The problem is that they expect people to pay over $600 per year to watch ads. That's what television is: an advertising machine. It's like a highway billboard ad, but right in your living room. They don't even try to hide it anymore. You get about 10 minutes of advertising in a 30 minute tv show, and that doesn't even include the product placement inside the show itself, and it doesn't include the banner ads the network overlays during the show.
Total revenue = subscription revenue + ad revenue and honestly they don't care where the money is coming from. If you're seeing ads it's because you sell your eyeballs cheaper than your wallet. If you were willing to watch an additional $600 or more of ads they'd send it for free. If you were willing to pay $600 + more than the ad revenue for a completely commercial free product, they would offer it. If they offer one people go "Waaaaaaah, way too many ads" and the other then "Waaaaaaah, way too expensive" so you get copay. According to this article:
In the United States, ad sales make up at least 50 percent of revenues.
So the question is, are you ready to pay $1200-1500/year for ad free television? Or would you just like to pay $600 with no ads and get a free pony? Because that's what your eyeballs are worth and you need to make them a better offer.
I guess you missed the link in your own article that debunks the study?
The "debunking" is a joke in itself, it's trying to hide an elephant down a mouse hole.
They only looked at the files with the most seeds, which already skews the results
That would only be true if the most popular files are pirated, if the most popular files were legal that'd skew it the other way. So for this to even be an argument the figure has to be >50%, but possibly higher than it should have been.
and pirated stuff has a huge list of fake seeds to screw up lazy anti-piracy enforcers, which means that choosing the torrents with the most seeds invalidates the entire study because the ones with the most (fake) seeds are the pirated ones.
[citation needed] because the pirated stuff has had far more seeds than the rest since long before they started their anti-piracy bullshit. Prove that minus the shit seeds (e.g. with Peerblock) the genuine seeds are not still the most popular. The debunking doesn't do the debunking, just handwaving.
I would also add that relying on 'this one public BitTorrent tracker we found somewhere' is not statistically valid, because it's just one tracker. You have to get a statistically valid sample of all the trackers or you can't conclude anything. For example, if they included these these trackers instead, I would expect different results -- and by failing to consider them, they naturally get totally invalid numbers.
That's like saying that to get a valid sample of traffic you can't measure it on one road, you have to measure it on all roads. It's certainly a source of error, but okay if you include those trackers weighting by seeds (unless you can prove they're fake), do they significantly change the result? Again it's not debunking, it's just handwaving.
I could also add that those figures would in any case not include the many, many huge private trackers that are 100% piracy because that's what they're all about and that thus the figures are vastly underreporting piracy. I seriously feel this is like saying the sky is blue but somebody show a photo taken during sunrise/sundown with a huge telephoto lens where the sky looks red. Yes a little bit of the sky is red a little bit of the time, but on the whole it's very obviously blue. You don't show that a better study would come to a different result, you just claim the proof is so weak it's worthless. Kinda like the ID people when they "debunk" evolution and such, they don't offer a better model they just point at microscopic imperfections in the model and say this makes it all invalid.
And to make it "reeeeeeeal" simple for you, Verizon is within its rights to stop selling an unlimited data plan at any time, beyond the terms it initially signed you up for.
And the quote that started it:
If they really, really want to let me out of my contract here in a month or two, so be it.
Seriously, what are you guys fighting over? If Verizon signed you on for a two year contract they can't come and say that your unlimited data plan is now a limited data plan. If you're released from your contract all is fine and they can offer new contracts on whatever terms they want. I don't see that you're actually saying anything that's in conflict with each other.
Here.. 89% definitively illegal, 11% probably illegal, 0.3% confirmed legal. And since you want to play the wikipedia game, anything you say to make this article invalid is [citation needed], no arguments of your own only reliable third party sources.
but the 500 GB WD in my most current build is running at 40% capacity and I've got a lot of media on there
No you don't, but I'm finally starting to figure out what the people that lived on campus and had 100 Mbit around y2k was talking about when they said streaming was the future while I was still fighting with 64 kbps ISDN hoping to get a 1 Mbps ADSL line. Or even download and delete, which is a lesser form. Right now there's ~20.000 BluRays on Amazon and there's no reason for me to have a petabyte array to store them on. That's 100 people with a 10 TB server or 1000 people with a 1 TB disk or 10000 people with 100 GB in a corner of their disk, as long as we're all connected by a ridiculously fast Internet. Keeping a local "cache" is just becoming less and less necessary.
