Likely outcome: a barber pole that spins, but goes nowhere. Yet everyone presumes there's some direction clearly labeled as "up" within the genetic pell mell.
Where did you get that in what I wrote? For one thing it's obvious that humans do better with specialization, even in primitive hunter-gatherer societies. For the tribe as a whole it's probably better that a few wake up early and a few stay up late than the whole tribe being on the exact same rhythm, so it's not about an optimal person but if those genes contribute positively to the mix. And it's obvious from sexual preferences that we don't all gravitate towards the same center. Maybe I should have added the same tedious point that evolution is only a game of numbers, not if the next generation is smarter or better or whatever to what came before but it didn't seem relevant to the discussion.
If you use source code found on github, it's going to be hard for the author to win a copyright lawsuit. This is a non-issue. They've basically allowed you to fork the code (with the implication that you're going to modify it). I don't see them in any way being able to recover punitive or even statutory damages.
So under what license do you have the code, if it doesn't have one? Are you're going to claim that this CYA sentence in the terms of service that GitHub have put there to avoid being sued for handing out "unlicensed" copies to people is the same as the author putting the code in the public domain? I think you'd get laughed out of court with that defense. For sure it protects GitHub distributing the code, it probably protects you cloning the repository but you for sure hasn't been granted any "exclusive rights" like modification, distribution or even compiling it - since the binary is clearly a derived work of the source code. To use a car analogy, it's like you let a stranger use your parking space. It's now on your property, but it's still their car and without any further permission you can do roughly nothing with it.
So is fabrication of fire arms, but both are not evolution in theway we have defined the term evolution.
Well you're right in that if we saw people with machine guns slaughter guys with muskets, we wouldn't call that evolution. Neither is going from 6-7 children/woman to 2-3 children/woman as many countries have done in a generation or two. It's only evolution if there's a reasonably clear link between your genetic makeup and your ability/probability to reproduce. I don't see much chance that a random mutation would help me survive a bullet, though there's a good chance that personality traits that are genetic could help me avoid a situation (or worse, put me in a situation) where I get shot. That's real evolutionary pressure right there, though I think the number of people shot and killed is too small to have any real significance.
But in terms of culture then genetics is a huge part of attractiveness, including appearance, personality and intelligence. That can have both direct effects to hooking up and indirect effects like social circle, social status and economic status. And perhaps even far more so today, how many kids you want to have. Sure society is a huge influence here but ultimately it comes down to personal choice that may be a lot more built in than people realize. Changing culture also makes different genes important, in a society with pre-arranged marriages your courtship genes might not matter much but in a society of free selection they do. That is a new selection pressure right there.
IMHO there's absolutely nothing wrong with a good sequel. Chances are extremely good you didn't get everything right and you didn't have the time or budget to implement everything you wanted to do. You'll probably also learn a lot from the feedback from the first game that you don't get in alpha/beta testing or possibly to late to do anything about it. It doesn't matter if it's the modern games or the classics, I'd be pretty sad if they stopped at Ultima I, Final Fantasy I or Civilization I and said that was it, on to the next thing. Not to mention you have a bunch of fans, people now know what the game concept is and they're hopefully looking for more. By all means if you have a cash cow, milk it.
That said, if you drop anything that isn't a cash cow today chances are good the customers will eventually get tired of the same old rehashes and you'll slowly head into the sunset. Most cash cows started as a risky proposal. Sure, for example "The Sims" is now out in two sequels and dozens of expansion and stuff packs but the original was a very risky game. I perfectly understand that companies don't want to bet the farm on unknown projects, but in this case I think it's too much next quarter thinking. That chance game that may lead to a decade long series of sequels making us money is probably going to be a loss on next year's performance. It's like R&D for the game industry, except it's a lot more accepted to not do any.
On the one hand, Ouya has no disc slot and is thus not limited by physical shelf space. On the other hand, it's still limited by screen space above the fold of the list of games in each genre.
Order by popularity and the problem will mostly sort itself out, like you say over 90 percent of the releases on Android and iOS are crap but 99 percent of the buyers don't see them. They see Angry Birds and whatever else is in the top 100 or so per category, what's featured you can have a process for or they've been reading some game review and actually look for something that's not crap. Good luck "bootstrapping" the Ouya market though, it's a classic chicken and egg situation where you either need to bring a lot of heavy hitting games or a rabid following of fans. Otherwise this could be another Firefly, the fans love it but most people don't want it.
Here in Europe it is widespread belief that the fact that 1 and 2 euros are in coins are a reason for inflation.
Personally I wish you'd get rid of most of the crazy cent coins, still got some from this summer... seriously, 1 euro-cent = 1.3 US cents? Here in Norway we just recently dropped the 0.5 NOK = 8.8 US cents so the smallest unit is 1 NOK = US 17.6 cents. Just the time wasted in the cashier line as somebody tries to count out 23 cents should let you know this is a drag on productivity, not counting all the effort spent producing it and having it in circulation. Oh well, not really my problem I guess.
Your ISP has an acceptable use policy that you are required to agree to in order to get service from them, which most likely states that you're not allowed to do anything illegal, and that if you do use their network to do something illegal, you agree that you are wholly responsible for it.
