They had an experimental high end, Linux-based OS that was almost ready to retake the top spot in mindshare.
Just like YotLD is next year, right? Here's a sobering quote:
On Jan. 3, Chief Development Officer Kai Oistämö walked over to his boss's tiny cubicle to share his concerns about the MeeGo software that was supposed to be Nokia's answer to Apple and Android. The pair decided to quietly interview two dozen influential employees about MeeGo, from executives to rank-and-file engineers.
Before the first interview, Elop drew out what he knew about the plans for MeeGo on a whiteboard, with a different color marker for the products being developed, their target date for introduction, and the current levels of bugs in each product. Soon the whiteboard was filled with color, and the news was not good: At its current pace, Nokia was on track to introduce only three MeeGo-driven models before 2014 - far too slow to keep the company in the game. Elop tried to call Oistämö, but his phone battery was dead. "He must have been trying an Android phone that day," says Elop. When they finally spoke late on Jan. 4, "It was truly an oh-s--t moment - and really, really painful to realize where we were," says Oistämö. Months later, Oistämö still struggles to hold back tears. "MeeGo had been the collective hope of the company," he says, "and we'd come to the conclusion that the emperor had no clothes. It's not a nice thing."
Nokia bought Trolltech and QT in January 2008 and that's all they had to show after three years - they had one helluva piece of technology but wasted it and never managed to make a decent platform. The reality is that the N9 - even with Nokia still fully behind it - was a lightweight that wouldn't touch iOS or Android market share and they had no heavy punches to follow up the stop-gap either. They just couldn't let go of Symbian to develop Meego to the platform it needed to be.
I don't need it - I just want it. I have 60/60 today and going up from 25/5 was pure luxury, but it's the whole "there's plenty bandwidth for everything, all the time no matter how much I'm doing at once" and it cuts down on all download waiting times. For example if I suddenly decide to play an old game Steam has the nasty habit of telling me there's a new huge required patch and I can't play until it's downloaded. With 60 Mbit that's maybe 5 minutes of waiting instead of 60 minutes with 5 Mbit. It's carefree Internet, just like strictly speaking I in no way need the 16GB of RAM I have either but it means I just don't have to think about it. It was actually very annoying being stuck with "just" 2GB at work.
As long as they actually compete in the same space, delivering to the same customers. If you just slice up a big monopoly you only get a bunch of mini-monopolies, it really doesn't make much of a difference. My impression is that with exclusivity agreements most people in the US live in some form of mini-monopoly or mini-duopoly even if they're with a small ISP..
Until you run into something that doesn't follow the cost of living like say computer equipment - a $300 graphics card is still a $300 graphics card. Same goes if you want a marble slab in your kitchen or anything else where the cost of materials and factory processing far exceeds the local labor. And if you scrape together enough to go on vacation then your money is strong and theirs is weak, people always go in direction of most bang for their buck. Yes, it does make your labor expensive but I've no doubt the Indians would love to swap sides.
All I want is a flat rate, one stop shop for streaming anything ever made. Completely possible techwise, utterly undoable from an IP standpoint.
From one vendor, yes. But the real issue is that you can buy one CD here, one CD there and still play them in the same player with playlists across different sources. With pretty much all current streaming services you're locked to that service's tools. What would be slightly more feasible from an IP standpoint and still feasible from a tech standpoint would be some kind of generic client that could play music from any of your subscriptions and give you common playlists, not unlike the repository model for distributions. You could have some free music sources, some paid ones like Spotify, small bands or labels could set up their own streaming source. To make the powers to be happy it'd probably have to be a closed client but it could be by a non-profit company on RAND terms.
Not to spread too much flowers and sunshine on your doom and gloom, but if that's going to happen why haven't desktop prices increased sharply? They've been falling in market share like a rock compared to laptops, you'd think desktop CPUs and motherboards and big graphics cards and whatnot would increase in price but they haven't. Also you forgot "typing-intense", unless you still count tablets with a proper keyboard as tablets. And "precision-intense", I'd hate to edit photos on a tablet without a mouse. I do think that eventually all the common computing tasks people need to do can fit in your phone though, you just dock it in a tablet/laptop/desktop and away you go.
