Well, you are mostly right, but having a robot involved, even if it is minimally autonomous, means a complex tool is being used, introducing some consistency to the part of the job it does.
Just not to the results, early robots would just continue to smash things until someone hit the off switch when things go wrong. Not that most robotic surgery is autonomous at all, it's mostly advanced puppeteering of tools smaller than the surgeon could operate directly.
This one uses examples from the industrial revolution that are not applicable anymore because the rate of automation is far faster (and accelerating), meaning that the economy doesn't have enough time to rellocate workers to other basic tasks before they are automated as well.
I doubt we'll run out of work as such, there'll never be an end to the want for personal services and the poor will end up working for each other for pennies because they can't afford the robot products. However, the return on capital and the return on labor may diverge, meaning the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the distance increase to the point where there's really no way to move up through regular labor, even highly qualified positions. Not unlike what you see in certain third world countries, there's the ultra rich, those that provide services to them and the ultra poor.
It is not a robot, and it is only labeled as an assistant to diagnostic, but it already is capable of being on top of all of the literature about cancer, and make suggestions based on that. This is something very few doctors can do, or have the time and interest of doing.
And it doesn't have to outcompete the best surgeon in the world, it only needs to be available then and there. A robot that can give you surgery now, no matter how risky is better than a doctor who can operate in an hour when you're dead. But I'm guessing for quite some time still a robot will cost more than a human.
In his affidavit, Trooper Mire testified the money was bundled with rubber bands, sealed in plastic shrink wrapping, and hidden in the vehicle's floor compartment. He stated based on his experience, such packaging indicates a "substantial connection between the questionable currency and narcotics transactions." The claimants presented no evidence to contradict these statements made by Trooper Mire in his affidavit.
Relying on the reasoning of the court of appeal, the claimants contend the dog's alert is not reliable evidence of criminal activity because 96% of currency in circulation may contain trace amounts of narcotic residue. (...) Even if the claimants had shown a large percentage of currency in circulation contains trace amounts of narcotic residue, they did not show these trace amounts of narcotics would cause a trained police dog to alert.
Trooper Mire's affidavit also implies Tina Beers was traveling on a route commonly used to transport drug money.
Other factors to consider are Tina Beers' nervousness upon being stopped and her initial denial of ownership of the money. The claimants contend these facts do not prove the money was drug-related. While these facts alone do not prove the money is drug-related, they may be considered under the totality of circumstances to determine if there was probable cause for forfeiture.
That pretty much sums up their arguments. So we have a trooper saying drug users often hide their cash and drive this road, but there's absolutely zero evidence of any drug relation except the narcotics dog they brought in to sniff the cash at the police station alerted them. That the dog alerted them is considered proof that it is drug related and the government will do nothing to test the reliability of their dogs, they are faultless until you provide evidence to the contrary. Oh yeah and she was nervous, I guess lots of people carrying drug cash is nervous so that's slam dunk evidence it's drug related.
And this was at the state Supreme Court level, last year. Not that I generally carry $100k+ in cash, but sounds more like an arbitrary seizure of cash than anything that belongs in a civilized society. I mean really, all you need is a dog that can alert when its owner wants it to, have a police officer make some ominous claims on where the money might be coming from and all presumption of innocence is thrown out the window, you have to prove to the court beyond any probable cause that the money is really yours or it will be forfeit.
The point is that "liberalism" applied to economy is a center-right concept, while "liberalism" applied to "social matter" is a center-left concept.
At least here in Norway I'd disagree, the left is into high taxes, many government services and little economic freedom as well as trying to curb anything they consider harmful or unhealthy activities so little social freedom as well. They want to both provide for you and protect you from yourself. Here I'd say both kinds of liberals are to the right of that, but it's not the "same" right as they disagree almost as much with each other as they do with the left.
Well very often you have massive legacy applications that also consists of mature code in maintenance mode where behind a few years behind the bleeding edge doesn't matter at all, as long as it's rock stable and receive security patches. Where you'd like upgrade day and every day after to be yet another uneventful and boring day, because the only alternative is a really bad day. If you really need bleeding edge features or is doing new development I'd use something newer, but if not you just bleed for no reason at all.
Thirdly, the assumption that a government job is equivalent to unemployment is silly. Government employees perform a service and we pay them for it. That the money flows through the IRS instead of some corporation's accounts receivable is irrelevant.
In some ways, sure. In other ways you often don't have a choice about using public services and in the cases where you do then you're often paying double because they're there anyway whether you use them or not. Unlike using private services paying taxes is not voluntary, so a majority can force you to pay regardless of the quality or value of these services. But no matter if the people who'd like higher taxes or lower taxes is in majority, it's very much a "two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner" situation. The opposite of "I got mine, screw you" is also not that great.
Try taking some of NASA's moon rocks and say that because of the outer space treaty they have no property right claim to them and see how long it's until you're locked up in jail. Nation states can't claim it as their territory, but it's entirely unclear how or if anyone can claim mining rights on an asteroid, or if it's a race to see who can gobble up the asteroid first. "Planting the flag" might be good enough or it might not, depending on how deep pockets you have and how many big governments you can get to play by those rules.
