You don't actually "own" land in the event of government instability. Nor mineral rights, nor water rights, nor any other form of "ownership" that exists only by support of the government agreeing you own it. A tulip bulb on the other hand. That is yours at least as long as you can keep someone from taking it away. Precious metals, guns, bullets, alcohol, gasoline, non-perishable food. Those are tangible assets.
Private property has collapsed much more rarely than fiat currencies, as a matter of degree. But if you find yourself in the middle of the Civil War II, chances are very good you'll be relieved of all your "tangible assets" by an army while your claim to the land might survive the war. And refugees are almost always robbed blind by bandits and armed gangs, if you're first driven from your land. I'd rely more on stealth, feigned poverty and forged surrender than mere accumulation of assets. Chances are you're not the biggest and baddest thing out there and any hoard will attract a lot of unwanted attention. On the other hand, I have to live somewhere too so I'd rather just try transferring my assets there ahead of me and escape by a long distance flight. I'd rather relocate across the globe than rely on a prepper bunker.
Well let's take a process like "quenching steel" compared to regular steel, you still have all the same basic ingredients, you heat it up and cool it down but really the rapid quenching brings out new and novel properties in the steel. It surely should qualify for a patent, it's not like the regular steel smith has a patent for everything his smithy could do - yet the smith has never done or even thought about doing. In the same way it would be absurd to patent the Turing complete machine and say all software is merely the application of machine states. On the other end of the spectrum if you add 0.01% table salt and claim your quenched steel+salt isn't infringing on any patent because it only says steel, the courts will laugh at your attempt to trivially avoid the patent. Most software is like that, trivial changes of inputs, instructions, ordering etc. are "new" but not in any sense novel while software with new functionality that's never been done before sounds novel and non-obvious to me.
Is there a value to sending people to school beyond testable knowledge? That's a big question.
No, because the obvious answer is yes. But do you have to lump it together with tests to measure specific knowledge? I've had years of regular full time onsite university education, if what I need is to prove my ability in a specific topic then that should be possible without requiring a meager and largely irrelevant addition to my general interpersonal skills, particularly if my available hours, location or other duties make it impractical or impossible. At least anything that can be reasonably accomplished through exams and exercises, I don't really see how we could let loose doctors and lawyers without real world experience with real patients and clients which necessitates a controlled training program. Most fields are not like that though, if it's all on paper or computer or with inanimate objects then you should be able to read yourself to a degree in most STEM fields.
To even form this structure in RAM would require, what? 40-50 more Moores Law iterations? Which I doubt is even physically possible.
As the highly abused saying goes, the proof is in the pudding - in this case the grey matter. If the brain is capable of having this processing and storage capacity, interconnectivity and power requirements then surely so can we, if we don't it's because our silicon-based technology is inefficient and inferior compared to the organic "technology" of the brain. Using custom silicon that mimics the brain - rather than trying to emulate it on a Von Neumann architecture - it should be doable in the same realm as supercomputers, I saw one research paper that said based on the size of emulating one and one neuron it should eventually be possible to do it at the size of a car with a 10 kW power supply. Still, the real issue is that they're not usable for anything else than research since we really, really don't have a programming model for a system like this.
1) Tor is not a peer-to-peer approach. It does not remove the central server, it only makes the routers individually unaware of the contents of a package. You still have to serve replies from a central server subject to a jurisdiction (the problem we were pretending we could solve). Tor works if you wish to obscure who wants what, but it is still an overlay to the client-server paradigm.
Yes, but good luck finding out what that jurisdiction is, at least they don't seem to have much luck in locating and shutting down hidden services. If you only really need a DNS name that'll stay constant and that doesn't need to be "easy" then the onion system would be just fine, you own them by virtue of owning the private key and they all look like ebiueabv35rwas.onion. Unlike an IP you can move the key around and run your site from any box you want, which is the most essential part of DNS. You probably won't type it up but if you find it on some web page somewhere and bookmark it you'll have it.
Robots will be so good at complex tasks that they will find it overkill to use one for simple tasks. They'll simply say, why waste a robot on this task when we have all of these stupid humans who are willing to do it for basically nothing. Half the quality at an eighth the price. Can't beat that.
