A review score is an opinion. Her unhappyness is also an opinion. He would have to show the fact statements in the review were lies. Specifically he would have to prove that Jewelry was not stolen.
That's far from the only "fact", there's at least three in the summary that are not opinion
Perez's Yelp review accused the company of 1. damaging her home, 2. charging her for work that wasn't done and 3. of losing jewelry.
Those are all matters of fact, not opinion the court could look into. Also, this is a civil case not a criminal trial so the standard is "preponderance of evidence". Can she offer any evidence she had the jewels? Did she file a police complaint? The court system won't just take her word for it, if she's just throwing out accusations without a shred of evidence he might not have to prove a thing and still win. After all, how could he prove that jewels that doesn't exist haven't gone missing?
There is no money in POTS but there is plenty of money in last mile internet delivery so the copper networks are going to be with us for quite a while. In some places fiber will replace them but that is still a land line.
The question is though, will it be used for telephones? Some 76% of all households and 84% of the population here have broadband (I think cutoff is 128 kbps, but median is now 7.9 Mbps and average around 14 Mbps) and almost all offer some kind of VoIP telephony in their service but hardly anyone is buying it. Either people use their regular Internet service to run Skype or something like that or they use their cell phone, the actual phones are certainly disappearing. Also phones are less and less about calling, voice and texts are almost flat while mobile broadband is up 60% YoY.
I can get a land line for ~$15-30/month and often less. There is almost no useful cell plan you can get here that is that cheap and that doesn't even take into account the full cost of the phone.
I don't know the US market that well but at least smart phones is not an apples to apples comparison. My parents have some extremely simple phones that are roughly as advanced as a landline and use them relatively little - the phones were $35 and the plan is $18/month minimum they can dial for that they rarely exceed. The old ISDN line they had cost $32/month and didn't include any minutes at all. Sure I have an iPhone and a data plan to match, but I'm paying for a whole lot of other things than talking on the phone.
Not remotely. Sure mobile devices are going to take huge swaths of market share from land line phones but it's not hard to find use cases where a land line phone is required, useful or even preferable. Off the top of my head:
I'm not going to argue you point for point, but here's the statistic for Norway since 1998, light blue is landlines and dark blue is cell phones. Just last year there was a 7.2% decline in landlines and a 12.3% decline in landline traffic. This is what our biggest telco said earlier this year:
Telenor: In 7-8 years, no POTS in Norway and most of copper decommissioned
At Telenor's Capital Markets Day today, Berit Svendsen, CEO of Telenor Norway, explained that the cost of operating Telenor's copper network is no longer sustainable. Consequently, Telenor will roll out fibre and migrate copper-based customers to either fibre or coax - or mobile. In 7-8 years, there will no longer be any "plain old telephony service" (yes, that's what she called it) in Norway.
Arguably the first incumbent operator that put an end date for POTS. Copper will survive, in a modernised form, only in some rural areas where Telenor do not face fibre competition. But in large parts of the country, copper will be decommissioned entirely.
In practice when calling to a cell phone - which now outnumber landlines almost 4:1 - landlines are no cheaper and customers calling you from a cell phone themselves probably won't notice the difference between calling a landline and another cell phone in a place with good coverage and a good headset. And this is a fairly sparsely populated country with a fully built out "traditional" telephone network, if it's not worth maintaining here then I think copper networks will disappear from most urban areas on the globe.
The engineer looks at the Wall Street guy making 3/4 of a million per year and goes "That guy hates his job, is always stressed out, works 90 hours every week, has no hobbies because his job is his life, any family he has he barely sees, it's kind of sad. Why make so much money if you won't get to spend it until after you're all burnt out?"
Or you could just become a video game developer, where you hate your job, is always stressed out, works 90 hours every week, has no hobbies because your job is your life, and family you have you barely see, it's kind of sad but at least you're not making 3/4 of a million per year. A lot of people project that he must hate his job because they'd hate his job, when in fact they don't. I've been briefly in the financial industry and I think many of them plain like it, they feel it's a battle of wits against the other investors in the market and they love coming out on top. Where the engineer wants to play a game of chess the wall street guy would much rather sit down at a texas hold'em poker table and read other players or pull off stone cold bluffs.
They like it so much they want to get better at it even if the job doesn't technically require it, just like developers who go home and write more code or learn more about software development. I'm met a few people with enough money they could retire today and life very comfortably the rest of their lives, you really think they're at work because they hate it there? They like it, they're gamblers at heart so why would they stop getting their kicks in their day job? Of course there's a lot of overworked, underpaid junior staff that are just hoping to some day make that 3/4 of a million, but the people that hate it don't last long just like all the non-IT people looking to make a quick buck on the dotcom wave.
Precious metals are just as worthless as fiat currencies in most scenarios where a collapse occurs. Unless there's another fiat currency to exchange your lump of gold for, it won't do you any more good than paper money. No one will want it and you won't be able to easily exchange it for anything that's actually useful.
