They'll come around eventually, Spotify and other streaming services are now over half the music market in Scandinavia and HBO seems to have finally taken a whacking with the cluebat and introduced HBO Nordic, a streaming-only service that'll have new episodes within 24h of airing. Sure they could use a few more whacks with the cluebat, but it's a start. Give it another 5 years and I think it will have spread just like Spotify has. Movies will be last because they still manage to get people out of their chair and into cinemas for unskippable commercials and to buy overpriced soda and popcorn on top of expensive tickets, but if TV go streaming they will too. In any case, there's no reason to stop pirating. It's no surprise these services have launched where piracy is strongest and where the Pirate Party has made most progress, they're damage control. You just have to keep at it and drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
Fourth: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". Given that, the "exclusive Right" mentioned in Article I Section 8 cannot be the exclusive right to speak, perform, or publish a piece; only the exclusive right to sell it. Laws against non-commercial sharing and use are a violation of the First Amendment.
If you're going to be that anal about it, I would bet they reply that it says freedom of speech not any other form of communication or medium. Pedantry strikes both ways....
People always want faster. Until you can download the 4k HD video in 2 seconds, people will always want it faster.
Let me put it this way, I have a 60 Mbit line because it costs less than 64 kbps ISDN cost me (well, strictly speaking my parents) 15 years ago, not because I pay 1000 times as much. If technology will also deliver me a Gbit line for the same price, I might just take that too. But it has nothing to do with what I want really, I don't will it to happen. In fact if it happens maybe I'll say "Thanks, but can't you give me a 100 Mbit line at half that price?" since I have lots of other things I'd also like to spend money on.
This is pretty much the first trap you fall into when it comes to marketing, thinking it's better so people must want it. And if you ask such a naive question, people will say sure they want it. But if you ask if your boss gave you a big raise today, would you spend more money on it? Then it turns out the answer is often no, what they have works for them, they got other things they'd like to spent money on and you can't upsell them an inch. Would be nice tho. In fact if you offer more for the same price and your customers instead choose the same for a lower price, you can outright downsell them and lower your revenue instead of making people spend more because it's a better value.
I can't really remember there was ever a time like that, the evolution went from text (10s of kB) to pics (100s of kB) to audio (MBs) to thumbnail video (10s of MB) to DivX rips (100s of MB) to HD vids (GBs) to BluRay (10s of GB) so the question isn't really what connection speed we have, but what to fill it with. Even 4K/HEVC video is supposedly barely double the size (4x the pixels, 50% better compression but audio stays the same) of 1080p/H.264 video. It's not so much technical limitations we're hitting but the audiovisual input limitations of the human body, and I don't see touch, smell or taste coming over the Internet any time soon.
Maybe if we invent some kind of immersive VR environment were you need massive amounts of 3D data to interact with other people and objects but beyond that, it's just the luxury of downloading a 50GB move to your laptop 5 minutes before you go on your remote mountain cabin trip. I have a 60/60 Mbit line now, and I honestly very rarely feel the need for anything faster. It's already to the point where I put one thing on download, look through the other things and by the time I'm done I can already start watching the first thing, even without streaming.
A computer is a very versatile tool. (...) A better question is "'When do computers help education and when do they hurt?" You can find good examples of each.
In my experience, when you use that versatility to do more fun, distracting and immediately rewarding things than learning anything which is most of the time in a forced learning situation. I don't know exactly when I went from an unwilling pupil to a willing student, but for many years I was in school because I had to be in school while I'd rather be out and play. A pretty common sentiment among kids and young teens, I would think. Textbooks don't really leave much room for doing anything other than reading, while every computer class was full of non-curriculum related activity. If you're teaching from the blackboard you see if people are paying attention, if they're all staring at their own screens you don't. It's a great tool to learn when you want to learn, but I rather see why schools are struggling to make good use of it. Natural curiosity only gets you that far.
