I always thought, that the fairest court of all, would be the one where the "prosecutor" (for lack of better term) would be searching for the "truth", not necessarily going for "conviction". This would remove the adversarial nature of the whole court process, it would be about discovering the "truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth".
The problem with this is that the "prosecutor" is now the one deciding what the truth is, so when it comes to trial it would be even more biased towards "the defendant wouldn't be here unless he was guilty", except you didn't get any say in this little pre-trial. Of course they shouldn't press charges where the evidence clearly doesn't hold but they should "overprosecute" a little and let judges and juries decide. I'd be far more concerned about a court system where nobody is acquitted at trial than the opposite.
To Temper the Prosecution's zeal, they would be held accountable for all the prosecutions they have, and if they get a "conviction" of someone who is later proved innocent (i.e. DNA proof), that they are tossed in Jail for the remainder of the plaintiffs sentence.
So if somebody successfully frames you for murder or gives false testimony or the police present me with a bogus case and I as a prosecutor get you convicted on what apparently looks like solid evidence, I risk spending the rest of my life in jail? Nobody accepts that kind of occupational risk on things they have so very little control over.
All Lawyers would be "public" lawyers, and would be assigned randomly to one side or the other side of the case. Lawyers with extensive experience and a proven record would be eligible for Judgeships.
Everybody knows a public lawyer is a last resort because he's not your lawyer, he got no interest in delivering you his best performance. "Unimportant" people will still be thrown under the bus as the lawyers work on gathering cases and friends to get their judgeship and I'm sure they'll find some way to give their lawyers kickbacks anyway.
Why would things ever stop being archived and kept track of? Seriously. Are we going to have a nuclear war or something? The whole archive would probably fit on a USB pen drive. Making 1000 copies every year would be a rounding error on the city's budget.
Well, we might have something like that. That hard drive in your machine, how long is it going to last? If you power it down, how long is it actually usable? Those spares, how good is the shelf live? HDDs fail, CDs and DVDs fade away and USB pen drives will lose their charge if put in storage and almost nobody has a tape drive. The whole "copy to new media" assume we will have a continuous, uninterrupted flow of cheap storage, stable power and people with nothing better to do. Just imagine we had WWII all over again, 1939-1945 is six years where you probably can't get spares because there's slightly more important things like a war going on.
And after Thailand and Japan is in ruins you could probably add years rebuilding the components and the plants and the infrastructure required, say a good 10 years where nobody could give a shit about city hall records from the 1850s. I expect that without replacements most of my data would be dead and gone like a fart in the wind because the backups are all out as well. Whatever is important and printable I'd probably print out but I can't very well print terabytes and there's no way to print a video. In short, I'm entirely dependent on modern society to keep the amount of data that I do. While a million years sound like overkill, I can understand products to last hundreds of years.
Yet the sole reason a social media site exists is because users want to be there (...) And since users aren't really tied to a site they are free to be fickle and jump to the next shiny thing they can share links to cat videos on.
Perhaps, perhaps not. There's a huge amount of peer pressure of the "Why can't you use YouTube like everybody else? Stop being such a special snowflake." variety, maybe not for cat videos but for many other things. For example recently I needed to talk to some friends and their tool of choice is now Facebook Chat. Before that there was MSN, before that ICQ or IRC. I didn't choose to abandon any of those, but you can't be social without people to be social with. You can more than sustain a profit on those network effects as long as you don't become so obnoxious people leave in greater numbers than they join.
We already have those sports, instead of running we have cycling and formula one, depending on whether you allow engines or not. They're just not fancy enough to be called cyborgs. What's the point of seeing how far a spring-loaded jumper can be catapulted in the high jump? We already have human cannonball shows. Sure the Olympics have turned into a perversion of itself, but sports is a lot more than that and I'd hate to see kids and youth thinking it's all about the drugs and turning themselves into freaks of nature.
Approximately 99.999% of all shops I know both online and offline have some sort of "typo clause" in their terms and conditions, if their $100 item is suddenly $1 for some reason I think most will choose to exercise it if the algorithm goes completely bonkers. But if it's a minor mispricing relative to the item value or their total sales and they don't want the flurry of 1-star reviews that's bound to follow, they eat that loss. Been there, done that, got my order fulfilled - let's call it a surprise sale for both parties. If you're fucking this up so badly you can't take it, you really got no business running a retail store.
Re:Let them talk forever, it's what the EU is for
on
Bye ACTA, Hello CETA
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Hopefully forever. European counties founded the EU because it's better to keep the politicians talking about money than to have them threaten each other and start a war.
As long as it was a trade union as trade is mostly good for everyone and create positive dependencies, but what's been happening recently? Hell no. Greeks and the other countries that have been forced to beg for aid feeling they've lost all sovereignty and is being dictated by France and Germany, while the Germans feel they're being blackmailed into covering other people debt and all the old nation lines are flaring red hot again, insults about who's lazy and spoiled and cruel and whatnot. Lately they've ripped open many old wounds and created a lot of new ones and it's far from over.