Yeah right, a robot that smart at complex tasks will use lesser computers and robots as tools the way we use them as tools. You think companies will deal with hiring and training employees with all their quirks and unreliability when they can put in a purchase order for a $10 sensor and a $2 micro-controller and have the complex robot tell it how to do the job? Not bloody likely. Most of the reason computers suck at what they do is because we suck at telling them what to do, well I expect a robot to suck equally bad at telling a human what to do, while it should be excellent at simulating what a cheap piece of hardware could do and could transfer that control software with perfect accuracy in no time. Even the Matrix plot that we'll be living potato batteries is more plausible than that they'll need us for simple tasks. We have a baseline for living, computers don't.
and the defendant in an infringement suit can show proof of actual damages to mitigate statutory damages.
As far as I know, that is not really true - the copyright holder can choose to ask for actual or statutory damages and while it might have an impact on where you end up on the $750-150,000 statutory scale you can't prove your way below the statutory minimum. And that is pretty damn steep for a dollar tune or porn flick. You can knock that down to $200 if you can prove you're an innocent infringer, but then the burden is on you to prove that.
Yes, it's more like this: Imagine if you took a sack of marbles and spread them infinitely thin, you'd expect that the distance between any two marbles to also grow to infinity. This is proof that primes are not like this, no matter how thin they're spread they'll cluster in pairs less than 70 million apart. The conjencture is that you'll always find another pair 2 units apart (like 5 and 7, 11 and 13 etc.) no matter how big the numbers get.
Can someone please tell me why this is a good idea
The long story is here (PDF). Motherboard will still do the heavy lifting from 12V to 2.4V, but the integrated VRM will distribute it. Advantage is extremely clean, fine-grained, low-latency and flexible power supply to deliver exactly as much power to where it's needed and probably - this is just speculation on my part - allowing the CPU to work on a wider range of voltages since there's less noise and ripple so you don't need the same tolerance limits. It sounds perfect for smart phones, tablets and laptops that are primarily battery-limited, nice to have for average machines but potentially an issue for overclockers. All you need is cooling though, it shouldn't limit overclocking if you can keep the temp down.
Actually I'd argue exact the opposite, this is the earliest possible convenience where it is possible to say when and what features will be coming with reasonable certainty. Post-launch reviews are fun but most of the news are about upcoming products/services/changes and really what you just said - it won't actually be in distros on release day anyway. So you can read about it now, it'll release in two months, be in most distros this fall and in Debian in 2016.... maybe. That said, in the rush to get this story out and get page hits they forgot the part about making a decent summary of what's new and why it should matter, but hey... it would be the right time.
Well if our plane crashes deep in the snowy mountains with some passengers killed on impact with no rescue in sight and it's either eat or starve to death, I'll be happy to bury you under a tombstone that says "Here lies a true ethical vegetarian". Just kidding, actually I'll wait for you to die and eat you too. While I haven't eaten human meat there's a lot in the don't ask, don't tell category that tastes just fine until you hear what it is...
All real world currencies are usually legal tender - It is required that people have to accept legal tender as payment for good and services
Generally no, only as payment for debts, products consumed or services already provided like eating at a restaurant and paying afterwards. Stores can refuse you for having too large money like $100 bills, too small money like tons of one cent coins or pretty much any reason they want. Having legal tender doesn't force anyone to do business with you.
They usually have enough business knowledge that they provide some value to the company, but from a technical perspective they are a slowly-increasing liability.
What you said:
Many people provide value to an organization in ways that aren't always easily visible to co-workers. It's entirely possible the coders who doesn't seem to be "as up to date" in his skills may be providing benefits to the organization in ways you don't yet have the experience or perspective to appreciate.
And if those people moved either up or sideways to continue to provide that benefit, that is great. The problem is when those people are still doing technical work that lead to bad code, bad design, bad practices and bad solutions that they can do by virtue of their seniority. It's very hard to rein in someone who has more experience, longer work history and who has more management clout from making bad decisions even when they really are bad. There's at least three ways to make a senior person butt out like trust, vanity or distraction. The best is of course if they just relinquish control if they trust me, which usually comes along. If that fails, there's always vanity as no senior person really likes to hear he's dealing with the nitty-gritty implementation details and the third is just to run up requirements/business side issues until they leave more of the tech side to you.