You either have to make an argument that I don't own my hard drive but that your bother does own his bit pattern (that imaginary property is superior to real property, abrogating the entire basis for Western civilization)
You're a bit high on the hyperbole, private property is not a total and absolute right. The government can and will come in and condemn the building if it's not up to spec and in general there's a ton of laws that apply to what, when and how you care to use your private property to play a drum solo at 3AM. Even if you've done nothing to upset the neighbors they'll still come and arrest you for growing pot in the basement, private property or not. It's not exactly the equivalent of a total ban on gardening or a nazi-commie-fascist regime. You only need 128-256 random bits for a string to be totally unique, you didn't listen to/dev/rand and accidentally created a 3MB metallica song the way you could "reinvent" the BLT sandwich. You'd be pretty hard pressed to argue that copyright prevents you from assembling your own bits in your own pattern that you've created.
Is copyright a limitation on real property? Most certainly and I doubt anyone has questioned that for centuries because it was even more obvious when it took paper and ink to copy a book, not just flipping bits on a hard disk but the Statute of Anne is over 300 years old and the grants of monopolies and printing privileges go back to the 15th century so how far back to you want to go to find this copyright-free basis of western civilization, the dark ages? Even the US constitution and Bill of Rights managed to say "freedom of the press" and "time limited exclusive rights to authors" at the same time, so free but not that free. History is history, now it's the Information Age and we have fantastic and exact information-duplication machines, so we want to stop information? As likely as the Roman Church was to stop the spread of Bibles after Gutenberg, I'd say.
That's a nice thought, but unfortunately completely unrealistic and still favouring the clown with the deepest pocket. Let's be honest - the poor Joe Average wouldn't put a penny in the pot. Only then, a large corporation would have a guy with legal training on some weird position, like "Legal Operations Officer" to avoid chipping into the pot as well. With no money in the pot, the court could decide to let the parties represent themselves.
True, but if they don't want to claim any legal costs then they also should be barred from compensation from those costs. I think it's far more likely that they'll bankroll your lawyer too, but it will be padded to the damages they ask for. Remember that this also means that if a nutcase sues you and you want a real lawyer to defend you so nothing crazy happens, you'd end up paying for a lawyer for the nutcase as well. It'd be another incentive to legal trolling and ambulance chasers.
One company told us that of the 1,459 machines it's sold so far in 2013, only 7% have left the factory with Windows 8 installed.
A quick googling came up with this:
The U.K. PC market totaled 3 million units in the first quarter of 2012
So far in 2013 should be about half that or 1.5 million units, so this is a company with about a 0,1% market share. I think we already know Win8 is not doing great from browser stats, but this is just a way to create a big headline.
despite practically owning a phone manufacturing company
And yet Nokia isn't head and shoulders above the other WP8 phones, here the Lumia 820 got weak reviews and they ended up recommending the HTC WP 8S instead if you wanted a WP8 phone in that price range, not that they found either of them hot (dice throw 3 and 4, respectively). I wouldn't be surprised if Nokia eventually gets the boot - or bought - and Microsoft goes solo like with their Surface tablets, right now Nokia isn't living up to their hardware reputation.
Mark Shuttleworth has said that they're primarily targeting consumers in the developing world and corporations/organizations in the developed world, which sounds like a viable plan to me if they can execute it.
What part of that sounds like viable? To me it sounds like OLPC for tablets, except they think to make a profit on it. Is there any track record of a "poor man's device" succeeding in computers or small electronics? I'm thinking razor thin margins and extreme need for volume to drive unit price down, exactly what a large incumbent industry is made for like the dumb phones Nokia has been pounding out billions of. This is a lot more on the hardware side, a huge Android manufacturer thinking "If I order the cheapest parts I can find for 100 million tablets more, drop price another $10 and manage to sell them to new customers in developing countries at that price, do I make a profit?" than it is about software. I don't even think you'd need to be a Google partner, since it's about being as far away from the bleeding edge as possible.
The other part of it is that even if they're poor, they want a "normal" device like other people in richer countries have, if you look at use of Linux you'd think that'd rich countries use Windows and poor countries use Linux since it's free, right? That picture is at best mixed, many high-income countries like Germany are strong in open source while many if not most poorer countries have rampant Windows piracy and almost no open source culture at all because they want access to all the Windows software. So even if Ubuntu were able to put these low-end tablets on the shelves for equal or even slightly cheaper prices than Android tablets I think the market would overwhelmingly choose Android tablets. All around, Android is what Ubuntu would like to be and the train already left the station last year when Android wiped out pretty much everything that wasn't Apple.
We're agile enough that we can migrate our desktop to QML if that's the decision that gets made. Unity has existed on four toolkits already, what's a fifth between friends;)
I can't really make up my mind if this says the most about OSS or being "agile", but I think a facepalm is in order...
"Ponzi scheme" is not a synonym for "something to do with money I disagree with". Stop using it as such. Bitcoin isn't a Ponzi scheme because it's not an investment scheme.
If you're going to argue something it's probably not smart to quote something that ruins your argument. The vast majority of BitCoins are being held as an investment/speculation, and the only way it'll pay returns is by subsequent BitCoin buyers driving up the price allowing the early investors to sell off their BitCoins at a profit, since BitCoins don't produce anything or have any value by themselves. Current BitCoin holders have exactly the same incentives as members of a Ponzi scheme to keep the pyramid growing, the bigger the pyramid the more profit they make. That all this profit flows from the late entrants to the early entrants without producing anything of value is what makes it a Ponzi scheme, that it is done through deflation only makes it look like there's no money flow.
