defining slaves as property and not people, hence none of the rights guaranteed to the people are being violated. Sadly you need a bunch of lawyers to write a lawyer-proof definition and the Bill of Rights is very far from that.
No really, I have no idea what dream world you live in where BTC is some magical universally accepted currency, because that isn't the universe we all occupy at this exact instant. The GP was right, and it's a legitimate question. What happens to the BTC market if the US government basically blocks all the exchanges by hitting them all with $23M worth of withdrawals?
Withdrawals? Do you think it's some kind of bank account? It's an exchange rate, set by buy and sell offers. Now the government could of course say they'll sell these, all at once and at any rate and the exchange rate would tank to zeroish because they'd fill every buy order but all I'd have to do is put up an offer for $0.001 / BTC and I'd get all the government's bitcoins for $23. Which would, given that they were trading for $1000 before, probably be a very good deal. In fact so good that somebody would probably scoop them up for $1 ($23,000) or maybe $100 ($2.3M), if they think this dip is purely market technical and temporary. No matter exactly where the exchange rate would end up nothing would be "blocked", sure some of the speculators would potentially lose a lot of money/potential profit - particularly if they were forced to cash out at the bottom, just like in the stock market - but trade would resume at whatever the new price would be. And eventually the government's store of bitcoin would be exhausted and their influence on the price gone.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in an office and honestly, I'm not sure it's very productive (particularly not right now, heh). At a former employer we were five people in a fairly large room - IT&Ops. At yet another employer I know at least one sprint team that was placed in their own corner of the open office because they chatted so much with each other, they were annoying everyone else but they were very effective. I'm really not an extrovert and yet the office is lonely. Unless someone explictly tells me, I don't gleam into what anyone else is doing. I can never hear two people discuss and put in a "I have a solution for that" or "No, don't do it that way". And you are really starved for social interaction, I guess you could hover at the coffee machine or water cooler or use Lync but exchanging a little banter is so much more natural.
However, make sure there's enough quiet rooms for people to go to - particular one man rooms for people on the phone or something as it 's often off-topic and loud. Or as a big "Do Not Disturb" sign. Or to just grab when two or three people need to discuss something on a whiteboard. Those that are extremely tight fisted with space and only look at rent per square meter is missing the point, it's like skimping on office supplies which are ultimately petty change when you spend five minutes chasing down a paperclip. Meaningful communication is extremely valuable to the company, noise is just annoying. The point is to get the signal-to-noise ratio up, neither blasting everyone with everything nor to cut it off entirely.
I'm fairly sure prisons withdraw quite a few rights, parole somewhat less but unless it's "cruel and unusual punishment" - sorry, wrong country - the court can do pretty much as they want. I do believe hackers and others convicted of other serious offenses can already be banned from using computers.
Whistleblowing would be reporting to a higher authority wrongdoing within the government. That means that they are reporting to someone within the government that is higher up.
Is that some newspeak definition? Yes, when those higher up in the system are unaware is generally the best practice. But if they are aware and condone, support or ordered the unethical behavior going to others has always been an accepted form of whistleblowing, whether it's the media, law enforcement or other kinds of watchdog agencies and organizations. If you think your company is dumping toxic waste I'd call that whistleblowing no matter if you went to the CEO, FBI, EPA, Greenpeace or the New York Times. Particularly if it's in the dark shades of gray involving exploitation, polluting the environment, destroying historical or cultural items, exterminating threatened species, brutal treatment of animals, dangers to employer or public safety and other such things that may be simply unethical, not illegal.
You're the kind of person who think the waterboarding at Gitmo should have remained a secret. I mean if we only report it upwards and everybody at the top tell you to STFU, then you should just STFU right? This is particularly true when the system is broken or contain loopholes, I wouldn't put money on the Supreme Court finding anything of what Snowden has published unconstitutional. For example the global mass metadata collection, spying on leaders of your allies and such, if it doesn't involve US citizens I assume they'll tell me to shove my human rights where the sun doesn't shine. I don't care what a kangaroo court in the US finds, I say exposing NSA for what they are has been a good thing for the world. At the very least for the privacy of everyone not living in the US.