Is it a bit cynical and cruel? Perhaps, but I really don't want to have a manager that I feel is holding everyone back, push them towards where they can shine and leave me some room to shine on my own. The best managers seem to have this figured out on their own, they know when to provide direction and guidelines but also when to back off and let the people who know all the details make the right decision. But the world isn't full of great managers and really, you can waste a lot of time and great code writing a flawed system that can't ever really work and perform the way it was supposed to. And nobody cared how great your wall was when the whole house caves in.
Interesting article, but some points there are really off:
It reasoned that consumers voluntarily convey to the phone company the numbers they dial when placing a call, that they therefore have no reasonable expectation of privacy in that information and have consented to further disclosure of this information to law enforcement. Perhaps we agree as well that "consent" in some scenarios in which the third-party doctrine applies is not really voluntary.
Well yes, they need that to connect the call. If we do a person-for-technology substitution like they do, you'd have to tell the phone operator where to connect you do. That person would functionally have to know and process that information and the operator could volunteer or be forced to testify as much. I don't see how you can argue that knowledge that you force on third parties - unlike the contents - could or should be protected.
This is not so. First, most communicants simply cannot meet in order to exchange information. It is not practical to do so, particularly where the communicants are far apart or are numerous, as occurs much more frequently today than in the past. There is no substitution effect to worry about because there is no practical alternative to use of the third party to convey the information. The alternative is not to show up personally so the police can watch; rather, as a practical matter, the alternative when one wants to have a Fourth Amendment-protected communication is not to communicate at all.
The alternative is encryption. That way you can have security of content, but not of non-content since the third party still needs to know where to deliver it.
Anyway, despite their minor disagreements they both quite clearly say that anything you store online is free game today.
The Nordic countries seem pretty good, as does Switzerland.
We're heading down the same slippery slope here in Norway, for example now with the data storage directive ISPs will have to collect and store source and destination for email service and position every time your phone gets a call, text or uses the Internet - that is practically all the time for a smartphone, so far not the content though. When people pointed out that it is only email, if you send say a Facebook message it's not recorded they got the deer-in-headlights look and a mumbling about extending it. If you're concerned about unconstitutional wiretapping by the NSA in the US, don't worry because Sweden made it legal through the FRA law.
The FRA law (FRA-lagen in Swedish) is a Swedish legislative package that authorizes the Swedish Defence Radio Authority to warrantlessly wiretap all telephone and Internet traffic that crosses Sweden's borders. It was passed by the Parliament of Sweden on June 18, 2008, by a vote of 143 to 138 (with one delegate abstaining and 67 delegates not present)[1] and took effect on January 1, 2009.
Some countries might be slipping worse than others but I really don't see any going in the right direction anymore.
Might as well use Windows with that philosophy. The big difference with Linux is its efficiency. Get rid of that, might as well get rid of linux.
Fast, cheap, good - pick two? >:-) If you have a modern system, no OS should take a significant amount of resources on its own. Don't waste just to waste but as long as developer time is a limited resource, I'd rather have more features, higher quality and better performance than lower resource usage. The hardware is there to be used, that's what it's bought for. Hell, I regularly run an application that likes to chew through it's whole 32 bit memory space (4GB) and I let it because I still have 12 to spare and there's no direct replacement and it mostly works. What you care about is simply nothing that I care about at all, but then so I took your advice on my machine in favor of Windows 7. If Microsoft continues down their path I might have to migrate to Linux again, but if so I'd like a few other things than efficiency. Otherwise it might be a Mac, but I'd rather not.
Well, one part is if the code is maintainable but the other part is if there are anyone to maintain it. Very often, even when it's of reasonable quality, the answer is "there's nobody who really knows how it works anymore". Functionality is changed or added in bits and pieces here and there but nobody's maintaining the system requirements or documentation or has any responsibility for the architecture or design. If nobody has good in-depth knowledge then you can't possibly expect it to be well maintained, as long as nobody's taken the time to pop the lid and see what's inside all boxes are black boxes.
Microsoft is rich enough to survive another Vista or two, but many PC manufacturers are not. If Microsoft does nothing to make them happy again, they may get desperate and push Linux in earnest.