Seriously, you're going to bring that up as a point? Apart from stating the obvious and that TOR could implement that as a one-time yes/no dialog to no effect whatsoever, it's not the operator's rules. It's the law, and it's not their job to teach you about it or make sure you don't break it. If I borrow you my car I might check that you have a driver's license, but I'm not going to explain to you that you can't drive at 200 mph and run people over and that it's fully your fault if you do even if it's my car.
A Tor operator, on the other hand, by design does not know who is using their connection, and thus, cannot enforce that their users must agree to any policy.
Most services can't, maybe a few may point to some IP that may or may not belong to me or me alone and that keeps changing. Having to agree to a policy and having proof of identity is two quite different and separate things.
Further, and again by design, a Tor node does not keep any records that can be used to help authorities track down people using that connection for illegal purposes.
Also my cash doesn't have a written history of who I got them from to help the police track down people who use them for illegal purposes. I'm sure it would be nice for them, just like a ton of other information they might have wanted. But unless there's some requirement in law you'd care to point to, there's no need. Besides, the two points above taken together essentially you mean running an open wifi should be illegal, since it typically has no AUP and no meaningful logs of who connected.
Much of the law operates on the basis of what a 'reasonable person' would understand. A reasonable person would understand that, given their policies and practices, a typical ISP is not attempting to shield people performing illegal activities. On the other hand, a reasonable person who knows what a Tor exit node is and sets one up should understand that there is a high chance that there will be illegal activities being funneled through their node.
A "reasonable person" as you define him would conclude that allowing ISPs to pass torrent traffic has a "high chance that there will be illegal activities being funneled through" like copyright infringement and should be blocked. Hell, at some point before legal music and video stream took off it's highly doubtful ISPs should be allowed to operate at all. I guess you like the "USPS should open every package to make sure they don't contain anything illegal" world.
But honestly, if you're not willing to go to jail to defend the principle that people should be able to anonymously use the Internet, then maybe operating a Tor exit node isn't something you should be doing.
Yeah, and you should totally not use that freedom of speech unless you're prepared to go to jail for it. Fortunately most of us that use our freedoms don't go to jail for it, that's pretty much what freedom is. Yes, there's a risk that if you do something the government won't like they'll be nasty to you - it's another thing to accept it as a fact of life and therefore you shouldn't do anything the government doesn't like.
It's not so much the rags to riches stories, it's that unions are far from perfect.
1. Unions like all power structures start acting in their own interests and not the people they really represent, just like corporations or governments. That may mean generous benefits for the union leaders, making life miserable for non-union workers and in the worst cases it's a possibility for bribes and corruption. 2. Collective agreements typically means those who contribute less than average get more than they deserve and those who contribute more get less. While the company can't pressure wages down by pressuring employees one by one the employees that excel can't pressure back either. They may even leave for a different company where they get individual deals, depleting the union company of good workers. 3. Occasionally companies become completely captive to their unions, who refuse to adapt to a changing market to the point where the company will fail and even possibly go bankrupt instead of adapt. Unions rely on the collective trust of the members and won't sacrifice a part to save the rest even when that is what is necessary.
I think overall that unions typically do more good than harm, but depending what you get hung up on I can understand that other people feel differently.
Linux technical support does not cost more than Windows tech support, especially when you consider the volumes involved.
The volume of what? Windows sales to Linux sales? Let's face it, every manufacturer makes things work with Windows because it's on 90% of all PCs, as they would with any OS that's on 90% of all PCs. How many hours have they spent making sure it all works under Linux and how many sales can they divide that by? If they have to maintain that support in new versions of Ubuntu, how many sales can they divide that by? Because I'm sure people would be most unhappy if in 6 months the next Ubuntu upgrade would break it. Never mind the people who'd gladly buy the Windows version and install Ubuntu themselves to both get a dual boot machine and save $50.
The people who buy the Linux version, well they're probably going to feel entitled to some Linux support and actually use it. Just because you do have the technical skills to dig into a problem and fix it yourself, it's very convenient if you can get someone else to fix the problem for you. And they'll probably have higher expectations than the cheap outsourced Windows support who's mostly there to solve PEBCAK problems with scripts. And to be honest it's not really much of an untapped market because if people here don't like the offer they'll just pick some different model and install it themselves. It's not like you get lots of sales because you're one of few options.
If you don't modify your behavior to the social context you're in, then you're the strange one. A working relationship is not the same as a friendship which is not the same as a relationship which is not the same as blood ties (well, hopefully not) which is not the same as old classmates and whatever else is on the Facebook list. Even in the cases where there's some "broadcast" news to announce to absolutely everyone I probably wouldn't tell everyone in the same way with the same level of detail. In real life this was rather simple, those that were there heard it and if you told more or less in different settings it wouldn't really be obvious and probably just adapting to the audience. With Facebook you're either posting to everyone, or it's often going to be obvious that you have tiers of information. There's way more "friends" on my list than I'd care to share my life with.
I've used Postgres commercially for years, with a number of employers. It's a great DB and having dealt with MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, et al I'd never go back - though the softies tell me that SQL Server is much better these days.
