English isn't the world's most spoken language (when you include secondary speakers) for its elegance, consistency or expressiveness. It's a combination of history and politics and power and isolation and culture and grabbing concepts and words and pronunciation from other languages. Languages are the same, some exist practically by being first. Some exist only because they've had large companies like Sun or Java backing them. Others survive because they've been isolated cornering a specific need in finance or science or academia. I remember Java 1.0 and very early Javascript, that the world is now full of Android and AJAX apps is nothing short of a freak of history. Trying to analyze it from the language's qualities alone is never going to give meaningful results.
Assuming no laboratory or administrative costs, how valuable is an education that you got for the cost of two or three hours of one-on-one attention (including teaching and evaulation) per year?
Wouldn't that primarily depend on how much time I spent and how much I learned? At least in an ideal world it should be utterly irrelevant if I did it all alone or had a personal teacher 8 hours a day. As for testing, yes if you need the degree then that costs. If you just want to get better at your job and earn raises/promotions that way, maybe you don't need it. Maybe you can do some variation of no cure - no pay and show people that you know your stuff. Or pay for a proper testing and certification. Alone this is just the video version of the book, but I've learned a lot from books so... what exactly is the problem here?
You're not really arguing against his point though, you're arguing for it. The more bullshit degrees are out there the more important it becomes who the accrediting institution is, that they're one that'd weed out the cheaters and won't hand out A's like candy. Still, there's good reasons why you might want to separate the teaching from the exam.
And will the people doing this flagging be trained to know what is and what isn't illegal content?
Since ignorance of the law is not an excuse, everyone should know the law already;)
I don't think the proponent of this idea has thought enough about the unintended consequences of such a capability.
Don't you already have a place online you can tip the police? I checked and here in Norway the police do. The categories listed there are:
- Hate speech - Human trafficking - Sexual exploitation of children - Economic crime - International crime - Other crime
Nothing prevents me from taking an URL and pasting it in under any of these today. I suppose with a "flag this" button you save about 10 seconds of Googling, you don't need to hit Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V but apart from that I'd say the opportunity is there already today. Unless you want to automatically take down sites if it gets enough flags, that surely couldn't be abused in any way....
You have your answer. You charge by the hour for support including bug fixes. Only slaves work for free.
If there is nothing else in the contract then I would say yes, once the client has signed off on it any remaining bugs are billable. Of course then it's easy to dump a bug-ridden piece of shit on the customer, hope they do poor testing and cash in big both on finishing early and getting extra bug fixes. So I wouldn't say "never" is that common, most contracts I've seen have a guarantee period of 1-6 months where bugs are fixed free of charge. But they always make it clear this is a service and obviously it's baked into the price of the contract, it's just incentive to deliver a good product the first time and have as few bugs in the guarantee period as possible rather than have all the skeletons tumble out as the customer uses the product. Most business software requires you to have a support contract to get support too, COTS with free support is really an exception.
You can bet that is coming once DNA sequencing gets cheap enough. The excuse will no doubt be crime fighting, as the police sometimes have DNA but no match.
1) Agree a payment plan. Stage paymens for specific milestones.
To the degree you can agree on one. What I've seen is that it's very hard - even with Agile and whatnot - to deliver value in the same pace as you deliver work. Particularly if the client wants to retire or replace an old system or it needs to have some integrations to other systems before they can use it, or simply setting up the structures to implement the business logic in. And if the client wants to bail halfway because they're not happy with the quality or performance or cost of change requests or whatnot then they're not going to get the other half done for the other half of the money by some other bidder. So ideally they want to pay you a lot for a finished project, and much much less for an unfinished one.
Of course as a developer you want the exact opposite, you don't want the client to pull out at 80% without getting at least 80% of the cost - ideally even a penalty because you'd planned with the last 20% too. Or trying to be difficult and claim the work isn't finished. Unfortunately some developers are also quite ruthless in that they know they've only delivered 20% of the value, that the client is now deeply committed and that creating some kind of cost overrun by exploiting any ambiguity in the spec to do it in a silly or unnatural way to create change requests that the client practically can't refuse. It's hardly an uncommon tactic on big contracts to bid low and then make up for it on extra services. Even with agreed prices there's no agreed estimates...