I call bullshit on this, people have continued to value gold through many centuries, through two world wars and many a nation's collapse. No matter what kind of WW3 or global economic meltdown you predict it is extremely probable that people will continue to value gold. If you're one of the people with plenty supplies and guns looking to make yourself rich, what are you going to trade for to have when society recovers and neither food nor water nor bullets are very valuable anymore? Money is clearly not an option. Neither land nor property is good because you never know if they'll honor deeds or ownership and you can't easily hide it or take it with you if you need to flee. Physical gold is excellent in all those respects..
It is simply a matter of supply and demand, desperate people who need goods now and profiteers looking to get rich and precious metals are their best way of doing it. Of course you can't expect a fair deal but I'd still take having precious metals and jewelry to trade over just about anything else, it's one of the most liquid assets you can have during a war. There's almost certain to be someone offering you something useful for gold, thus everybody who can spare anything is willing to take gold as payment. Of course you need real, actual gold - not gold certificates for gold bullions in a vault somewhere that may or may not be honored like most people invest in when the invest in gold.
UN works on consensus. Any country can veto anything.
China, France, Russia, United Kingdom and the United States can veto anything, The UN is a place where all countries are equal, but as usual some are more equal than others.
They were one of the (if *not* THE) first to come up with a general computing platform that has a digital distribution mechanism for client apps full of DRM *that happens to be the only way to install third-party software on the platform*
Well, if you consider extending it to a "general computing platform" as their innovation. Consoles have been locked down for years, they haven't been exclusively digital distribution but including physical distribution equally full of DRM they've been doing it since the NES in 1983 and they've been constantly expanding their functionality towards browsing, media playback and media center functionality and other general computing. Apple caught them blindsided moving via smart phones to tablets they were hardly the first or the only ones to try killing off the general purpose PC. They were just a lot more successful at it.
No it doesn't, but I guess if you don't have facts use FUD. Intel has kept a "segment TDP" on the retail packaging because they want all Sandy/Ivy Bridge motherboards, coolers etc. to support 95W processors - the maximum in the Sandy Bridge line - but the actual processor will never use more than 77W. This was explained here but Intel's site and 99,9% of all reviews and online sites will list it as a 77W processor. In fact the 95W figure is so rare that only reason to bring it up - particularly ignoring all the other places that say differently - is to troll.
Okay so they're the only x86 CPU offering 1.25v DDR3 support but the difference between a pair of 1.25v and 1.5v DIMMs is around 4 W and you can save 3 of those 4 W moving to the commonly available 1.35v DDR3. Meanwhile AMD keeps putting out 125W processors like the FX-8350 to not really compete with a 77W processor like the i7-3770K, so this "major datacenter advantage" I think I'll file under "major wishful thinking". Not to mention you're investing into a platform with little future since AMD wants to push ARM servers now. But I guess Intel has let AMD put a positive spin on continuing to deliver on old sockets.
Don't mangle a legal text. This is the actual phrase in law:
(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.
The only part that is "under penalty of perjury" is the last half which says that they have permission from the copyright holders of the alleged work - not the actual work. In short "I think this file is the latest Harry Potter movie, and under penalty of perjury I'm authorized by Warner Bros to send DMCA notices for the latest Harry Potter movie". What's in the file is irrelevant as long as they don't lie about being authorized by Warner Bros. If any other part of the information in the notice is wrong it is only punishable as misrepresentation.
(f) Misrepresentations. - 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 owner'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.
Unfortunately the key words here are "knowingly materially misrepresents", in plain English I'd probably say "lying". I'm going to borrow a mens rea-meter from the illustrated guide to criminal law, knowingly is very high up on the scale above reckless and negligent - basically unless you're sending out false DMCA notices on purpose there's no penalty at all. There is no penalty for being negligent or even reckless when sending out DMCA notices.
More than 1 year retention required by Law enforcement and they aren't doing their jobs properly.
There'll always be cases where the police are not at fault, like say a person that's suffered abuse or rape and finally a few years later has finally worked up the courage to press charges and those SMS messages would have been good evidence. Or say they catch a serial killer and would like to backtrack him to other murders he might have committed maybe as far as 20 years back. If you try to present it like the only reason that would be useful is because the case has been lying in a desk drawer for a year, you'll only end up with egg on your face. It all comes down to why do you have the fourth amendment and private letters to begin with? Should the government have a right to peek at everyone's communication justin case they're doing something naughty? But then, since people are using Facebook chat I guess for most people the answer is yes - there is no such thing as a "private" message on Facebook, if your message triggers any flags Facebook employees will look at it and possibly report it to the police - not just theory but happens in practice.
The problem is if you don't like any of their agreements, you just can't use technology. Yes we have a right to choose which product we want to use, but we are not offered the ability to use anything without handing over some fundamental right in the long run. The only option is to become a Luddite and live in a cave. There is no Gypsy option yet for technology and associated cloud services.
Oh please, you can do pretty much everything if you either a) host it yourself or b) rent some space in a co-lo. I don't store my things "in the cloud", I store them on my HDDs with backups just like I did before the cloud and social media became the new hype. You don't have to blog on Facebook, you can easily get a free blog on your own terms. If you don't like Spotify then iTunes and Amazon didn't go anywhere. And if there's no free alternative to iEverywhere or gEverywhere it's because nobody's bothered to build it on top of Linux and Android - last I checked the source code to both was free and so was the SDKs so free free to start, rather than whine about it.