I have to say that it is easier to find good professionals on ANY field than to find competent marketing people. Marketing is not sales, it is not advertising and it is not product comparison. Marketing is strategy, pure and simple. Unfortunately, most marketing schools don't focus enough on strategy, or the mental part of marketing, leading to crappy professionals.
That seems an extremely narrow view on what marketing is, I don't think a marketing strategy is the whole of marketing any more than an product strategy is all of product development. The first sentence I found on wikipedia was "Marketing is the process of communicating the value of a product or service to customers." which seems about right. If you start veering too close to what the value proposition is then you're probably into business strategy, where of course what your customers want and competitors do is one important side but only one half compared to what is possible, feasible and profitable to deliver on the other and not all of it is market driven, like Ford said if he'd asked his customers they'd want a faster horse. There's a whole branch of business analysts and the like that are usually not counted as marketing. Perhaps that is what you want?
I'd say all of it from the whole strategy of where and with what message you're going to communicate with the market down to the individual ads and talking points are marketing. I'd put the border towards sales that marketing is sending the same message to a whole group - even if that group is a specific demographic or triggered by characteristics/events, salespeople talk to individuals or individual companies. If I sent someone to a trade show to hold a presentation I'd call it marketing, but the people at the stand I'd call sales because they're trying to pick up on that unique customer's wants and needs and sell according to that. It's getting a blurry line with targeted marketing and such, I'm not sure amazon.com has sales people in the sense I'm thinking about but all real world retail stores and everyone with key account managers still do.
Well VMware is not anything like a normal application since it doesn't want to run that way at all, it gropes deeply into the internal structures of the kernel. Which rather brings us to:
Microsoft never removes functions in updates, it just adds new ones with the new feature. Yes, that is messy, but they never break user or driver code! I thought this was Linus' mantra as we've seen in the audio patch issue a couple months back. He needs to make this apply to third party kernel modules and drivers as well.
No, it is to never break the userspace API or the drivers in the kernel. Anything else, the policy is that they'll break it as often and as much as they like, either you keep up with the changes or you opensource your code, get it in mainline and let the kernel maintain it. Pretty much the entire core development team is in agreement on this, if third party kernel modules or applications they depend on fail they don't care. Linus wants you to be able to run that Linux application you wrote in 1995 today, but if he broke the VMware kernel module three times last week he does not care. One of the reasons they dislike them so much is that modules can barf all over the kernel, at least before they refused to look at any bug report with the nVidia blob loaded.
So, judging from this, for IIPA, "illegal file sharing" does not actually mean "things that are outlawed and prosecuted in respective countries", it simply means "things we don't want other people to do".
Well at least in the US you have civil and criminal copyright infringement, so it can be infringing without being criminal. As I understood it in Spain downloading is considered an act of private copying which is legal, but it sounds like unauthorized uploading still is illegal, just not criminally prosecuted unless it's for commercial profit. I'm sure they would have formulated it differently if all non-commercial file sharing was fully legal, you could set up huge, legal, non-profit seeds in Spain.
So I'm sorry but until you get somebody with a brain to be the head of a distro, one who'll flip the bird to Torvalds and just fork the whole damned thing and make a Linux distro where you can update the damned thing without shit breaking?
Unfortunately it's not Torvalds you should flip the bird to. There are a lot of components that live between the applications and the kernel, and pulseaudio is one of them. Here's a pretty good illustration, Linus controls the kernel layer with the ALSA/OSS hardware drivers, HAL and network stack (for remote sound), but not the pulse engine or library layer. Also all USB devices work in the same way, the kernel only has basic USB read/write functions so if your device doesn't have drivers it's not Linus or the kernel at fault. There have also been many cases where the initialization/config/user interface has been broken, you can fix it from the command line but out of the box it appears broken.
Of course all of this doesn't matter if you're the user, anything that breaks anywhere from the GUI to the kernel is broken, but if we're going to play pin the blame game it is important. For example if you want to pin the blame on pulseaudio then Red Hat created it and many other distros like Ubuntu implemented it very poorly, Linus was not at all in the decision loop and I think he'd be very insulted if people though he'd approved that clusterfuck. What we should have is more people like Torvalds that could hit all these other projects with a cluebat, honestly if all components were run like he runs the kernel we wouldn't be having this discussion. His rule 1, 2 and 3 is don't break userspace.
The components have been made in the East for a long time now, particularly Taiwan was famous long before China. For those that missed the memo, the recent HDD crisis was due to floodings in Thailand which is in SE Asia. All sorts of optics and related electronics is heavily centered around Japanese companies like Canon, Nikon and Sony. The OEMs have mostly just been assembling systems from standard parts which is a commodity service.
If we could observe small objects to aim these things, we could also send people to bomb shelters/evacuate them that'd take a lot of the punch out of it and just brace for impact. For the really large objects then firing this laser at a dino-killer won't do anything anyway. From a WP article: "In 1998, NASA formally embraced the goal of finding and cataloging, by 2008, 90% of all near-Earth objects (NEOs) with diameters of 1 km or larger that could represent a collision risk to Earth. The 1 km diameter metric was chosen after considerable study indicated that an impact of an object smaller than 1 km could cause significant local or regional damage but is unlikely to cause a worldwide catastrophe."