The politicians want stronger central control but the people doesn't, I fear that the current path they're on is going to take them more in the direction of a Soviet Union, Yugoslavia or Roman Empire where there's a lot of states on the outskirts that feel they are getting overrun by a big central government in Brussels. Granted there's a lot less guns involved but there sure is a lot of economic blackmail, which I hardly think is the best foundation for a union. Rushing too fast into a United States of Europe to save the economy may turn out to be rather counterproductive to actually creating a united Europe.
In theory there are lots of advantages, but most of them are negated by one thing - they know they're a monopoly and act like it, unless they're in immediate fear of being outsourced. Most IT departments work so that when nothing is wrong they don't get much praise but when shit hits the fan they're the one taking it so most of them become notoriously conservative. The people that raise to the top are those who haven't caused any shit storms, breeding more conservatism. So yes good response time, but not if you're doing anything that could mean a lot of work or risk for IT like getting any kind of new system up and running. It's actually been worse than outsourcing in my experience, probably because for outsourcing companies taking over new systems is their core business.
Even I'm surprised someone was stupid enough to put their phone in a microwave mind you.
A woman I know of managed to lose her cell phone in the toilet, which is clumsy. But she felt it was so yucky to reach in and grab it, she decided to flush it first... Granted, alcohol was involved but you're still pretty retarded when you do that. And while I haven't put a cell phone in the microwave, years ago we had these plates with engraving that I didn't think about was metal. It was quite the lightning show. Most of that shit happen simply because you aren't even thinking about it.
People running IE are far less likely to have blocked statcounter.com than those running other browsers.
Unless it's in adblock's default block list - which also few people relatively speaking use, then I doubt even 1/1000 has statcounter blocked. Slashdotters have a ton of addons but it's like going to a car enthusiast forum, ask who runs all stock parts and then concluding most cars on the road are modded. For most the browser is just another utility like the car transporting you from A to B, I'm guessing most that use Firefox has some addons because it's a pain to use without them but they're not micromanaging like that.
Really? Anyone? Really believes that the ISP are protecting you? Your privacy? With claws and fangs?
No, I think they're covering their own asses by making sure they know absolutely nothing about anything I do or don't do. If they start flagging copyright infringements for one company I'm sure they'll get sued by a bunch of other companies for secondary infringement or criminal negligence or being co-conspirators as they let all the other infringements pass. And not just copyright infringement but everything else too, the user is sending SPAM and they let it pass? Sue the ISP. Internet fraud? Sue the ISP. Hacking? Sue the ISP. If anyone can show the ISP "knew" the customer was doing something illegal but continued the subscription to turn a profit, they could get in all sorts of legal shit. Either you're reading the bits or you're not, you can't both do that and claim ignorance at the same time.
Here in Norway you can go to a municipal clerk, but churches, mosques and other organizations like humanitarians can get a "license to marry" if they do their paperwork. So the priest is the one actually marrying you both in the legal and religious sense, but the paperwork will be exactly the same. Unlike the municipal clerk they are not required to marry anyone though, so they can have their own rules on who they'll marry and not. I think those two varieties cover pretty much all of Europe, it's a legal procedure in some way not just a marriage contract.
Hacking the device (jailbreaking) has been ruled legal by the courts, in spite of big money's objections. Are you anticipating a reverse course on that?
All it takes is for any jailbroken device to be permanently banned from the app store and practically nobody would risk having a jailbroken phone for normal use. And you can pretty much do that already if you roll in TPM and "Trusted Computing" and require remote attestation. And no matter what legal rights you have to your own device they're perfectly within their rights to refuse service. It's just not a big enough problem that they want to bring out the big guns.
Agreed, but if the copyright on something has expired, then companies should be free to open up something like that to the world.
Why? A contract may very well stipulate conditions that go beyond the copyright term. "Should be" != "is"
For instance, in this case, let's say IBM chose to open up OS/2 Warp. They could get an agreement w/ Microsoft and all surviving companies to be okay w/ releasing it under any agreeable license. Same for device drivers.
If you need an agreement they could try it today, it'd still be a helluva lot of work to track everyone down and many would either refuse or make outrageous demands.
However, if the device drivers concerned are of certain discontinued products, feel free to publish them, given that they are not otherwise actively supported.
So you're the law now, since you can tell them to "feel free"? Are you going to indemnify them when some liquidation company somewhere finds they have some IP rights lying around collecting dust that they can sue for? The risk of even one lawsuit of "up to $150,000" plus lawyer time is enough to scare away any interest in the project.
Once it becomes obvious that your don't plan to repay what your borrow, people stop lending you money, and economies fail catastrophically once that happens.
And there's one other important factor here, it's not like your personal mortgage that you got once from the bank and need to pay down. The government borrows from very many investors and they're constantly refinancing it and suddenly nobody wants to borrow to you because it's obvious nobody else is going to borrow to you which means you're doing to collapse. This self-enforcing loop where they all weaken each other's confidence in you means once the interest rates go beyond a certain level they're impossible to bring down again. You saw it with the Greek collapse, suddenly the interest rates weren't just 7% that'd be unsustainable but they were suddenly 10-20-30% or more. The country was/is less credit worthy than most regular people are, even we aren't charged a 30% interest on unsecured debt.