If you are a Mac user, as a drinker of the Kool-Aid you have no choice. Whatever is coming out is insanely great, you simply must believe that because any other thought would lead to madness. Windows folk will simply bitterly cling to Windows 7 until it end of lifes and hope policy changes, as it often does. They are more like Star Trek fans, they admit there is a pattern to which releases suck and don't suck. But again, their choice is limited to picking one of the available supported versions. When you hitch yourself to a commercial entity you always subject yourself to their business needs, which are rarely in alignment with your own and you get little input into the decisions they make and few options when they change directions and abandon you.
Except distros pretty much demand that you're on the upgrade treadmill to get newer versions of software, backports are few and far between and library versions are often carelessly bumped so everything turns into a massive upgrade. For the most part you can install a brand new Windows application on an OS released in 2001 and it'll still work fine. I don't have to "bitterly cling" to Windows 7, it's not me losing out on that but Microsoft. Yes, maybe eventually after a string of horrible releases where I don't want to upgrade to any of them but that hasn't happened so far. I gladly skipped Vista as did many others I know, with no skin off our backs. I can stay on Windows 7 until 2020 and for the most part every new version of every application I want will run, without me manually compiling anything from source.
proper software is functional first, intuitive next, and pretty last.
A Ferrari is not a very functional car, it's only got room for one passenger, practically no luggage, it has a crappy MPG, high maintenance and insurance and if you're staying to the posted speed limits you're not actually getting anywhere that much faster. You buy it for the looks and the feel and the power which makes it a helluva fun play toy to have, but you're far more likely to use it for a slow cruise down impress-the-ladies boulevard or a dick measuring acceleration contest than measuring the seconds you saved on your commute. Same with the clothes that you wear, people go by many other characteristics than the functional ones like textile strength, washing, durability, insulation, even for sports gear it's not just about functioning but to look good at the same time. And I certainly don't measure my food just by nutritional value, it better look tasty as well.
Of course everything has to be functional "enough", it doesn't matter how good the car is otherwise if it can't get you from A to B. But people don't want it stripped down to just being functional like a rally car. They actually like their pretty leather seats and everything that makes it feel good, look good and make it enjoyable to drive. The same is true of computers too, maybe it's not the most functional way of doing it but it works well enough and people like the shiny. You could tell people that they shouldn't, but well.... if I had the money, I'd still take the Ferrari hands down. I'd probably have a "functional" car though, but I'd be trying to use it as little as possible and only when I need it.
The problem with Android apps is that they pretend to stuff up a quickly hacked piece of crap, an put commercial in it and also want you to pay for it. This does not work. It would not work in iOS too, but you know, 30% of world population are idiots.
Or maybe 30% of the world population value their time. I've found that most $1 applications on the iPhone are far less annoying than the "free" applications, which are almost all either teasers, trialware, freemium, pay-to-win or annoying adware. Even if there's gold somewhere in that pile of dirt digging it out takes time. Because most applications are perfectly happy selling for $1, if they can sell 100k copies they make $100k - before Apple's cut anyway - they tend to actually deliver a fully featured commercial free game where you don't get stuck in a grinder if you don't make in-game purchases. You get what you pay for and at the same time it's only a buck - cut one AAA game and you can buy 60 of them. Even if 5 are crap, 15 are poor, 20 are ok, 15 are good and 5 are highly addictive you'll enjoy the good ones and quickly forget the bad ones. Well worth the money.
And if there's one kind of headline that companies would like to -avoid- in the newspapers then it's headlines of the "Acme files for bankruptcy, unable to make payroll."
I've never seen that kind of headline ever, nobody makes a "serious" article because a huge company didn't pay one worker over a labor dispute. You might get a joke article because the hilarity of one guy with a few thousands in claims filing for a billion dollar company's bankruptcy. Salary owed is treated as a due debt, failing to pay your debts means you're insolvent and filing for bankruptcy. It'd be a silly world if the last thing every failing company did was sue their bank over their loan agreement, claiming it's somehow invalid and they don't have to make down payments or pay interest until the court case is settled. Doesn't work that way for loans, shouldn't work that way for salary either.
When you speak in public, your name IS our business. You can stand behind your words or you can keep quiet. Choose.
Yeah, damn those Federalist Papers, without them we could still have our crumpets and tea (properly taxed by Her Majesty the Queen, of course). Or as someone else put it:
Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical minority views... Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority.... It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation... at the hand of an intolerant society.
But hey, piss on the constitution and everything the US was built upon and call it patriotic as so many do. I have a few more you can adopt, "war is peace", "freedom is slavery", and "ignorance is strength". The first one is already done with the permanent war on drugs/terrorists/jaywalkers, the second you're already working on by taking the freedoms away and the last one, well I think there's been plenty in this thread already. In short, go fuck yourself.