Well if they "in earnest" try shipping hardware without Microsoft software then Microsoft could also roll their own hardware, like they did with Surface. People are more tied to the OS than to Dell or Compaq or HP hardware.
You may not believe or understand this, but some of us actually enjoy driving.
But how many enjoys driving all the time? All traffic, all road conditions, never tired, never busy, never wanted for a button to push to make the car drive itself while you do something else? I have friends who are quite car conscious but they also like cruise control, automatic gearbox and all that, it's more about going around in comfort and style than pretending to be a rally driver. I think there's a solid market of people that aren't looking for the "basic transport from A to B" but the "private limo driver from A to B" experience, particularly since the computer has even more discretion than a human. And it's not like they're going to take away the "off" switch any time soon, so if you want to go ahead...
That's all well and nice, but the practical reality is that it goes: Symptoms -> Diagnosis -> Treatment
Except for very basic symptom treatments like painkillers if you're in pain you usually need a diagnosis before you get started on treatments, even if it's not entirely correct or the treatment might not work. If my general physician sees I'm under the weather and should stay in bed for a couple of days he still needs to put some kind of general condition on the sick notice like a non-specific virus infection. Until you get a diagnosis you are in many ways in medical limbo, which is why it matter so much.
Standard tracker functionality? Yes, you could probably use DHT or similar but old fashioned trackers are simple, reliable and doesn't really give away anything but volume of data transferred.
I can't imagine anybody seriously believes tablets will completely replace PCs. But I think they'll make a helluva dent (if they haven't already).
They recently published some stats here from Norway, access to home PC was up 2% to 95% of the respondents and tablets at 37% (first year recorded). I think most people will end up with both, simple as that. That said, I think it has a huge impact on the sort of PC people want. For consumption, people want performance - they want everything to be snappy and flashy and smooth. For production, a lot of the time the limitation is between the keyboard and the chair, for example now that I'm "producing" this comment I like my keyboard, but the CPU is practically idle. The overlap between input-heavy and performance heavy is rather small, essentially hardcore games. But I think for most people the answer will be that yes, we have a laptop, no it's not very powerful and yes it's collecting dust most of the time but it's useful when we need it.
Maybe those creative professionals should contribute to the development of gimp by coding and contributing the features that they want? (...) The graphic designers are just to lazy to do it themselves, instead they demand that you do it for them for free.
No they don't, they really don't and this is really one very annoying aspect of open source zealots. Said zealots push their software (the GIMP in this case) and the would-be users (graphics designers in this case) explain why it's not working for them because it lacks features X, Y and Z and then the zealots starts berating them for why they don't contribute code or money to implement that. Then the would-be users go "Wait, what, huh I didn't ask for the GIMP, you pushed it and I told you why it didn't work. I'm fine with paying $price for Photoshop, you're the one who told me you have a better alternative but you don't. And no, an equally sized donation would be a mouse piss in the ocean towards making it so."
And yet, somehow you've manged to flip this around that it's not a failure of the GIMP project but that it's the graphics designers' fault. If you're trying to convert a Windows user into a Linux user it's not the Windows user's job to make Linux usable to him. If you're trying to convert a MS Office user into a LibreOffice user it's not the MS Office user's job to make LibreOffice usable to them. If you're trying to make a Photoshop user into a GIMP user it's not the Photoshop user's job to make GIMP usable to them. They're happy where they are and they don't want to fix your project. Too bad like all zealotry you become immune to the cluebat, no matter how hard they bash.
The problem with the "LOW MARKET SHARE!!1!!" comments is that you're talking about a company having a 10% of a market worth billions of dollars. I will take 10% of a billion dollars any day of the week.
Yes, but saying they'll be the new standard makes no sense, Apple yields the low end and mainstream market early and often. Seen any budget iPhones? iPads? Macs? Budget Apple anything? It doesn't matter how many blunders Microsoft makes as long as Apple doesn't want to enter those market segments and do it better. They don't want to start a race to the bottom against Windows any more than against Android, and no we won't all be buying $1000 computers, $500 phones and $500 tablets any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't actually "own" land in the event of government instability. Nor mineral rights, nor water rights, nor any other form of "ownership" that exists only by support of the government agreeing you own it. A tulip bulb on the other hand. That is yours at least as long as you can keep someone from taking it away. Precious metals, guns, bullets, alcohol, gasoline, non-perishable food. Those are tangible assets.