What the difference between threading an app and sharding it are? I'm kinda leaning towards writing this off as a bunch of theoretical BS, not the kind that makes sense either. Database servers are the highest load servers on most networks, distributing data process to them sounds idiotic at best.
Different scales, the only way I've heard sharing used is to distribute the load between many servers, not like a cluster but that each server has their own form of dedicated area, like for example in a MMORPG you can divide the game world and pass people from shard to shard as they cross the game world. Or splitting a data set by rows depending on which "belong" together, a bit like NUMA for data - local data interacts fastest with local data, less fast with remote data but it all acts seamless as one big database. It works quite well if your range of interaction is limited like in a space shooter, but it's not a magic bullet.
(*) Technology has also caused the loss of video stores, CD stores, so many things are hard to buy locally now. Technology should add options, not destroy them!
Technology is invented not unvented, you can only abandon it. CD and video stores are dying because neither I nor anyone I know go there anymore. Should we keep pizza places open if everybody wants to eat sushi instead? Don't be silly, technology adds options and when people overwhelmingly choose them over the old ones, the old will go away just like people all sorts of fashions and trends and other fads.
And even more so on the GPU side, CPUs may add a few instructions each round but GPUs rewrite the book quite often, here's from nVidia's hardware emulators.
Turn your back on them, and they WILL try to go back to a similar model.
I think you have that backwards, there's been plenty bands who have refused to be part of the online/streaming business or backed out again and the results seem pretty much unanimous. They try going back to a similar model, and the customers turn their backs on them, either they fire up their P2P clients or just play one of the many songs who are easily available that the band doesn't make it a PITA to pay for. If you think that any more than a few die hard fans will go out of their way to buy your music, you have a huge overinflated ego.
However, as the summary points out, the end user must pay $35 to challenge "strikes" against them, and while they are refunded the full amount, if they win, there is nothing else won, nor is the ISP punished for false claims. In other words, the user assumes all risk even if they know that they are innocent.
I'm more interested in what happens when you lose your challenge, to you have to just accept it or what happens if you take it to court? Defamation of character, harassment, false accusations, take your pick. Or is this one of those wonderful "binding arbitration" aka kangaroo courts that are binding and final?
Anyway, as long as you got choices I would suggest to not contest and simply cancel your subscription on first notice as long as you got choices. Even if you only have a couple to choose from the ISP and you're going to is another six-strike ISP they will still hate that much more than anything else.
Let "Windows Update" be just that, an add an "Update Center" with a warning banner on top that this is all third party software you have already installed on the system and that nothing here is provided by or supported by Microsoft. You have add/remove software in the control panel, why not update software?
First they just need to stuff the idea of "downloading music makes you a bad person / thief" into the masses / societies. They are already at it, on a global scale.
You mean like they could call these people by the same name as those nasty sea robbers? Yes they're already at it and have been at it for 400 years, are they winning? I still remember the 90s with hidden underground eLiTe BBSs, FTP warez servers and floppy trading, they're a million billion miles away from even turning time back to 2000 before Napster. Did they win when Napster died? Grokster? Kazaa? DC++ hubs? Suprnova? They're winning the formal battles but losing the war for the public opinion, best evidence by how everybody just flows to a new service. And even if less people file share with age, in a few years the people who were 20-25 back then have teenage kids of their own and they'll know all this BS is false, even if they don't do it themselves anymore. The clock isn't about to go backwards any time soon.
The Wii U doesn't appeal to me because it looks more complicated and it costs more than twice as much. Talk to me when it is $150. I'd also prefer it didn't have big easy-to-break-looking, drain-its-batteries-all-the-time controller tv things.
It's the only thing that gives it potential to be not yet another clone of the xbox/playstation formula. We've used it a bit and the asymmetry is quite fun as a party game, like for example one hides and the others seek or whatever. However, it's not the same kind of "pick up and wave a racket" killer like the Wii and it's just not different enough that other companies will use it for something important when they can have a nearly identical xbox/ps3/wiiu game.