So even at 100 times the ISS with a year of advance warning, it can only prevent a smaller regional disaster (1/2 diameter = 1/8th the volume and 1/8th the energy of a 1km asteroid). It is quite probably cheaper, simpler and more guaranteed to work to slowly evacuate that region over that year or to prepare necessary shelters and supplies to just wait it out. This is just stone, not nukes so there's no radiation damage, once the dust clears you're free to exit the shelters again and while crops and animals might be lost there's no long term poisoning of the water and food chain. In short, compared to all the other dangerous places choose to live with earthquakes and volcanos and whatnot with far more immediate danger this seems like a total waste of money and effort. Now dino-killers would be nice to have a defense against, but this is not it.
You know, it could have been... Windows 8 is slow out the gates, it's still stuck in the "other" category on StatCounter which last week was 4.48%, I'm guessing 4% Win8 as there's always been half a percent other while at the same time after release Win7 had 10% uptake. If Linux had been ready this is probably as good a time as the Vista launch. Macs have slowly been chipping away at Windows' market share and will probably take another upswing as Microsoft is busy pushing touch-laptops/tablets/hybrids, while Windows is still dominating with 90% the "other" category is slowly approaching critical mass and the halo effects for Mac from the iPhone/iPad is likely to continue. Unfortunately it looks like we're heading more towards a duopoly instead of a real three-way race.
Of course Android proves it's not the kernel that is the problem, two in three smart phones now ship with a Linux kernel - forked or not. It's what you have running on top that matters and I hope there'll be something similar to take the desktop market with storm, but I'm starting to suspect it will not be Gnome, KDE or Unity. I'm guessing more a desktop spin-off of Android, of course I could be totally wrong but I see three strong "ecosystems" forming with iPhone/iPad/Mac, Windows Phone/Surface/Windows, Android phone/tablet/??? for desktop. Each will try to push their own synergies (buzzword alert) like iCloud and MS Office and so on and I think Google will have to do better than the Chromebook to stay on top. Right now people mix and match but I'm not sure how long that'll last, since they'll all want to use their strengths to reel the other markets in.
Police time + court time + prison time = $$$. I just did a quick check in Norway and at least here it'd equal the cost of 13-14 years of prison time. Sounds totally reasonable to me to get a serial rapist behind bars, I'm guess they're just trying to make the twins realize the futility of their position or to make the government step in with extra money to fund this so it doesn't come out of the local budget. I'd be extremely surprised if they're let go with the message that we couldn't afford to figure out which of you was guilty. In particular because there's nothing stopping them from continuing to assault women. But I'm guessing it's quite possible that they're both in on it and so neither would like the police to solve the case.
Why, did most of the applications and games pay for it? I rather doubt that and if they did most should ask for a refund. Why shouldn't Adobe be able to file a Photoshop bug on WINE when everybody and their dog can? Particularly since they can debug both sides of the code and say "Here on real Windows when I call function foo() I get X but when I do this on WINE I get Y" instead of user level bug reports that button A doesn't work. There's a middle ground between "Why thank you we'll get right to work on your free Linux port" and "You think we're your slave labor, go away" called "We'll add it to the very big pile of bug reports, if our users vote for this bug we might get around to fixing it but if WINE support is important to your company we're for hire." I think it's quite rude to explicitly not fix it unless they pay you, just because the company filed the bug themselves.
It isn't like anyone is holding a gun to any of these women to disrobe, or have sex on screen (they have to sign papers about age and all this anyway)...how could it possibly be in any way, an imposition on their civil rights??!!? Is freedom of choice what to do with yourself not a civil right? What about that?
You're not allowed to sell yourself into slavery no matter how badly you need the money and will do it "voluntarily", it's considered a violation of your civil rights. Some people feel the same about unwanted sex acts, no matter how badly you need the money and will do it "voluntarily" they consider it a violation of your civil rights too. That yes, there is a fundamental difference to scrubbing toilets you don't want and having sex you don't want which borders on rape. Their argument is that if all you wanted was sex you could have sex for free, the money is coercing you to engage in sex acts you otherwise wouldn't. They don't argue that is that way for every woman and every sex act, but that as long as sex can be sold for money it is inevitable that this will happen. For that reason, they want to ban prostitution and porn production - at least any done for money.
I don't really agree with that logic, but I think it's a fairly accurate summary of the arguments I've heard. Personally I think all they're doing is creating a huge underground market for trafficking and forced prostitution instead of keeping it above ground as a highly regulated industry. But instead of making a practical policy that works in reality they don't want to "give in" and keep the ideologically pure policy, even when it's clearly not working. There's a lot of policy issues like that, principles are more important than results. The only time they'll back down is if it really backfires like Prohibition, even though I'm sure lots of people still thought it was principally right.
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Well, you are mostly right, but having a robot involved, even if it is minimally autonomous, means a complex tool is being used, introducing some consistency to the part of the job it does.