Feature wise I like Postgres better than SQL Server, intervals, arrays and being able to do all sorts of DDL in transactions is excellent. What seems to be the killer in the places I've seen it is Integration Services - being able to create easy workflows to get data into, out of and between databases. If all I wanted was a database to run an application against, I'd have no hesitation with Postgres. SQL Server has mainly been fighting Oracle and that's like Outlook fighting Lotus Notes, you don't have to be good just less awkward. Oracle can do extreme things but it's hard to administrate, hard to develop for and costs a ton of money. SQL Server is the okay database with fairly easy to learn management / integration / reporting / analytics tools. But if you mostly want to get your hands dirty and write SQL code Postgres is great. The only reason why I'd use SQL is if a web hosting provider offered it, as a backend database? No way.
I'm still holding off on SSD's. Speed? I don't need it, just STORAGE space (movies, mp3's, photos run through photoshop). Until the price per gig gets down to the mechanicals, and the reliability improves, I'll stick with a few t-byte drives.
If you're buying a "few t-bytes drives" that's on a desktop and you're really missing out on the best of both worlds. Currently I have 13TB over 6 HDDs and one 128 GB SSD, there's no way I could replace it all with SSD and there's no way I'd want to replace it all with HDDs. The only annoyance I've found is that eventually I had to move my Steam directory to the HDD, games have too many big graphics assets to fit comfortably with the OS and my other software in 128 GB, now I have a comfortable 34 GB free. I guess if all you're doing is streaming video then it doesn't matter at all, but then why do you care if SSDs come down in price or not? Because the speed and IOPS would still not matter to you...
What I want to know is how reliable is it? All new tech, all new driver chips? I think I'll let other people be the guinea pigs for this...
Well it's not like the other SSDs on the market are exactly tried and true models, honestly it looks to me like the drives have grown more and more mature with each generation. I'd trust them enough, meaning I wouldn't really trust any storage media not to have a fatal crash. Still, at least around here the new Vector comes with a pretty solid premium to an equivalently sized Vertex 4, which should have the worst bugs beaten out of it now.
* provide legal protection for businesses that choose to use technological protection measures or "digital locks" to protect their work as part of their business models; and, * give consumers the ability to, among other things, record their favourite TV shows for later viewing, transfer music from a CD to a digital device, and create a mash-up to post via social media.
In other words, stronger protections for (1) to take away (2). They explcitly repeat it under the consumer benefits as "if they are doing so for their private use and have not broken a digital lock." and under concerns of creators as "Consumers will not be able to break a digital lock to exercise these exceptions.". They're also going to hit on all sorts of "enablers" of copyright infringement, but don't worry because they say "Search engines and ISPs will be unaffected by this provision, to the extent that they act as true intermediaries." My guess is that there's no true Scotsman. But sure they capped the non-commercial infringement to $5k instead of $20k now. By the way, did anyone check if they use the US definition of "commercial" where if it has a large enough sticker value they count it as commercial anyway even if you make no money on it?
Nope. People have IPv6 enabled browsers so they can connect to IPv6 enabled websites, but how many have some sort of legacy software that doesn't in any way understand or support IPv6 - perhaps there's not even an input field for an IPv6 address. Of course people will now chime "dual stack" but it has practically all of the annoyances while not solving the problem since it means pairing every IPv6 address with an IPv4 address. And by annoyance I mean like some stupid software, I don't remember what would prefer the IPv6 address over the IPv4 address then leading to a delay before it would connect via IPv4. I couldn't be arsed to find some other solution, so IPv6 is completely disabled on my machine. And so far I've had zero reason to change that. The only people feeling the hurt are those not getting an IPv4 address.
I think the answer to most of your questions are "not in the US". The record pay-outs for a traffic accident here in Norway is around $2 million USD for a young person seriously crippled for life, of course we have a universal health care system so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison as that only covers non-medical costs and loss of income but they don't have to risk billion dollar lawsuits in the US. If the accident rate should go bat crazy I imagine they can restrict the cars to only drive under certain road/weather/traffic conditions or in the worst case abort and refund, sure that'd be costly but pulling the emergency brake doesn't have an $infinity cost.
Once it's off the ground I don't think you'll have much problem rolling the system out to other countries, I imagine they'll store a bunch of "black box" data to analyze accidents and figure out what, if anything, the car could have done better. Cars aren't like humans, you can both simulate a huge number of possible scenarios and you can torture test it on a driving range with climate controls to handle rain/snow/hail/fog/ice/oil spills/potholes, simulate humans or animals and so on. If you can find one flawed behavior there'll probably be a thorough search for similar flaws. With humans it's mostly "error in judgement, moving along" but here you can really go into what caused that error and fix it.
I'm not sure what Nintendo's strategy is here, they already dominate the low end console market.
The Wii sales are pretty tapped out, last week down to 91k vs 276k for the PS3 and 354k for the Xbox360. I guess they're using the Wii U publicity to get some halo attention for the new, cheaper Wii which occupies a completely different price point.
No, just most of the repair business. When I was young there was a fairly well selling electronics shop that sold replacement parts for TVs, radios, computers and anything else with transistors and such. Things were so basic and the components so large a slightly skilled person with a soldering iron could repair them. Today that's practically gone, it's all so tiny and integrated and parts so specialized that if it breaks you either have warranty or go buy a new one. Same with computers, they used to have coprocessors and the sound card and network card and controller card and 2D card and 3D card was separate - well tough shit today it's mostly all integrated on the motherboard. The future is that it's just one big SoC with everything soldered on. The savings on all the units that don't break will probably make up for the losses on the broken and irreparable ones - in any case people are likely to pick the one with the lowest sticker price in the store. The second hand market won't die, but it'll be for buying and selling complete units, not bits and pieces of them. Just like I can't very well sell the Gigabit NIC or HD Audio on my motherboard even if I wanted to.