Not to rain on your parade, but sometimes you can make extremely advanced outputs without knowing what's actually happening. A good example is the way the ancient Japanese figured out differential hardening of their swords, a very complex form of smithing. You could in principle discover a superconductor without really understanding magnetism, if you could some up with something that expels the Higgs field you could have an anti-gravity (actually, anti-mass) device without really understanding mass. Sure, you stand a better chance of doing it the other way around but it's not necessarily the only way.
Yes, he's wrong but there's usually quite a lot of menial work part of or related to manufacturing. Trailers, trucks, warehousing, raw materials, basic maintenance like oiling, lubing and changing wear parts or machining tools every so often. Of course all those wouldn't exist without the high-tech manufacturing plant and certainly some highly skilled people there as well, but the plant provides a mix. If you outsource that and say everybody is now doing complex design, you need a workforce where everybody can do complex design. That's usually a problem...
Most competence systems I've seen has a 1-5 performance rating where 3 is performing okay, 4 well and 5 exceptionally. On occasion there's a 2 for underperforming and very rarely an 1 which is basically fail but it's rare because you shouldn't get promoted to that level if you aren't already performing like one. That's usually reserved for total mishires or people who've had some kind of personal breakdown. Saying that X% of your workers are underperforming is saying that your hiring process fails X% of the time - that figure should be close to zero.
Of course before that there's usually a set of skills that your employment level should have, so the demands on a "Senior Developer" is different from a "Junior Developer". Usually these are set up in a competence matrix, so when they're looking at possible promotions they can say yes, you're coding at a Senior Developer coding level but you lack skill X which is required to be a Senior Developer. Skills development is related but actually quite distinct from your work performance, you can have done your job excellently but done very little to improve your skill set.
Sane companies also look at professional development, if you're a first year Senior Developer whose performance has improved but still is below average you're probably a better choice than the 5th year Senior Developer whose performance has declined and is now equal to yours, those two are connected. It was probably a better idea to promote him to an okay performing Senior Developer than for him to be an overachieving Junior Developer. That's another reason 5s are so rare, if you are that good you should be in a position with higher demands.
That said, when it comes down to it managers can pretty much manage to tweak the rating however they want. That said, even the worst of managers want to look good to their team/departments bosses and customers. If they know you're critical for them to deliver on time and in good quality, you'll survive most of the office politics. But without trying to kiss too much ass, make sure your boss knows what you're doing for him. Don't expect him to find out on his own.
Although you are being ridiculed, I think you are right. It is damn near impossible to have an accident and not having ten or more witnesses.
If you think that, you must live in the city. Outside the cities if you go off the road at night and tumble a few meters down so you're not in anyone's headlights chances are good nobody noticed and nobody will notice until morning even on somewhat traveled roads. Here's a typical example from Norway. Driver went off the road, the road is a little bit elevated from the terrain and at night nobody's going to see it. There are always tire tracks from old accidents, unless you see the car nobody's going to check it out. I found at least two recent fatal accident like that in April and in May here in Norway so for the whole EU area I think thousands per year is the right order. Of course not everybody could have been saved, but a lot of people suffer internal injuries in high impact crashes that must be treated or they will be fatal.
Be better to spend the money actually GOING to the stars than just listening to them, in my opinion.:)
The Mars rovers including all mission extensions have cost almost a billion dollars and lasted less than ten years, so say $100 million/year. Shutting down SETI would then give you 2% of a Mars rover, want to make a guess at how infinitesimally small it'd be of an interstellar space ship? Not that we have the foggiest idea on how to build one... Space is absurdly big, Voyager 1 is 35 years out but less than 1/1000th of the way to the nearest star. Unless somebody is about to invent the warp drive, the only realistic chance of discovering alien life in the next 100 years - possibly next 1000 years - is to build huge, huge optical and radio telescopes, find earth-like exoplanets and ping them.
Sorry, you can't fool us into believing that the problem is some imaginary $300 / month subscription fee - we know that pirates are the problem.
The false dichotomy here is thinking only one of them can be the problem. Clearly they have a problem with people whose sole reason for piracy is to save money, whether it's cheapskates who pirate when they can and buy when they must or freeloaders who wouldn't pay anyway, but demoralizes the paying customers - why should they pay when the freeloaders don't. Because of that they're implementing copying restrictions and DRM systems and region codes, annoying unskippable warnings which is also abused for trailers and commercials, pushing for mass surveillance, three/six strike laws that lack judicial oversight and mass shakedowns that are economically impossible to defend against, carry excessive penalties (thousands of dollars for one 99 cent song) and so on.
That pisses a lot of other people off, people who like to run a media server like me. People that run Linux like I did, not anymore but that's a different story. People that have a laptop with no optical drive which they feel they should be able to watch it on. People that feel once they have bought it, they should be able to convert it to watch on their phone or tablet. People that don't like them poking their noses in all private communication. People that don't like kangaroo courts. People that are afraid they'll get a thousands of dollar lawsuit because their wifi was open or their machine was hacked or their tenants or relatives was on P2P. On top of that particularly the TV and movie industry cling to an outdated business model which makes the pirate service far more convenient.