Private property has collapsed much more rarely than fiat currencies, as a matter of degree. But if you find yourself in the middle of the Civil War II, chances are very good you'll be relieved of all your "tangible assets" by an army while your claim to the land might survive the war. And refugees are almost always robbed blind by bandits and armed gangs, if you're first driven from your land. I'd rely more on stealth, feigned poverty and forged surrender than mere accumulation of assets. Chances are you're not the biggest and baddest thing out there and any hoard will attract a lot of unwanted attention. On the other hand, I have to live somewhere too so I'd rather just try transferring my assets there ahead of me and escape by a long distance flight. I'd rather relocate across the globe than rely on a prepper bunker.
Well let's take a process like "quenching steel" compared to regular steel, you still have all the same basic ingredients, you heat it up and cool it down but really the rapid quenching brings out new and novel properties in the steel. It surely should qualify for a patent, it's not like the regular steel smith has a patent for everything his smithy could do - yet the smith has never done or even thought about doing. In the same way it would be absurd to patent the Turing complete machine and say all software is merely the application of machine states. On the other end of the spectrum if you add 0.01% table salt and claim your quenched steel+salt isn't infringing on any patent because it only says steel, the courts will laugh at your attempt to trivially avoid the patent. Most software is like that, trivial changes of inputs, instructions, ordering etc. are "new" but not in any sense novel while software with new functionality that's never been done before sounds novel and non-obvious to me.
Is there a value to sending people to school beyond testable knowledge? That's a big question.
No, because the obvious answer is yes. But do you have to lump it together with tests to measure specific knowledge? I've had years of regular full time onsite university education, if what I need is to prove my ability in a specific topic then that should be possible without requiring a meager and largely irrelevant addition to my general interpersonal skills, particularly if my available hours, location or other duties make it impractical or impossible. At least anything that can be reasonably accomplished through exams and exercises, I don't really see how we could let loose doctors and lawyers without real world experience with real patients and clients which necessitates a controlled training program. Most fields are not like that though, if it's all on paper or computer or with inanimate objects then you should be able to read yourself to a degree in most STEM fields.
To even form this structure in RAM would require, what? 40-50 more Moores Law iterations? Which I doubt is even physically possible.
As the highly abused saying goes, the proof is in the pudding - in this case the grey matter. If the brain is capable of having this processing and storage capacity, interconnectivity and power requirements then surely so can we, if we don't it's because our silicon-based technology is inefficient and inferior compared to the organic "technology" of the brain. Using custom silicon that mimics the brain - rather than trying to emulate it on a Von Neumann architecture - it should be doable in the same realm as supercomputers, I saw one research paper that said based on the size of emulating one and one neuron it should eventually be possible to do it at the size of a car with a 10 kW power supply. Still, the real issue is that they're not usable for anything else than research since we really, really don't have a programming model for a system like this.
1) Tor is not a peer-to-peer approach. It does not remove the central server, it only makes the routers individually unaware of the contents of a package. You still have to serve replies from a central server subject to a jurisdiction (the problem we were pretending we could solve). Tor works if you wish to obscure who wants what, but it is still an overlay to the client-server paradigm.
Yes, but good luck finding out what that jurisdiction is, at least they don't seem to have much luck in locating and shutting down hidden services. If you only really need a DNS name that'll stay constant and that doesn't need to be "easy" then the onion system would be just fine, you own them by virtue of owning the private key and they all look like ebiueabv35rwas.onion. Unlike an IP you can move the key around and run your site from any box you want, which is the most essential part of DNS. You probably won't type it up but if you find it on some web page somewhere and bookmark it you'll have it.
Robots will be so good at complex tasks that they will find it overkill to use one for simple tasks. They'll simply say, why waste a robot on this task when we have all of these stupid humans who are willing to do it for basically nothing. Half the quality at an eighth the price. Can't beat that.