Look at AMDs client roadmap for 2012 and 2013. Did you see the recent Trinity benchmarks? Sucky CPU, decent GPU. Well look at the roadmap, those Piledriver cores are all you're going to get in AMDs "high-end" all the way through 2013. I'm sure you'll get more power in a cell phone or tablet format, but if you just want CPU power and don't care that it burns 100W because it's plugged to the wall then the future is mostly depressing. To use a car analogy, lower MPGs are great but it's not exactly what's going to get cheers from the Top Gear crowd. Sure a good soccer mom car sells and it's the same for CPUs, but they don't excite anybody.
I'm just going to come out and say it... the Atom is all hype. Yes... low power... but also low in performance and low in everything except price.
When the Atom came it was a dirt cheap CPU for the "any CPU is good enough" market. I wouldn't buy one now after AMD came with Fusion, but between 2008 and 2011 it did okay and was certainly not "all hype".
Sorry but the 8 core FX kicks the crud out of the quad core i7 that is the same clock speed. I actually USE a pc for video editing rendering and 3d rendering and the new 8 core machine with one FX processor is kicking the arse of the i7 machine.
Mind telling us what applications you use? Because the 3.6 GHz FX-8150 loses to the 3.5 GHz i7-3770K in all of these (or 4.2 GHz vs 3.9 GHz if you want to compare turbo speeds), sometimes massively:
SYSMark 2012 - Video Creation SYSMark 2012 - 3D Modeling DivX encode x264 encode - first and second pass Windows Media Encoder 9 3dsmax (7/7 benchmarks) CineBench R10 (single and multithreaded) POV-ray SMP benchmark Blender Character Render
Of course if you take the slower FX-8120 and compare it to the same clockspeed i5-3450 then maybe you'll score a few wins since it doesn't have hyperthreading, but that's only because Intel sells it with the handbrake on...
Well, they'll sell them at the prices that they sell at, it's not like a CPU ever has a negative margin. The question is if that's good enough in the long run to keep making new designs and break even. Particularly as Intel is making a ton of money on processors that AMD can't compete against. Their Ivy Bridge processors should cost about 75% of a Sandy Bridge but sell for 98% of the price. Intel now has huge margins because AMD can't keep the pressure up, it's not really helping AMD to surrender the high end because it only gives Intel a bigger war chest.
This launch is okay, it's all around much better than Llano and keeping a fair pace with Intel, but it obviously tops out if you want CPU performance. What will be interesting to see it next year when Intel will have both a completely new architecture for the Atom and be on their best processing technology. Then I fear AMD may be seeing the two-front war again, both on the high and low end. Right now the Atom is a little too gimped to actually threaten AMDs offerings. I expect Intel just wants AMD crippled, not killed though to avoid antitrust regulations, so I think they'll be around while Intel makes all the money.
A computer can do some of the work, such as making sure the model's foot is touching the floor, but it can't yet give you a sense of balance.
Yet. As processing power goes higher and higher, I'm sure you can model not just the outside but innards too. Muscles flexing, tendons stretching, joints bending, the weight of your body shifting - you'll not simply wave it around like a doll but it'll actually simulate the body working to effectuate the movement. Give it a push and it tries to stay on its feet. Make it stumble and it'll recover on its own. We already have military robots that more or less do this, not bipeds but certainly four-legged ones. Essentially this is virtual robotics, we're looking to make something that could have been a real robot obeying the real-world laws of physics.
But you can't show 3D rendered oranges and say "look how perfect our oranges are!"
No, but you can pick the most perfect oranges you can find, scan them and use them pretty much any way you like... did you know most food in advertising is completely uneatable? They add tons of additives to it to make it look prettier, the colors more vivid, they arrange it so all the tasty bits of a mix are on the outside and there's usually a generous dose of photoshopping afterwards too. Look online for comparisons of the photo on the package with the food as prepared per the instructions and you'll see what I mean. Outright fraud isn't permitted but misleading is just par for the course.
DRM is targeted at the people who are paying for the product, rather than the pirates who are going to hack the product anyway and never would have bought it in the first place.
DRM is targeted at technophobes and there's still plenty people who can't figure out to use a ripper and won't go to TPB because they still feel a little bit dirty about it, as least enough that they won't ask the kid down the street to teach them this torrents thing. But those people are either getting very old or have finally after 10+ years finally figured it out. It may have made sense back when one kid got a CD from their parents and another kid tried to copy it, not when both of them are downloading off the Internet. Like a lot of other things they do it's an obsolete system that's largely made irrelevant, except it makes it a giant pest to be an open source user. Even if you can't buy under Linux like e.g. iTunes with DRM-free files at least you can play them.