The other problem is there is no "internet". No one thing you can point at. Who invented "the space shuttle" as one individual inventing one object is an equally dumb question.
Thousands of slaves worked to build a pyramid, but only one pharaoh ordered it built. Without that person it certainly wouldn't have been built then, there and the way it was. Somebody pulled that essential elements together and made "the Internet", just like Tim Berners-Lee made the Would Wide Web. I'm sure someone else would have created something "webbish" but the actual incarnation can usually be narrowed down very much both in time, place and people. Maybe there's a little ambiguity about what's essential and who contributed or not, but it's only about where the cut-off should be.
How much longer are we going to put up with the two false alternatives that continue to kick the can down the road and buy votes with money that will be paid back by future generations?
Since it's like going shopping with someone else's credit card, I predict when the bank says you've hit your limit. And I predict sometime shortly after that said "future generations" will refuse to pay the bill. Greece's private creditors had to take a 74% loss (53.5% nominal and lower interest rate) but so far EU has bankrolled them, now the interest rates are simply unsustainable for Spain. Either they have to come down right now or the mad scramble for the exit starts like it did with Greece. The US is not there yet but there's plenty examples of what will happen if you don't change your course. But then, the same could be said of all these countries that are there now...
Yes, I think this is a big flaw with the DMCA. If you have the chutzpah to file a signed counter-notice under penalty of perjury with your real name and address, then I say the ISP should be required to "act expeditiously to restore, or enable access to, the material" and let them battle it out in court, it's a civil matter and there should be no presumption to either side. Also you run the risk of perjury and they don't, the notice should require the "A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law." to be under penalty of perjury. You might be wrong, but you must do so in "good faith" - right now you can send out anything you want as long as you don't "knowingly misrepresent" which is practically impossible to prove. If you have a stupid process with simple keyword searches and no QA you can be as reckless in sending out notices as you please and it's fully legal.
Just having more does not make wealth inequality except in the strictest of definitions.
Actually in the most common definitions, that's exactly what it does. There's absolute poverty which has been in sharp decline, then there's relative relative poverty which is defined by earning under a certain percentage of the average - usually 50 or 60%. So all other things being equal, if your neighbor can afford another bottle of Dom Perignon then the average goes up and the number of "poor" people increase, even though they're actually no worse off. Talking to my parents or other old people on the conditions they grew up in you realize that even the poorest child growing up here in Norway today is probably far better off than the average child 50 years ago and that's probably true most places in the world. Not that it's a tall hurdle to pass but sometimes when you read about it they make it sound like child abuse to let children grow up in "poverty".
Don't get me wrong, it could be a bit humiliating being the poor kid and maybe get teased and things like that, but not keeping up with the Joneses doesn't exactly qualify as any serious case of childhood trauma. We're not talking like they miss anything really important, only expensive clothes, status symbols like iPhones, expensive vacations and expensive social activities. There's nobody starving or freezing or that have diseases because they can't afford doing anything about it, then it's down to neglect or abuse. If it was up to me I'd pull some money out of general welfare and over into healthcare, police, child protection services and others to reduce the number of "worst cases" that really do have a childhood worth complaining over.
So if you know the algorithm and training data, and you can feed the system new data with manipulated labels then you can confuse it. It's a little early to panic about your spam filter. Hopefully everyone realizes that if you let the spammers tell your computer what is and is not spam, they can cause it to let their spam through.
Well I assume that's why the spam/not spam buttons are there in my webmail reader, that somehow this goes into a form of feedback system. I'd not be surprised if spammers send spam to themselves, then flag it as not spam in order to confuse the system. Or signing up for stuff legitimately, then flagging it as spam anyway. Anything to increase the noise floor so they have to back off on filtering or lose genuinely wanted mail.
Desktops were locked down under the Microsoft Tax, Linux never had a chance. Along comes another platform, and it was Microsoft left flapping in the wind.
As usual it was Apple coming in doing something people have done before, only much better. I remember Microsoft tablets, there's no doubt they were first - and unusable. It was just like a PC, except with a stylus instead of a keyboard which we all know is so efficient. Lately I've been a bit surprised though because Apple has taken real technological leadership in some areas, like the display on the iPad 3 and the retina MBP. Things where you can truly say that there hasn't been anything like that offered ever before. Makes me both want to love their gear and hate their walled in garden.