Are they at the 1mW/MHz level of ARMs yet or aren't they?
I think they passed that quite some time ago, the Medfield platform had these figures for SoC Power Consumption last year: 100MHz 600MHz 1.3GHz 1.6GHz ~50mW ~175mW ~500mW ~750mW
That is more like 0.5 to 0.3 mW/MHz, of course presumably without any GPU load. They're just one in the crowd though, they'll have to do better to win.
If they used the DMCA yes, but as I understand it a lot of the big takedown senders - and I would assume NASCAR is one of them - have a private deal with YouTube to pull content, without formally issuing a DMCA notice. It's not required by law, but it's not forbidden by law either. Also your quote is very wrong, the legal text is:
(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
Only the last part is "under penalty of perjury", the rest only goes under "misrepresentation" in the law.
Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section - (1) that material or activity is infringing, or (2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification, shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys' fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright ownerâ(TM)s authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.
Most people will never use or even need to understand most words in the dictionary, does it hurt them in any way? The purpose of Unicode is far more practical than "to provide a universal character set for writing text in different languages", it's to end the horrible practice of code pages. To do that, Unicode needs to be a superset of all other code pages, no matter how stupidly they were designed. That is why you have all sorts of control characters and other stuff that absolutely aren't characters, it's pretty hard to complain about that when your ideals are shot after mapping in 7-bit ASCII. I can't speak for the CJK mess, but at least for us here in Europe Unicode has been a big blessing.
And coercion for example from friends and family. Claiming to not have the code can in itself be grounds for negative reactions or be taken as an admission that they didn't vote for somebody else.
Well, the public was given a choice back in the 90's. There were ad-driven sites, and there were subscription-based sites. We know which business model won. The "free" one, because people tend to value short-term rewards over long-term ones. The tracking and collusion by ad companies is just natural evolution of the wild west world of internet advertising.
The problem is not advertising, it's the "wild west" part. I didn't really mind ads that were essentially bill boards or dead tree ads put online, I never hated ads when I read the newspaper or magazines when I was younger. Okay I didn't like them either, but I knew they were helping pay the bills so I seemed like a fair trade. Online ads on the other hand have all the subtlety of a circus clown trying to get your attention, worst was all the focus on click-through leading to pop-ups, pop-unders and whatnot since my click-through rate was approximately equal to my "pop-up appeared where I wanted to click" and "missed the corner" rate. It certainly wasn't enough to be something off to the side that you'd notice while you were reading the article, like in print. And it all started an arms race with the advertisers for blocking/circumvention techniques.
The other part is tracking, paper and TV ads worked too even if you couldn't track people by them. I know the advertisers would like to, but people don't want to be tracked so the result is they try to do it in secret with cookies, web bugs and such. From being a rather innocent part of the page advertising has become the new spyware and scumware. So even if the worst of the ads have died down, there's equally much if not more reason to block it. To turn it off is to open the floodgates to what I consider one step above malware, because like you say it's the wild west out there. The problem is that when you block everything, you also block things that aren't really problems.
I think it would be good if there was some sort of certification to say: 1) Plain text or image ads, no animation, pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitial or DOM tricks - part of the page like on paper. 2) No tracking, you can show me ads but that is all.
In return you'd go on a whitelist and I think I could even sweeten the deal by volunteering some basic demographics/interests, I'm not opposed to relevant ads just to poking into my individual, personal habits. The downside is that it'd have to be an organization controlling this certification, otherwise there'd be no way to punish those who lie. Perhaps something similar to the malware site checker many browsers have now? In addition to malware you'd also flag sites that fraudulently claim to use classic advertising. I think that could be a win-win for all the serious sites that really do tend to play nice and to bring the wild west into modern civilization.
That's a ridiculous question, no, and nobody should. Your argument is rationalizing a bait-and-switch tactic.