He is no longer seeking primary votes, and is instead focusing 100% on taking delegate positions. This race is not over.
FYI Romney has more delegates than the rest of them combined and with everyone else giving up their campaign there's no way he'll lose the majority he already has. Even if Ron got 100% of Santorum's and Gingrich's delegates behind him, which I find unlikely given how wildly different the candidates are it still wouldn't be close to enough. But reality never much seemed to bother Ron or his followers...
I'm really curious as to how many unique, regular users (regular meaning people that log in at least every couple days) they actually have. Obviously nobody on the outside would ever know, but I wouldn't be surprised if 1/3 of their 'users' are inactive accounts that haven't been touched in ages...
Oh I'm thinking less than that, but the only two groups I'm hearing from are those on Facebook and those not on Facebook or anything else. That still doesn't sound like a bad position for them to be in...
Everyone knows integers only go from 0 to 4294967295!
Hey, on my computer INT_MAX is only 2137483647. Damn store must have cheated me, giving me crippled integers. I'm going to down there right now and demand one where integers go all the way up to 0x11..11..11..11.
In my current job, I negotiated a 'Google' day. (...) most of the time, it's work stuff that wouldn't otherwise get enough time from me - website refinements, code cleanup, automation scripts and other things that add value to the company, but not in a directly linear way.
I don't think having some self-directed time to do your regular job is really what the article was talking about. That's more "I'm the one in the middle of it and see what needs fixing better than you do" rather than any kind of permission to do pet projects or experiments. That's great but I wouldn't call it any real freedom anymore than an agile team that says "This sprint we need to refactor, we won't be making any external deliverables". Anything like a skunkworks means something that'll actually end up as a new product or new service or new market that wasn't part of your daily duties. From the sounds of it that's just a small fraction of that day.
Sounds to me like a minor tweak to the peer selection should fix this then. Find one or more genuine peers/seeds (a complete hash-verified piece), then prioritize peers you get via PeerExchange from those over the tracker/DHT since both of those can be stuffed with poison nodes. That way the real nodes will quickly cluster together, giving you good speed despite all the noise. Of course Peerblock works too, but I figure a more permanent solution won't be far away...
"Stuck"? FreeBSD gets a foot in the door of companies where GPL (and GPLv3 in particular) is something they'd prefer not to deal with. Being able to use a modern GPL-free OS as a foundation of a product is a convenient option to have. And being GPLv3-free can be even more compelling.
Not to troll, but what companies are those? What's the closest thing to Red Hat that's selling FreeBSD support, what volume are we talking about? Or are they all providing their own support? Don't get me wrong, I know particularly a lot of web hosting companies run it - 6/39 of the top providers on Netcraft's list are FreeBSD, but I doubt they have a problem with the GPL. If BSD went away, they'd probably just join all the Linux hosting companies. There's of course Apple and then there's.... who?
Exactly! And look what happened to Myspace (that was the last Facebook). This valuation is for something less stable than the price of tulips.
I think your logic is a bit strange, MySpace might be to Facebook what Altavista or Yahoo was to Google. Yes, the leadership changed rapidly for a while but then a victor emerged and continues to dominate the industry. Or MMORPGs and WoW for example. Yes, I know the dangers of anecdotal data but I see more and more people gravitating towards Facebook rather than away, they don't email they use Facebook messages. They don't use MSN, they use Facebook chat. They don't share photo albums on Flickr, they share them on Facebook. It's practically becoming another AOL, a little "Facebookverse" in itself. I mean it's not like social networking is going to go away, people will be somewhere. And right now I have a hard time seeing who'd snatch them away from Facebook after even Google has failed.
As for money laundering, Bitcoin makes a poor money laundering system. Everything is easy to track. First, you need to *get* the bitcoints. Mining isn't going to get you enough volume to do anything worth while. This means you have to buy them with real currency. That transaction happens on a server which will almost certainly keep records (i.e. the information is available to law enforcement). It's also difficult to buy BTC with cash. You pretty much need to go through a bank account. After that, each transaction is traceable -- by everyone. You don't even need to be part of the system to track the transactions. Just download the blocks. Only stupid people would use this for money laundering. Using it for large scale illegal transactions would pretty much be like having a neon sign over your head saying, "Arrest Me"!"