Just not to the results, early robots would just continue to smash things until someone hit the off switch when things go wrong. Not that most robotic surgery is autonomous at all, it's mostly advanced puppeteering of tools smaller than the surgeon could operate directly.
This one uses examples from the industrial revolution that are not applicable anymore because the rate of automation is far faster (and accelerating), meaning that the economy doesn't have enough time to rellocate workers to other basic tasks before they are automated as well.
I doubt we'll run out of work as such, there'll never be an end to the want for personal services and the poor will end up working for each other for pennies because they can't afford the robot products. However, the return on capital and the return on labor may diverge, meaning the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the distance increase to the point where there's really no way to move up through regular labor, even highly qualified positions. Not unlike what you see in certain third world countries, there's the ultra rich, those that provide services to them and the ultra poor.
It is not a robot, and it is only labeled as an assistant to diagnostic, but it already is capable of being on top of all of the literature about cancer, and make suggestions based on that. This is something very few doctors can do, or have the time and interest of doing.
And it doesn't have to outcompete the best surgeon in the world, it only needs to be available then and there. A robot that can give you surgery now, no matter how risky is better than a doctor who can operate in an hour when you're dead. But I'm guessing for quite some time still a robot will cost more than a human.
I think the related news from the Louisiana Supreme Court is even more hilarious:
In his affidavit, Trooper Mire testified the money was bundled with rubber bands, sealed in plastic shrink wrapping, and hidden in the vehicle's floor compartment. He stated based on his experience, such packaging indicates a "substantial connection between the questionable currency and narcotics transactions." The claimants presented no evidence to contradict these statements made by Trooper Mire in his affidavit.
Relying on the reasoning of the court of appeal, the claimants contend the dog's alert is not reliable evidence of criminal activity because 96% of currency in circulation may contain trace amounts of narcotic residue. (...) Even if the claimants had shown a large percentage of currency in circulation contains trace amounts of narcotic residue, they did not show these trace amounts of narcotics would cause a trained police dog to alert.
Trooper Mire's affidavit also implies Tina Beers was traveling on a route commonly used to transport drug money.
Other factors to consider are Tina Beers' nervousness upon being stopped and her initial denial of ownership of the money. The claimants contend these facts do not prove the money was drug-related. While these facts alone do not prove the money is drug-related, they may be considered under the totality of circumstances to determine if there was probable cause for forfeiture.
That pretty much sums up their arguments. So we have a trooper saying drug users often hide their cash and drive this road, but there's absolutely zero evidence of any drug relation except the narcotics dog they brought in to sniff the cash at the police station alerted them. That the dog alerted them is considered proof that it is drug related and the government will do nothing to test the reliability of their dogs, they are faultless until you provide evidence to the contrary. Oh yeah and she was nervous, I guess lots of people carrying drug cash is nervous so that's slam dunk evidence it's drug related.
And this was at the state Supreme Court level, last year. Not that I generally carry $100k+ in cash, but sounds more like an arbitrary seizure of cash than anything that belongs in a civilized society. I mean really, all you need is a dog that can alert when its owner wants it to, have a police officer make some ominous claims on where the money might be coming from and all presumption of innocence is thrown out the window, you have to prove to the court beyond any probable cause that the money is really yours or it will be forfeit.
The point is that "liberalism" applied to economy is a center-right concept, while "liberalism" applied to "social matter" is a center-left concept.
At least here in Norway I'd disagree, the left is into high taxes, many government services and little economic freedom as well as trying to curb anything they consider harmful or unhealthy activities so little social freedom as well. They want to both provide for you and protect you from yourself. Here I'd say both kinds of liberals are to the right of that, but it's not the "same" right as they disagree almost as much with each other as they do with the left.
Well very often you have massive legacy applications that also consists of mature code in maintenance mode where behind a few years behind the bleeding edge doesn't matter at all, as long as it's rock stable and receive security patches. Where you'd like upgrade day and every day after to be yet another uneventful and boring day, because the only alternative is a really bad day. If you really need bleeding edge features or is doing new development I'd use something newer, but if not you just bleed for no reason at all.
Thirdly, the assumption that a government job is equivalent to unemployment is silly. Government employees perform a service and we pay them for it. That the money flows through the IRS instead of some corporation's accounts receivable is irrelevant.
In some ways, sure. In other ways you often don't have a choice about using public services and in the cases where you do then you're often paying double because they're there anyway whether you use them or not. Unlike using private services paying taxes is not voluntary, so a majority can force you to pay regardless of the quality or value of these services. But no matter if the people who'd like higher taxes or lower taxes is in majority, it's very much a "two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner" situation. The opposite of "I got mine, screw you" is also not that great.
Try taking some of NASA's moon rocks and say that because of the outer space treaty they have no property right claim to them and see how long it's until you're locked up in jail. Nation states can't claim it as their territory, but it's entirely unclear how or if anyone can claim mining rights on an asteroid, or if it's a race to see who can gobble up the asteroid first. "Planting the flag" might be good enough or it might not, depending on how deep pockets you have and how many big governments you can get to play by those rules.