Well in transit it's a communication, but when it has arrived it's in the possession of the recipient. As far as I know the police doesn't need a wiretap warrant to confiscate a letter found in someone's house, so why should they need to for a text message? Yes, it's a little odd that the mail man keeps delivering after it's been seized but maybe the right analogy is a PO box? Even if the mail man delivers a new package to the PO box, it's not a wiretap. I am of course assuming the phone was legally seized because the owner certainly has a 4th amendment right in his phone. But you as sender of a text message to that phone only has 4th amendment protection of it in transit. Once it's in the recipient's possession, it can be seized from him without violating your rights.
The suspect has to be the one who broaches the subject of illegality, the cops can't ask. The idea is they can't entice somebody to commit a crime that otherwise wouldn't have taken place.
Undercover cops are trained to give the suspect enough rope to hang himself with, preferably without leading the conversation but it's not a strict requirement. If it's customary for prostitutes to ask if you're looking for a good time then they can ask that too. Otherwise it would be easy to create a custom where the prostitutes would have to make the first move, thus negating sting jobs. That's not how it works.
It might be, but what's so clear about it? What's the equivalent of a sting operation for terrorism? Well it's to set up a fake terrorist plot and see who signs up. There's never been a requirement that the police prove or even make likely that yes, there would have been a drug dealer or a prostitute there even if the police didn't run a sting. They only need to prove that if that situation occurred, you'd be willing to break the law. So if the plot is fake and there probably wouldn't have been a real one doesn't really matter, as long as they didn't exceedingly induce anyone to be part of it. Which may or may not be the case, but it's not so that false flag = entrapment.
If Intel gives a shit about open source graphics drivers, where are the open drivers for their Atom IGP?
Licensed from PowerVR so not their IP, but next year it looks like they'll replace it with their in-house Ivy Bridge graphics in the "Valley View" Atoms. But if you got an Atom today and want good open source support, you're shit out of luck.
They should have a graduated scale, maybe $100 for the first patch, $1,000 for the second, $10,000 for the third, and so on.
Except I'd really like to get most bugs fixed, eventually. This way you'd get the major bugs fixed early but the minor bugs that you only get around to fixing late would be crazy expensive to fix. I think the price should be time-based instead, the longer between patches the cheaper it gets. If you have to patch then repatch then repatch again, then that SHOULD be expensive. If you patch, collect up all these minor issues and make a "refining" patch three months later then I don't think it should cost you much. The goal is after all to avoid patchmania.
In all honesty, what a load of bullcrap. Whoever is attacking you has the element of surprise and will come at you with guns drawn and safeties off. And if they want to shoot you then with bullets flying. Not to mention every choice of time and place and they only pick fights they're going to win, like when I'm on my way home from the pub after one too many beers. If you claim guns have "removed force from the menu" in the US you must be smoking the really, really good stuff. Nothing puts me on equal footing with the attacker, whether it's a gun pointed at me or a knife on my throat. Even in the wild west the sheriff and bounty hunters was a very important part of society, the less rule of law you got the more guns you need because you're on your own. Maybe he should try civilized society sometime, it's a pretty good alternative to the hand gun.
Like MS would be the only one... I remember a colleague of mine talking about a takeover they did at a former employer of a company, the code was mostly written by the two founders and they weren't exactly young either. They were actually warned in advanced that the code base they were taking over could be a bit juvenile, of course after the agreement was signed. The biggest gem they found was probably the card initialization. The debug message? "The first time always hurts..." and the sleazy sexual innuendo kept coming. Some people just don't ever grow up, they'd still snicker at that in the retirement home...
The biggest problem with the "You don't need an SUV" argument is that people tend to buy and do what they want, not what they need. Examples are: I didn't have to go to my cabin last weekend, but I went anyway. I didn't have to pick my home/work so I'd need this commute, but I like living in the suburbs. I didn't need to get a SUV, but I like the high driver's seat. Limiting yourself to only the things that are strictly necessary may work in wartime but otherwise people will do what they want. Same goes for all the stuff I buy, of course I could go all Buddhist monk and only own a handful of things, it's a very eco-friendly life style but I like my way of living with gizmos and gadgets and appliances and whatnot. The only reason SUVs took a nose dive is because gas prices hit owners straight in the wallet, the greenies talked before too any nobody listened.