I think you're vastly exaggerating the actual cost difference since a lot of the cost is in the chipset compared to removing the physical slot/port. Ignoring the B/Q chipsets for business there were four for Sandy Bridge (H61, H67, P67, Z68) and three for Ivy Bridge (H77, Z75, Z77) and I can't even find a Z75 motherboard for sale so in reality just two. The leaked chipset overviews for Haswell indicate there might only be three overall - Z87, H87 and Q87. There'll be Z87 + extra chips flagship, the standard fully decked Z87 mobo, the fully decked H87 mobo and the stripped to the bone H87 mobo. And those archetypes will serve 99% of the market though I'm sure you're happy you could chip off $5 for the port you don't need. There's no real market need for 100 motherboard models, it's just motherboard companies with a need to differentiate themselves.
Intel has for several generations now kept each socket for two generations, one tick-tock (or tock-tick, can't be arsed to check) and the generation-to-generation benefits are now so small you have to be quite foolish to buy a new CPU now and a new CPU in a year, unless you're getting the lowest of low-end now and will max it next year when you have more money for some reason. Even then I'd suggest you either delay it a year or just go for the best you can afford right now. That it's actually the same socket is just a money-saver for Intel, motherboard producers and OEMs so they don't have to change designs, it's not really an end user feature anymore.
The interfaces are mostly backwards compatible so it doesn't kill you to have a PCIe 2.0 graphics port, USB 2.0 ports or SATA 2.0 port instead of the latest and greatest. The only significant new port with no backward compatibility I've seen on a motherboard is Thunderbird, but it's not very mainstream. Haswell is supposedly going to finally kill off the decade old PCI-connector. For the rest, when was the last time you really thought now I have to upgrade the motherboard? For it was when we switched from AGP to PCIe, meaning it was some years ago.
Keynes taught us that deficits are structural, and more or less look after themselves.The key is to keep growth as high as possible.
And how exactly do you do that when the main reason investors are fleeing are doubts about your solvency? You're correctly identifying one evil circle - spending cuts leads to tax income cuts and unemployment so you need more spending cuts - but the other evil circle is spending increases leading to more investors fleeing leading to an even more tanking economy so you need even more spending increases. Greece is so neck deep in debt they can not afford to pay interest, who do you think will extend them credit to spend more now?
That means investment and government spending during bad runs.
Yes, but it requires that the government hasn't maxed its credit cards in the good times when banks were willing and the interests low. If you've had the pedal to the metal the whole time you have no reserves, no extras and you can either drive straight off the cliff or hit the emergency brake at 200 mph for equally disastrous results. Greece hit the emergency brakes then crashed and burned, those that didn't now say "well that was the wrong choice" but that's assuming there was a right one. I'd say the jury is still out on that one.
1) One BitCoin and one account is as good as the other, so you can swap them outside the system. I can send you 100 BTC from my account A to your account B, then get back 50, 25 and 25 BTC back randomly delayed from your other account C to my other account D. Sure, all the transactions are public record but there's no link between the 100 BTC I used to have in A and the 100 BTC I have now in D. Only the swapping service could possibly link those transactions together. 2) If you can both acquire and spend your money anonymously then the transactions are meaningless, say you do anonymous rent-a-coder work for BTC and use those BTC to pay for web hosting that you only access anonymously. That's the essence of a currency right there, you can make money for doing work and then spend it on what you choose. Yes if any point you're tied to an identity they can try rolling transactions both forwards and backwards to see where you got money from and what you spent money on.
That's not really one of the problems with BitCoins, the main reason is exactly this that the supply is diminishing. Hoarding old coins from when they were easy to make only seems like a better and better idea, unless of course the BitCoin economy collapses because everyone's hoarding. I bet a lot of the people that offer services for BitCoin are the same as those hoarding large BTC reserves, the pyramid game only works if they can sucker more people to join in.
There's a pretty big difference between games that have a hard skill requirements, like you failed mission X so try again - it'll be just as hard next time - and those where you can just gather more XP, get some better gear and so with perseverance the mission will get easier. You're in principle always making progress, there's no hard fail but you choose you own level of challenge. Grinding on the other hand typically describes doing something with no challenge, for the sake of gathering resources or equipment to use later.
So far I'd say the people that care about the storage unit is more a nuisance than a benefit, I do care if it's a 100M row fact table. But I have a guy at work that cares whether it's an int or a smallint when the table will never have more than 1000 rows - that's 4 kB for an int vs 2 kB for a smallint - and 1 kB for a tinyint as that happens too. And it creates all sorts of little fun with tools that says field X isn't compatible with field Y because I'm comparing int's to smallint's. And that total waste of time could probably pay for another 16-256GB RAM on the production server - it's after all one system that'll be running this code "for real". I've done code changes that result in a 10x-100x speed-up so it's not like it's heavily optimized either. I stick to this order for modern code, make it work, make it work well, make it work fast. Saving space on attributes is a fraction of the third priority.
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Likely outcome: a barber pole that spins, but goes nowhere. Yet everyone presumes there's some direction clearly labeled as "up" within the genetic pell mell.