That's just stupid, space is empty. It's about as hard to hide a spacecraft as it is to hide a supercarrier, it's not that it's there which is a secret but what it can do. The military isn't ostrich stupid, they don't stick their head in the sand and pretend nobody else can see it either. Just like you can't hide a nuclear detonation anymore, anything that doesn't happen in a simulator will get picked up by seismographs. And yes, they register different than earthquakes.
Look at it this way. If you were at a cinema watching a movie and, at any point for 7 days after watching a film you could stand in line and fill in a short form to get an immediate refund... would you?
There's a floating scale: - Hell no, it was the best movie since sliced bread - Good movie and money well spent - It wasn't memorable but worth the money - I wouldn't have paid for it again, but okay - Give me my money back - Give me my money and my two hours back - Give me my money and restitution for two hours of torture
I'd never go for the "Hell I loved the movie but if I can get my money back I will" though.
And we're not talking about $13 or $14 here, it's $5. Or $0.99. Most people can't be bothered.
Yeah, there's a few things though - then you can only sell things that sell for "can't be bothered" money, no more $60 games just $0.99 Angry Birds clones and such. And the market can easily be trashed by crap and ripoffs because people can't be arsed. I've paid for a few apps for my iPhone that were practically fraud, but for $0.99 yeah you're right I haven't bothered to get a refund. It's not exactly healthy for the market though.
If genius came free, without HUGE DOWNSIDES then selection would ensure that we'd all be geniuses. Think about it for a second, virtually every renowned genius had huge emotional or operational baggage. Dyslexia, autism, bipolar, monopolar, synesthesia... the list of common problems suffered by the exceptionally intelligent is legion
Well, to be renowned you must not only be exceptionally bright you also have to have some exceptional achievement, there's a lot of people who qualify for MENSA that aren't known for anything. For most that means years and years of long studies and research to even get to the point where a stroke of genius can occur, it's a long time since Archimedes and great revelations came by taking a bath. A singular focus and a balanced life are diametrically opposite because there's only 24 hours a day for everyone. I think most exceptional people suffer some form of mild OCD, everything from top athletes to top musicians to top scientists.
Why do I say that? Because they're all intensely repetitive. Exercise. Exercise some more. Exercise even more and then some. Practice. Practice some more. Practice even more and then some. Study. Study some more. Study even more and then some. Most people would simply get fed up and want a mixed life, a bit of books, TV, video games, listening to music, hanging out with friends, partying, chasing girlfriends (and probably ending up with wife and family). I think that's downside enough for most people, they choose a mainstream life and in most of those there's no time for extraordinary scientific achievement, though no rule is without exceptions.
Unlike Windows, there are only a tiny number of such keys. You can't exploit them the same way these guys apparently did by creating a random key signed by another random key which happened to be flagged as a CA key, because it wouldn't be accepted when installing the package.
The key that verifies that it comes from the $distro repository, yes. But there are many thousands of developers and packagers that could be compromised so you get a signed trojan horse, it's not like the distro does code review. Like for example OpenSSL that was badly broken for two years in all Debian based distros and that was pure ignorance, public and obvious. How hard to you think it would be to discover a malicious and covert custom exploit targeting only a few machines? It could have gone unnoticed forever.
I've been on that kind of cripplenet before, wouldn't ever want to go back there. I'd take practically any other kind of connection with a full IP of their own rather than your solution.
Good computing habits preclude the need for AV software. Just my two cents.
And how exactly would you know if mozilla.com has been compromised or if someone is running a MITM on you? Or if you're going to drag up Linux, how sure are you that not a single signing key to any package on your system is compromised? Good computing habits are good enough for my single consumer desktop, but they're not exactly hardened servers with tripwires, traffic policies, alerts and intense traffic monitoring. If they send a "real" virus directed towards me, I wouldn't bet too much on my good habits. It's all relative to the threat level, just like my apartment is fairly safe against common burglars but it's not exactly a jeweler's shop with millions in value nor it is a military bunker.
As for AV software, yes I run it as a second opinion. Personally I don't think I'm too smart to make a blunder, or the odd combination of a seeming trusted download and an old virus signature the AV will detect. Besides, how do you know your own opinion is correct? It's not like they announce themselves, it could be sending out your credit card into and be a proxy to everything without telling you. The silent ones are far more dangerous than the popup infestations and ransomware.