True, but there's really no telling when money truly changes hands. Okay, so we have account A buying Bitcoins and account Z cashing it and a chain of transactions A->B, B->C, C->D and so on, where M->N is known to be a drug transaction. Is A = M and N = Z or are they ten steps removed? A bought something from B, who spend them on hosting at C, which hired some freelance work D, who gave them to friend E for a bottle of scotch.... you get the general idea. The less old currencies is involved the harder it is, even with data mining.
E-wallets and tumblers make it even harder, true maybe it's hard to make people put clean money in but all the dirty money gets whirled around. Whoever is cashing it has no clue or relation to any crime the money is linked to, which makes for a pretty poor case. I think tax laws are far more dangerous to most, the IRS really don't like it when people cheat them on income tax. If you work for bitcoins and keeps cashing them out, flags are going to be raised.
If LogMeIn had shut down their free service because their main data center had a huge fire and they needed to serve their paying customers I'd have no problems with that, but this sounds like a decision made some time ago in a board room but kept secret until right before the hammer drops. It's not about contracts and obligations, it's about integrity. If I agree with a buddy to go fishing - and no, we don't write contracts for that - and the day before he cancels, that's fine if it's a family/medical emergency. If I learn it's because he's going to a concert that he bought tickets for two weeks ago then you can be damn sure I'd be angry and yelling.
They're often still getting something from you, even if they're delivering a free service. For example I've had a free email account now for 10+ years, seems like they're happy to trade ads for free service. I don't know about you, but I'd consider it very rude if they didn't give me more than 24 hours to let me know that it is coming to an end. I don't expect it to last for ever, but there's nice and less nice ways to end it. Even for a company that's under no legal obligation to be nice.
Everyone who uses standard units knows it's just over 1 kLOC/fortnight, don't go all SI on us.
Yeah, except it takes a blazingly fast line and makes it even faster. At this level of aggregation no single customer is going to notice much, you rarely hear people who have a big last mile pipe complain about the backbone speed. Nice to see the backbone keeping up with FTTH and such, but really the main issue is that fiber is still for the few. Or to turn on gloat mode, I'm not sure what's behind my 100Mbps pipe but it seems pretty damn fast to me.
After the release of next Windows, this little (extremely expensive) Win8 mistake can be swept under the rug just like ME and Vista.
Sorry, but mobile is in a huge bubble right now. Right now saying you want to stick to Windows(/Mac/Linux) is like saying you want to concentrate on brick-and-mortar stores in the middle of the dotcom boom, everybody is scrambling to write smartphone/tablet interfaces for everything they want to sell, even where it IMHO makes no sense. Before the hype dies down, most software wil be ported to Android/iOS and ARM and when the limitations of the hardware and interface become apparent, the obvious solution is to "backport" the hardware. Tired of looking at a 10" tablet? Here's your 20" tablet with a stand. Oh and a full size keyboard so you can write longer text. And here's a mouse for your gorilla arm. And then you essentially have a PC with different innards.
Windows 8 is doing everything it can to sell that this is the future, while simultaniously showing that Microsoft is not very good at it. Yes, ME and Vista were horribly bad but they weren't a change in direction and certainly not in a direction where others are the market leaders. Remember, tablets are powerful enough for 95% of people's computing needs. Heck, with current smartphones I'd almost argue it's purely an interface issue, the actual "computer" most people need soon fits in a matchbox. The main issue today is that your software doesn't run on it, but that's being ported at an incredible rate.
Displaying a firearm in public is an established crime. Owning a video camera and bringing it into a theatre is not. NEXT.
No, but attempting to record a movie in a cinema is a felony. Pointing a video camera at the screen the entire movie is like taking aim at any pedestrian that walks past from your kitchen window, gun loaded and unsecured just in case they decide to become a trespasser/home intruder. Somehow I don't think "I didn't pull the trigger" would be a sufficient excuse if anyone saw you.
How would a cinema enforce a life-time, chain-wide ban? Just keep bugging them and don't forget to lawyer up.