Where did you get that in what I wrote? For one thing it's obvious that humans do better with specialization, even in primitive hunter-gatherer societies. For the tribe as a whole it's probably better that a few wake up early and a few stay up late than the whole tribe being on the exact same rhythm, so it's not about an optimal person but if those genes contribute positively to the mix. And it's obvious from sexual preferences that we don't all gravitate towards the same center. Maybe I should have added the same tedious point that evolution is only a game of numbers, not if the next generation is smarter or better or whatever to what came before but it didn't seem relevant to the discussion.
If you use source code found on github, it's going to be hard for the author to win a copyright lawsuit. This is a non-issue. They've basically allowed you to fork the code (with the implication that you're going to modify it). I don't see them in any way being able to recover punitive or even statutory damages.
So under what license do you have the code, if it doesn't have one? Are you're going to claim that this CYA sentence in the terms of service that GitHub have put there to avoid being sued for handing out "unlicensed" copies to people is the same as the author putting the code in the public domain? I think you'd get laughed out of court with that defense. For sure it protects GitHub distributing the code, it probably protects you cloning the repository but you for sure hasn't been granted any "exclusive rights" like modification, distribution or even compiling it - since the binary is clearly a derived work of the source code. To use a car analogy, it's like you let a stranger use your parking space. It's now on your property, but it's still their car and without any further permission you can do roughly nothing with it.
So is fabrication of fire arms, but both are not evolution in theway we have defined the term evolution.
Well you're right in that if we saw people with machine guns slaughter guys with muskets, we wouldn't call that evolution. Neither is going from 6-7 children/woman to 2-3 children/woman as many countries have done in a generation or two. It's only evolution if there's a reasonably clear link between your genetic makeup and your ability/probability to reproduce. I don't see much chance that a random mutation would help me survive a bullet, though there's a good chance that personality traits that are genetic could help me avoid a situation (or worse, put me in a situation) where I get shot. That's real evolutionary pressure right there, though I think the number of people shot and killed is too small to have any real significance.
But in terms of culture then genetics is a huge part of attractiveness, including appearance, personality and intelligence. That can have both direct effects to hooking up and indirect effects like social circle, social status and economic status. And perhaps even far more so today, how many kids you want to have. Sure society is a huge influence here but ultimately it comes down to personal choice that may be a lot more built in than people realize. Changing culture also makes different genes important, in a society with pre-arranged marriages your courtship genes might not matter much but in a society of free selection they do. That is a new selection pressure right there.
IMHO there's absolutely nothing wrong with a good sequel. Chances are extremely good you didn't get everything right and you didn't have the time or budget to implement everything you wanted to do. You'll probably also learn a lot from the feedback from the first game that you don't get in alpha/beta testing or possibly to late to do anything about it. It doesn't matter if it's the modern games or the classics, I'd be pretty sad if they stopped at Ultima I, Final Fantasy I or Civilization I and said that was it, on to the next thing. Not to mention you have a bunch of fans, people now know what the game concept is and they're hopefully looking for more. By all means if you have a cash cow, milk it.
That said, if you drop anything that isn't a cash cow today chances are good the customers will eventually get tired of the same old rehashes and you'll slowly head into the sunset. Most cash cows started as a risky proposal. Sure, for example "The Sims" is now out in two sequels and dozens of expansion and stuff packs but the original was a very risky game. I perfectly understand that companies don't want to bet the farm on unknown projects, but in this case I think it's too much next quarter thinking. That chance game that may lead to a decade long series of sequels making us money is probably going to be a loss on next year's performance. It's like R&D for the game industry, except it's a lot more accepted to not do any.
On the one hand, Ouya has no disc slot and is thus not limited by physical shelf space. On the other hand, it's still limited by screen space above the fold of the list of games in each genre.
Order by popularity and the problem will mostly sort itself out, like you say over 90 percent of the releases on Android and iOS are crap but 99 percent of the buyers don't see them. They see Angry Birds and whatever else is in the top 100 or so per category, what's featured you can have a process for or they've been reading some game review and actually look for something that's not crap. Good luck "bootstrapping" the Ouya market though, it's a classic chicken and egg situation where you either need to bring a lot of heavy hitting games or a rabid following of fans. Otherwise this could be another Firefly, the fans love it but most people don't want it.
Here in Europe it is widespread belief that the fact that 1 and 2 euros are in coins are a reason for inflation.
Personally I wish you'd get rid of most of the crazy cent coins, still got some from this summer... seriously, 1 euro-cent = 1.3 US cents? Here in Norway we just recently dropped the 0.5 NOK = 8.8 US cents so the smallest unit is 1 NOK = US 17.6 cents. Just the time wasted in the cashier line as somebody tries to count out 23 cents should let you know this is a drag on productivity, not counting all the effort spent producing it and having it in circulation. Oh well, not really my problem I guess.
Your ISP has an acceptable use policy that you are required to agree to in order to get service from them, which most likely states that you're not allowed to do anything illegal, and that if you do use their network to do something illegal, you agree that you are wholly responsible for it.
Seriously, you're going to bring that up as a point? Apart from stating the obvious and that TOR could implement that as a one-time yes/no dialog to no effect whatsoever, it's not the operator's rules. It's the law, and it's not their job to teach you about it or make sure you don't break it. If I borrow you my car I might check that you have a driver's license, but I'm not going to explain to you that you can't drive at 200 mph and run people over and that it's fully your fault if you do even if it's my car.