Slashdot Mirror
They had an experimental high end, Linux-based OS that was almost ready to retake the top spot in mindshare.
Just like YotLD is next year, right? Here's a sobering quote:
On Jan. 3, Chief Development Officer Kai Oistämö walked over to his boss's tiny cubicle to share his concerns about the MeeGo software that was supposed to be Nokia's answer to Apple and Android. The pair decided to quietly interview two dozen influential employees about MeeGo, from executives to rank-and-file engineers.
Before the first interview, Elop drew out what he knew about the plans for MeeGo on a whiteboard, with a different color marker for the products being developed, their target date for introduction, and the current levels of bugs in each product. Soon the whiteboard was filled with color, and the news was not good: At its current pace, Nokia was on track to introduce only three MeeGo-driven models before 2014 - far too slow to keep the company in the game. Elop tried to call Oistämö, but his phone battery was dead. "He must have been trying an Android phone that day," says Elop. When they finally spoke late on Jan. 4, "It was truly an oh-s--t moment - and really, really painful to realize where we were," says Oistämö. Months later, Oistämö still struggles to hold back tears. "MeeGo had been the collective hope of the company," he says, "and we'd come to the conclusion that the emperor had no clothes. It's not a nice thing."
Nokia bought Trolltech and QT in January 2008 and that's all they had to show after three years - they had one helluva piece of technology but wasted it and never managed to make a decent platform. The reality is that the N9 - even with Nokia still fully behind it - was a lightweight that wouldn't touch iOS or Android market share and they had no heavy punches to follow up the stop-gap either. They just couldn't let go of Symbian to develop Meego to the platform it needed to be.
I don't need it - I just want it. I have 60/60 today and going up from 25/5 was pure luxury, but it's the whole "there's plenty bandwidth for everything, all the time no matter how much I'm doing at once" and it cuts down on all download waiting times. For example if I suddenly decide to play an old game Steam has the nasty habit of telling me there's a new huge required patch and I can't play until it's downloaded. With 60 Mbit that's maybe 5 minutes of waiting instead of 60 minutes with 5 Mbit. It's carefree Internet, just like strictly speaking I in no way need the 16GB of RAM I have either but it means I just don't have to think about it. It was actually very annoying being stuck with "just" 2GB at work.
As long as they actually compete in the same space, delivering to the same customers. If you just slice up a big monopoly you only get a bunch of mini-monopolies, it really doesn't make much of a difference. My impression is that with exclusivity agreements most people in the US live in some form of mini-monopoly or mini-duopoly even if they're with a small ISP..
Until you run into something that doesn't follow the cost of living like say computer equipment - a $300 graphics card is still a $300 graphics card. Same goes if you want a marble slab in your kitchen or anything else where the cost of materials and factory processing far exceeds the local labor. And if you scrape together enough to go on vacation then your money is strong and theirs is weak, people always go in direction of most bang for their buck. Yes, it does make your labor expensive but I've no doubt the Indians would love to swap sides.
All I want is a flat rate, one stop shop for streaming anything ever made. Completely possible techwise, utterly undoable from an IP standpoint.
From one vendor, yes. But the real issue is that you can buy one CD here, one CD there and still play them in the same player with playlists across different sources. With pretty much all current streaming services you're locked to that service's tools. What would be slightly more feasible from an IP standpoint and still feasible from a tech standpoint would be some kind of generic client that could play music from any of your subscriptions and give you common playlists, not unlike the repository model for distributions. You could have some free music sources, some paid ones like Spotify, small bands or labels could set up their own streaming source. To make the powers to be happy it'd probably have to be a closed client but it could be by a non-profit company on RAND terms.
Not to spread too much flowers and sunshine on your doom and gloom, but if that's going to happen why haven't desktop prices increased sharply? They've been falling in market share like a rock compared to laptops, you'd think desktop CPUs and motherboards and big graphics cards and whatnot would increase in price but they haven't. Also you forgot "typing-intense", unless you still count tablets with a proper keyboard as tablets. And "precision-intense", I'd hate to edit photos on a tablet without a mouse. I do think that eventually all the common computing tasks people need to do can fit in your phone though, you just dock it in a tablet/laptop/desktop and away you go.