Yeah right, a robot that smart at complex tasks will use lesser computers and robots as tools the way we use them as tools. You think companies will deal with hiring and training employees with all their quirks and unreliability when they can put in a purchase order for a $10 sensor and a $2 micro-controller and have the complex robot tell it how to do the job? Not bloody likely. Most of the reason computers suck at what they do is because we suck at telling them what to do, well I expect a robot to suck equally bad at telling a human what to do, while it should be excellent at simulating what a cheap piece of hardware could do and could transfer that control software with perfect accuracy in no time. Even the Matrix plot that we'll be living potato batteries is more plausible than that they'll need us for simple tasks. We have a baseline for living, computers don't.
and the defendant in an infringement suit can show proof of actual damages to mitigate statutory damages.
As far as I know, that is not really true - the copyright holder can choose to ask for actual or statutory damages and while it might have an impact on where you end up on the $750-150,000 statutory scale you can't prove your way below the statutory minimum. And that is pretty damn steep for a dollar tune or porn flick. You can knock that down to $200 if you can prove you're an innocent infringer, but then the burden is on you to prove that.
Yes, it's more like this: Imagine if you took a sack of marbles and spread them infinitely thin, you'd expect that the distance between any two marbles to also grow to infinity. This is proof that primes are not like this, no matter how thin they're spread they'll cluster in pairs less than 70 million apart. The conjencture is that you'll always find another pair 2 units apart (like 5 and 7, 11 and 13 etc.) no matter how big the numbers get.
Can someone please tell me why this is a good idea
The long story is here (PDF). Motherboard will still do the heavy lifting from 12V to 2.4V, but the integrated VRM will distribute it. Advantage is extremely clean, fine-grained, low-latency and flexible power supply to deliver exactly as much power to where it's needed and probably - this is just speculation on my part - allowing the CPU to work on a wider range of voltages since there's less noise and ripple so you don't need the same tolerance limits. It sounds perfect for smart phones, tablets and laptops that are primarily battery-limited, nice to have for average machines but potentially an issue for overclockers. All you need is cooling though, it shouldn't limit overclocking if you can keep the temp down.
Actually I'd argue exact the opposite, this is the earliest possible convenience where it is possible to say when and what features will be coming with reasonable certainty. Post-launch reviews are fun but most of the news are about upcoming products/services/changes and really what you just said - it won't actually be in distros on release day anyway. So you can read about it now, it'll release in two months, be in most distros this fall and in Debian in 2016.... maybe. That said, in the rush to get this story out and get page hits they forgot the part about making a decent summary of what's new and why it should matter, but hey... it would be the right time.
Well if our plane crashes deep in the snowy mountains with some passengers killed on impact with no rescue in sight and it's either eat or starve to death, I'll be happy to bury you under a tombstone that says "Here lies a true ethical vegetarian". Just kidding, actually I'll wait for you to die and eat you too. While I haven't eaten human meat there's a lot in the don't ask, don't tell category that tastes just fine until you hear what it is...
All real world currencies are usually legal tender - It is required that people have to accept legal tender as payment for good and services
Generally no, only as payment for debts, products consumed or services already provided like eating at a restaurant and paying afterwards. Stores can refuse you for having too large money like $100 bills, too small money like tons of one cent coins or pretty much any reason they want. Having legal tender doesn't force anyone to do business with you.
From the question:
They usually have enough business knowledge that they provide some value to the company, but from a technical perspective they are a slowly-increasing liability.
What you said:
Many people provide value to an organization in ways that aren't always easily visible to co-workers. It's entirely possible the coders who doesn't seem to be "as up to date" in his skills may be providing benefits to the organization in ways you don't yet have the experience or perspective to appreciate.
And if those people moved either up or sideways to continue to provide that benefit, that is great. The problem is when those people are still doing technical work that lead to bad code, bad design, bad practices and bad solutions that they can do by virtue of their seniority. It's very hard to rein in someone who has more experience, longer work history and who has more management clout from making bad decisions even when they really are bad. There's at least three ways to make a senior person butt out like trust, vanity or distraction. The best is of course if they just relinquish control if they trust me, which usually comes along. If that fails, there's always vanity as no senior person really likes to hear he's dealing with the nitty-gritty implementation details and the third is just to run up requirements/business side issues until they leave more of the tech side to you.