You have a problem with pirates? Well, the feeling is mutual because I have a problem with you because I would like to pay but there's nothing worth paying for. You've made your content so locked up and difficult to access and use as I want that the pirates win without a fight. The service I want you're not willing to offer to me for any price. Your current efforts are futile and the totalitarian society you'd have to build to stomp out piracy is not one I'd care to live in. As far as I'm concerned you're a hindrance to my enjoyment and a menace to society and the best way of neutralizing you would be to take your copyright away. If people want you to continue creating, they'll pay. If not then find some other work. It's not the perfect solution but getting rid of copyright is the lesser evil, you're the greater.
Perhaps in the US, but most everywhere else the bandwidth is still increasing. Here's the latest figures from Norway, solid green line is average speed and solid blue line is mean speed. All cable/DSL/fiber lines are sold uncapped and our consumer protection agency is making sure you get what you pay for, so those figures are quite meaningful. I've personally downloaded a 500GB+ torrent in 3 days on a 60 Mbit/s line and it was no problem. You can see about a year ago the average speed made a huge jump, that was the biggest fiber company doubling their speeds. Now cable and DSL have followed and the mean is 7.2 Mbit/s. I can't find a recent figure on the total number of fiber connections but the biggest supplier network has 280k of 1670k broadband subscriptions alone (17%) which means the total is probably 20-25%.somewhere.
All new housing is installed with fiber and they're still retrofitting it all over the place. Cable, telecom and electricity companies are all now fighting for a piece of that pie and there's a rush to lay fiber first because it's very hard for a runner-up to get enough customers to lay cable too with 20-25% year-over-year growth. And we're one of the thinnest populated countries in the world, we're 214th out of 242 while the US is 179th. Our biggest telecom operator has already said they're looking to phase out the copper lines and deliver only fiber and mobile, meaning PSTN, ISDN and DSL will go away like the telegraph and the beeper service. Maybe it'll still exist in rural areas as a legacy network but in cities I doubt you can get a regular landline in 2020. You talk on your cell phone and for Internet you're either on 4G+ mobile broadband or you're on fiber.
Here's a basic and reliable formula for success - educate yourself, save your money, and don't be stupid. Oh, and position yourself at where money goes to.
Moderate success, working the corporate ladder. Crazy success you only get with major ownership in a an idea that goes sky high. And you have to have the balls to ride that rocket too. I think everybody here has heard of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, but have you heard of Ronald Wayne? He's a co-founder of Apple but sold out very early, if he'd kept all his stock he'd be worth 35 billion dollars today. But as he admits, he couldn't risk it and cashed out.
Why? You can secretly love the movie, but pretend it "sucks" (what defines sucks, btw?) and take it back. Free rental isn't a good business model for anyone.
That they could doesn't mean everyone would. I just got my Games of Thrones Season One Bluray, did I need to buy it? No, all the episodes are already on my HDD in HD thanks to the wonder of the Internet. I just figured it's a great show and I hope they make more of it, so I bought it. And even if that series is cancelled, well at least I've put the message out that I'd pay for things of the same style and/or genre. I don't feel bad about buying it "after the fact", it's already produced before it airs and the bet already made. Season one would undoubtedly exist no matter what, the only question is if season one revenues makes them want to make a season two or three and in that calculation my BluRay purchase is as good money as any other. I wish they'd give me a Steam-like solution that was more convenient than pirating though...
That sounds like the kind of CIO that'd make me want to run in the other direction, fast. To use a military analogy it's like saying an army only need privates, be wary of being promoted to an officer. I know some brilliant coders that have written excellent code on projects that have flopped miserably. Why? Very often because the project was a bad idea to begin with, the scope and requirements unclear, conflicting and changing or they're stuck waiting for input or some other group that isn't delivering so ultimately it failed to deliver any value to customers or the intended users anyway. That view is utterly failing to see the value of breaking down the overall goal into objectives, the logistics, equipment, support and training to put that private in the right place at the right time to pull the trigger.
That's not to say becoming an officer is for everybody and there's room for special forces, extremely high skill people but still doers that aren't about commanding or supporting other people. I think a lot of people here on Slashdot would like that position, it's not about drawing up battle plans on the map (or is that Powerpoint these days), it's about high quality execution. It still needs commanders with a clue though, if you just put marines in the trenches with everybody else there's little room for excellence, you're just cannon fodder like the rest. You need someone to say "This is the critical part of the mission, and I need you to do it because you're the best of the best". Either that or go into architecture, like what's the backbone of our fighting capability going to be. I think everyone here has tried building a software app on quicksand. It never ends well.
News flash: It's the absolutely poorest countries that have had birth rates of 6-7/women on average, I think one of my grandparents had 9 that lived to adult age. If it was expensive to raise a kid, only the richest countries in the world could afford that. Children are only expensive because today the standard is an all-expenses paid package complete with brand clothing, iPhones, expensive vacations and their own personally decorated private room so that two incomes can barely deal with raising three kids. If you want to invest the time and responsibility, I'd say go for it. Despite that the saying is "putting food on the table", there's extremely few that can't actually put literal food on the literal table. Being raised by good parents in a poor home is still going to beat being raised by bad parents in a rich home by a long shot.