A Tor operator, on the other hand, by design does not know who is using their connection, and thus, cannot enforce that their users must agree to any policy.
Most services can't, maybe a few may point to some IP that may or may not belong to me or me alone and that keeps changing. Having to agree to a policy and having proof of identity is two quite different and separate things.
Further, and again by design, a Tor node does not keep any records that can be used to help authorities track down people using that connection for illegal purposes.
Also my cash doesn't have a written history of who I got them from to help the police track down people who use them for illegal purposes. I'm sure it would be nice for them, just like a ton of other information they might have wanted. But unless there's some requirement in law you'd care to point to, there's no need. Besides, the two points above taken together essentially you mean running an open wifi should be illegal, since it typically has no AUP and no meaningful logs of who connected.
Much of the law operates on the basis of what a 'reasonable person' would understand. A reasonable person would understand that, given their policies and practices, a typical ISP is not attempting to shield people performing illegal activities. On the other hand, a reasonable person who knows what a Tor exit node is and sets one up should understand that there is a high chance that there will be illegal activities being funneled through their node.
A "reasonable person" as you define him would conclude that allowing ISPs to pass torrent traffic has a "high chance that there will be illegal activities being funneled through" like copyright infringement and should be blocked. Hell, at some point before legal music and video stream took off it's highly doubtful ISPs should be allowed to operate at all. I guess you like the "USPS should open every package to make sure they don't contain anything illegal" world.
But honestly, if you're not willing to go to jail to defend the principle that people should be able to anonymously use the Internet, then maybe operating a Tor exit node isn't something you should be doing.
Yeah, and you should totally not use that freedom of speech unless you're prepared to go to jail for it. Fortunately most of us that use our freedoms don't go to jail for it, that's pretty much what freedom is. Yes, there's a risk that if you do something the government won't like they'll be nasty to you - it's another thing to accept it as a fact of life and therefore you shouldn't do anything the government doesn't like.
It's not so much the rags to riches stories, it's that unions are far from perfect.
1. Unions like all power structures start acting in their own interests and not the people they really represent, just like corporations or governments. That may mean generous benefits for the union leaders, making life miserable for non-union workers and in the worst cases it's a possibility for bribes and corruption.
2. Collective agreements typically means those who contribute less than average get more than they deserve and those who contribute more get less. While the company can't pressure wages down by pressuring employees one by one the employees that excel can't pressure back either. They may even leave for a different company where they get individual deals, depleting the union company of good workers.
3. Occasionally companies become completely captive to their unions, who refuse to adapt to a changing market to the point where the company will fail and even possibly go bankrupt instead of adapt. Unions rely on the collective trust of the members and won't sacrifice a part to save the rest even when that is what is necessary.
I think overall that unions typically do more good than harm, but depending what you get hung up on I can understand that other people feel differently.
Linux technical support does not cost more than Windows tech support, especially when you consider the volumes involved.
The volume of what? Windows sales to Linux sales? Let's face it, every manufacturer makes things work with Windows because it's on 90% of all PCs, as they would with any OS that's on 90% of all PCs. How many hours have they spent making sure it all works under Linux and how many sales can they divide that by? If they have to maintain that support in new versions of Ubuntu, how many sales can they divide that by? Because I'm sure people would be most unhappy if in 6 months the next Ubuntu upgrade would break it. Never mind the people who'd gladly buy the Windows version and install Ubuntu themselves to both get a dual boot machine and save $50.
The people who buy the Linux version, well they're probably going to feel entitled to some Linux support and actually use it. Just because you do have the technical skills to dig into a problem and fix it yourself, it's very convenient if you can get someone else to fix the problem for you. And they'll probably have higher expectations than the cheap outsourced Windows support who's mostly there to solve PEBCAK problems with scripts. And to be honest it's not really much of an untapped market because if people here don't like the offer they'll just pick some different model and install it themselves. It's not like you get lots of sales because you're one of few options.
If you don't modify your behavior to the social context you're in, then you're the strange one. A working relationship is not the same as a friendship which is not the same as a relationship which is not the same as blood ties (well, hopefully not) which is not the same as old classmates and whatever else is on the Facebook list. Even in the cases where there's some "broadcast" news to announce to absolutely everyone I probably wouldn't tell everyone in the same way with the same level of detail. In real life this was rather simple, those that were there heard it and if you told more or less in different settings it wouldn't really be obvious and probably just adapting to the audience. With Facebook you're either posting to everyone, or it's often going to be obvious that you have tiers of information. There's way more "friends" on my list than I'd care to share my life with.
The only reason why I'd use SQL is if a web hosting provider offered it, as a backend database? No way.
Grr, that last sentence was supposed to say MySQL... redid the sentence, didn't notice.
I've used Postgres commercially for years, with a number of employers. It's a great DB and having dealt with MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, et al I'd never go back - though the softies tell me that SQL Server is much better these days.