At least from my perspective the standard for a new building of that type today is usually fiber to each apartment, then a converter box that offers TV, Internet and phone for so called triple play. Then you would normally pull a fiber cable to each apartment and have a magic box that breaks it out into the various services. I assume you don't have a cable TV provider today? Because if you're already wired for cable, hooking up cable modems is clearly the easiest way to go. And if they won't give you a nice price, threaten to switch providers for everything. I've never heard of an entire apartment building being supplied by wireless APs, sure people can set up their own APs but there's always been a wire to the wall. It might be a bit cheaper to retrofit to an existing building but I wouldn't recommend it, hotels and such have struggled a lot to get good reception in every room.
With solar that makes sense because you're really generating the power with your solar cells, when they're first installed you're collecting free sunlight. I don't see the big point in buying a small methane generator and then buy methane while tied to the grid, then I assume it would be much cheaper to put a big methane power plant on the grid and buy electricity from there. In short, I don't see a big reason for ever turning this generator on unless you're off the grid...
The way you pose your question is sounds like "Why does software developers like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg get to make billions of dollars and be set for life? It's unfair, I as a plumber can't do that so it's only fair that I pirate everything I come across, particularly everything that says Microsoft on it." Star actors hit the lottery jackpot, that's why. Even in big Hollywood productions most the people are not getting paid millions. For example the LotR production employed 2400 people, of course two of them was Elijah Wood and Peter Jackson but most of them wasn't even on camera and most of the rest nameless extras on completely ordinary salaries, just like there's thousands of Microsoft developers working for ordinary pay. Pretending all actors are as rich as Elijah Wood is as stupid as pretending all software developers are as rich as Zuckerberg.
Yes... because your $500? ($1500??)+ PC is a simpler more reasonable solution than a $50 bluray player and $5 worth of cables (which you'd need for your computer too)... give me a break.
You do realize most of us would still have the PC for gaming and surfing and coding and whatever else we do right? So the only extra cost I had was the HDMI cable. It's one device less so less cable clutter, it's less shelf waste - I have a collection of discs and they're all collcting dust. And I can put it on my laptop or iphone or ipad, I can easily have a backup, browsing a folder is easier than searching through discs. I'm not going to make a mountain out of a mole hill but in an ideal world I'd still pick having my movie collection on a PC.
People left England because of religious oppression.... Then you know what they did?
It wasn't exactly atheist movements being persecuted, various minority/fringe religious groups were persecuted and fled to a country where they could make their own little wacky religious community. They weren't trying to get away from religion, just the dominant one in the country they left. Not sure why you'd think otherwise, the Bible Belt is far more religious than any area I know of in Europe. Oh maybe not in the Christianity statistics, but in the number of people that truly are deeply religious. Here in Norway almost 80% are technically in the state church and get counted as Christian, but only about 2% visit church weekly and 12% for Christmas. To most people church is a place for ceremonies like baptism, confirmation, marriage, funeral and the occasional memorial service with a dash of religion.
True, but those systematic flaws to would be there every year. So unless there's some reason to believe people would lie more today than they did before then that the poll hasn't changed since 1982 probably means people's real opinions haven't changed either. That is to say, 30 years of science and evidence detailing the evolutionary process means absolutely nothing to them. Extrapolation is of course always dubious but I suspect that holds true both forwards and backwards in time, that is nothing we've done have changed their minds and nothing will.
If you ran your own silicate mine you wouldn't buy in silicates from elsewhere. His point is if you already have the staff and infrastructure and perhaps are even in the IT business its cheaper to do it yourself.
Well sure, if you first decide what staff and infrastructure you have then decide what business you want to be in but most companies do it the other way around. To take an example from the IT industry that's maybe more relevant, AMD used to run the own fabs. Then they spun off GloFo and now they've divested themselves of it and become a fabless company because they decided designing CPUs is what their core business is while they could buy processing time from TSMC. It's actually quite common that businesses do this, saying we don't want to do this ourselves anymore, lay off, spin off or sell the business then hire that service back in from the open market.
Your emergency medical information does not change much really, we're not talking about your journal. Epilepsy, diabetes, allergies, heart condition, hemophilia and conditions like that are what an emergency paramedic needs to know, the rest not so much.