Slashdot Mirror
I always thought, that the fairest court of all, would be the one where the "prosecutor" (for lack of better term) would be searching for the "truth", not necessarily going for "conviction". This would remove the adversarial nature of the whole court process, it would be about discovering the "truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth".
The problem with this is that the "prosecutor" is now the one deciding what the truth is, so when it comes to trial it would be even more biased towards "the defendant wouldn't be here unless he was guilty", except you didn't get any say in this little pre-trial. Of course they shouldn't press charges where the evidence clearly doesn't hold but they should "overprosecute" a little and let judges and juries decide. I'd be far more concerned about a court system where nobody is acquitted at trial than the opposite.
To Temper the Prosecution's zeal, they would be held accountable for all the prosecutions they have, and if they get a "conviction" of someone who is later proved innocent (i.e. DNA proof), that they are tossed in Jail for the remainder of the plaintiffs sentence.
So if somebody successfully frames you for murder or gives false testimony or the police present me with a bogus case and I as a prosecutor get you convicted on what apparently looks like solid evidence, I risk spending the rest of my life in jail? Nobody accepts that kind of occupational risk on things they have so very little control over.
All Lawyers would be "public" lawyers, and would be assigned randomly to one side or the other side of the case. Lawyers with extensive experience and a proven record would be eligible for Judgeships.
Everybody knows a public lawyer is a last resort because he's not your lawyer, he got no interest in delivering you his best performance. "Unimportant" people will still be thrown under the bus as the lawyers work on gathering cases and friends to get their judgeship and I'm sure they'll find some way to give their lawyers kickbacks anyway.
Why would things ever stop being archived and kept track of? Seriously. Are we going to have a nuclear war or something? The whole archive would probably fit on a USB pen drive. Making 1000 copies every year would be a rounding error on the city's budget.
Well, we might have something like that. That hard drive in your machine, how long is it going to last? If you power it down, how long is it actually usable? Those spares, how good is the shelf live? HDDs fail, CDs and DVDs fade away and USB pen drives will lose their charge if put in storage and almost nobody has a tape drive. The whole "copy to new media" assume we will have a continuous, uninterrupted flow of cheap storage, stable power and people with nothing better to do. Just imagine we had WWII all over again, 1939-1945 is six years where you probably can't get spares because there's slightly more important things like a war going on.
And after Thailand and Japan is in ruins you could probably add years rebuilding the components and the plants and the infrastructure required, say a good 10 years where nobody could give a shit about city hall records from the 1850s. I expect that without replacements most of my data would be dead and gone like a fart in the wind because the backups are all out as well. Whatever is important and printable I'd probably print out but I can't very well print terabytes and there's no way to print a video. In short, I'm entirely dependent on modern society to keep the amount of data that I do. While a million years sound like overkill, I can understand products to last hundreds of years.
Yet the sole reason a social media site exists is because users want to be there (...) And since users aren't really tied to a site they are free to be fickle and jump to the next shiny thing they can share links to cat videos on.
Perhaps, perhaps not. There's a huge amount of peer pressure of the "Why can't you use YouTube like everybody else? Stop being such a special snowflake." variety, maybe not for cat videos but for many other things. For example recently I needed to talk to some friends and their tool of choice is now Facebook Chat. Before that there was MSN, before that ICQ or IRC. I didn't choose to abandon any of those, but you can't be social without people to be social with. You can more than sustain a profit on those network effects as long as you don't become so obnoxious people leave in greater numbers than they join.
bring on the cyborgs
We already have those sports, instead of running we have cycling and formula one, depending on whether you allow engines or not. They're just not fancy enough to be called cyborgs. What's the point of seeing how far a spring-loaded jumper can be catapulted in the high jump? We already have human cannonball shows. Sure the Olympics have turned into a perversion of itself, but sports is a lot more than that and I'd hate to see kids and youth thinking it's all about the drugs and turning themselves into freaks of nature.
Approximately 99.999% of all shops I know both online and offline have some sort of "typo clause" in their terms and conditions, if their $100 item is suddenly $1 for some reason I think most will choose to exercise it if the algorithm goes completely bonkers. But if it's a minor mispricing relative to the item value or their total sales and they don't want the flurry of 1-star reviews that's bound to follow, they eat that loss. Been there, done that, got my order fulfilled - let's call it a surprise sale for both parties. If you're fucking this up so badly you can't take it, you really got no business running a retail store.
Hopefully forever. European counties founded the EU because it's better to keep the politicians talking about money than to have them threaten each other and start a war.
As long as it was a trade union as trade is mostly good for everyone and create positive dependencies, but what's been happening recently? Hell no. Greeks and the other countries that have been forced to beg for aid feeling they've lost all sovereignty and is being dictated by France and Germany, while the Germans feel they're being blackmailed into covering other people debt and all the old nation lines are flaring red hot again, insults about who's lazy and spoiled and cruel and whatnot. Lately they've ripped open many old wounds and created a lot of new ones and it's far from over.