Feature wise I like Postgres better than SQL Server, intervals, arrays and being able to do all sorts of DDL in transactions is excellent. What seems to be the killer in the places I've seen it is Integration Services - being able to create easy workflows to get data into, out of and between databases. If all I wanted was a database to run an application against, I'd have no hesitation with Postgres. SQL Server has mainly been fighting Oracle and that's like Outlook fighting Lotus Notes, you don't have to be good just less awkward. Oracle can do extreme things but it's hard to administrate, hard to develop for and costs a ton of money. SQL Server is the okay database with fairly easy to learn management / integration / reporting / analytics tools. But if you mostly want to get your hands dirty and write SQL code Postgres is great. The only reason why I'd use SQL is if a web hosting provider offered it, as a backend database? No way.
I'm still holding off on SSD's. Speed? I don't need it, just STORAGE space (movies, mp3's, photos run through photoshop). Until the price per gig gets down to the mechanicals, and the reliability improves, I'll stick with a few t-byte drives.
If you're buying a "few t-bytes drives" that's on a desktop and you're really missing out on the best of both worlds. Currently I have 13TB over 6 HDDs and one 128 GB SSD, there's no way I could replace it all with SSD and there's no way I'd want to replace it all with HDDs. The only annoyance I've found is that eventually I had to move my Steam directory to the HDD, games have too many big graphics assets to fit comfortably with the OS and my other software in 128 GB, now I have a comfortable 34 GB free. I guess if all you're doing is streaming video then it doesn't matter at all, but then why do you care if SSDs come down in price or not? Because the speed and IOPS would still not matter to you...
What I want to know is how reliable is it? All new tech, all new driver chips? I think I'll let other people be the guinea pigs for this...
Well it's not like the other SSDs on the market are exactly tried and true models, honestly it looks to me like the drives have grown more and more mature with each generation. I'd trust them enough, meaning I wouldn't really trust any storage media not to have a fatal crash. Still, at least around here the new Vector comes with a pretty solid premium to an equivalently sized Vertex 4, which should have the worst bugs beaten out of it now.
* provide legal protection for businesses that choose to use technological protection measures or "digital locks" to protect their work as part of their business models; and,
* give consumers the ability to, among other things, record their favourite TV shows for later viewing, transfer music from a CD to a digital device, and create a mash-up to post via social media.
In other words, stronger protections for (1) to take away (2). They explcitly repeat it under the consumer benefits as "if they are doing so for their private use and have not broken a digital lock." and under concerns of creators as "Consumers will not be able to break a digital lock to exercise these exceptions.". They're also going to hit on all sorts of "enablers" of copyright infringement, but don't worry because they say "Search engines and ISPs will be unaffected by this provision, to the extent that they act as true intermediaries." My guess is that there's no true Scotsman. But sure they capped the non-commercial infringement to $5k instead of $20k now. By the way, did anyone check if they use the US definition of "commercial" where if it has a large enough sticker value they count it as commercial anyway even if you make no money on it?
Nope. People have IPv6 enabled browsers so they can connect to IPv6 enabled websites, but how many have some sort of legacy software that doesn't in any way understand or support IPv6 - perhaps there's not even an input field for an IPv6 address. Of course people will now chime "dual stack" but it has practically all of the annoyances while not solving the problem since it means pairing every IPv6 address with an IPv4 address. And by annoyance I mean like some stupid software, I don't remember what would prefer the IPv6 address over the IPv4 address then leading to a delay before it would connect via IPv4. I couldn't be arsed to find some other solution, so IPv6 is completely disabled on my machine. And so far I've had zero reason to change that. The only people feeling the hurt are those not getting an IPv4 address.
I think the answer to most of your questions are "not in the US". The record pay-outs for a traffic accident here in Norway is around $2 million USD for a young person seriously crippled for life, of course we have a universal health care system so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison as that only covers non-medical costs and loss of income but they don't have to risk billion dollar lawsuits in the US. If the accident rate should go bat crazy I imagine they can restrict the cars to only drive under certain road/weather/traffic conditions or in the worst case abort and refund, sure that'd be costly but pulling the emergency brake doesn't have an $infinity cost.
Once it's off the ground I don't think you'll have much problem rolling the system out to other countries, I imagine they'll store a bunch of "black box" data to analyze accidents and figure out what, if anything, the car could have done better. Cars aren't like humans, you can both simulate a huge number of possible scenarios and you can torture test it on a driving range with climate controls to handle rain/snow/hail/fog/ice/oil spills/potholes, simulate humans or animals and so on. If you can find one flawed behavior there'll probably be a thorough search for similar flaws. With humans it's mostly "error in judgement, moving along" but here you can really go into what caused that error and fix it.
I'm not sure what Nintendo's strategy is here, they already dominate the low end console market.
The Wii sales are pretty tapped out, last week down to 91k vs 276k for the PS3 and 354k for the Xbox360. I guess they're using the Wii U publicity to get some halo attention for the new, cheaper Wii which occupies a completely different price point.
So... Laptops are obsolete now?
No, just most of the repair business. When I was young there was a fairly well selling electronics shop that sold replacement parts for TVs, radios, computers and anything else with transistors and such. Things were so basic and the components so large a slightly skilled person with a soldering iron could repair them. Today that's practically gone, it's all so tiny and integrated and parts so specialized that if it breaks you either have warranty or go buy a new one. Same with computers, they used to have coprocessors and the sound card and network card and controller card and 2D card and 3D card was separate - well tough shit today it's mostly all integrated on the motherboard. The future is that it's just one big SoC with everything soldered on. The savings on all the units that don't break will probably make up for the losses on the broken and irreparable ones - in any case people are likely to pick the one with the lowest sticker price in the store. The second hand market won't die, but it'll be for buying and selling complete units, not bits and pieces of them. Just like I can't very well sell the Gigabit NIC or HD Audio on my motherboard even if I wanted to.
