So far 1334 delegates have been dealt out - 838 to Romney, only 88 initially to Ron Paul. Even if you believe that all of Santorum's and Gingrich's delegates would vote for Ron Paul all three of them together only add up to 496 delegates. There are currently 2286 - 1334 = 952 delegates left and Romney needs 1144 - 838 = 306 more to win or about 32%. Ron Paul has something like 15% support in the popular polls, but he's going to take 68% of the remaining delegates? On top of taking 100% of the freed delegates?
(3) You don't quit a 26 mile marathon at mile 22. Paul's come all this way, and only has two more months to go.
The problem with your analogy is that Romney is on mile 22, Ron Paul around mile 8 and you're still claiming he's going to win. Finishing for the sake of finishing is fine, but you only come across as one of Ron's wildly delusional fanboys.
Assuming that it operates 25 years without a glitch, that it's never damaged in a storm, that it never requires an electrician, that no kids find it fun to throw rocks at your roof or whatever. Sounds like you're more than breaking even but I'd budget something for maintenance, nothing ever seems to be quite as zero maintenance as promised.
The number of games that don't work via Wine is an ever-shrinking list,
Really? My experience was that it was an ever growing list of new games that did not work. Maybe eventually, somewhat with some tweaks you could almost somehow run them eventually, but many stayed unplayable for years. Of course many games do work so you can game on Linux, but this very much depends on whether you find this a glass half full or glass half empty situation...
What feature bloat? If you don't use the new features, you don't incur any cost. No bloat.
I'm fairly fluent in three languages, but if I switched between them at random during a conversation depending on which one lets me express myself better I would just have created an insanely complex language with enormous redundancy and extremely inconsistent pronunciation and grammar that would be massive pain for anyone else to learn. You can't simply say "well now you can express everything you could in one language and much, much more" and pretend that's an advantage with no drawbacks. Or even if it's the same language and you're writing a book with each author contributing a page each you wouldn't want the style to change radically from page to page, particularly when editors constantly go in and redo a page here and paragraph there.
I don't think it's possible to completely avoid code style wars, but if there's one generally accepted "best practice" way of doing things - and I don't necessarily mean in your team or in your company but in the language ecosystem and all your new hires too - then everyone can understand a code base much faster and is more productive. Consistency is huge, you want everything to behave in predictable ways. Not to mention basic training time, how long until you know the language features? The more you add to it, the worse it gets because unlike human languages working code doesn't get replaced no matter how archaic the language. Of course there's such a thing as too sparse a language too, but for the most part I'd say less is more even if it doesn't solve everything optimally.
Yes, but those parties can also choose to NOT give up the information, and they really shouldn't. You shouldn't tell a cop what time of day it is unless there is a subpeona. Telcos not talking unless they have a subpeona is a perfectly fine policy.
This may be just a rumor, but I hear a lot of people talk to cops because they want crimes solved. Victims, witnesses, people keeping records of various sorts. Obviously if you are or might become a suspect then STFU and getting a lawyer is good advice, but it's not like most people intentionally sabotage the police from doing their job. Overall I'm happy if they get the people that steal, rob, assault and rape people off the streets not to mention all that defraud, embezzle and so on even if I don't agree with every law they have to enforce. On the whole I'd rather live with them than in a lawless country.
The question is when it stops becoming "theirs" and starts becoming "mine", if I rent an apartment can the landlord let the police search it without warrant? If I lease a car can the leasing company give permission to search my trunk without warrant? Can the phone company give out my calls to the police without warrant? Can my ISP give out my Internet traffic to the police without warrant? Can the police scan my home with an IR camera without warrant? Can they attach a GPS transmitter to my car without warrant?
I mean obviously I don't own the phone lines, yet we still think the phone call is "mine" just like a letter being sent is either mine or the recipient's, not the post office's property. But if someone hands me a bag of drugs and tells me to deliver to their other guy then I'm screwed, "it's not mine I was just carrying it for someone else" doesn't fly. Obviously they've decided that in this case possession trumps ownership. A "reasonable expectation of privacy" is almost a circular definition because where you get it you come to expect it and where you don't get it you don't expect it either.
Or just mishits because they're angry, I had one colleague at a former workplace who was replying to a friend making his goodbyes and wrote a rather fiery mail on how unhappy he was with things himself and might soon join him. Except he hit "Reply to all" instead of "Reply", fortunately he's the kind of guy that can bounce that off but that was a 9.5/10 on the email screw-up scale. I'll reserve a perfect ten for broadcasting highly intimate personal details, which fortunately I haven't seen yet. There's such a thing as too much information....