Are you telling me that people don't know there are commercials on TV or that the TV networks try to conceal this fact? If there's not a large discrepancy between what the customer thought he'd get and what he got, it's per definition not a bait-and-switch. For example if they promised you an ad-free service but each program has sponsors who get "sponsor spots" to promote their products instead, that'd be a bait-and-switch.
"Oh, you already paid $X for our cable product as agreed? Sorry, but our product is now worth $X + $80, and you're going to have to pay the difference or watch some ads on your existing service.
How you managed to twist what the grandparent said into that is amazing, what he pointed out is that today you provide them with $X in subscription revenue and $80 in ad revenue so no profit-maximizing company would offer you a service with $0 in ad revenue without $X + $80 in subscription revenue. If you think your current agreement entitles you to ad free service for $X, go see a lawyer but in any case the agreement you have today would not be binding on what they offer tomorrow.
In all honesty, I find almost all work - and this goes far beyond IT - consists of parts where you need to communicate and collaborate and parts that are tasks that are clearly isolated and scoped but not necessarily defined in detail that you need to deep-dive into individually. In fact it's a question that seriously annoys me in interviews, whether you like working as a team or individually. Have you ever in a real world job found that you only need one of those capabilities? I've found that people who work part-time from home often divide their work so the communication and collaboration happens at the office and leave the individual tasks to do at home. I'm sure that makes you feel like most the work gets done at home, but I'm not sure it necessarily means you in total get more done than at the office.
Data morphing can be done with near zero computational processing, unlike proper encryption.
What kind of CPU/Internet connection do you have? According to Anandtech's Bench, both an Intel 3770K and AMD FX-8350 can encrypt/decrypt >3GB/s - that's 24 Gbit/s. They could encrypt my measly 60 Mbit fiber line with both hands tied behind their backs, that is not the problem at all.
A lot of people are not suitable for remote employment, and a lot of people just aren't capable of involving off-site people. But if you've done it a while, hopefully you've weeded out those who couldn't and shouldn't and are left with good people you wouldn't otherwise have on staff. Doing anything like this without a grandfather clause sounds like chasing away a lot of good people that you've worked hard to find for almost no reason at all. But then I've never had any major issue with corporate suicides, unlike people they don't have any inherent reason to exist.
That is how you get out of a recession. The government spends its way out, and then when times are good again cuts back and reduced the deficit it built up.
Yes, but the reality is that many countries didn't cut back so their credit limits were already fairly stretched when you go into recession. When investors start to question your ability to pay your debts and wonder if you're about to enter a credit death spiral the risk premiums go insane and far exceed any real return on investment you could make. If you overextend yourself the interest rates raise tenfold like Greece experienced, you can't borrow your way out of the problems when your borrowing is the cause of the problems or the negative effects far exceeds the positive effects. So the question is, does France have the maneuvering room to do this?
I would think rationally, yes. France is not nearly as in as deep trouble as many other countries, but investors are now a very nervous bunch ready to stampede. They look to the Greek "haircut" and is very afraid that all of the Euro countries will go down as a bunch of dominos, in fact many thinh it can go a lot worse. Look for example at Spain, huge economy, 26% unemployment and 59.8% of all under 25 without work, things are approaching some kind of breaking point the world hasn't seen since the 1930s when communism, fascism and nazism started to look like good ideas. Also known as "we don't know how it'll be after the revolution, but it couldn't possibly get any worse".
no thinking person believes the BS; but thinking people are not in charge...
You don't have to believe the BS to spout the BS... The smart people know exactly what buttons to push to manipulate the populace and the internal self-justice of the system, if you call out the emperor for having no clothes it won't have a fairy tale ending as the system will turn on you and the people won't believe you. Even in BS-land you need a certain kind of smarts to rise to the top, though the ability to turn a blind eye is almost equally important.