I think you're vastly exaggerating the actual cost difference since a lot of the cost is in the chipset compared to removing the physical slot/port. Ignoring the B/Q chipsets for business there were four for Sandy Bridge (H61, H67, P67, Z68) and three for Ivy Bridge (H77, Z75, Z77) and I can't even find a Z75 motherboard for sale so in reality just two. The leaked chipset overviews for Haswell indicate there might only be three overall - Z87, H87 and Q87. There'll be Z87 + extra chips flagship, the standard fully decked Z87 mobo, the fully decked H87 mobo and the stripped to the bone H87 mobo. And those archetypes will serve 99% of the market though I'm sure you're happy you could chip off $5 for the port you don't need. There's no real market need for 100 motherboard models, it's just motherboard companies with a need to differentiate themselves.
Intel has for several generations now kept each socket for two generations, one tick-tock (or tock-tick, can't be arsed to check) and the generation-to-generation benefits are now so small you have to be quite foolish to buy a new CPU now and a new CPU in a year, unless you're getting the lowest of low-end now and will max it next year when you have more money for some reason. Even then I'd suggest you either delay it a year or just go for the best you can afford right now. That it's actually the same socket is just a money-saver for Intel, motherboard producers and OEMs so they don't have to change designs, it's not really an end user feature anymore.
The interfaces are mostly backwards compatible so it doesn't kill you to have a PCIe 2.0 graphics port, USB 2.0 ports or SATA 2.0 port instead of the latest and greatest. The only significant new port with no backward compatibility I've seen on a motherboard is Thunderbird, but it's not very mainstream. Haswell is supposedly going to finally kill off the decade old PCI-connector. For the rest, when was the last time you really thought now I have to upgrade the motherboard? For it was when we switched from AGP to PCIe, meaning it was some years ago.
Keynes taught us that deficits are structural, and more or less look after themselves.The key is to keep growth as high as possible.
And how exactly do you do that when the main reason investors are fleeing are doubts about your solvency? You're correctly identifying one evil circle - spending cuts leads to tax income cuts and unemployment so you need more spending cuts - but the other evil circle is spending increases leading to more investors fleeing leading to an even more tanking economy so you need even more spending increases. Greece is so neck deep in debt they can not afford to pay interest, who do you think will extend them credit to spend more now?
That means investment and government spending during bad runs.
Yes, but it requires that the government hasn't maxed its credit cards in the good times when banks were willing and the interests low. If you've had the pedal to the metal the whole time you have no reserves, no extras and you can either drive straight off the cliff or hit the emergency brake at 200 mph for equally disastrous results. Greece hit the emergency brakes then crashed and burned, those that didn't now say "well that was the wrong choice" but that's assuming there was a right one. I'd say the jury is still out on that one.
1) One BitCoin and one account is as good as the other, so you can swap them outside the system. I can send you 100 BTC from my account A to your account B, then get back 50, 25 and 25 BTC back randomly delayed from your other account C to my other account D. Sure, all the transactions are public record but there's no link between the 100 BTC I used to have in A and the 100 BTC I have now in D. Only the swapping service could possibly link those transactions together.
2) If you can both acquire and spend your money anonymously then the transactions are meaningless, say you do anonymous rent-a-coder work for BTC and use those BTC to pay for web hosting that you only access anonymously. That's the essence of a currency right there, you can make money for doing work and then spend it on what you choose. Yes if any point you're tied to an identity they can try rolling transactions both forwards and backwards to see where you got money from and what you spent money on.
That's not really one of the problems with BitCoins, the main reason is exactly this that the supply is diminishing. Hoarding old coins from when they were easy to make only seems like a better and better idea, unless of course the BitCoin economy collapses because everyone's hoarding. I bet a lot of the people that offer services for BitCoin are the same as those hoarding large BTC reserves, the pyramid game only works if they can sucker more people to join in.
There's a pretty big difference between games that have a hard skill requirements, like you failed mission X so try again - it'll be just as hard next time - and those where you can just gather more XP, get some better gear and so with perseverance the mission will get easier. You're in principle always making progress, there's no hard fail but you choose you own level of challenge. Grinding on the other hand typically describes doing something with no challenge, for the sake of gathering resources or equipment to use later.
So far I'd say the people that care about the storage unit is more a nuisance than a benefit, I do care if it's a 100M row fact table. But I have a guy at work that cares whether it's an int or a smallint when the table will never have more than 1000 rows - that's 4 kB for an int vs 2 kB for a smallint - and 1 kB for a tinyint as that happens too. And it creates all sorts of little fun with tools that says field X isn't compatible with field Y because I'm comparing int's to smallint's. And that total waste of time could probably pay for another 16-256GB RAM on the production server - it's after all one system that'll be running this code "for real". I've done code changes that result in a 10x-100x speed-up so it's not like it's heavily optimized either. I stick to this order for modern code, make it work, make it work well, make it work fast. Saving space on attributes is a fraction of the third priority.