You either have to make an argument that I don't own my hard drive but that your bother does own his bit pattern (that imaginary property is superior to real property, abrogating the entire basis for Western civilization)
You're a bit high on the hyperbole, private property is not a total and absolute right. The government can and will come in and condemn the building if it's not up to spec and in general there's a ton of laws that apply to what, when and how you care to use your private property to play a drum solo at 3AM. Even if you've done nothing to upset the neighbors they'll still come and arrest you for growing pot in the basement, private property or not. It's not exactly the equivalent of a total ban on gardening or a nazi-commie-fascist regime. You only need 128-256 random bits for a string to be totally unique, you didn't listen to /dev/rand and accidentally created a 3MB metallica song the way you could "reinvent" the BLT sandwich. You'd be pretty hard pressed to argue that copyright prevents you from assembling your own bits in your own pattern that you've created.
Is copyright a limitation on real property? Most certainly and I doubt anyone has questioned that for centuries because it was even more obvious when it took paper and ink to copy a book, not just flipping bits on a hard disk but the Statute of Anne is over 300 years old and the grants of monopolies and printing privileges go back to the 15th century so how far back to you want to go to find this copyright-free basis of western civilization, the dark ages? Even the US constitution and Bill of Rights managed to say "freedom of the press" and "time limited exclusive rights to authors" at the same time, so free but not that free. History is history, now it's the Information Age and we have fantastic and exact information-duplication machines, so we want to stop information? As likely as the Roman Church was to stop the spread of Bibles after Gutenberg, I'd say.
That's a nice thought, but unfortunately completely unrealistic and still favouring the clown with the deepest pocket. Let's be honest - the poor Joe Average wouldn't put a penny in the pot. Only then, a large corporation would have a guy with legal training on some weird position, like "Legal Operations Officer" to avoid chipping into the pot as well. With no money in the pot, the court could decide to let the parties represent themselves.
True, but if they don't want to claim any legal costs then they also should be barred from compensation from those costs. I think it's far more likely that they'll bankroll your lawyer too, but it will be padded to the damages they ask for. Remember that this also means that if a nutcase sues you and you want a real lawyer to defend you so nothing crazy happens, you'd end up paying for a lawyer for the nutcase as well. It'd be another incentive to legal trolling and ambulance chasers.
One company told us that of the 1,459 machines it's sold so far in 2013, only 7% have left the factory with Windows 8 installed.
A quick googling came up with this:
The U.K. PC market totaled 3 million units in the first quarter of 2012
So far in 2013 should be about half that or 1.5 million units, so this is a company with about a 0,1% market share. I think we already know Win8 is not doing great from browser stats, but this is just a way to create a big headline.
despite practically owning a phone manufacturing company
And yet Nokia isn't head and shoulders above the other WP8 phones, here the Lumia 820 got weak reviews and they ended up recommending the HTC WP 8S instead if you wanted a WP8 phone in that price range, not that they found either of them hot (dice throw 3 and 4, respectively). I wouldn't be surprised if Nokia eventually gets the boot - or bought - and Microsoft goes solo like with their Surface tablets, right now Nokia isn't living up to their hardware reputation.
Your stores must suck, both NVIDIA and ATI are readilly available round here.
If they're still trying to sell off 2010 inventory I'd say pot, meet kettle - you might want to check out the new AMD cards.
Mark Shuttleworth has said that they're primarily targeting consumers in the developing world and corporations/organizations in the developed world, which sounds like a viable plan to me if they can execute it.
What part of that sounds like viable? To me it sounds like OLPC for tablets, except they think to make a profit on it. Is there any track record of a "poor man's device" succeeding in computers or small electronics? I'm thinking razor thin margins and extreme need for volume to drive unit price down, exactly what a large incumbent industry is made for like the dumb phones Nokia has been pounding out billions of. This is a lot more on the hardware side, a huge Android manufacturer thinking "If I order the cheapest parts I can find for 100 million tablets more, drop price another $10 and manage to sell them to new customers in developing countries at that price, do I make a profit?" than it is about software. I don't even think you'd need to be a Google partner, since it's about being as far away from the bleeding edge as possible.
The other part of it is that even if they're poor, they want a "normal" device like other people in richer countries have, if you look at use of Linux you'd think that'd rich countries use Windows and poor countries use Linux since it's free, right? That picture is at best mixed, many high-income countries like Germany are strong in open source while many if not most poorer countries have rampant Windows piracy and almost no open source culture at all because they want access to all the Windows software. So even if Ubuntu were able to put these low-end tablets on the shelves for equal or even slightly cheaper prices than Android tablets I think the market would overwhelmingly choose Android tablets. All around, Android is what Ubuntu would like to be and the train already left the station last year when Android wiped out pretty much everything that wasn't Apple.
We're agile enough that we can migrate our desktop to QML if that's the decision that gets made. Unity has existed on four toolkits already, what's a fifth between friends ;)
I can't really make up my mind if this says the most about OSS or being "agile", but I think a facepalm is in order...
"Ponzi scheme" is not a synonym for "something to do with money I disagree with". Stop using it as such. Bitcoin isn't a Ponzi scheme because it's not an investment scheme.
If you're going to argue something it's probably not smart to quote something that ruins your argument. The vast majority of BitCoins are being held as an investment/speculation, and the only way it'll pay returns is by subsequent BitCoin buyers driving up the price allowing the early investors to sell off their BitCoins at a profit, since BitCoins don't produce anything or have any value by themselves. Current BitCoin holders have exactly the same incentives as members of a Ponzi scheme to keep the pyramid growing, the bigger the pyramid the more profit they make. That all this profit flows from the late entrants to the early entrants without producing anything of value is what makes it a Ponzi scheme, that it is done through deflation only makes it look like there's no money flow.