If you are a Mac user, as a drinker of the Kool-Aid you have no choice. Whatever is coming out is insanely great, you simply must believe that because any other thought would lead to madness. Windows folk will simply bitterly cling to Windows 7 until it end of lifes and hope policy changes, as it often does. They are more like Star Trek fans, they admit there is a pattern to which releases suck and don't suck. But again, their choice is limited to picking one of the available supported versions. When you hitch yourself to a commercial entity you always subject yourself to their business needs, which are rarely in alignment with your own and you get little input into the decisions they make and few options when they change directions and abandon you.
Except distros pretty much demand that you're on the upgrade treadmill to get newer versions of software, backports are few and far between and library versions are often carelessly bumped so everything turns into a massive upgrade. For the most part you can install a brand new Windows application on an OS released in 2001 and it'll still work fine. I don't have to "bitterly cling" to Windows 7, it's not me losing out on that but Microsoft. Yes, maybe eventually after a string of horrible releases where I don't want to upgrade to any of them but that hasn't happened so far. I gladly skipped Vista as did many others I know, with no skin off our backs. I can stay on Windows 7 until 2020 and for the most part every new version of every application I want will run, without me manually compiling anything from source.
proper software is functional first, intuitive next, and pretty last.
A Ferrari is not a very functional car, it's only got room for one passenger, practically no luggage, it has a crappy MPG, high maintenance and insurance and if you're staying to the posted speed limits you're not actually getting anywhere that much faster. You buy it for the looks and the feel and the power which makes it a helluva fun play toy to have, but you're far more likely to use it for a slow cruise down impress-the-ladies boulevard or a dick measuring acceleration contest than measuring the seconds you saved on your commute. Same with the clothes that you wear, people go by many other characteristics than the functional ones like textile strength, washing, durability, insulation, even for sports gear it's not just about functioning but to look good at the same time. And I certainly don't measure my food just by nutritional value, it better look tasty as well.
Of course everything has to be functional "enough", it doesn't matter how good the car is otherwise if it can't get you from A to B. But people don't want it stripped down to just being functional like a rally car. They actually like their pretty leather seats and everything that makes it feel good, look good and make it enjoyable to drive. The same is true of computers too, maybe it's not the most functional way of doing it but it works well enough and people like the shiny. You could tell people that they shouldn't, but well.... if I had the money, I'd still take the Ferrari hands down. I'd probably have a "functional" car though, but I'd be trying to use it as little as possible and only when I need it.
The problem with Android apps is that they pretend to stuff up a quickly hacked piece of crap, an put commercial in it and also want you to pay for it. This does not work. It would not work in iOS too, but you know, 30% of world population are idiots.
Or maybe 30% of the world population value their time. I've found that most $1 applications on the iPhone are far less annoying than the "free" applications, which are almost all either teasers, trialware, freemium, pay-to-win or annoying adware. Even if there's gold somewhere in that pile of dirt digging it out takes time. Because most applications are perfectly happy selling for $1, if they can sell 100k copies they make $100k - before Apple's cut anyway - they tend to actually deliver a fully featured commercial free game where you don't get stuck in a grinder if you don't make in-game purchases. You get what you pay for and at the same time it's only a buck - cut one AAA game and you can buy 60 of them. Even if 5 are crap, 15 are poor, 20 are ok, 15 are good and 5 are highly addictive you'll enjoy the good ones and quickly forget the bad ones. Well worth the money.
And if there's one kind of headline that companies would like to -avoid- in the newspapers then it's headlines of the "Acme files for bankruptcy, unable to make payroll."
I've never seen that kind of headline ever, nobody makes a "serious" article because a huge company didn't pay one worker over a labor dispute. You might get a joke article because the hilarity of one guy with a few thousands in claims filing for a billion dollar company's bankruptcy. Salary owed is treated as a due debt, failing to pay your debts means you're insolvent and filing for bankruptcy. It'd be a silly world if the last thing every failing company did was sue their bank over their loan agreement, claiming it's somehow invalid and they don't have to make down payments or pay interest until the court case is settled. Doesn't work that way for loans, shouldn't work that way for salary either.
When you speak in public, your name IS our business. You can stand behind your words or you can keep quiet. Choose.
Yeah, damn those Federalist Papers, without them we could still have our crumpets and tea (properly taxed by Her Majesty the Queen, of course). Or as someone else put it:
Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical minority views ... Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. ... It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation ... at the hand of an intolerant society.
But hey, piss on the constitution and everything the US was built upon and call it patriotic as so many do. I have a few more you can adopt, "war is peace", "freedom is slavery", and "ignorance is strength". The first one is already done with the permanent war on drugs/terrorists/jaywalkers, the second you're already working on by taking the freedoms away and the last one, well I think there's been plenty in this thread already. In short, go fuck yourself.