Is it a bit cynical and cruel? Perhaps, but I really don't want to have a manager that I feel is holding everyone back, push them towards where they can shine and leave me some room to shine on my own. The best managers seem to have this figured out on their own, they know when to provide direction and guidelines but also when to back off and let the people who know all the details make the right decision. But the world isn't full of great managers and really, you can waste a lot of time and great code writing a flawed system that can't ever really work and perform the way it was supposed to. And nobody cared how great your wall was when the whole house caves in.
Interesting article, but some points there are really off:
It reasoned that consumers voluntarily convey to the phone company the numbers they dial when placing a call, that they therefore have no reasonable expectation of privacy in that information and have consented to further disclosure of this information to law enforcement. Perhaps we agree as well that "consent" in some scenarios in which the third-party doctrine applies is not really voluntary.
Well yes, they need that to connect the call. If we do a person-for-technology substitution like they do, you'd have to tell the phone operator where to connect you do. That person would functionally have to know and process that information and the operator could volunteer or be forced to testify as much. I don't see how you can argue that knowledge that you force on third parties - unlike the contents - could or should be protected.
This is not so. First, most communicants simply cannot meet in order to exchange information. It is not practical to do so, particularly where the communicants are far apart or are numerous, as occurs much more frequently today than in the past. There is no substitution effect to worry about because there is no practical alternative to use of the third party to convey the information. The alternative is not to show up personally so the police can watch; rather, as a practical matter, the alternative when one wants to have a Fourth Amendment-protected communication is not to communicate at all.
The alternative is encryption. That way you can have security of content, but not of non-content since the third party still needs to know where to deliver it.
Anyway, despite their minor disagreements they both quite clearly say that anything you store online is free game today.
The Nordic countries seem pretty good, as does Switzerland.
We're heading down the same slippery slope here in Norway, for example now with the data storage directive ISPs will have to collect and store source and destination for email service and position every time your phone gets a call, text or uses the Internet - that is practically all the time for a smartphone, so far not the content though. When people pointed out that it is only email, if you send say a Facebook message it's not recorded they got the deer-in-headlights look and a mumbling about extending it. If you're concerned about unconstitutional wiretapping by the NSA in the US, don't worry because Sweden made it legal through the FRA law.
The FRA law (FRA-lagen in Swedish) is a Swedish legislative package that authorizes the Swedish Defence Radio Authority to warrantlessly wiretap all telephone and Internet traffic that crosses Sweden's borders. It was passed by the Parliament of Sweden on June 18, 2008, by a vote of 143 to 138 (with one delegate abstaining and 67 delegates not present)[1] and took effect on January 1, 2009.
Some countries might be slipping worse than others but I really don't see any going in the right direction anymore.
Might as well use Windows with that philosophy. The big difference with Linux is its efficiency. Get rid of that, might as well get rid of linux.
Fast, cheap, good - pick two? >:-) If you have a modern system, no OS should take a significant amount of resources on its own. Don't waste just to waste but as long as developer time is a limited resource, I'd rather have more features, higher quality and better performance than lower resource usage. The hardware is there to be used, that's what it's bought for. Hell, I regularly run an application that likes to chew through it's whole 32 bit memory space (4GB) and I let it because I still have 12 to spare and there's no direct replacement and it mostly works. What you care about is simply nothing that I care about at all, but then so I took your advice on my machine in favor of Windows 7. If Microsoft continues down their path I might have to migrate to Linux again, but if so I'd like a few other things than efficiency. Otherwise it might be a Mac, but I'd rather not.
...is not gratis at all, just course materials included. Slashvertisement much?
Well, one part is if the code is maintainable but the other part is if there are anyone to maintain it. Very often, even when it's of reasonable quality, the answer is "there's nobody who really knows how it works anymore". Functionality is changed or added in bits and pieces here and there but nobody's maintaining the system requirements or documentation or has any responsibility for the architecture or design. If nobody has good in-depth knowledge then you can't possibly expect it to be well maintained, as long as nobody's taken the time to pop the lid and see what's inside all boxes are black boxes.