Sure because they made an economic structure (the euro) without the political structure (a common economic policy) so if they want a United States of Europe all they have to do is add a federal government. But Europe doesn't want that, being English or French or German isn't the same as being a Californian or Texan or New Yorker. They're not just different states, they're different countries. "I'm European" doesn't mean the same as "I'm American" and most likely never will. If you try forcing them together with a top-heavy government you'll only end up with a mish-mash country like the USSR or Yugoslavia that'll fall apart violently. Maybe if you took it one area by another then in a hundred years and I'm sure that's what they thought when they introduced the euro, but we're not there today. And particularly not now under these circumstances, it'd be like sewing up a poisoned wound. If things do come to a collapse now they need to back off and try again in a better way, not rush it and hope a central government will fix everything.
The euro may or may not collapse but the EU will survive in some form or the other, there's been far too many positive gains by being a 500 million people market rather than 27 countries with their own odd rules. Even very worst case I suspect the southern countries get kicked out/leave and the northern/eastern countries stay. There are after all despite the PIIGGS over 20 countries who haven't fucked their economy. Besides, it's not like they could turn this around if they just paid attention to it. Right now if they increase taxes and impose cutbacks their economy tanks more and they get less taxes and more people on unemployment. If they decrease taxes to kick start the economy their public deficit goes to hell and the markets shut them down. Right now they're at the bottom of a deep, deep pit and only has to sit still and hope the world economy recovers so they're able to climb out. Meanwhile they might as well reject bullshit like ACTA.
With the assumption that they are using single-mode fiber, you will cap out at roughly 40Gbps to the home.
They've done 111 Gbps on a single channel in the lab, but yes "only" 40 Gbps is more likely but I can live with that. Normally I can reach 5-6 MB/s actual transfer rates on my 60 Mbps fiber so it can't be that oversubscribed, I suspect the backbone hookup is far more than a OC-12. I could get 400 Mbps for about $1000/month, 1000 Mbps is available at "call us" prices so it's technically possible to get something ridiculously fast already.
Slashdot Mirror
Acronym Overload Detected. A summary is supposed to summarize but I couldn't tell what this story is about unless I already know.
English isn't the world's most spoken language (when you include secondary speakers) for its elegance, consistency or expressiveness. It's a combination of history and politics and power and isolation and culture and grabbing concepts and words and pronunciation from other languages. Languages are the same, some exist practically by being first. Some exist only because they've had large companies like Sun or Java backing them. Others survive because they've been isolated cornering a specific need in finance or science or academia. I remember Java 1.0 and very early Javascript, that the world is now full of Android and AJAX apps is nothing short of a freak of history. Trying to analyze it from the language's qualities alone is never going to give meaningful results.
Assuming no laboratory or administrative costs, how valuable is an education that you got for the cost of two or three hours of one-on-one attention (including teaching and evaulation) per year?
Wouldn't that primarily depend on how much time I spent and how much I learned? At least in an ideal world it should be utterly irrelevant if I did it all alone or had a personal teacher 8 hours a day. As for testing, yes if you need the degree then that costs. If you just want to get better at your job and earn raises/promotions that way, maybe you don't need it. Maybe you can do some variation of no cure - no pay and show people that you know your stuff. Or pay for a proper testing and certification. Alone this is just the video version of the book, but I've learned a lot from books so... what exactly is the problem here?
You're not really arguing against his point though, you're arguing for it. The more bullshit degrees are out there the more important it becomes who the accrediting institution is, that they're one that'd weed out the cheaters and won't hand out A's like candy. Still, there's good reasons why you might want to separate the teaching from the exam.
And will the people doing this flagging be trained to know what is and what isn't illegal content?
Since ignorance of the law is not an excuse, everyone should know the law already ;)
I don't think the proponent of this idea has thought enough about the unintended consequences of such a capability.
Don't you already have a place online you can tip the police? I checked and here in Norway the police do. The categories listed there are:
- Hate speech
- Human trafficking
- Sexual exploitation of children
- Economic crime
- International crime
- Other crime
Nothing prevents me from taking an URL and pasting it in under any of these today. I suppose with a "flag this" button you save about 10 seconds of Googling, you don't need to hit Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V but apart from that I'd say the opportunity is there already today. Unless you want to automatically take down sites if it gets enough flags, that surely couldn't be abused in any way....