Most people just don't want to manage their own computers, least not in the sense you and I mean. They're perfectly happy with an Apple or Google "appliance" that runs 100000+ apps. Why point fingers at the corporations when 99% handed over control voluntarily? It's like saying democracy needs regulation because 99% make stupid decisions. You can't regulate people into caring about the things you care about, because you'd have to be blind and deaf to not have noticed the wailing every time Facebook changes their privacy policy. Yet people keep using it. Same way there's nothing preventing people from installing Linux, but 99% don't do it anyway. Most people simply don't care if their computer comes as a big binary blob.
I read it as "If you send me small irrelevant stuff that doesn't fix major issues such as oopses, security, things like that..."
Only because you know oopses, security are major issues. Let's try that sentence again:
"If you send me small irrelevant stuff that doesn't fix major issues (typos, formatting, things like that), I'm going to curse at you and ignore your pull request. So don't do it."
It works just as well with examples of the "small irrelevant things", in fact it feels like a more natural sentence to me. But this is exactly why we don't write code in English...
Chrome has lots of point releases, actually. You're right that they update the major version number quickly, though. I miss the days when a major version number change meant new features, not bug fixes or speedups.
Personally I don't know on what version of Chrome I have at all and don't miss it a bit, no website is at least complaining that I must run IE or upgrade to a newer version. I'm sure there's support for new features but it looks like most websites are now content with just waiting for them to become available rather than actively pushing them. I'm very glad "best viewed with" seem to have died a silent death.
I want to be excited about buying a $600 liquid cooled video card again. But when a $300 game console gives mostly the same graphics quality and performance as PC games, meh.
Yeah because gaming should be all about who has the most badass hardware and has overclocked their CPU/GPU for those extra FPS, not if the game is any good or whether you actually play it well. Yes new hardware isn't that exciting anymore when I already have a quad core with gigs of memory and solid graphics, but I don't miss those not-so-good old days.
Well, "commands"... it's actually a recording of Celine Dion, it makes it go even faster trying to get away. They're considering doing a pan pipe album to power an interstellar probe next.
There is great potential here if this sort of thing can be made to work cleanly and safely. I suspect a lot of programmers (myself included) think better in a single-threaded manner. People are mostly used to dealing with A B C D and, as such, I think we usually write code to execute steps the same way.
If you've ever done a dish with more than one casserole or making a side dish while the main dish is cooking you've done parallelization in real life, the problem is that expressing it in a computer language is hard. Functional programming works okay if you're doing lots of similar things at the same time, but not if you're doing lots of different - but parallelizable - tasks. I want to call oven.roast( meat ), stove.boil( potatoes ) and workbench.slice( salad ) but I don't particularly care about the order and I know they're side effect free relative to each other, but how do I express that? Either I write them in sequence ABC and they happen in sequence ABC or I have to write threads and schedule them which is honestly overkill - I want it to use the resources efficiently not micromanage the schedule myself.
Particularly if these come in random and unpredictable amounts like the orders at a restaurant I need the computer to work it out itself. It's also very important if you have small resource conflicts like the hot casserole and hot pot roast both requiring mittens to move. I know quite a lot about mutexes and locks and semaphores to make it explicit but now it feels like I'm explicitly describing the opportunities for parallelism not the dependencies preventing it. Imagine if you were a project manager, do you start with every task depending on every other task? No, you start with the tasks then make dependencies where they're needed.
I wonder if you could do something more with "scoped const-ness", for lack of a better term. That is to say a function is non-const in a certain scope and const outside it, and thus can be executed in parallel with anything else outside that scope. To continue the example above, let's say I could define a function oven.raiseTemperature() that's non-const in the oven scope and const in the global scope and a function stove.stirPot() that is the same for the stove. If I then call them the compiler would know it's free to reorder them or run them in parallel, it picks the optimal execution based on the hardware available or even dynamically at run time. Functions that depend on multiple objects would automatically become fences to "sync up", though not necessarily on a global scale. Like a function on both the oven and stove may sync the kitchen, but not the living room.
It might not give you massive parallelization but it'd at least let you parallelize many mixed tasks that I don't feel you manage to do easily in any language today. It certainly sounds like a safer way than starting off a bunch of worker threads and praying you didn't create any deadlocks or live locks or race conditions or whatnot. Much like the global const the compiler should be able to validate that it doesn't in fact have any side effects outside the scope it claims. I'm sure there's lots of reasons why this wouldn't be as useful as I imagine it would be, but it certainly seems easier for those of us used to imperative programming.
I've said it before: decentralize it, it's the only way to be sure. The USA govt. at the moment (via the Dept. Commerce) has effective control over the generic domain names.
But as far as I know each country manage their own country domain so they don't have a monopoly on domain names. That's why TPB moved from.org to.se and they're hardly less popular because of it. That's roughly as decentralized as you can get without terrible headaches with namespace crashes where my "slashdot.org" is different than your "slashdot.org" - you'll be destroying the one Internet where everyone can reach the same sites and restore many of the old borders Internet has been tearing down. Imagine just how crazy email would be if I couldn't write a domain name and know it'd be delivered to the right domain, or that I couldn't get email from all over the world without registering with hundreds of DNS services. Yes, ideally the US should have been banished into edu.us, gov.us, and mil.us but beyond that it's a good system.