Slashdot Mirror
They'll come around eventually, Spotify and other streaming services are now over half the music market in Scandinavia and HBO seems to have finally taken a whacking with the cluebat and introduced HBO Nordic, a streaming-only service that'll have new episodes within 24h of airing. Sure they could use a few more whacks with the cluebat, but it's a start. Give it another 5 years and I think it will have spread just like Spotify has. Movies will be last because they still manage to get people out of their chair and into cinemas for unskippable commercials and to buy overpriced soda and popcorn on top of expensive tickets, but if TV go streaming they will too. In any case, there's no reason to stop pirating. It's no surprise these services have launched where piracy is strongest and where the Pirate Party has made most progress, they're damage control. You just have to keep at it and drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
Fourth: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". Given that, the "exclusive Right" mentioned in Article I Section 8 cannot be the exclusive right to speak, perform, or publish a piece; only the exclusive right to sell it. Laws against non-commercial sharing and use are a violation of the First Amendment.
If you're going to be that anal about it, I would bet they reply that it says freedom of speech not any other form of communication or medium. Pedantry strikes both ways....
So I'm three-for-three?
It could also be an urban legend spun from no actual quote at all, so technically no :p
People always want faster. Until you can download the 4k HD video in 2 seconds, people will always want it faster.
Let me put it this way, I have a 60 Mbit line because it costs less than 64 kbps ISDN cost me (well, strictly speaking my parents) 15 years ago, not because I pay 1000 times as much. If technology will also deliver me a Gbit line for the same price, I might just take that too. But it has nothing to do with what I want really, I don't will it to happen. In fact if it happens maybe I'll say "Thanks, but can't you give me a 100 Mbit line at half that price?" since I have lots of other things I'd also like to spend money on.
This is pretty much the first trap you fall into when it comes to marketing, thinking it's better so people must want it. And if you ask such a naive question, people will say sure they want it. But if you ask if your boss gave you a big raise today, would you spend more money on it? Then it turns out the answer is often no, what they have works for them, they got other things they'd like to spent money on and you can't upsell them an inch. Would be nice tho. In fact if you offer more for the same price and your customers instead choose the same for a lower price, you can outright downsell them and lower your revenue instead of making people spend more because it's a better value.
I can't really remember there was ever a time like that, the evolution went from text (10s of kB) to pics (100s of kB) to audio (MBs) to thumbnail video (10s of MB) to DivX rips (100s of MB) to HD vids (GBs) to BluRay (10s of GB) so the question isn't really what connection speed we have, but what to fill it with. Even 4K/HEVC video is supposedly barely double the size (4x the pixels, 50% better compression but audio stays the same) of 1080p/H.264 video. It's not so much technical limitations we're hitting but the audiovisual input limitations of the human body, and I don't see touch, smell or taste coming over the Internet any time soon.
Maybe if we invent some kind of immersive VR environment were you need massive amounts of 3D data to interact with other people and objects but beyond that, it's just the luxury of downloading a 50GB move to your laptop 5 minutes before you go on your remote mountain cabin trip. I have a 60/60 Mbit line now, and I honestly very rarely feel the need for anything faster. It's already to the point where I put one thing on download, look through the other things and by the time I'm done I can already start watching the first thing, even without streaming.
A computer is a very versatile tool. (...) A better question is "'When do computers help education and when do they hurt?" You can find good examples of each.
In my experience, when you use that versatility to do more fun, distracting and immediately rewarding things than learning anything which is most of the time in a forced learning situation. I don't know exactly when I went from an unwilling pupil to a willing student, but for many years I was in school because I had to be in school while I'd rather be out and play. A pretty common sentiment among kids and young teens, I would think. Textbooks don't really leave much room for doing anything other than reading, while every computer class was full of non-curriculum related activity. If you're teaching from the blackboard you see if people are paying attention, if they're all staring at their own screens you don't. It's a great tool to learn when you want to learn, but I rather see why schools are struggling to make good use of it. Natural curiosity only gets you that far.