You have your answer. You charge by the hour for support including bug fixes. Only slaves work for free.
If there is nothing else in the contract then I would say yes, once the client has signed off on it any remaining bugs are billable. Of course then it's easy to dump a bug-ridden piece of shit on the customer, hope they do poor testing and cash in big both on finishing early and getting extra bug fixes. So I wouldn't say "never" is that common, most contracts I've seen have a guarantee period of 1-6 months where bugs are fixed free of charge. But they always make it clear this is a service and obviously it's baked into the price of the contract, it's just incentive to deliver a good product the first time and have as few bugs in the guarantee period as possible rather than have all the skeletons tumble out as the customer uses the product. Most business software requires you to have a support contract to get support too, COTS with free support is really an exception.
You can bet that is coming once DNA sequencing gets cheap enough. The excuse will no doubt be crime fighting, as the police sometimes have DNA but no match.
1) Agree a payment plan. Stage paymens for specific milestones.
To the degree you can agree on one. What I've seen is that it's very hard - even with Agile and whatnot - to deliver value in the same pace as you deliver work. Particularly if the client wants to retire or replace an old system or it needs to have some integrations to other systems before they can use it, or simply setting up the structures to implement the business logic in. And if the client wants to bail halfway because they're not happy with the quality or performance or cost of change requests or whatnot then they're not going to get the other half done for the other half of the money by some other bidder. So ideally they want to pay you a lot for a finished project, and much much less for an unfinished one.
Of course as a developer you want the exact opposite, you don't want the client to pull out at 80% without getting at least 80% of the cost - ideally even a penalty because you'd planned with the last 20% too. Or trying to be difficult and claim the work isn't finished. Unfortunately some developers are also quite ruthless in that they know they've only delivered 20% of the value, that the client is now deeply committed and that creating some kind of cost overrun by exploiting any ambiguity in the spec to do it in a silly or unnatural way to create change requests that the client practically can't refuse. It's hardly an uncommon tactic on big contracts to bid low and then make up for it on extra services. Even with agreed prices there's no agreed estimates...
That's just stupid, space is empty. It's about as hard to hide a spacecraft as it is to hide a supercarrier, it's not that it's there which is a secret but what it can do. The military isn't ostrich stupid, they don't stick their head in the sand and pretend nobody else can see it either. Just like you can't hide a nuclear detonation anymore, anything that doesn't happen in a simulator will get picked up by seismographs. And yes, they register different than earthquakes.
Look at it this way. If you were at a cinema watching a movie and, at any point for 7 days after watching a film you could stand in line and fill in a short form to get an immediate refund... would you?
There's a floating scale:
- Hell no, it was the best movie since sliced bread
- Good movie and money well spent
- It wasn't memorable but worth the money
- I wouldn't have paid for it again, but okay
- Give me my money back
- Give me my money and my two hours back
- Give me my money and restitution for two hours of torture
I'd never go for the "Hell I loved the movie but if I can get my money back I will" though.
And we're not talking about $13 or $14 here, it's $5. Or $0.99. Most people can't be bothered.
Yeah, there's a few things though - then you can only sell things that sell for "can't be bothered" money, no more $60 games just $0.99 Angry Birds clones and such. And the market can easily be trashed by crap and ripoffs because people can't be arsed. I've paid for a few apps for my iPhone that were practically fraud, but for $0.99 yeah you're right I haven't bothered to get a refund. It's not exactly healthy for the market though.
If genius came free, without HUGE DOWNSIDES then selection would ensure that we'd all be geniuses. Think about it for a second, virtually every renowned genius had huge emotional or operational baggage. Dyslexia, autism, bipolar, monopolar, synesthesia... the list of common problems suffered by the exceptionally intelligent is legion
Well, to be renowned you must not only be exceptionally bright you also have to have some exceptional achievement, there's a lot of people who qualify for MENSA that aren't known for anything. For most that means years and years of long studies and research to even get to the point where a stroke of genius can occur, it's a long time since Archimedes and great revelations came by taking a bath. A singular focus and a balanced life are diametrically opposite because there's only 24 hours a day for everyone. I think most exceptional people suffer some form of mild OCD, everything from top athletes to top musicians to top scientists.