The politicians want stronger central control but the people doesn't, I fear that the current path they're on is going to take them more in the direction of a Soviet Union, Yugoslavia or Roman Empire where there's a lot of states on the outskirts that feel they are getting overrun by a big central government in Brussels. Granted there's a lot less guns involved but there sure is a lot of economic blackmail, which I hardly think is the best foundation for a union. Rushing too fast into a United States of Europe to save the economy may turn out to be rather counterproductive to actually creating a united Europe.
In theory there are lots of advantages, but most of them are negated by one thing - they know they're a monopoly and act like it, unless they're in immediate fear of being outsourced. Most IT departments work so that when nothing is wrong they don't get much praise but when shit hits the fan they're the one taking it so most of them become notoriously conservative. The people that raise to the top are those who haven't caused any shit storms, breeding more conservatism. So yes good response time, but not if you're doing anything that could mean a lot of work or risk for IT like getting any kind of new system up and running. It's actually been worse than outsourcing in my experience, probably because for outsourcing companies taking over new systems is their core business.
Even I'm surprised someone was stupid enough to put their phone in a microwave mind you.
A woman I know of managed to lose her cell phone in the toilet, which is clumsy. But she felt it was so yucky to reach in and grab it, she decided to flush it first... Granted, alcohol was involved but you're still pretty retarded when you do that. And while I haven't put a cell phone in the microwave, years ago we had these plates with engraving that I didn't think about was metal. It was quite the lightning show. Most of that shit happen simply because you aren't even thinking about it.
People running IE are far less likely to have blocked statcounter.com than those running other browsers.
Unless it's in adblock's default block list - which also few people relatively speaking use, then I doubt even 1/1000 has statcounter blocked. Slashdotters have a ton of addons but it's like going to a car enthusiast forum, ask who runs all stock parts and then concluding most cars on the road are modded. For most the browser is just another utility like the car transporting you from A to B, I'm guessing most that use Firefox has some addons because it's a pain to use without them but they're not micromanaging like that.
Really? Anyone? Really believes that the ISP are protecting you? Your privacy? With claws and fangs?
No, I think they're covering their own asses by making sure they know absolutely nothing about anything I do or don't do. If they start flagging copyright infringements for one company I'm sure they'll get sued by a bunch of other companies for secondary infringement or criminal negligence or being co-conspirators as they let all the other infringements pass. And not just copyright infringement but everything else too, the user is sending SPAM and they let it pass? Sue the ISP. Internet fraud? Sue the ISP. Hacking? Sue the ISP. If anyone can show the ISP "knew" the customer was doing something illegal but continued the subscription to turn a profit, they could get in all sorts of legal shit. Either you're reading the bits or you're not, you can't both do that and claim ignorance at the same time.
Here in Norway you can go to a municipal clerk, but churches, mosques and other organizations like humanitarians can get a "license to marry" if they do their paperwork. So the priest is the one actually marrying you both in the legal and religious sense, but the paperwork will be exactly the same. Unlike the municipal clerk they are not required to marry anyone though, so they can have their own rules on who they'll marry and not. I think those two varieties cover pretty much all of Europe, it's a legal procedure in some way not just a marriage contract.
Hacking the device (jailbreaking) has been ruled legal by the courts, in spite of big money's objections. Are you anticipating a reverse course on that?
All it takes is for any jailbroken device to be permanently banned from the app store and practically nobody would risk having a jailbroken phone for normal use. And you can pretty much do that already if you roll in TPM and "Trusted Computing" and require remote attestation. And no matter what legal rights you have to your own device they're perfectly within their rights to refuse service. It's just not a big enough problem that they want to bring out the big guns.
Agreed, but if the copyright on something has expired, then companies should be free to open up something like that to the world.
Why? A contract may very well stipulate conditions that go beyond the copyright term. "Should be" != "is"
For instance, in this case, let's say IBM chose to open up OS/2 Warp. They could get an agreement w/ Microsoft and all surviving companies to be okay w/ releasing it under any agreeable license. Same for device drivers.
If you need an agreement they could try it today, it'd still be a helluva lot of work to track everyone down and many would either refuse or make outrageous demands.
However, if the device drivers concerned are of certain discontinued products, feel free to publish them, given that they are not otherwise actively supported.
So you're the law now, since you can tell them to "feel free"? Are you going to indemnify them when some liquidation company somewhere finds they have some IP rights lying around collecting dust that they can sue for? The risk of even one lawsuit of "up to $150,000" plus lawyer time is enough to scare away any interest in the project.
Once it becomes obvious that your don't plan to repay what your borrow, people stop lending you money, and economies fail catastrophically once that happens.
And there's one other important factor here, it's not like your personal mortgage that you got once from the bank and need to pay down. The government borrows from very many investors and they're constantly refinancing it and suddenly nobody wants to borrow to you because it's obvious nobody else is going to borrow to you which means you're doing to collapse. This self-enforcing loop where they all weaken each other's confidence in you means once the interest rates go beyond a certain level they're impossible to bring down again. You saw it with the Greek collapse, suddenly the interest rates weren't just 7% that'd be unsustainable but they were suddenly 10-20-30% or more. The country was/is less credit worthy than most regular people are, even we aren't charged a 30% interest on unsecured debt.