The other problem is there is no "internet". No one thing you can point at. Who invented "the space shuttle" as one individual inventing one object is an equally dumb question.
Thousands of slaves worked to build a pyramid, but only one pharaoh ordered it built. Without that person it certainly wouldn't have been built then, there and the way it was. Somebody pulled that essential elements together and made "the Internet", just like Tim Berners-Lee made the Would Wide Web. I'm sure someone else would have created something "webbish" but the actual incarnation can usually be narrowed down very much both in time, place and people. Maybe there's a little ambiguity about what's essential and who contributed or not, but it's only about where the cut-off should be.
How much longer are we going to put up with the two false alternatives that continue to kick the can down the road and buy votes with money that will be paid back by future generations?
Since it's like going shopping with someone else's credit card, I predict when the bank says you've hit your limit. And I predict sometime shortly after that said "future generations" will refuse to pay the bill. Greece's private creditors had to take a 74% loss (53.5% nominal and lower interest rate) but so far EU has bankrolled them, now the interest rates are simply unsustainable for Spain. Either they have to come down right now or the mad scramble for the exit starts like it did with Greece. The US is not there yet but there's plenty examples of what will happen if you don't change your course. But then, the same could be said of all these countries that are there now...
Yes, I think this is a big flaw with the DMCA. If you have the chutzpah to file a signed counter-notice under penalty of perjury with your real name and address, then I say the ISP should be required to "act expeditiously to restore, or enable access to, the material" and let them battle it out in court, it's a civil matter and there should be no presumption to either side. Also you run the risk of perjury and they don't, the notice should require the "A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law." to be under penalty of perjury. You might be wrong, but you must do so in "good faith" - right now you can send out anything you want as long as you don't "knowingly misrepresent" which is practically impossible to prove. If you have a stupid process with simple keyword searches and no QA you can be as reckless in sending out notices as you please and it's fully legal.
Just having more does not make wealth inequality except in the strictest of definitions.
Actually in the most common definitions, that's exactly what it does. There's absolute poverty which has been in sharp decline, then there's relative relative poverty which is defined by earning under a certain percentage of the average - usually 50 or 60%. So all other things being equal, if your neighbor can afford another bottle of Dom Perignon then the average goes up and the number of "poor" people increase, even though they're actually no worse off. Talking to my parents or other old people on the conditions they grew up in you realize that even the poorest child growing up here in Norway today is probably far better off than the average child 50 years ago and that's probably true most places in the world. Not that it's a tall hurdle to pass but sometimes when you read about it they make it sound like child abuse to let children grow up in "poverty".
Don't get me wrong, it could be a bit humiliating being the poor kid and maybe get teased and things like that, but not keeping up with the Joneses doesn't exactly qualify as any serious case of childhood trauma. We're not talking like they miss anything really important, only expensive clothes, status symbols like iPhones, expensive vacations and expensive social activities. There's nobody starving or freezing or that have diseases because they can't afford doing anything about it, then it's down to neglect or abuse. If it was up to me I'd pull some money out of general welfare and over into healthcare, police, child protection services and others to reduce the number of "worst cases" that really do have a childhood worth complaining over.
So if you know the algorithm and training data, and you can feed the system new data with manipulated labels then you can confuse it. It's a little early to panic about your spam filter. Hopefully everyone realizes that if you let the spammers tell your computer what is and is not spam, they can cause it to let their spam through.
Well I assume that's why the spam/not spam buttons are there in my webmail reader, that somehow this goes into a form of feedback system. I'd not be surprised if spammers send spam to themselves, then flag it as not spam in order to confuse the system. Or signing up for stuff legitimately, then flagging it as spam anyway. Anything to increase the noise floor so they have to back off on filtering or lose genuinely wanted mail.
Desktops were locked down under the Microsoft Tax, Linux never had a chance. Along comes another platform, and it was Microsoft left flapping in the wind.
As usual it was Apple coming in doing something people have done before, only much better. I remember Microsoft tablets, there's no doubt they were first - and unusable. It was just like a PC, except with a stylus instead of a keyboard which we all know is so efficient. Lately I've been a bit surprised though because Apple has taken real technological leadership in some areas, like the display on the iPad 3 and the retina MBP. Things where you can truly say that there hasn't been anything like that offered ever before. Makes me both want to love their gear and hate their walled in garden.