Why do I say that? Because they're all intensely repetitive. Exercise. Exercise some more. Exercise even more and then some. Practice. Practice some more. Practice even more and then some. Study. Study some more. Study even more and then some. Most people would simply get fed up and want a mixed life, a bit of books, TV, video games, listening to music, hanging out with friends, partying, chasing girlfriends (and probably ending up with wife and family). I think that's downside enough for most people, they choose a mainstream life and in most of those there's no time for extraordinary scientific achievement, though no rule is without exceptions.
Unlike Windows, there are only a tiny number of such keys. You can't exploit them the same way these guys apparently did by creating a random key signed by another random key which happened to be flagged as a CA key, because it wouldn't be accepted when installing the package.
The key that verifies that it comes from the $distro repository, yes. But there are many thousands of developers and packagers that could be compromised so you get a signed trojan horse, it's not like the distro does code review. Like for example OpenSSL that was badly broken for two years in all Debian based distros and that was pure ignorance, public and obvious. How hard to you think it would be to discover a malicious and covert custom exploit targeting only a few machines? It could have gone unnoticed forever.
After all, it is 80 units behind a single IP.
I've been on that kind of cripplenet before, wouldn't ever want to go back there. I'd take practically any other kind of connection with a full IP of their own rather than your solution.
Good computing habits preclude the need for AV software. Just my two cents.
And how exactly would you know if mozilla.com has been compromised or if someone is running a MITM on you? Or if you're going to drag up Linux, how sure are you that not a single signing key to any package on your system is compromised? Good computing habits are good enough for my single consumer desktop, but they're not exactly hardened servers with tripwires, traffic policies, alerts and intense traffic monitoring. If they send a "real" virus directed towards me, I wouldn't bet too much on my good habits. It's all relative to the threat level, just like my apartment is fairly safe against common burglars but it's not exactly a jeweler's shop with millions in value nor it is a military bunker.
As for AV software, yes I run it as a second opinion. Personally I don't think I'm too smart to make a blunder, or the odd combination of a seeming trusted download and an old virus signature the AV will detect. Besides, how do you know your own opinion is correct? It's not like they announce themselves, it could be sending out your credit card into and be a proxy to everything without telling you. The silent ones are far more dangerous than the popup infestations and ransomware.
At least from my perspective the standard for a new building of that type today is usually fiber to each apartment, then a converter box that offers TV, Internet and phone for so called triple play. Then you would normally pull a fiber cable to each apartment and have a magic box that breaks it out into the various services. I assume you don't have a cable TV provider today? Because if you're already wired for cable, hooking up cable modems is clearly the easiest way to go. And if they won't give you a nice price, threaten to switch providers for everything. I've never heard of an entire apartment building being supplied by wireless APs, sure people can set up their own APs but there's always been a wire to the wall. It might be a bit cheaper to retrofit to an existing building but I wouldn't recommend it, hotels and such have struggled a lot to get good reception in every room.
With solar that makes sense because you're really generating the power with your solar cells, when they're first installed you're collecting free sunlight. I don't see the big point in buying a small methane generator and then buy methane while tied to the grid, then I assume it would be much cheaper to put a big methane power plant on the grid and buy electricity from there. In short, I don't see a big reason for ever turning this generator on unless you're off the grid...
The way you pose your question is sounds like "Why does software developers like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg get to make billions of dollars and be set for life? It's unfair, I as a plumber can't do that so it's only fair that I pirate everything I come across, particularly everything that says Microsoft on it." Star actors hit the lottery jackpot, that's why. Even in big Hollywood productions most the people are not getting paid millions. For example the LotR production employed 2400 people, of course two of them was Elijah Wood and Peter Jackson but most of them wasn't even on camera and most of the rest nameless extras on completely ordinary salaries, just like there's thousands of Microsoft developers working for ordinary pay. Pretending all actors are as rich as Elijah Wood is as stupid as pretending all software developers are as rich as Zuckerberg.
Yes... because your $500? ($1500??)+ PC is a simpler more reasonable solution than a $50 bluray player and $5 worth of cables (which you'd need for your computer too)... give me a break.