I have a very simple proposal that would clearly show beyond a shadow of a doubt what this is about. Grant the UN their own.un domain and let them try to build their "freer" Internet. I mean, you can't possibly become less free with more choice, right? Unless of course your agenda is something completely different, like giving people less choice. Compared to all the pundits in the UN the ICANN has been remarkably hands-off about who gets a domain, that the US courts use the opportunity to cease things under their jurisdiction is so but I doubt UN domains would get any "special global" status, I think more that it'd be shut down by any member of the UN that wants it shut down. That all they can do is yell and scream at YouTube and not pull its domain has been the best way to bring free speech to all the countries that don't want it.
How many of the 61 at "severe risk" countries are micro-states in the middle of the ocean with a single cable connecting them to the internet? More than half; so nothing too sinister about the size of the "severe risk" category.
And most of the rest in the poorer countries of Africa, where the answer to the question "Why do you have one ISP?" would be "Because it's one more than zero". Even with monopoly rent it's pretty hard making business on people that are that poor and probably for the most part don't have computers at all. Anyway, I find the numbers quite meaningless since they don't measure physical redundancy, resistance to government interference or consumer choice. Average number of providers available per person would be interesting though, I bet the US would end up in the "extremely high risk" monopoly/duopoly category. Though I guess after that the researchers can forget asking any ISPs for work...
IANAL either but I'm pretty sure that only applies to the whole, as long as you get paid at all that's consideration for all the things they get. I've never had a contract "itemized" matching things point by point. Now if your employer unilaterally made an IP landgrab in an existing work relationship and were stupid enough to make it a separate agreement instead of a renegotiation of the work contract and offered no compensation, then maybe that'd apply.
Wrong, you are paid to do what you are paid to do. Inventions can only be owned by your employer if you are paid to sit on your arse all day long thinking and trying to invent things. If you are paid to code they own the code, not any inventions.
This is not McDonald's where you're to slavishly follow a recipe over and over again. Maybe if you're in an Indian sweatshop where you're coding a millimeter-defined spec but otherwise most people that code are paid to find solutions, not just implement them. If you're being asked to participate in any kind of feature design, architecture or business collaboration group or discussion, that's part of your job too. I understand employers want some control, if you offer crappy solution A while you're working on super solution B because in three months you plan to go independent and launch your own contractor/consulting/software company then clearly you're not giving it your best. I think most people have a natural feel for where that boundary should go, but to pin it down legally in a way that makes both parties satisfied is not so easy.
Seriously, fat elf? ELF was fine, it's another TLA that you might pronounce as E-L-F, but there's only one way people would say FatELF. "Just turn the GIMP into a FatELF and it'll run on all platforms.", seriously RMS should add another one to the list, free as in beer, free as in speech and free as in puns.
Why would you care how long a drive takes to rip a CD/DVD? Do you sit and watch and wait for each one to be ripped? Are you using some strange OS that only lets you do one thing at a time? I did the same thing a few years ago. I just had a big stack next to my primary computers, and just swapped them out while I was working on them. How long each one took wasn't relevant.
Now I don't know what you do at your computer, but no matter if it's watching a movie or playing a game or studying or coding or whatever, interrupting myself all the time is rather annoying and detrimental to my enjoyment/performance. Been there, done that and I for sure cared how fast I could get it over with. These days I have double hard drives, it's as good a backups as the discs were since they were on-site anyway or I could get an external HDD for the same security as off-site discs. I only restored from them once, you know what the worst part was? Discs that had slight reading problems, they'd eventually finish but it could take up to an hour to read one disc. If you want to spend a week of your life swapping discs in case of a disk crash, optical media is a great backup. Otherwise I'd only take backup to another disk or online.
The only question is, will MS stick to their guns and force this paradigm shift, or will they relent like they did with Vista and make Windows 8 a short-lived intermediate OS for whatever comes next?
How did Microsoft in any way "relent" with Vista? It was their leading platform for 2.5 years and people were refusing to upgrade from 5+ year old XP installs. If people act in the same way towards Win8 their sales will be weak for many years until they can finally push Win7 so 2015-2020 or so.
To hurry adoption along even more I expect them to be more aggressive with Windows 7's EOL schedule than they were with XP, which was generous to start and then extended.
The end of sales date is not set, but the EOL dates for Win7 are: Mainstream support: January 12, 2015 Extended support: January 14, 2020
Anyway, their extension was actually pretty much according to their stated support policy:
Mainstream Support for Business and Developer products will be provided for 5 years or for 2 years after the successor product (N+1) is released, whichever is longer. Microsoft will also provide Extended Support for the 5 years following Mainstream support or for 2 years after the second successor product (N+2) is released, whichever is longer.
For some reason Windows goes under this clause with extended support, even the home versions of XP, Vista and Win7. Since Vista was not released until January 30, 2007 the mainstream support must be at least to January 30, 2009 and the extended support then to January 30, 2014. The actual date is in April 2014. So it's not kindness from Microsoft, it's following their own stated policy.
Slashdot Mirror
A review score is an opinion. Her unhappyness is also an opinion. He would have to show the fact statements in the review were lies. Specifically he would have to prove that Jewelry was not stolen.