The second time you "bug them" they charge you with criminal trespass? At that point it doesn't matter what you're doing, you're breaking the law just by being there. Even if you're not bugging them, if a security guard recognizes you when you're out with family or friends and have left your Google Glass at home they still have the right to have the cops arrest you.
Why? Because some overzealous pimple-faced minimum-wage snot might call the fucking FBI over it?
No, keep wearing them. And let the idiots keep involving the fucking FBI every time, until they give up with the bullshit nonsense.
You don't want to get into a pissing match with the FBI about who can harass who more. Nor the cinema, they're a private property and you're in violation of their rules so they're entitled to ban you for life. Possibly even in all cinemas in the same chain, the way airlines ban some passengers from all their flights. Actually, on second thoughts... you first, I'll be right behind you.
The games on the Wii were not very impressive either - but you could put the Wii controller in someone's hand and say "swing it like a tennis racket/golf club/baseball bat/whatever" and that was its killer feature. The "in depth" games never sold the Wii much except to Mario/Zelda fans. The only good thing about the Wii U is assymmetric gaming, like one player hides and the others seek. Many of the games to show of the new controller I totally hated, it's like I got a 60" TV here so why am I looking at a 6.2" controller that's smaller than a tablet in a single player game? If I wanted that, I got a smartphone that isn't thetered to my TV...
But that's not where the profit is. That's not what's going to take AMD into the mid-21st century. If AMD sticks to that line of thinking, it'll go the way of Cyrix... and for exactly the same reason. AMD can't invest in a new fab plant because its cash reserves are too low, whereas Intel's pile of gold just keeps growing.
Dude, this already happened back in 2009 when they first spun off and later sold out of GlobalFoundries.
They are trying to claw their way into the mid-range market and undercut Intel.
Again it sounds like you dropped out of a time machine from 2009, when Thuban was aging and Bulldozer was supposed to be AMDs ace in the hole. Since then AMD has done nothing but dodge Intel selling all-in-one APUs using their graphics division and special case architectures for consoles, supercomputers, ARM servers and everything but going head to head with Intel. Their flagship CPU is still a Bulldozer refresh from 2012 built on 32nm, they've got nothing to compete with for systems that use no graphics (CPU crunching) or dedicated graphics (on board graphics irrelevant).
AMDs own roadmap shows there's no replacement coming in 2014, the only thing you'll get are Kaveri APUs. And the only thing selling them are the GCN graphics, otherwise they're almost out of the CPU business. Xeons now rule totally supreme over the once so good, but horribly aging Opterons. Sadly you're projecting what you'd like to happen with what is happening, AMD is not turning to fight they're running looking for something else to turn a profit on. It might be the best (or only) remaining choice for AMD, even if it sucks for us.
Actually, this solves nothing. The vast majority of people will never need an organ replaced, and it is something they just don't think about.
Well, I think "If you're in a terrible accident and needed a organ transplant, would you like to be at the top or bottom of the recipient list?" will get more attention than "If you die in a terrible accident, woul you like your organs to help save other people?" Of course a lot could probably be achieved by simply making it required to say yes or no when signing up for a health insurance, which seems a rather natural time for it.
Would you like metered television too? No longer broadcast to you 24/7, now you get to watch 90 minutes a day, and after that you have to pay? Would that make sense to you?
Dude, TV is metered and it's called ads. The TV companies love couch potatoes, the more people watch ads the more money they make.
Bandwidth is already rationed by setting speed levels.
Bandwidth is poorly rationed by setting speed levels. Most people just want really fast Internet in bursts, buy a new game on Steam and you want it downloaded ASAP. I'd have no problem with say a 100Mbps/1TB line, those who want to keep it capped 24x7 can pay for their 300+ TB worth of bandwidth themselves.
People rationing bandwidth at night by not using any isn't going to save anyone anything. It's just dark fiber.
Which is why at least some of the services with caps offer free nightly bandwidth like midnight to 6AM, because their goal is to lower the afternoon peak. On unmetered Internet there's no incentive to conserve bandwidth even at peak times and those peaks define the dimensioning capacity. And that one costs lots of very real money. Or just trying to archieve the Internet adding a huge base load on the system, heightening all other peaks.