You do realize most of us would still have the PC for gaming and surfing and coding and whatever else we do right? So the only extra cost I had was the HDMI cable. It's one device less so less cable clutter, it's less shelf waste - I have a collection of discs and they're all collcting dust. And I can put it on my laptop or iphone or ipad, I can easily have a backup, browsing a folder is easier than searching through discs. I'm not going to make a mountain out of a mole hill but in an ideal world I'd still pick having my movie collection on a PC.
People left England because of religious oppression.... Then you know what they did?
It wasn't exactly atheist movements being persecuted, various minority/fringe religious groups were persecuted and fled to a country where they could make their own little wacky religious community. They weren't trying to get away from religion, just the dominant one in the country they left. Not sure why you'd think otherwise, the Bible Belt is far more religious than any area I know of in Europe. Oh maybe not in the Christianity statistics, but in the number of people that truly are deeply religious. Here in Norway almost 80% are technically in the state church and get counted as Christian, but only about 2% visit church weekly and 12% for Christmas. To most people church is a place for ceremonies like baptism, confirmation, marriage, funeral and the occasional memorial service with a dash of religion.
True, but those systematic flaws to would be there every year. So unless there's some reason to believe people would lie more today than they did before then that the poll hasn't changed since 1982 probably means people's real opinions haven't changed either. That is to say, 30 years of science and evidence detailing the evolutionary process means absolutely nothing to them. Extrapolation is of course always dubious but I suspect that holds true both forwards and backwards in time, that is nothing we've done have changed their minds and nothing will.
If you ran your own silicate mine you wouldn't buy in silicates from elsewhere. His point is if you already have the staff and infrastructure and perhaps are even in the IT business its cheaper to do it yourself.
Well sure, if you first decide what staff and infrastructure you have then decide what business you want to be in but most companies do it the other way around. To take an example from the IT industry that's maybe more relevant, AMD used to run the own fabs. Then they spun off GloFo and now they've divested themselves of it and become a fabless company because they decided designing CPUs is what their core business is while they could buy processing time from TSMC. It's actually quite common that businesses do this, saying we don't want to do this ourselves anymore, lay off, spin off or sell the business then hire that service back in from the open market.
Your emergency medical information does not change much really, we're not talking about your journal. Epilepsy, diabetes, allergies, heart condition, hemophilia and conditions like that are what an emergency paramedic needs to know, the rest not so much.
Sure because they made an economic structure (the euro) without the political structure (a common economic policy) so if they want a United States of Europe all they have to do is add a federal government. But Europe doesn't want that, being English or French or German isn't the same as being a Californian or Texan or New Yorker. They're not just different states, they're different countries. "I'm European" doesn't mean the same as "I'm American" and most likely never will. If you try forcing them together with a top-heavy government you'll only end up with a mish-mash country like the USSR or Yugoslavia that'll fall apart violently. Maybe if you took it one area by another then in a hundred years and I'm sure that's what they thought when they introduced the euro, but we're not there today. And particularly not now under these circumstances, it'd be like sewing up a poisoned wound. If things do come to a collapse now they need to back off and try again in a better way, not rush it and hope a central government will fix everything.
The euro may or may not collapse but the EU will survive in some form or the other, there's been far too many positive gains by being a 500 million people market rather than 27 countries with their own odd rules. Even very worst case I suspect the southern countries get kicked out/leave and the northern/eastern countries stay. There are after all despite the PIIGGS over 20 countries who haven't fucked their economy. Besides, it's not like they could turn this around if they just paid attention to it. Right now if they increase taxes and impose cutbacks their economy tanks more and they get less taxes and more people on unemployment. If they decrease taxes to kick start the economy their public deficit goes to hell and the markets shut them down. Right now they're at the bottom of a deep, deep pit and only has to sit still and hope the world economy recovers so they're able to climb out. Meanwhile they might as well reject bullshit like ACTA.
With the assumption that they are using single-mode fiber, you will cap out at roughly 40Gbps to the home.
They've done 111 Gbps on a single channel in the lab, but yes "only" 40 Gbps is more likely but I can live with that. Normally I can reach 5-6 MB/s actual transfer rates on my 60 Mbps fiber so it can't be that oversubscribed, I suspect the backbone hookup is far more than a OC-12. I could get 400 Mbps for about $1000/month, 1000 Mbps is available at "call us" prices so it's technically possible to get something ridiculously fast already.