Offer any sort of legal service anonymously for BitCoins? It could be anything that you can deliver digitally, whether it's code, artwork, translations, esseys, whatever that you can deliver via proxies and such. You now have anonymous bitcoins, sure they can trace the coins going into your wallet but all they'll find is an innocent guy who paid for something legal. If there's a challenge it's on the other side, after receiving money for something illegal they're now dirty and you need to launder them. For one you can sell it to some other anonymous service that won't care, but let's assume you want to cash out.
For one you have tumbler services, basically you give away BitCoin A with A's history and you get back BitCoin B with B's history. Combine that with a bunch of fake transactions between shell accounts and you'll have money that appear to come from everywhere and has been circulating for a while. Now create some sort of legal service that takes payment in BitCoins and has anonymous customers and have your shell accounts "pay" for service, then cash out. When the police comes, it's just "I don't know what you're talking about, I run a newsgroup service over TOR and these are all subscription payments. I don't know who these customers are or how they got their money, sorry."
I'm sure someone can come up with some better ideas too, but those are just off the top of my head.
In this industry, age discrimination is common knowledge, and several groups have tried to get laws passed to eliminate it, to no effect.
Yes, in some cases old people are discriminated against but I'd say in total I've seen more young people discriminated against. I'm your elder and I've been in this business longer than you have so I'm right and you're wrong and I'll be damned if I get passed up by a young whippersnapper like you. Many career ladders enforce this with a straight up "years of experience" limit that translates into an age limit, even if you're performing at an equal or better level. That is also abused to make really bright young people work at wage levels far below what they're worth. Many people have a hard time accepting that a lot of their old skills and knowledge is obsolete and while they've probably gained some sort of wisdom with age they have 20 years of experience but still perform no better than the guy with 5 years of experience.
If I try to be objective on my own job performance, I'd have to agree there's a diminishing return on experience. There was a huge difference between being fresh out of school and having a few years of experience, but now? The difference between 8 and 10 years seems completely marginal to the difference between 0 and 2 or even 2 and 4 years. Of course I'm now somewhat more experienced than I was, but I felt pretty experienced two years ago too. I'd say this is reflected in the career ladder as well, if I want to move up I have to improve in team management and customer management, if I just keep becoming a super-experienced expert in what I do now I've hit the ceiling already. Okay sure I expect a little pay raise if I get 20 or 30 years of experience instead of 10, but it won't be the kind of continued rise some people seem to expect.
Awwwwwww judge, don't clue them in. I'd so like to see Oracle awarded $1 for this whole shenanigans, it'd be a much more embarrassing result than losing the case.
Well, there's a difference between incompetence and fraud. Billing extra hours to increase your own paycheck is a pretty clear case of fraud, but unless you can prove that somehow the person who ordered the routers got any personal kickback from it you can't really say the same about those. It is of course possible, but I've also seen cases where my biggest question is who thought it was a good idea to hire that person to sit on a budget. But everything can happen when the stupid hire the really stupid.
Was that an orderly protest or a riot? Include in your analysis consideration of the fact that the person who threw the bottle may be somebody in the employ of the police force.
Oh please, the false flag theories are being thrown around so often and carelessly on Slashdot that this is starting to turn into a conspiracy nut site. If you go to a soccer match there'll be 10000 people looking to see the game and 100 hooligans. If 10000 go out for beers and fun on Saturday night, 100 go out to make trouble and pick fights. Get 10000 people for a demonstration and 100 will be there to throw bottles and rocks and general vandalism. Not to mention a lot of these people have enemies, like racists and anti-racists, environmentalists and oil companies, that sort of thing. The police would be rather far down on my list of suspects even if there was a false flag operation.
Face it, lots of people in our field die young. Being fat and sitting around all day is not good.
People in general, but RMS? I have the impression he's always at a conference or university or somewhere giving a speech, if he ever sits down it must be in airport lounges and airplane seats. I wonder how many travel days that guy has per year. Maybe he should watch his blood pressure when he starts ranting about free software and the GPL, but I don't think he could keep it down if he wanted to.
As with DRMed music, the pirates will win because they OFFER A BETTER PRODUCT.
The pirates are not what caused the music companies to drop DRM. If it was just the pirates, they'd still be pushing broken DRM just like the movie industry won't quit after CSS and AACS and BD+ and HDCP being broken. The only reason is that Apple was dominating online sales and they refused to license FairPlay, they were getting a monopoly on distribution. The studios couldn't live with that but to get competition they had to drop DRM and start selling regular MP3s and AACs. The music industry surrendered, the movie industry will fight to the very last man. Someone drop a few nukes on them and make them surrender please (doing it from orbit optional).