I have to say that it is easier to find good professionals on ANY field than to find competent marketing people. Marketing is not sales, it is not advertising and it is not product comparison. Marketing is strategy, pure and simple. Unfortunately, most marketing schools don't focus enough on strategy, or the mental part of marketing, leading to crappy professionals.
That seems an extremely narrow view on what marketing is, I don't think a marketing strategy is the whole of marketing any more than an product strategy is all of product development. The first sentence I found on wikipedia was "Marketing is the process of communicating the value of a product or service to customers." which seems about right. If you start veering too close to what the value proposition is then you're probably into business strategy, where of course what your customers want and competitors do is one important side but only one half compared to what is possible, feasible and profitable to deliver on the other and not all of it is market driven, like Ford said if he'd asked his customers they'd want a faster horse. There's a whole branch of business analysts and the like that are usually not counted as marketing. Perhaps that is what you want?
I'd say all of it from the whole strategy of where and with what message you're going to communicate with the market down to the individual ads and talking points are marketing. I'd put the border towards sales that marketing is sending the same message to a whole group - even if that group is a specific demographic or triggered by characteristics/events, salespeople talk to individuals or individual companies. If I sent someone to a trade show to hold a presentation I'd call it marketing, but the people at the stand I'd call sales because they're trying to pick up on that unique customer's wants and needs and sell according to that. It's getting a blurry line with targeted marketing and such, I'm not sure amazon.com has sales people in the sense I'm thinking about but all real world retail stores and everyone with key account managers still do.
Well VMware is not anything like a normal application since it doesn't want to run that way at all, it gropes deeply into the internal structures of the kernel. Which rather brings us to:
Microsoft never removes functions in updates, it just adds new ones with the new feature. Yes, that is messy, but they never break user or driver code! I thought this was Linus' mantra as we've seen in the audio patch issue a couple months back. He needs to make this apply to third party kernel modules and drivers as well.
No, it is to never break the userspace API or the drivers in the kernel. Anything else, the policy is that they'll break it as often and as much as they like, either you keep up with the changes or you opensource your code, get it in mainline and let the kernel maintain it. Pretty much the entire core development team is in agreement on this, if third party kernel modules or applications they depend on fail they don't care. Linus wants you to be able to run that Linux application you wrote in 1995 today, but if he broke the VMware kernel module three times last week he does not care. One of the reasons they dislike them so much is that modules can barf all over the kernel, at least before they refused to look at any bug report with the nVidia blob loaded.
So, judging from this, for IIPA, "illegal file sharing" does not actually mean "things that are outlawed and prosecuted in respective countries", it simply means "things we don't want other people to do".
Well at least in the US you have civil and criminal copyright infringement, so it can be infringing without being criminal. As I understood it in Spain downloading is considered an act of private copying which is legal, but it sounds like unauthorized uploading still is illegal, just not criminally prosecuted unless it's for commercial profit. I'm sure they would have formulated it differently if all non-commercial file sharing was fully legal, you could set up huge, legal, non-profit seeds in Spain.
So I'm sorry but until you get somebody with a brain to be the head of a distro, one who'll flip the bird to Torvalds and just fork the whole damned thing and make a Linux distro where you can update the damned thing without shit breaking?
Unfortunately it's not Torvalds you should flip the bird to. There are a lot of components that live between the applications and the kernel, and pulseaudio is one of them. Here's a pretty good illustration, Linus controls the kernel layer with the ALSA/OSS hardware drivers, HAL and network stack (for remote sound), but not the pulse engine or library layer. Also all USB devices work in the same way, the kernel only has basic USB read/write functions so if your device doesn't have drivers it's not Linus or the kernel at fault. There have also been many cases where the initialization/config/user interface has been broken, you can fix it from the command line but out of the box it appears broken.
Of course all of this doesn't matter if you're the user, anything that breaks anywhere from the GUI to the kernel is broken, but if we're going to play pin the blame game it is important. For example if you want to pin the blame on pulseaudio then Red Hat created it and many other distros like Ubuntu implemented it very poorly, Linus was not at all in the decision loop and I think he'd be very insulted if people though he'd approved that clusterfuck. What we should have is more people like Torvalds that could hit all these other projects with a cluebat, honestly if all components were run like he runs the kernel we wouldn't be having this discussion. His rule 1, 2 and 3 is don't break userspace.
The components have been made in the East for a long time now, particularly Taiwan was famous long before China. For those that missed the memo, the recent HDD crisis was due to floodings in Thailand which is in SE Asia. All sorts of optics and related electronics is heavily centered around Japanese companies like Canon, Nikon and Sony. The OEMs have mostly just been assembling systems from standard parts which is a commodity service.