What the difference between threading an app and sharding it are? I'm kinda leaning towards writing this off as a bunch of theoretical BS, not the kind that makes sense either. Database servers are the highest load servers on most networks, distributing data process to them sounds idiotic at best.
Different scales, the only way I've heard sharing used is to distribute the load between many servers, not like a cluster but that each server has their own form of dedicated area, like for example in a MMORPG you can divide the game world and pass people from shard to shard as they cross the game world. Or splitting a data set by rows depending on which "belong" together, a bit like NUMA for data - local data interacts fastest with local data, less fast with remote data but it all acts seamless as one big database. It works quite well if your range of interaction is limited like in a space shooter, but it's not a magic bullet.
(*) Technology has also caused the loss of video stores, CD stores, so many things are hard to buy locally now. Technology should add options, not destroy them!
Technology is invented not unvented, you can only abandon it. CD and video stores are dying because neither I nor anyone I know go there anymore. Should we keep pizza places open if everybody wants to eat sushi instead? Don't be silly, technology adds options and when people overwhelmingly choose them over the old ones, the old will go away just like people all sorts of fashions and trends and other fads.
And even more so on the GPU side, CPUs may add a few instructions each round but GPUs rewrite the book quite often, here's from nVidia's hardware emulators.
Turn your back on them, and they WILL try to go back to a similar model.
I think you have that backwards, there's been plenty bands who have refused to be part of the online/streaming business or backed out again and the results seem pretty much unanimous. They try going back to a similar model, and the customers turn their backs on them, either they fire up their P2P clients or just play one of the many songs who are easily available that the band doesn't make it a PITA to pay for. If you think that any more than a few die hard fans will go out of their way to buy your music, you have a huge overinflated ego.
However, as the summary points out, the end user must pay $35 to challenge "strikes" against them, and while they are refunded the full amount, if they win, there is nothing else won, nor is the ISP punished for false claims. In other words, the user assumes all risk even if they know that they are innocent.
I'm more interested in what happens when you lose your challenge, to you have to just accept it or what happens if you take it to court? Defamation of character, harassment, false accusations, take your pick. Or is this one of those wonderful "binding arbitration" aka kangaroo courts that are binding and final?
Anyway, as long as you got choices I would suggest to not contest and simply cancel your subscription on first notice as long as you got choices. Even if you only have a couple to choose from the ISP and you're going to is another six-strike ISP they will still hate that much more than anything else.
Let "Windows Update" be just that, an add an "Update Center" with a warning banner on top that this is all third party software you have already installed on the system and that nothing here is provided by or supported by Microsoft. You have add/remove software in the control panel, why not update software?
First they just need to stuff the idea of "downloading music makes you a bad person / thief" into the masses / societies. They are already at it, on a global scale.
You mean like they could call these people by the same name as those nasty sea robbers? Yes they're already at it and have been at it for 400 years, are they winning? I still remember the 90s with hidden underground eLiTe BBSs, FTP warez servers and floppy trading, they're a million billion miles away from even turning time back to 2000 before Napster. Did they win when Napster died? Grokster? Kazaa? DC++ hubs? Suprnova? They're winning the formal battles but losing the war for the public opinion, best evidence by how everybody just flows to a new service. And even if less people file share with age, in a few years the people who were 20-25 back then have teenage kids of their own and they'll know all this BS is false, even if they don't do it themselves anymore. The clock isn't about to go backwards any time soon.
The Wii U doesn't appeal to me because it looks more complicated and it costs more than twice as much. Talk to me when it is $150. I'd also prefer it didn't have big easy-to-break-looking, drain-its-batteries-all-the-time controller tv things.
It's the only thing that gives it potential to be not yet another clone of the xbox/playstation formula. We've used it a bit and the asymmetry is quite fun as a party game, like for example one hides and the others seek or whatever. However, it's not the same kind of "pick up and wave a racket" killer like the Wii and it's just not different enough that other companies will use it for something important when they can have a nearly identical xbox/ps3/wiiu game.