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The problem is that they expect people to pay over $600 per year to watch ads. That's what television is: an advertising machine. It's like a highway billboard ad, but right in your living room. They don't even try to hide it anymore. You get about 10 minutes of advertising in a 30 minute tv show, and that doesn't even include the product placement inside the show itself, and it doesn't include the banner ads the network overlays during the show.
Total revenue = subscription revenue + ad revenue and honestly they don't care where the money is coming from. If you're seeing ads it's because you sell your eyeballs cheaper than your wallet. If you were willing to watch an additional $600 or more of ads they'd send it for free. If you were willing to pay $600 + more than the ad revenue for a completely commercial free product, they would offer it. If they offer one people go "Waaaaaaah, way too many ads" and the other then "Waaaaaaah, way too expensive" so you get copay. According to this article:
In the United States, ad sales make up at least 50 percent of revenues.
So the question is, are you ready to pay $1200-1500/year for ad free television? Or would you just like to pay $600 with no ads and get a free pony? Because that's what your eyeballs are worth and you need to make them a better offer.
I guess you missed the link in your own article that debunks the study?
The "debunking" is a joke in itself, it's trying to hide an elephant down a mouse hole.
They only looked at the files with the most seeds, which already skews the results
That would only be true if the most popular files are pirated, if the most popular files were legal that'd skew it the other way. So for this to even be an argument the figure has to be >50%, but possibly higher than it should have been.
and pirated stuff has a huge list of fake seeds to screw up lazy anti-piracy enforcers, which means that choosing the torrents with the most seeds invalidates the entire study because the ones with the most (fake) seeds are the pirated ones.
[citation needed] because the pirated stuff has had far more seeds than the rest since long before they started their anti-piracy bullshit. Prove that minus the shit seeds (e.g. with Peerblock) the genuine seeds are not still the most popular. The debunking doesn't do the debunking, just handwaving.
I would also add that relying on 'this one public BitTorrent tracker we found somewhere' is not statistically valid, because it's just one tracker. You have to get a statistically valid sample of all the trackers or you can't conclude anything. For example, if they included these these trackers instead, I would expect different results -- and by failing to consider them, they naturally get totally invalid numbers.
That's like saying that to get a valid sample of traffic you can't measure it on one road, you have to measure it on all roads. It's certainly a source of error, but okay if you include those trackers weighting by seeds (unless you can prove they're fake), do they significantly change the result? Again it's not debunking, it's just handwaving.
I could also add that those figures would in any case not include the many, many huge private trackers that are 100% piracy because that's what they're all about and that thus the figures are vastly underreporting piracy. I seriously feel this is like saying the sky is blue but somebody show a photo taken during sunrise/sundown with a huge telephoto lens where the sky looks red. Yes a little bit of the sky is red a little bit of the time, but on the whole it's very obviously blue. You don't show that a better study would come to a different result, you just claim the proof is so weak it's worthless. Kinda like the ID people when they "debunk" evolution and such, they don't offer a better model they just point at microscopic imperfections in the model and say this makes it all invalid.
And to make it "reeeeeeeal" simple for you, Verizon is within its rights to stop selling an unlimited data plan at any time, beyond the terms it initially signed you up for.
And the quote that started it:
If they really, really want to let me out of my contract here in a month or two, so be it.
Seriously, what are you guys fighting over? If Verizon signed you on for a two year contract they can't come and say that your unlimited data plan is now a limited data plan. If you're released from your contract all is fine and they can offer new contracts on whatever terms they want. I don't see that you're actually saying anything that's in conflict with each other.
Citation needed.
Here.. 89% definitively illegal, 11% probably illegal, 0.3% confirmed legal. And since you want to play the wikipedia game, anything you say to make this article invalid is [citation needed], no arguments of your own only reliable third party sources.
but the 500 GB WD in my most current build is running at 40% capacity and I've got a lot of media on there
No you don't, but I'm finally starting to figure out what the people that lived on campus and had 100 Mbit around y2k was talking about when they said streaming was the future while I was still fighting with 64 kbps ISDN hoping to get a 1 Mbps ADSL line. Or even download and delete, which is a lesser form. Right now there's ~20.000 BluRays on Amazon and there's no reason for me to have a petabyte array to store them on. That's 100 people with a 10 TB server or 1000 people with a 1 TB disk or 10000 people with 100 GB in a corner of their disk, as long as we're all connected by a ridiculously fast Internet. Keeping a local "cache" is just becoming less and less necessary.