Well in transit it's a communication, but when it has arrived it's in the possession of the recipient. As far as I know the police doesn't need a wiretap warrant to confiscate a letter found in someone's house, so why should they need to for a text message? Yes, it's a little odd that the mail man keeps delivering after it's been seized but maybe the right analogy is a PO box? Even if the mail man delivers a new package to the PO box, it's not a wiretap. I am of course assuming the phone was legally seized because the owner certainly has a 4th amendment right in his phone. But you as sender of a text message to that phone only has 4th amendment protection of it in transit. Once it's in the recipient's possession, it can be seized from him without violating your rights.
The suspect has to be the one who broaches the subject of illegality, the cops can't ask. The idea is they can't entice somebody to commit a crime that otherwise wouldn't have taken place.
Undercover cops are trained to give the suspect enough rope to hang himself with, preferably without leading the conversation but it's not a strict requirement. If it's customary for prostitutes to ask if you're looking for a good time then they can ask that too. Otherwise it would be easy to create a custom where the prostitutes would have to make the first move, thus negating sting jobs. That's not how it works.
It might be, but what's so clear about it? What's the equivalent of a sting operation for terrorism? Well it's to set up a fake terrorist plot and see who signs up. There's never been a requirement that the police prove or even make likely that yes, there would have been a drug dealer or a prostitute there even if the police didn't run a sting. They only need to prove that if that situation occurred, you'd be willing to break the law. So if the plot is fake and there probably wouldn't have been a real one doesn't really matter, as long as they didn't exceedingly induce anyone to be part of it. Which may or may not be the case, but it's not so that false flag = entrapment.
If Intel gives a shit about open source graphics drivers, where are the open drivers for their Atom IGP?
Licensed from PowerVR so not their IP, but next year it looks like they'll replace it with their in-house Ivy Bridge graphics in the "Valley View" Atoms. But if you got an Atom today and want good open source support, you're shit out of luck.
They should have a graduated scale, maybe $100 for the first patch, $1,000 for the second, $10,000 for the third, and so on.
Except I'd really like to get most bugs fixed, eventually. This way you'd get the major bugs fixed early but the minor bugs that you only get around to fixing late would be crazy expensive to fix. I think the price should be time-based instead, the longer between patches the cheaper it gets. If you have to patch then repatch then repatch again, then that SHOULD be expensive. If you patch, collect up all these minor issues and make a "refining" patch three months later then I don't think it should cost you much. The goal is after all to avoid patchmania.
In all honesty, what a load of bullcrap. Whoever is attacking you has the element of surprise and will come at you with guns drawn and safeties off. And if they want to shoot you then with bullets flying. Not to mention every choice of time and place and they only pick fights they're going to win, like when I'm on my way home from the pub after one too many beers. If you claim guns have "removed force from the menu" in the US you must be smoking the really, really good stuff. Nothing puts me on equal footing with the attacker, whether it's a gun pointed at me or a knife on my throat. Even in the wild west the sheriff and bounty hunters was a very important part of society, the less rule of law you got the more guns you need because you're on your own. Maybe he should try civilized society sometime, it's a pretty good alternative to the hand gun.
Like MS would be the only one... I remember a colleague of mine talking about a takeover they did at a former employer of a company, the code was mostly written by the two founders and they weren't exactly young either. They were actually warned in advanced that the code base they were taking over could be a bit juvenile, of course after the agreement was signed. The biggest gem they found was probably the card initialization. The debug message? "The first time always hurts..." and the sleazy sexual innuendo kept coming. Some people just don't ever grow up, they'd still snicker at that in the retirement home...
The biggest problem with the "You don't need an SUV" argument is that people tend to buy and do what they want, not what they need. Examples are: I didn't have to go to my cabin last weekend, but I went anyway. I didn't have to pick my home/work so I'd need this commute, but I like living in the suburbs. I didn't need to get a SUV, but I like the high driver's seat. Limiting yourself to only the things that are strictly necessary may work in wartime but otherwise people will do what they want. Same goes for all the stuff I buy, of course I could go all Buddhist monk and only own a handful of things, it's a very eco-friendly life style but I like my way of living with gizmos and gadgets and appliances and whatnot. The only reason SUVs took a nose dive is because gas prices hit owners straight in the wallet, the greenies talked before too any nobody listened.