That's far from the only "fact", there's at least three in the summary that are not opinion
Perez's Yelp review accused the company of
1. damaging her home,
2. charging her for work that wasn't done and
3. of losing jewelry.
Those are all matters of fact, not opinion the court could look into. Also, this is a civil case not a criminal trial so the standard is "preponderance of evidence". Can she offer any evidence she had the jewels? Did she file a police complaint? The court system won't just take her word for it, if she's just throwing out accusations without a shred of evidence he might not have to prove a thing and still win. After all, how could he prove that jewels that doesn't exist haven't gone missing?
There is no money in POTS but there is plenty of money in last mile internet delivery so the copper networks are going to be with us for quite a while. In some places fiber will replace them but that is still a land line.
The question is though, will it be used for telephones? Some 76% of all households and 84% of the population here have broadband (I think cutoff is 128 kbps, but median is now 7.9 Mbps and average around 14 Mbps) and almost all offer some kind of VoIP telephony in their service but hardly anyone is buying it. Either people use their regular Internet service to run Skype or something like that or they use their cell phone, the actual phones are certainly disappearing. Also phones are less and less about calling, voice and texts are almost flat while mobile broadband is up 60% YoY.
I can get a land line for ~$15-30/month and often less. There is almost no useful cell plan you can get here that is that cheap and that doesn't even take into account the full cost of the phone.
I don't know the US market that well but at least smart phones is not an apples to apples comparison. My parents have some extremely simple phones that are roughly as advanced as a landline and use them relatively little - the phones were $35 and the plan is $18/month minimum they can dial for that they rarely exceed. The old ISDN line they had cost $32/month and didn't include any minutes at all. Sure I have an iPhone and a data plan to match, but I'm paying for a whole lot of other things than talking on the phone.
Not remotely. Sure mobile devices are going to take huge swaths of market share from land line phones but it's not hard to find use cases where a land line phone is required, useful or even preferable. Off the top of my head:
I'm not going to argue you point for point, but here's the statistic for Norway since 1998, light blue is landlines and dark blue is cell phones. Just last year there was a 7.2% decline in landlines and a 12.3% decline in landline traffic. This is what our biggest telco said earlier this year:
Telenor: In 7-8 years, no POTS in Norway and most of copper decommissioned
At Telenor's Capital Markets Day today, Berit Svendsen, CEO of Telenor Norway, explained that the cost of operating Telenor's copper network is no longer sustainable. Consequently, Telenor will roll out fibre and migrate copper-based customers to either fibre or coax - or mobile. In 7-8 years, there will no longer be any "plain old telephony service" (yes, that's what she called it) in Norway.
Arguably the first incumbent operator that put an end date for POTS. Copper will survive, in a modernised form, only in some rural areas where Telenor do not face fibre competition. But in large parts of the country, copper will be decommissioned entirely.
In practice when calling to a cell phone - which now outnumber landlines almost 4:1 - landlines are no cheaper and customers calling you from a cell phone themselves probably won't notice the difference between calling a landline and another cell phone in a place with good coverage and a good headset. And this is a fairly sparsely populated country with a fully built out "traditional" telephone network, if it's not worth maintaining here then I think copper networks will disappear from most urban areas on the globe.
The engineer looks at the Wall Street guy making 3/4 of a million per year and goes "That guy hates his job, is always stressed out, works 90 hours every week, has no hobbies because his job is his life, any family he has he barely sees, it's kind of sad. Why make so much money if you won't get to spend it until after you're all burnt out?"
Or you could just become a video game developer, where you hate your job, is always stressed out, works 90 hours every week, has no hobbies because your job is your life, and family you have you barely see, it's kind of sad but at least you're not making 3/4 of a million per year. A lot of people project that he must hate his job because they'd hate his job, when in fact they don't. I've been briefly in the financial industry and I think many of them plain like it, they feel it's a battle of wits against the other investors in the market and they love coming out on top. Where the engineer wants to play a game of chess the wall street guy would much rather sit down at a texas hold'em poker table and read other players or pull off stone cold bluffs.
They like it so much they want to get better at it even if the job doesn't technically require it, just like developers who go home and write more code or learn more about software development. I'm met a few people with enough money they could retire today and life very comfortably the rest of their lives, you really think they're at work because they hate it there? They like it, they're gamblers at heart so why would they stop getting their kicks in their day job? Of course there's a lot of overworked, underpaid junior staff that are just hoping to some day make that 3/4 of a million, but the people that hate it don't last long just like all the non-IT people looking to make a quick buck on the dotcom wave.
Precious metals are just as worthless as fiat currencies in most scenarios where a collapse occurs. Unless there's another fiat currency to exchange your lump of gold for, it won't do you any more good than paper money. No one will want it and you won't be able to easily exchange it for anything that's actually useful.
I call bullshit on this, people have continued to value gold through many centuries, through two world wars and many a nation's collapse. No matter what kind of WW3 or global economic meltdown you predict it is extremely probable that people will continue to value gold. If you're one of the people with plenty supplies and guns looking to make yourself rich, what are you going to trade for to have when society recovers and neither food nor water nor bullets are very valuable anymore? Money is clearly not an option. Neither land nor property is good because you never know if they'll honor deeds or ownership and you can't easily hide it or take it with you if you need to flee. Physical gold is excellent in all those respects..