Look at AMDs client roadmap for 2012 and 2013. Did you see the recent Trinity benchmarks? Sucky CPU, decent GPU. Well look at the roadmap, those Piledriver cores are all you're going to get in AMDs "high-end" all the way through 2013. I'm sure you'll get more power in a cell phone or tablet format, but if you just want CPU power and don't care that it burns 100W because it's plugged to the wall then the future is mostly depressing. To use a car analogy, lower MPGs are great but it's not exactly what's going to get cheers from the Top Gear crowd. Sure a good soccer mom car sells and it's the same for CPUs, but they don't excite anybody.
I'm just going to come out and say it... the Atom is all hype. Yes... low power... but also low in performance and low in everything except price.
When the Atom came it was a dirt cheap CPU for the "any CPU is good enough" market. I wouldn't buy one now after AMD came with Fusion, but between 2008 and 2011 it did okay and was certainly not "all hype".
Sorry but the 8 core FX kicks the crud out of the quad core i7 that is the same clock speed. I actually USE a pc for video editing rendering and 3d rendering and the new 8 core machine with one FX processor is kicking the arse of the i7 machine.
Mind telling us what applications you use? Because the 3.6 GHz FX-8150 loses to the 3.5 GHz i7-3770K in all of these (or 4.2 GHz vs 3.9 GHz if you want to compare turbo speeds), sometimes massively:
SYSMark 2012 - Video Creation
SYSMark 2012 - 3D Modeling
DivX encode
x264 encode - first and second pass
Windows Media Encoder 9
3dsmax (7/7 benchmarks)
CineBench R10 (single and multithreaded)
POV-ray SMP benchmark
Blender Character Render
Of course if you take the slower FX-8120 and compare it to the same clockspeed i5-3450 then maybe you'll score a few wins since it doesn't have hyperthreading, but that's only because Intel sells it with the handbrake on...
Well, they'll sell them at the prices that they sell at, it's not like a CPU ever has a negative margin. The question is if that's good enough in the long run to keep making new designs and break even. Particularly as Intel is making a ton of money on processors that AMD can't compete against. Their Ivy Bridge processors should cost about 75% of a Sandy Bridge but sell for 98% of the price. Intel now has huge margins because AMD can't keep the pressure up, it's not really helping AMD to surrender the high end because it only gives Intel a bigger war chest.
This launch is okay, it's all around much better than Llano and keeping a fair pace with Intel, but it obviously tops out if you want CPU performance. What will be interesting to see it next year when Intel will have both a completely new architecture for the Atom and be on their best processing technology. Then I fear AMD may be seeing the two-front war again, both on the high and low end. Right now the Atom is a little too gimped to actually threaten AMDs offerings. I expect Intel just wants AMD crippled, not killed though to avoid antitrust regulations, so I think they'll be around while Intel makes all the money.
A computer can do some of the work, such as making sure the model's foot is touching the floor, but it can't yet give you a sense of balance.
Yet. As processing power goes higher and higher, I'm sure you can model not just the outside but innards too. Muscles flexing, tendons stretching, joints bending, the weight of your body shifting - you'll not simply wave it around like a doll but it'll actually simulate the body working to effectuate the movement. Give it a push and it tries to stay on its feet. Make it stumble and it'll recover on its own. We already have military robots that more or less do this, not bipeds but certainly four-legged ones. Essentially this is virtual robotics, we're looking to make something that could have been a real robot obeying the real-world laws of physics.
But you can't show 3D rendered oranges and say "look how perfect our oranges are!"
No, but you can pick the most perfect oranges you can find, scan them and use them pretty much any way you like... did you know most food in advertising is completely uneatable? They add tons of additives to it to make it look prettier, the colors more vivid, they arrange it so all the tasty bits of a mix are on the outside and there's usually a generous dose of photoshopping afterwards too. Look online for comparisons of the photo on the package with the food as prepared per the instructions and you'll see what I mean. Outright fraud isn't permitted but misleading is just par for the course.
DRM is targeted at the people who are paying for the product, rather than the pirates who are going to hack the product anyway and never would have bought it in the first place.
DRM is targeted at technophobes and there's still plenty people who can't figure out to use a ripper and won't go to TPB because they still feel a little bit dirty about it, as least enough that they won't ask the kid down the street to teach them this torrents thing. But those people are either getting very old or have finally after 10+ years finally figured it out. It may have made sense back when one kid got a CD from their parents and another kid tried to copy it, not when both of them are downloading off the Internet. Like a lot of other things they do it's an obsolete system that's largely made irrelevant, except it makes it a giant pest to be an open source user. Even if you can't buy under Linux like e.g. iTunes with DRM-free files at least you can play them.