Are they at the 1mW/MHz level of ARMs yet or aren't they?
I think they passed that quite some time ago, the Medfield platform had these figures for SoC Power Consumption last year:
100MHz 600MHz 1.3GHz 1.6GHz
~50mW ~175mW ~500mW ~750mW
That is more like 0.5 to 0.3 mW/MHz, of course presumably without any GPU load. They're just one in the crowd though, they'll have to do better to win.
If they used the DMCA yes, but as I understand it a lot of the big takedown senders - and I would assume NASCAR is one of them - have a private deal with YouTube to pull content, without formally issuing a DMCA notice. It's not required by law, but it's not forbidden by law either. Also your quote is very wrong, the legal text is:
(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
Only the last part is "under penalty of perjury", the rest only goes under "misrepresentation" in the law.
Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section -
(1) that material or activity is infringing, or
(2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification,
shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys' fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright ownerâ(TM)s authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.
Most people will never use or even need to understand most words in the dictionary, does it hurt them in any way? The purpose of Unicode is far more practical than "to provide a universal character set for writing text in different languages", it's to end the horrible practice of code pages. To do that, Unicode needs to be a superset of all other code pages, no matter how stupidly they were designed. That is why you have all sorts of control characters and other stuff that absolutely aren't characters, it's pretty hard to complain about that when your ideals are shot after mapping in 7-bit ASCII. I can't speak for the CJK mess, but at least for us here in Europe Unicode has been a big blessing.
And coercion for example from friends and family. Claiming to not have the code can in itself be grounds for negative reactions or be taken as an admission that they didn't vote for somebody else.
Well, the public was given a choice back in the 90's. There were ad-driven sites, and there were subscription-based sites. We know which business model won. The "free" one, because people tend to value short-term rewards over long-term ones. The tracking and collusion by ad companies is just natural evolution of the wild west world of internet advertising.
The problem is not advertising, it's the "wild west" part. I didn't really mind ads that were essentially bill boards or dead tree ads put online, I never hated ads when I read the newspaper or magazines when I was younger. Okay I didn't like them either, but I knew they were helping pay the bills so I seemed like a fair trade. Online ads on the other hand have all the subtlety of a circus clown trying to get your attention, worst was all the focus on click-through leading to pop-ups, pop-unders and whatnot since my click-through rate was approximately equal to my "pop-up appeared where I wanted to click" and "missed the corner" rate. It certainly wasn't enough to be something off to the side that you'd notice while you were reading the article, like in print. And it all started an arms race with the advertisers for blocking/circumvention techniques.
The other part is tracking, paper and TV ads worked too even if you couldn't track people by them. I know the advertisers would like to, but people don't want to be tracked so the result is they try to do it in secret with cookies, web bugs and such. From being a rather innocent part of the page advertising has become the new spyware and scumware. So even if the worst of the ads have died down, there's equally much if not more reason to block it. To turn it off is to open the floodgates to what I consider one step above malware, because like you say it's the wild west out there. The problem is that when you block everything, you also block things that aren't really problems.
I think it would be good if there was some sort of certification to say:
1) Plain text or image ads, no animation, pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitial or DOM tricks - part of the page like on paper.
2) No tracking, you can show me ads but that is all.
In return you'd go on a whitelist and I think I could even sweeten the deal by volunteering some basic demographics/interests, I'm not opposed to relevant ads just to poking into my individual, personal habits. The downside is that it'd have to be an organization controlling this certification, otherwise there'd be no way to punish those who lie. Perhaps something similar to the malware site checker many browsers have now? In addition to malware you'd also flag sites that fraudulently claim to use classic advertising. I think that could be a win-win for all the serious sites that really do tend to play nice and to bring the wild west into modern civilization.