It is simply a matter of supply and demand, desperate people who need goods now and profiteers looking to get rich and precious metals are their best way of doing it. Of course you can't expect a fair deal but I'd still take having precious metals and jewelry to trade over just about anything else, it's one of the most liquid assets you can have during a war. There's almost certain to be someone offering you something useful for gold, thus everybody who can spare anything is willing to take gold as payment. Of course you need real, actual gold - not gold certificates for gold bullions in a vault somewhere that may or may not be honored like most people invest in when the invest in gold.
UN works on consensus. Any country can veto anything.
China, France, Russia, United Kingdom and the United
States can veto anything, The UN is a place where all countries are equal, but as usual some are more equal than others.
They were one of the (if *not* THE) first to come up with a general computing platform that has a digital distribution mechanism for client apps full of DRM *that happens to be the only way to install third-party software on the platform*
Well, if you consider extending it to a "general computing platform" as their innovation. Consoles have been locked down for years, they haven't been exclusively digital distribution but including physical distribution equally full of DRM they've been doing it since the NES in 1983 and they've been constantly expanding their functionality towards browsing, media playback and media center functionality and other general computing. Apple caught them blindsided moving via smart phones to tablets they were hardly the first or the only ones to try killing off the general purpose PC. They were just a lot more successful at it.
The i7 3770K has a TDP of 95W.
No it doesn't, but I guess if you don't have facts use FUD. Intel has kept a "segment TDP" on the retail packaging because they want all Sandy/Ivy Bridge motherboards, coolers etc. to support 95W processors - the maximum in the Sandy Bridge line - but the actual processor will never use more than 77W. This was explained here but Intel's site and 99,9% of all reviews and online sites will list it as a 77W processor. In fact the 95W figure is so rare that only reason to bring it up - particularly ignoring all the other places that say differently - is to troll.
Okay so they're the only x86 CPU offering 1.25v DDR3 support but the difference between a pair of 1.25v and 1.5v DIMMs is around 4 W and you can save 3 of those 4 W moving to the commonly available 1.35v DDR3. Meanwhile AMD keeps putting out 125W processors like the FX-8350 to not really compete with a 77W processor like the i7-3770K, so this "major datacenter advantage" I think I'll file under "major wishful thinking". Not to mention you're investing into a platform with little future since AMD wants to push ARM servers now. But I guess Intel has let AMD put a positive spin on continuing to deliver on old sockets.
Don't mangle a legal text. This is the actual phrase in law:
(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.
The only part that is "under penalty of perjury" is the last half which says that they have permission from the copyright holders of the alleged work - not the actual work. In short "I think this file is the latest Harry Potter movie, and under penalty of perjury I'm authorized by Warner Bros to send DMCA notices for the latest Harry Potter movie". What's in the file is irrelevant as long as they don't lie about being authorized by Warner Bros. If any other part of the information in the notice is wrong it is only punishable as misrepresentation.
(f) Misrepresentations. - 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 owner'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.
Unfortunately the key words here are "knowingly materially misrepresents", in plain English I'd probably say "lying". I'm going to borrow a mens rea-meter from the illustrated guide to criminal law, knowingly is very high up on the scale above reckless and negligent - basically unless you're sending out false DMCA notices on purpose there's no penalty at all. There is no penalty for being negligent or even reckless when sending out DMCA notices.
More than 1 year retention required by Law enforcement and they aren't doing their jobs properly.
There'll always be cases where the police are not at fault, like say a person that's suffered abuse or rape and finally a few years later has finally worked up the courage to press charges and those SMS messages would have been good evidence. Or say they catch a serial killer and would like to backtrack him to other murders he might have committed maybe as far as 20 years back. If you try to present it like the only reason that would be useful is because the case has been lying in a desk drawer for a year, you'll only end up with egg on your face. It all comes down to why do you have the fourth amendment and private letters to begin with? Should the government have a right to peek at everyone's communication justin case they're doing something naughty? But then, since people are using Facebook chat I guess for most people the answer is yes - there is no such thing as a "private" message on Facebook, if your message triggers any flags Facebook employees will look at it and possibly report it to the police - not just theory but happens in practice.
If a judge thinks a person is worth surveillance, then fine, but my past communications shouldn't be archived "just in case I'm a criminal".
Most people are probably in violation of some law or regulation or code. The real issue is "just in case we need to bust your ass".
The problem is if you don't like any of their agreements, you just can't use technology. Yes we have a right to choose which product we want to use, but we are not offered the ability to use anything without handing over some fundamental right in the long run. The only option is to become a Luddite and live in a cave. There is no Gypsy option yet for technology and associated cloud services.
Oh please, you can do pretty much everything if you either a) host it yourself or b) rent some space in a co-lo. I don't store my things "in the cloud", I store them on my HDDs with backups just like I did before the cloud and social media became the new hype. You don't have to blog on Facebook, you can easily get a free blog on your own terms. If you don't like Spotify then iTunes and Amazon didn't go anywhere. And if there's no free alternative to iEverywhere or gEverywhere it's because nobody's bothered to build it on top of Linux and Android - last I checked the source code to both was free and so was the SDKs so free free to start, rather than whine about it.