He is no longer seeking primary votes, and is instead focusing 100% on taking delegate positions. This race is not over.
FYI Romney has more delegates than the rest of them combined and with everyone else giving up their campaign there's no way he'll lose the majority he already has. Even if Ron got 100% of Santorum's and Gingrich's delegates behind him, which I find unlikely given how wildly different the candidates are it still wouldn't be close to enough. But reality never much seemed to bother Ron or his followers...
I'm really curious as to how many unique, regular users (regular meaning people that log in at least every couple days) they actually have. Obviously nobody on the outside would ever know, but I wouldn't be surprised if 1/3 of their 'users' are inactive accounts that haven't been touched in ages...
Oh I'm thinking less than that, but the only two groups I'm hearing from are those on Facebook and those not on Facebook or anything else. That still doesn't sound like a bad position for them to be in...
Everyone knows integers only go from 0 to 4294967295!
Hey, on my computer INT_MAX is only 2137483647. Damn store must have cheated me, giving me crippled integers. I'm going to down there right now and demand one where integers go all the way up to 0x11..11..11..11.
In my current job, I negotiated a 'Google' day. (...) most of the time, it's work stuff that wouldn't otherwise get enough time from me - website refinements, code cleanup, automation scripts and other things that add value to the company, but not in a directly linear way.
I don't think having some self-directed time to do your regular job is really what the article was talking about. That's more "I'm the one in the middle of it and see what needs fixing better than you do" rather than any kind of permission to do pet projects or experiments. That's great but I wouldn't call it any real freedom anymore than an agile team that says "This sprint we need to refactor, we won't be making any external deliverables". Anything like a skunkworks means something that'll actually end up as a new product or new service or new market that wasn't part of your daily duties. From the sounds of it that's just a small fraction of that day.
Sounds to me like a minor tweak to the peer selection should fix this then. Find one or more genuine peers/seeds (a complete hash-verified piece), then prioritize peers you get via PeerExchange from those over the tracker/DHT since both of those can be stuffed with poison nodes. That way the real nodes will quickly cluster together, giving you good speed despite all the noise. Of course Peerblock works too, but I figure a more permanent solution won't be far away...
"Stuck"? FreeBSD gets a foot in the door of companies where GPL (and GPLv3 in particular) is something they'd prefer not to deal with. Being able to use a modern GPL-free OS as a foundation of a product is a convenient option to have. And being GPLv3-free can be even more compelling.
Not to troll, but what companies are those? What's the closest thing to Red Hat that's selling FreeBSD support, what volume are we talking about? Or are they all providing their own support? Don't get me wrong, I know particularly a lot of web hosting companies run it - 6/39 of the top providers on Netcraft's list are FreeBSD, but I doubt they have a problem with the GPL. If BSD went away, they'd probably just join all the Linux hosting companies. There's of course Apple and then there's.... who?
Exactly! And look what happened to Myspace (that was the last Facebook). This valuation is for something less stable than the price of tulips.
I think your logic is a bit strange, MySpace might be to Facebook what Altavista or Yahoo was to Google. Yes, the leadership changed rapidly for a while but then a victor emerged and continues to dominate the industry. Or MMORPGs and WoW for example. Yes, I know the dangers of anecdotal data but I see more and more people gravitating towards Facebook rather than away, they don't email they use Facebook messages. They don't use MSN, they use Facebook chat. They don't share photo albums on Flickr, they share them on Facebook. It's practically becoming another AOL, a little "Facebookverse" in itself. I mean it's not like social networking is going to go away, people will be somewhere. And right now I have a hard time seeing who'd snatch them away from Facebook after even Google has failed.
As for money laundering, Bitcoin makes a poor money laundering system. Everything is easy to track. First, you need to *get* the bitcoints. Mining isn't going to get you enough volume to do anything worth while. This means you have to buy them with real currency. That transaction happens on a server which will almost certainly keep records (i.e. the information is available to law enforcement). It's also difficult to buy BTC with cash. You pretty much need to go through a bank account. After that, each transaction is traceable -- by everyone. You don't even need to be part of the system to track the transactions. Just download the blocks. Only stupid people would use this for money laundering. Using it for large scale illegal transactions would pretty much be like having a neon sign over your head saying, "Arrest Me"!"