The main reason people prefer the flat rate connections is predictability in price and predictability in performance. Yes, you might find that you have to kick your torrent-downloading teen off the net to get your bandwidth back, but he won't have "used up" your Internet of the month nor will your bill be higher. Around here they still have caps on mobile data plans, they all work so that after the cap the speed is reduced to a crawl and you many pay for another block of bandwidth. Seems fair to me, even though "unused" spectrum also in theory doesn't cost them anything.
From TFA (heresy, I know):
He goes on to explain that EBTC has 1,057 customers as of Dec. 31, 2013, and serves a 165- mile area. That means customer density is roughly seven customers per square mile. (...) Since 2009, he says, the FCC has decreased access charges by $285,004 and Universal Funding by $282,228, for a total of $566,232 or $531.68 per customer.
These are people in rural areas, where it's not very profitable to deliver service in the first place. Public funding is going down, actual bandwidth going up, a little fiber laid down in the dotcom days is growing old and they're in a short squeeze. These prices smell more of desperation than gouging, it can't be easy to break even with those numbers. I doubt any competitors will move in to take over this gold nugget.
Theo is the same that he's been for the last 20 years, on the one hand he's militant about the BSD license which gives away all the code to multi-billion corporations then a giant crybaby when the same corporations take the code and give him nothing but a cold shoulder in return. Oddly enough he's managed to gather a small following which barely keeps OpenBSD alive, usually by threatening to shut down OpenSSH development which is their only true success but this is neither the first nor the last time he's making such ultimatums.
If Linus is the benevolent dictator for life, Theo is the not-so-benevolent dictator for life. He started OpenBSD so he could run the show and any oppositition is harshly cut down. Don't argue with him about how the project's managed, what costs are necessary, everything is as Theo has decided it should be and he's only complaining that nobody is willing to fund his masterpiece. Your input is not wanted, just your wallet and he treats everyone from the smallest individual contributor to giant corporations the same. He's got balls of steel and an ego the size of a planet, but in the end he'll always be going around with a beggar's cup.
A pin or pattern / gesture lock is useless if the cops have the phone. They DO have tools to render such trivial things useless. They DO use those tools. I have seen the little box with the multitude of connectors being attached to a phone, and then the phone is unlocked, data dumped, and sorted through. Encryption, strong, non manufacturer based encryption, is the only thing close to safe.
Without hardware support you're screwed anyway because absolutely nobody wants to input a 128+ bit passphrase on their cell phone, you need some kind of trusted, tamper proof chip that'll nuke the encryption key if you enter the wrong PIN more than say 4-10 times.
I'm just dumbfounded at the implication here that the rover's ability to flip a small rock is regarded as luck. If it's such a valuable occurrence, should they not have included a rock-flipping function in the plans?
Well, maybe it's not as trivial as it sounds to fit an appropriate robotic arm, the sensors to find a suitable rock, the software to try grabbing it and turning it over and compared to the weight, time and effort it's probably just not worth it. Assuming this is really the first time it's happened in the practically ten years (a week left) it's been on Mars it's somewhat of a freak accident, just the right size and shape stone was caught in the wheels in just the right way to flip it over. It's like a free bonus that you weren't even trying to get, isn't that lucky?
And with kyoto and other nations trying to tie emissions to individuals, rather than to GDP, this will continue to happen. The only way to stop this is to have ALL NATIONS lower their emissions at the same time. In addition, it needs to be tied to GDP, rather than per capitia.
Great, I love it. My country only has about 5 million people so by GDP we should be about to pollute about 60 times as much as the US per capita with its 300 million. I really look forward to the US in total producing about 1/200th (approximate number of states recognized by the UN) of the world's CO2 emissions. Give me gas guzzlers, screw any restrictions on industry and taxes, levies and fees because we're home free baby. Oh wait, did you only want to apply that against bigger countries as China and India? My bad.
I've never understood the moral basis of why it should be measured by GDP and not by capita, what right does an American have to pollute more than me, or anyone else for that matter? And for that matter, I know my carbon footprint is way above the world average but I don't claim to have any moral right to it. I simply have the money to spend on a lifestyle that's more polluting than the people trying to life off a dollar or two a day, the world's not fair and I'm not claiming that it is.