Most people just don't want to manage their own computers, least not in the sense you and I mean. They're perfectly happy with an Apple or Google "appliance" that runs 100000+ apps. Why point fingers at the corporations when 99% handed over control voluntarily? It's like saying democracy needs regulation because 99% make stupid decisions. You can't regulate people into caring about the things you care about, because you'd have to be blind and deaf to not have noticed the wailing every time Facebook changes their privacy policy. Yet people keep using it. Same way there's nothing preventing people from installing Linux, but 99% don't do it anyway. Most people simply don't care if their computer comes as a big binary blob.
I read it as "If you send me small irrelevant stuff that doesn't fix major issues such as oopses, security, things like that..."
Only because you know oopses, security are major issues. Let's try that sentence again:
"If you send me small irrelevant stuff that doesn't fix major issues (typos, formatting, things like that), I'm going to curse at you and ignore your pull request. So don't do it."
It works just as well with examples of the "small irrelevant things", in fact it feels like a more natural sentence to me. But this is exactly why we don't write code in English...
Chrome has lots of point releases, actually. You're right that they update the major version number quickly, though. I miss the days when a major version number change meant new features, not bug fixes or speedups.
Personally I don't know on what version of Chrome I have at all and don't miss it a bit, no website is at least complaining that I must run IE or upgrade to a newer version. I'm sure there's support for new features but it looks like most websites are now content with just waiting for them to become available rather than actively pushing them. I'm very glad "best viewed with" seem to have died a silent death.
I want to be excited about buying a $600 liquid cooled video card again. But when a $300 game console gives mostly the same graphics quality and performance as PC games, meh.
Yeah because gaming should be all about who has the most badass hardware and has overclocked their CPU/GPU for those extra FPS, not if the game is any good or whether you actually play it well. Yes new hardware isn't that exciting anymore when I already have a quad core with gigs of memory and solid graphics, but I don't miss those not-so-good old days.
Well, "commands"... it's actually a recording of Celine Dion, it makes it go even faster trying to get away. They're considering doing a pan pipe album to power an interstellar probe next.
There is great potential here if this sort of thing can be made to work cleanly and safely. I suspect a lot of programmers (myself included) think better in a single-threaded manner. People are mostly used to dealing with A B C D and, as such, I think we usually write code to execute steps the same way.
If you've ever done a dish with more than one casserole or making a side dish while the main dish is cooking you've done parallelization in real life, the problem is that expressing it in a computer language is hard. Functional programming works okay if you're doing lots of similar things at the same time, but not if you're doing lots of different - but parallelizable - tasks. I want to call oven.roast( meat ), stove.boil( potatoes ) and workbench.slice( salad ) but I don't particularly care about the order and I know they're side effect free relative to each other, but how do I express that? Either I write them in sequence ABC and they happen in sequence ABC or I have to write threads and schedule them which is honestly overkill - I want it to use the resources efficiently not micromanage the schedule myself.
Particularly if these come in random and unpredictable amounts like the orders at a restaurant I need the computer to work it out itself. It's also very important if you have small resource conflicts like the hot casserole and hot pot roast both requiring mittens to move. I know quite a lot about mutexes and locks and semaphores to make it explicit but now it feels like I'm explicitly describing the opportunities for parallelism not the dependencies preventing it. Imagine if you were a project manager, do you start with every task depending on every other task? No, you start with the tasks then make dependencies where they're needed.
I wonder if you could do something more with "scoped const-ness", for lack of a better term. That is to say a function is non-const in a certain scope and const outside it, and thus can be executed in parallel with anything else outside that scope. To continue the example above, let's say I could define a function oven.raiseTemperature() that's non-const in the oven scope and const in the global scope and a function stove.stirPot() that is the same for the stove. If I then call them the compiler would know it's free to reorder them or run them in parallel, it picks the optimal execution based on the hardware available or even dynamically at run time. Functions that depend on multiple objects would automatically become fences to "sync up", though not necessarily on a global scale. Like a function on both the oven and stove may sync the kitchen, but not the living room.
It might not give you massive parallelization but it'd at least let you parallelize many mixed tasks that I don't feel you manage to do easily in any language today. It certainly sounds like a safer way than starting off a bunch of worker threads and praying you didn't create any deadlocks or live locks or race conditions or whatnot. Much like the global const the compiler should be able to validate that it doesn't in fact have any side effects outside the scope it claims. I'm sure there's lots of reasons why this wouldn't be as useful as I imagine it would be, but it certainly seems easier for those of us used to imperative programming.
I've said it before: decentralize it, it's the only way to be sure. The USA govt. at the moment (via the Dept. Commerce) has effective control over the generic domain names.
But as far as I know each country manage their own country domain so they don't have a monopoly on domain names. That's why TPB moved from .org to .se and they're hardly less popular because of it. That's roughly as decentralized as you can get without terrible headaches with namespace crashes where my "slashdot.org" is different than your "slashdot.org" - you'll be destroying the one Internet where everyone can reach the same sites and restore many of the old borders Internet has been tearing down. Imagine just how crazy email would be if I couldn't write a domain name and know it'd be delivered to the right domain, or that I couldn't get email from all over the world without registering with hundreds of DNS services. Yes, ideally the US should have been banished into edu.us, gov.us, and mil.us but beyond that it's a good system.