Not to rain on your parade, but sometimes you can make extremely advanced outputs without knowing what's actually happening. A good example is the way the ancient Japanese figured out differential hardening of their swords, a very complex form of smithing. You could in principle discover a superconductor without really understanding magnetism, if you could some up with something that expels the Higgs field you could have an anti-gravity (actually, anti-mass) device without really understanding mass. Sure, you stand a better chance of doing it the other way around but it's not necessarily the only way.
Yes, he's wrong but there's usually quite a lot of menial work part of or related to manufacturing. Trailers, trucks, warehousing, raw materials, basic maintenance like oiling, lubing and changing wear parts or machining tools every so often. Of course all those wouldn't exist without the high-tech manufacturing plant and certainly some highly skilled people there as well, but the plant provides a mix. If you outsource that and say everybody is now doing complex design, you need a workforce where everybody can do complex design. That's usually a problem...
Most competence systems I've seen has a 1-5 performance rating where 3 is performing okay, 4 well and 5 exceptionally. On occasion there's a 2 for underperforming and very rarely an 1 which is basically fail but it's rare because you shouldn't get promoted to that level if you aren't already performing like one. That's usually reserved for total mishires or people who've had some kind of personal breakdown. Saying that X% of your workers are underperforming is saying that your hiring process fails X% of the time - that figure should be close to zero.
Of course before that there's usually a set of skills that your employment level should have, so the demands on a "Senior Developer" is different from a "Junior Developer". Usually these are set up in a competence matrix, so when they're looking at possible promotions they can say yes, you're coding at a Senior Developer coding level but you lack skill X which is required to be a Senior Developer. Skills development is related but actually quite distinct from your work performance, you can have done your job excellently but done very little to improve your skill set.
Sane companies also look at professional development, if you're a first year Senior Developer whose performance has improved but still is below average you're probably a better choice than the 5th year Senior Developer whose performance has declined and is now equal to yours, those two are connected. It was probably a better idea to promote him to an okay performing Senior Developer than for him to be an overachieving Junior Developer. That's another reason 5s are so rare, if you are that good you should be in a position with higher demands.
That said, when it comes down to it managers can pretty much manage to tweak the rating however they want. That said, even the worst of managers want to look good to their team/departments bosses and customers. If they know you're critical for them to deliver on time and in good quality, you'll survive most of the office politics. But without trying to kiss too much ass, make sure your boss knows what you're doing for him. Don't expect him to find out on his own.
Although you are being ridiculed, I think you are right. It is damn near impossible to have an accident and not having ten or more witnesses.
If you think that, you must live in the city. Outside the cities if you go off the road at night and tumble a few meters down so you're not in anyone's headlights chances are good nobody noticed and nobody will notice until morning even on somewhat traveled roads. Here's a typical example from Norway. Driver went off the road, the road is a little bit elevated from the terrain and at night nobody's going to see it. There are always tire tracks from old accidents, unless you see the car nobody's going to check it out. I found at least two recent fatal accident like that in April and in May here in Norway so for the whole EU area I think thousands per year is the right order. Of course not everybody could have been saved, but a lot of people suffer internal injuries in high impact crashes that must be treated or they will be fatal.
Be better to spend the money actually GOING to the stars than just listening to them, in my opinion. :)
The Mars rovers including all mission extensions have cost almost a billion dollars and lasted less than ten years, so say $100 million/year. Shutting down SETI would then give you 2% of a Mars rover, want to make a guess at how infinitesimally small it'd be of an interstellar space ship? Not that we have the foggiest idea on how to build one... Space is absurdly big, Voyager 1 is 35 years out but less than 1/1000th of the way to the nearest star. Unless somebody is about to invent the warp drive, the only realistic chance of discovering alien life in the next 100 years - possibly next 1000 years - is to build huge, huge optical and radio telescopes, find earth-like exoplanets and ping them.
Sorry, you can't fool us into believing that the problem is some imaginary $300 / month subscription fee - we know that pirates are the problem.
The false dichotomy here is thinking only one of them can be the problem. Clearly they have a problem with people whose sole reason for piracy is to save money, whether it's cheapskates who pirate when they can and buy when they must or freeloaders who wouldn't pay anyway, but demoralizes the paying customers - why should they pay when the freeloaders don't. Because of that they're implementing copying restrictions and DRM systems and region codes, annoying unskippable warnings which is also abused for trailers and commercials, pushing for mass surveillance, three/six strike laws that lack judicial oversight and mass shakedowns that are economically impossible to defend against, carry excessive penalties (thousands of dollars for one 99 cent song) and so on.
That pisses a lot of other people off, people who like to run a media server like me. People that run Linux like I did, not anymore but that's a different story. People that have a laptop with no optical drive which they feel they should be able to watch it on. People that feel once they have bought it, they should be able to convert it to watch on their phone or tablet. People that don't like them poking their noses in all private communication. People that don't like kangaroo courts. People that are afraid they'll get a thousands of dollar lawsuit because their wifi was open or their machine was hacked or their tenants or relatives was on P2P. On top of that particularly the TV and movie industry cling to an outdated business model which makes the pirate service far more convenient.