If seven billion people had my lifestyle, the Earth would collapse. I know that, you seem to be in denial about that. That is not to say I try to be an environmental swine, but I like my car. I like going on long distance vacations. I like my large heated (replace with AC if you're down south) apartment, I like my appliances and gizmos and gadgets that all draw power. Trying to cement a situation where the people who polluted first and most get to keep polluting most is probably not very productive. At least I'd say fuck you, first you're the worst of the lot and then you get to reap benefits from it? No wonder China is giving you the finger.
The people that are using ad-blockers are stating "I am annoyed by adds"
First of all, you're assuming the person who did that didn't just get a quick fix because someone said somebody about AdBlock or their tech-savvy kid or classmate or coworker did. I mean, who *likes* TV commercials? Raise your hand. Also, you're ignoring the fact that impressionable people often avoid it as a self-defense, if they get smooth talked by a salesmen they cave so they avoid them. Am I the only one that's ever had a "(%#&% ad, circumventing my blocker.. but that is a damn good offer" love-hate moment?
Not with SPAM, that's just an annoyance... but web ads, there are actually companies out there with products I want, it's just something about the amount. It's like finding your mailbox doesn't just have one flyer, it has flyers stuffed to the top so it's a five minute sort job just to clear it out. Like the urban legend about the manager throwing away half the resume pile saying "we don't need unlucky people", if you throw away 80% of the ads the rest aren't so annoying.
People lie about willingness to pay, they claim they don't want ads but when it comes down to it, they don't want to pay what an ad free service costs. And the advertisers, well they'd rather show an ad to a person who sees ten ads/day rather than hundred ads/day. Sadly despite what /. wants to believe they do have all sorts of incentives to break through ad blockers, the ones who really, really hate ads well they weren't going to bring in any revenue anyway.
Well, I actually feel that is the weaker claim since it is a law passed by Congress, held in court by a judge as a civil lawsuit in open court. Evidence is presented by both sides, witnesses can be heard, pretty much all the formalism of a legal process is present so I'd say you'd have a better chance to argue that the seizure of your property is unconstitutional than the process to seize your property. Largely academic though since we know the Supreme Court has approved the whole process.
Maybe you won't but you know what 95% of the people who want to protest against Obama will vote for, get ready for a third George Bush (if there's any left) in office. <sarcasm>I'm sure that'll sort everything out.</sarcasm> I'd quote the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, but reality has fiction beat. Enjoy your lizard.
His assets are being tried in a court of law, and the constitution doesn't give any human rights to assets
The Bill of Rights was supposed to, this part:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures
Unfortunately all it takes is an unreasonable court to come up with an unreasonable definition of "unreasonable" and you've done an end-run around the Constitution. It's like defining slaves as property and not people, hence none of the rights guaranteed to the people are being violated. Sadly you need a bunch of lawyers to write a lawyer-proof definition and the Bill of Rights is very far from that.
No really, I have no idea what dream world you live in where BTC is some magical universally accepted currency, because that isn't the universe we all occupy at this exact instant. The GP was right, and it's a legitimate question. What happens to the BTC market if the US government basically blocks all the exchanges by hitting them all with $23M worth of withdrawals?
Withdrawals? Do you think it's some kind of bank account? It's an exchange rate, set by buy and sell offers. Now the government could of course say they'll sell these, all at once and at any rate and the exchange rate would tank to zeroish because they'd fill every buy order but all I'd have to do is put up an offer for $0.001 / BTC and I'd get all the government's bitcoins for $23. Which would, given that they were trading for $1000 before, probably be a very good deal. In fact so good that somebody would probably scoop them up for $1 ($23,000) or maybe $100 ($2.3M), if they think this dip is purely market technical and temporary. No matter exactly where the exchange rate would end up nothing would be "blocked", sure some of the speculators would potentially lose a lot of money/potential profit - particularly if they were forced to cash out at the bottom, just like in the stock market - but trade would resume at whatever the new price would be. And eventually the government's store of bitcoin would be exhausted and their influence on the price gone.