If we could observe small objects to aim these things, we could also send people to bomb shelters/evacuate them that'd take a lot of the punch out of it and just brace for impact. For the really large objects then firing this laser at a dino-killer won't do anything anyway. From a WP article: "In 1998, NASA formally embraced the goal of finding and cataloging, by 2008, 90% of all near-Earth objects (NEOs) with diameters of 1 km or larger that could represent a collision risk to Earth. The 1 km diameter metric was chosen after considerable study indicated that an impact of an object smaller than 1 km could cause significant local or regional damage but is unlikely to cause a worldwide catastrophe."
So even at 100 times the ISS with a year of advance warning, it can only prevent a smaller regional disaster (1/2 diameter = 1/8th the volume and 1/8th the energy of a 1km asteroid). It is quite probably cheaper, simpler and more guaranteed to work to slowly evacuate that region over that year or to prepare necessary shelters and supplies to just wait it out. This is just stone, not nukes so there's no radiation damage, once the dust clears you're free to exit the shelters again and while crops and animals might be lost there's no long term poisoning of the water and food chain. In short, compared to all the other dangerous places choose to live with earthquakes and volcanos and whatnot with far more immediate danger this seems like a total waste of money and effort. Now dino-killers would be nice to have a defense against, but this is not it.
You know, it could have been... Windows 8 is slow out the gates, it's still stuck in the "other" category on StatCounter which last week was 4.48%, I'm guessing 4% Win8 as there's always been half a percent other while at the same time after release Win7 had 10% uptake. If Linux had been ready this is probably as good a time as the Vista launch. Macs have slowly been chipping away at Windows' market share and will probably take another upswing as Microsoft is busy pushing touch-laptops/tablets/hybrids, while Windows is still dominating with 90% the "other" category is slowly approaching critical mass and the halo effects for Mac from the iPhone/iPad is likely to continue. Unfortunately it looks like we're heading more towards a duopoly instead of a real three-way race.
Of course Android proves it's not the kernel that is the problem, two in three smart phones now ship with a Linux kernel - forked or not. It's what you have running on top that matters and I hope there'll be something similar to take the desktop market with storm, but I'm starting to suspect it will not be Gnome, KDE or Unity. I'm guessing more a desktop spin-off of Android, of course I could be totally wrong but I see three strong "ecosystems" forming with iPhone/iPad/Mac, Windows Phone/Surface/Windows, Android phone/tablet/??? for desktop. Each will try to push their own synergies (buzzword alert) like iCloud and MS Office and so on and I think Google will have to do better than the Chromebook to stay on top. Right now people mix and match but I'm not sure how long that'll last, since they'll all want to use their strengths to reel the other markets in.
Police time + court time + prison time = $$$. I just did a quick check in Norway and at least here it'd equal the cost of 13-14 years of prison time. Sounds totally reasonable to me to get a serial rapist behind bars, I'm guess they're just trying to make the twins realize the futility of their position or to make the government step in with extra money to fund this so it doesn't come out of the local budget. I'd be extremely surprised if they're let go with the message that we couldn't afford to figure out which of you was guilty. In particular because there's nothing stopping them from continuing to assault women. But I'm guessing it's quite possible that they're both in on it and so neither would like the police to solve the case.
Why, did most of the applications and games pay for it? I rather doubt that and if they did most should ask for a refund. Why shouldn't Adobe be able to file a Photoshop bug on WINE when everybody and their dog can? Particularly since they can debug both sides of the code and say "Here on real Windows when I call function foo() I get X but when I do this on WINE I get Y" instead of user level bug reports that button A doesn't work. There's a middle ground between "Why thank you we'll get right to work on your free Linux port" and "You think we're your slave labor, go away" called "We'll add it to the very big pile of bug reports, if our users vote for this bug we might get around to fixing it but if WINE support is important to your company we're for hire." I think it's quite rude to explicitly not fix it unless they pay you, just because the company filed the bug themselves.
It isn't like anyone is holding a gun to any of these women to disrobe, or have sex on screen (they have to sign papers about age and all this anyway)...how could it possibly be in any way, an imposition on their civil rights??!!? Is freedom of choice what to do with yourself not a civil right? What about that?
You're not allowed to sell yourself into slavery no matter how badly you need the money and will do it "voluntarily", it's considered a violation of your civil rights. Some people feel the same about unwanted sex acts, no matter how badly you need the money and will do it "voluntarily" they consider it a violation of your civil rights too. That yes, there is a fundamental difference to scrubbing toilets you don't want and having sex you don't want which borders on rape. Their argument is that if all you wanted was sex you could have sex for free, the money is coercing you to engage in sex acts you otherwise wouldn't. They don't argue that is that way for every woman and every sex act, but that as long as sex can be sold for money it is inevitable that this will happen. For that reason, they want to ban prostitution and porn production - at least any done for money.
I don't really agree with that logic, but I think it's a fairly accurate summary of the arguments I've heard. Personally I think all they're doing is creating a huge underground market for trafficking and forced prostitution instead of keeping it above ground as a highly regulated industry. But instead of making a practical policy that works in reality they don't want to "give in" and keep the ideologically pure policy, even when it's clearly not working. There's a lot of policy issues like that, principles are more important than results. The only time they'll back down is if it really backfires like Prohibition, even though I'm sure lots of people still thought it was principally right.
I haven't taken my watch off in about 6 years with the exception of airport security checkpoints.
Anywhere else I'd assume it's waterproof so you shower with it, here on slashdot I'm not so sure...