You have a problem with pirates? Well, the feeling is mutual because I have a problem with you because I would like to pay but there's nothing worth paying for. You've made your content so locked up and difficult to access and use as I want that the pirates win without a fight. The service I want you're not willing to offer to me for any price. Your current efforts are futile and the totalitarian society you'd have to build to stomp out piracy is not one I'd care to live in. As far as I'm concerned you're a hindrance to my enjoyment and a menace to society and the best way of neutralizing you would be to take your copyright away. If people want you to continue creating, they'll pay. If not then find some other work. It's not the perfect solution but getting rid of copyright is the lesser evil, you're the greater.
Perhaps in the US, but most everywhere else the bandwidth is still increasing. Here's the latest figures from Norway, solid green line is average speed and solid blue line is mean speed. All cable/DSL/fiber lines are sold uncapped and our consumer protection agency is making sure you get what you pay for, so those figures are quite meaningful. I've personally downloaded a 500GB+ torrent in 3 days on a 60 Mbit/s line and it was no problem. You can see about a year ago the average speed made a huge jump, that was the biggest fiber company doubling their speeds. Now cable and DSL have followed and the mean is 7.2 Mbit/s. I can't find a recent figure on the total number of fiber connections but the biggest supplier network has 280k of 1670k broadband subscriptions alone (17%) which means the total is probably 20-25%.somewhere.
All new housing is installed with fiber and they're still retrofitting it all over the place. Cable, telecom and electricity companies are all now fighting for a piece of that pie and there's a rush to lay fiber first because it's very hard for a runner-up to get enough customers to lay cable too with 20-25% year-over-year growth. And we're one of the thinnest populated countries in the world, we're 214th out of 242 while the US is 179th. Our biggest telecom operator has already said they're looking to phase out the copper lines and deliver only fiber and mobile, meaning PSTN, ISDN and DSL will go away like the telegraph and the beeper service. Maybe it'll still exist in rural areas as a legacy network but in cities I doubt you can get a regular landline in 2020. You talk on your cell phone and for Internet you're either on 4G+ mobile broadband or you're on fiber.
Here's a basic and reliable formula for success - educate yourself, save your money, and don't be stupid. Oh, and position yourself at where money goes to.
Moderate success, working the corporate ladder. Crazy success you only get with major ownership in a an idea that goes sky high. And you have to have the balls to ride that rocket too. I think everybody here has heard of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, but have you heard of Ronald Wayne? He's a co-founder of Apple but sold out very early, if he'd kept all his stock he'd be worth 35 billion dollars today. But as he admits, he couldn't risk it and cashed out.
Why? You can secretly love the movie, but pretend it "sucks" (what defines sucks, btw?) and take it back. Free rental isn't a good business model for anyone.
That they could doesn't mean everyone would. I just got my Games of Thrones Season One Bluray, did I need to buy it? No, all the episodes are already on my HDD in HD thanks to the wonder of the Internet. I just figured it's a great show and I hope they make more of it, so I bought it. And even if that series is cancelled, well at least I've put the message out that I'd pay for things of the same style and/or genre. I don't feel bad about buying it "after the fact", it's already produced before it airs and the bet already made. Season one would undoubtedly exist no matter what, the only question is if season one revenues makes them want to make a season two or three and in that calculation my BluRay purchase is as good money as any other. I wish they'd give me a Steam-like solution that was more convenient than pirating though...
That sounds like the kind of CIO that'd make me want to run in the other direction, fast. To use a military analogy it's like saying an army only need privates, be wary of being promoted to an officer. I know some brilliant coders that have written excellent code on projects that have flopped miserably. Why? Very often because the project was a bad idea to begin with, the scope and requirements unclear, conflicting and changing or they're stuck waiting for input or some other group that isn't delivering so ultimately it failed to deliver any value to customers or the intended users anyway. That view is utterly failing to see the value of breaking down the overall goal into objectives, the logistics, equipment, support and training to put that private in the right place at the right time to pull the trigger.
That's not to say becoming an officer is for everybody and there's room for special forces, extremely high skill people but still doers that aren't about commanding or supporting other people. I think a lot of people here on Slashdot would like that position, it's not about drawing up battle plans on the map (or is that Powerpoint these days), it's about high quality execution. It still needs commanders with a clue though, if you just put marines in the trenches with everybody else there's little room for excellence, you're just cannon fodder like the rest. You need someone to say "This is the critical part of the mission, and I need you to do it because you're the best of the best". Either that or go into architecture, like what's the backbone of our fighting capability going to be. I think everyone here has tried building a software app on quicksand. It never ends well.
News flash: It's the absolutely poorest countries that have had birth rates of 6-7/women on average, I think one of my grandparents had 9 that lived to adult age. If it was expensive to raise a kid, only the richest countries in the world could afford that. Children are only expensive because today the standard is an all-expenses paid package complete with brand clothing, iPhones, expensive vacations and their own personally decorated private room so that two incomes can barely deal with raising three kids. If you want to invest the time and responsibility, I'd say go for it. Despite that the saying is "putting food on the table", there's extremely few that can't actually put literal food on the literal table. Being raised by good parents in a poor home is still going to beat being raised by bad parents in a rich home by a long shot.