Offer any sort of legal service anonymously for BitCoins? It could be anything that you can deliver digitally, whether it's code, artwork, translations, esseys, whatever that you can deliver via proxies and such. You now have anonymous bitcoins, sure they can trace the coins going into your wallet but all they'll find is an innocent guy who paid for something legal. If there's a challenge it's on the other side, after receiving money for something illegal they're now dirty and you need to launder them. For one you can sell it to some other anonymous service that won't care, but let's assume you want to cash out.
For one you have tumbler services, basically you give away BitCoin A with A's history and you get back BitCoin B with B's history. Combine that with a bunch of fake transactions between shell accounts and you'll have money that appear to come from everywhere and has been circulating for a while. Now create some sort of legal service that takes payment in BitCoins and has anonymous customers and have your shell accounts "pay" for service, then cash out. When the police comes, it's just "I don't know what you're talking about, I run a newsgroup service over TOR and these are all subscription payments. I don't know who these customers are or how they got their money, sorry."
I'm sure someone can come up with some better ideas too, but those are just off the top of my head.
In this industry, age discrimination is common knowledge, and several groups have tried to get laws passed to eliminate it, to no effect.
Yes, in some cases old people are discriminated against but I'd say in total I've seen more young people discriminated against. I'm your elder and I've been in this business longer than you have so I'm right and you're wrong and I'll be damned if I get passed up by a young whippersnapper like you. Many career ladders enforce this with a straight up "years of experience" limit that translates into an age limit, even if you're performing at an equal or better level. That is also abused to make really bright young people work at wage levels far below what they're worth. Many people have a hard time accepting that a lot of their old skills and knowledge is obsolete and while they've probably gained some sort of wisdom with age they have 20 years of experience but still perform no better than the guy with 5 years of experience.
If I try to be objective on my own job performance, I'd have to agree there's a diminishing return on experience. There was a huge difference between being fresh out of school and having a few years of experience, but now? The difference between 8 and 10 years seems completely marginal to the difference between 0 and 2 or even 2 and 4 years. Of course I'm now somewhat more experienced than I was, but I felt pretty experienced two years ago too. I'd say this is reflected in the career ladder as well, if I want to move up I have to improve in team management and customer management, if I just keep becoming a super-experienced expert in what I do now I've hit the ceiling already. Okay sure I expect a little pay raise if I get 20 or 30 years of experience instead of 10, but it won't be the kind of continued rise some people seem to expect.
Awwwwwww judge, don't clue them in. I'd so like to see Oracle awarded $1 for this whole shenanigans, it'd be a much more embarrassing result than losing the case.
Well, there's a difference between incompetence and fraud. Billing extra hours to increase your own paycheck is a pretty clear case of fraud, but unless you can prove that somehow the person who ordered the routers got any personal kickback from it you can't really say the same about those. It is of course possible, but I've also seen cases where my biggest question is who thought it was a good idea to hire that person to sit on a budget. But everything can happen when the stupid hire the really stupid.
Was that an orderly protest or a riot? Include in your analysis consideration of the fact that the person who threw the bottle may be somebody in the employ of the police force.
Oh please, the false flag theories are being thrown around so often and carelessly on Slashdot that this is starting to turn into a conspiracy nut site. If you go to a soccer match there'll be 10000 people looking to see the game and 100 hooligans. If 10000 go out for beers and fun on Saturday night, 100 go out to make trouble and pick fights. Get 10000 people for a demonstration and 100 will be there to throw bottles and rocks and general vandalism. Not to mention a lot of these people have enemies, like racists and anti-racists, environmentalists and oil companies, that sort of thing. The police would be rather far down on my list of suspects even if there was a false flag operation.
Face it, lots of people in our field die young. Being fat and sitting around all day is not good.
People in general, but RMS? I have the impression he's always at a conference or university or somewhere giving a speech, if he ever sits down it must be in airport lounges and airplane seats. I wonder how many travel days that guy has per year. Maybe he should watch his blood pressure when he starts ranting about free software and the GPL, but I don't think he could keep it down if he wanted to.
As with DRMed music, the pirates will win because they OFFER A BETTER PRODUCT.
The pirates are not what caused the music companies to drop DRM. If it was just the pirates, they'd still be pushing broken DRM just like the movie industry won't quit after CSS and AACS and BD+ and HDCP being broken. The only reason is that Apple was dominating online sales and they refused to license FairPlay, they were getting a monopoly on distribution. The studios couldn't live with that but to get competition they had to drop DRM and start selling regular MP3s and AACs. The music industry surrendered, the movie industry will fight to the very last man. Someone drop a few nukes on them and make them surrender please (doing it from orbit optional).