Microsoft is rich enough to survive another Vista or two, but many PC manufacturers are not. If Microsoft does nothing to make them happy again, they may get desperate and push Linux in earnest.
Well if they "in earnest" try shipping hardware without Microsoft software then Microsoft could also roll their own hardware, like they did with Surface. People are more tied to the OS than to Dell or Compaq or HP hardware.
You may not believe or understand this, but some of us actually enjoy driving.
But how many enjoys driving all the time? All traffic, all road conditions, never tired, never busy, never wanted for a button to push to make the car drive itself while you do something else? I have friends who are quite car conscious but they also like cruise control, automatic gearbox and all that, it's more about going around in comfort and style than pretending to be a rally driver. I think there's a solid market of people that aren't looking for the "basic transport from A to B" but the "private limo driver from A to B" experience, particularly since the computer has even more discretion than a human. And it's not like they're going to take away the "off" switch any time soon, so if you want to go ahead...
That's all well and nice, but the practical reality is that it goes:
Symptoms -> Diagnosis -> Treatment
Except for very basic symptom treatments like painkillers if you're in pain you usually need a diagnosis before you get started on treatments, even if it's not entirely correct or the treatment might not work. If my general physician sees I'm under the weather and should stay in bed for a couple of days he still needs to put some kind of general condition on the sick notice like a non-specific virus infection. Until you get a diagnosis you are in many ways in medical limbo, which is why it matter so much.
Standard tracker functionality? Yes, you could probably use DHT or similar but old fashioned trackers are simple, reliable and doesn't really give away anything but volume of data transferred.
I can't imagine anybody seriously believes tablets will completely replace PCs. But I think they'll make a helluva dent (if they haven't already).
They recently published some stats here from Norway, access to home PC was up 2% to 95% of the respondents and tablets at 37% (first year recorded). I think most people will end up with both, simple as that. That said, I think it has a huge impact on the sort of PC people want. For consumption, people want performance - they want everything to be snappy and flashy and smooth. For production, a lot of the time the limitation is between the keyboard and the chair, for example now that I'm "producing" this comment I like my keyboard, but the CPU is practically idle. The overlap between input-heavy and performance heavy is rather small, essentially hardcore games. But I think for most people the answer will be that yes, we have a laptop, no it's not very powerful and yes it's collecting dust most of the time but it's useful when we need it.
Maybe those creative professionals should contribute to the development of gimp by coding and contributing the features that they want? (...) The graphic designers are just to lazy to do it themselves, instead they demand that you do it for them for free.
No they don't, they really don't and this is really one very annoying aspect of open source zealots. Said zealots push their software (the GIMP in this case) and the would-be users (graphics designers in this case) explain why it's not working for them because it lacks features X, Y and Z and then the zealots starts berating them for why they don't contribute code or money to implement that. Then the would-be users go "Wait, what, huh I didn't ask for the GIMP, you pushed it and I told you why it didn't work. I'm fine with paying $price for Photoshop, you're the one who told me you have a better alternative but you don't. And no, an equally sized donation would be a mouse piss in the ocean towards making it so."
And yet, somehow you've manged to flip this around that it's not a failure of the GIMP project but that it's the graphics designers' fault. If you're trying to convert a Windows user into a Linux user it's not the Windows user's job to make Linux usable to him. If you're trying to convert a MS Office user into a LibreOffice user it's not the MS Office user's job to make LibreOffice usable to them. If you're trying to make a Photoshop user into a GIMP user it's not the Photoshop user's job to make GIMP usable to them. They're happy where they are and they don't want to fix your project. Too bad like all zealotry you become immune to the cluebat, no matter how hard they bash.
The problem with the "LOW MARKET SHARE!!1!!" comments is that you're talking about a company having a 10% of a market worth billions of dollars. I will take 10% of a billion dollars any day of the week.
Yes, but saying they'll be the new standard makes no sense, Apple yields the low end and mainstream market early and often. Seen any budget iPhones? iPads? Macs? Budget Apple anything? It doesn't matter how many blunders Microsoft makes as long as Apple doesn't want to enter those market segments and do it better. They don't want to start a race to the bottom against Windows any more than against Android, and no we won't all be buying $1000 computers, $500 phones and $500 tablets any time soon.