That's a ridiculous question, no, and nobody should. Your argument is rationalizing a bait-and-switch tactic.
Are you telling me that people don't know there are commercials on TV or that the TV networks try to conceal this fact? If there's not a large discrepancy between what the customer thought he'd get and what he got, it's per definition not a bait-and-switch. For example if they promised you an ad-free service but each program has sponsors who get "sponsor spots" to promote their products instead, that'd be a bait-and-switch.
"Oh, you already paid $X for our cable product as agreed? Sorry, but our product is now worth $X + $80, and you're going to have to pay the difference or watch some ads on your existing service.
How you managed to twist what the grandparent said into that is amazing, what he pointed out is that today you provide them with $X in subscription revenue and $80 in ad revenue so no profit-maximizing company would offer you a service with $0 in ad revenue without $X + $80 in subscription revenue. If you think your current agreement entitles you to ad free service for $X, go see a lawyer but in any case the agreement you have today would not be binding on what they offer tomorrow.
In all honesty, I find almost all work - and this goes far beyond IT - consists of parts where you need to communicate and collaborate and parts that are tasks that are clearly isolated and scoped but not necessarily defined in detail that you need to deep-dive into individually. In fact it's a question that seriously annoys me in interviews, whether you like working as a team or individually. Have you ever in a real world job found that you only need one of those capabilities? I've found that people who work part-time from home often divide their work so the communication and collaboration happens at the office and leave the individual tasks to do at home. I'm sure that makes you feel like most the work gets done at home, but I'm not sure it necessarily means you in total get more done than at the office.
Data morphing can be done with near zero computational processing, unlike proper encryption.
What kind of CPU/Internet connection do you have? According to Anandtech's Bench, both an Intel 3770K and AMD FX-8350 can encrypt/decrypt >3GB/s - that's 24 Gbit/s. They could encrypt my measly 60 Mbit fiber line with both hands tied behind their backs, that is not the problem at all.
A lot of people are not suitable for remote employment, and a lot of people just aren't capable of involving off-site people. But if you've done it a while, hopefully you've weeded out those who couldn't and shouldn't and are left with good people you wouldn't otherwise have on staff. Doing anything like this without a grandfather clause sounds like chasing away a lot of good people that you've worked hard to find for almost no reason at all. But then I've never had any major issue with corporate suicides, unlike people they don't have any inherent reason to exist.
That is how you get out of a recession. The government spends its way out, and then when times are good again cuts back and reduced the deficit it built up.
Yes, but the reality is that many countries didn't cut back so their credit limits were already fairly stretched when you go into recession. When investors start to question your ability to pay your debts and wonder if you're about to enter a credit death spiral the risk premiums go insane and far exceed any real return on investment you could make. If you overextend yourself the interest rates raise tenfold like Greece experienced, you can't borrow your way out of the problems when your borrowing is the cause of the problems or the negative effects far exceeds the positive effects. So the question is, does France have the maneuvering room to do this?
I would think rationally, yes. France is not nearly as in as deep trouble as many other countries, but investors are now a very nervous bunch ready to stampede. They look to the Greek "haircut" and is very afraid that all of the Euro countries will go down as a bunch of dominos, in fact many thinh it can go a lot worse. Look for example at Spain, huge economy, 26% unemployment and 59.8% of all under 25 without work, things are approaching some kind of breaking point the world hasn't seen since the 1930s when communism, fascism and nazism started to look like good ideas. Also known as "we don't know how it'll be after the revolution, but it couldn't possibly get any worse".
no thinking person believes the BS; but thinking people are not in charge...
You don't have to believe the BS to spout the BS... The smart people know exactly what buttons to push to manipulate the populace and the internal self-justice of the system, if you call out the emperor for having no clothes it won't have a fairy tale ending as the system will turn on you and the people won't believe you. Even in BS-land you need a certain kind of smarts to rise to the top, though the ability to turn a blind eye is almost equally important.