I have a very simple proposal that would clearly show beyond a shadow of a doubt what this is about. Grant the UN their own .un domain and let them try to build their "freer" Internet. I mean, you can't possibly become less free with more choice, right? Unless of course your agenda is something completely different, like giving people less choice. Compared to all the pundits in the UN the ICANN has been remarkably hands-off about who gets a domain, that the US courts use the opportunity to cease things under their jurisdiction is so but I doubt UN domains would get any "special global" status, I think more that it'd be shut down by any member of the UN that wants it shut down. That all they can do is yell and scream at YouTube and not pull its domain has been the best way to bring free speech to all the countries that don't want it.
How many of the 61 at "severe risk" countries are micro-states in the middle of the ocean with a single cable connecting them to the internet? More than half; so nothing too sinister about the size of the "severe risk" category.
And most of the rest in the poorer countries of Africa, where the answer to the question "Why do you have one ISP?" would be "Because it's one more than zero". Even with monopoly rent it's pretty hard making business on people that are that poor and probably for the most part don't have computers at all. Anyway, I find the numbers quite meaningless since they don't measure physical redundancy, resistance to government interference or consumer choice. Average number of providers available per person would be interesting though, I bet the US would end up in the "extremely high risk" monopoly/duopoly category. Though I guess after that the researchers can forget asking any ISPs for work...
IANAL either but I'm pretty sure that only applies to the whole, as long as you get paid at all that's consideration for all the things they get. I've never had a contract "itemized" matching things point by point. Now if your employer unilaterally made an IP landgrab in an existing work relationship and were stupid enough to make it a separate agreement instead of a renegotiation of the work contract and offered no compensation, then maybe that'd apply.
Wrong, you are paid to do what you are paid to do. Inventions can only be owned by your employer if you are paid to sit on your arse all day long thinking and trying to invent things. If you are paid to code they own the code, not any inventions.
This is not McDonald's where you're to slavishly follow a recipe over and over again. Maybe if you're in an Indian sweatshop where you're coding a millimeter-defined spec but otherwise most people that code are paid to find solutions, not just implement them. If you're being asked to participate in any kind of feature design, architecture or business collaboration group or discussion, that's part of your job too. I understand employers want some control, if you offer crappy solution A while you're working on super solution B because in three months you plan to go independent and launch your own contractor/consulting/software company then clearly you're not giving it your best. I think most people have a natural feel for where that boundary should go, but to pin it down legally in a way that makes both parties satisfied is not so easy.
Seriously, fat elf? ELF was fine, it's another TLA that you might pronounce as E-L-F, but there's only one way people would say FatELF. "Just turn the GIMP into a FatELF and it'll run on all platforms.", seriously RMS should add another one to the list, free as in beer, free as in speech and free as in puns.
Why would you care how long a drive takes to rip a CD/DVD? Do you sit and watch and wait for each one to be ripped? Are you using some strange OS that only lets you do one thing at a time? I did the same thing a few years ago. I just had a big stack next to my primary computers, and just swapped them out while I was working on them. How long each one took wasn't relevant.
Now I don't know what you do at your computer, but no matter if it's watching a movie or playing a game or studying or coding or whatever, interrupting myself all the time is rather annoying and detrimental to my enjoyment/performance. Been there, done that and I for sure cared how fast I could get it over with. These days I have double hard drives, it's as good a backups as the discs were since they were on-site anyway or I could get an external HDD for the same security as off-site discs. I only restored from them once, you know what the worst part was? Discs that had slight reading problems, they'd eventually finish but it could take up to an hour to read one disc. If you want to spend a week of your life swapping discs in case of a disk crash, optical media is a great backup. Otherwise I'd only take backup to another disk or online.
The only question is, will MS stick to their guns and force this paradigm shift, or will they relent like they did with Vista and make Windows 8 a short-lived intermediate OS for whatever comes next?
How did Microsoft in any way "relent" with Vista? It was their leading platform for 2.5 years and people were refusing to upgrade from 5+ year old XP installs. If people act in the same way towards Win8 their sales will be weak for many years until they can finally push Win7 so 2015-2020 or so.
To hurry adoption along even more I expect them to be more aggressive with Windows 7's EOL schedule than they were with XP, which was generous to start and then extended.
The end of sales date is not set, but the EOL dates for Win7 are:
Mainstream support: January 12, 2015
Extended support: January 14, 2020
Anyway, their extension was actually pretty much according to their stated support policy:
Mainstream Support for Business and Developer products will be provided for 5 years or for 2 years after the successor product (N+1) is released, whichever is longer. Microsoft will also provide Extended Support for the 5 years following Mainstream support or for 2 years after the second successor product (N+2) is released, whichever is longer.
For some reason Windows goes under this clause with extended support, even the home versions of XP, Vista and Win7. Since Vista was not released until January 30, 2007 the mainstream support must be at least to January 30, 2009 and the extended support then to January 30, 2014. The actual date is in April 2014. So it's not kindness from Microsoft, it's following their own stated policy.