I think in any democracy, from time to time, we all agree with Churchill when elections don't go the way we think they should: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."
Well if I was sick I wouldn't take a poll, I'd go see a doctor. But if you're looking for a way to run the country, then taking a poll is a good idea? Democracy makes plenty mistakes, the only saving grace is really that we're all in on it. It doesn't not stop you from banging your head on the wall shouting "OMG you've got to be kidding me they can't be this stupid, didn't you learn anything from last time?!" And it's obvious that what's good for the majority is not always what's good for the people, like the classic about two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner. You can blow more holes than a swiss chess in an argument that democracy provides an optimal solution, it's fairly obvious that it doesn't. But like Churchill said, we haven't found a better practical solution.
No. A negotiated restructuring is not the same as a default. No matter how you slice it or play at words, it isn't the same.
Greece first passed a law lowering the trigger value for their collective action clause (CAC) from 95% to 66% in best Star Wars fashion: "I've altered our deal. Pray that I don't alter it further" then a few days later activated their CAC to force the participation from 83.5% to 95.7% - the remaining 4.3% was in foreign jurisdiction where they couldn't do this money grab. The result of this is that all rating companies declared this as a default because:
As we have previously stated, we may view an issuer's unilateral change of the original terms and conditions of an obligation as a de facto restructuring and thus a default by Standard & Poor's published definition
In short, Greece did not reach a voluntary deal. They changed the deal without the consent of the debt holders. The credit default swaps (CDS) were triggered. Nobody that matters (and hint: Greece doesn't matter) considers this anything but a default. In fact, they probably made it worse for themselves and any other country with national debt. Don't like the deal? Pass a law and make a new one...
Somehow I don't see the problem with either solution:
a) Dark matter is real. Then we have a whole new class of matter to investigate. b) Dark matter is not real. Then we have a new understanding of the forces around us.
So what if it's real? The existence of dark matter particles would be a discovery about the size of finding the Higgs boson. It'd be way outside the Standard Model as we know it. We just need something more tangible on what exactly it is...
How is that worse than, eg., forgetting to put the wheel nuts back on after you rotated the tires?
Somehow that doesn't sound like a very convincing argument we should give people more opportunities to mess up their car. People can do a lot of stupid shit with a car already, mostly from the driver's seat and I'd rather eliminate them from that too. If driverless cars were real I know several people I'd recommend them to for their own, their passengers and everyone else's safety. Frankly I think many of them know it but public transportation doesn't work for them and taxi all the time gets too expensive so they keep driving until you take it from them over their cold dead body (and hopefully not a traffic accident victim's body).
You're assuming the message was for the spider and not for everyone who has a spider in their house. And the message is that if you carry a service we don't like, we'll make sure to inflict as much damage as possible when we come for it. You get a pretty good self-censoring effect out of it. Same reason TOR doesn't scale very well, you'd have to be mildly insane to run an exit node as a private person.
It's one of the things they teach you to watch out for in business school. Why it keeps happening over and over and over again, I have no idea.
Because it's hard to get accurate activity-based costs (ABC) when things share infrastructure and you reuse components and overhead like HR, sales or legal are doing things that can't be directly allocated to a product. For example one ancient legacy system requires some rather arcane skills that you spend three times as long to find a new maintainer for as your standard C# or Java application, trust me that's not internally allocated correctly in any business I know about. Another thing is that the marginal savings are often miscalculated, if you cut your staff by 10% you'll typically not cut your payroll overhead 10% because you still need systems for salaries and overtime and travel and taxes and so on, sure it's a little less of it but all the skills and all the systems must be maintained.
Even if you presume that you've managed to achieve all this and correctly map all costs to activities, it's not like you can take one business offering out and not have it affect your other service lines. People want one-stop solutions and if you can offer services X, Y and Z you've got a much better chance than if you just offer X and Y even though Z wasn't very profitable. The same goes with customers, there are many that have tried getting rid of the unprofitable customers only to have the profitable ones disappear as well. Think for example if you are a computer professional and recommend the less knowledgeable people to a store you know is good, you may be less profitable than them because you're an expert and pick the best deals but if they lose you they lose everyone asking you for advice too.
Finally, apart from when you're talking about opening or closing business lines the work to allocate costs is in itself seen as meaningless overhead, internal prices and internal billing is often a very hated subject. Managers start focusing on how the bill is split rather than the customers, the market and the products or services you're delivering and contributing to the overall bottom line. And since managers are typically measured on their own performance they don't have a real interest in a fair distribution of costs, those that are underbilled resist change and the overbilled want to turn the tables on them. Add the same level of power plays throughout the decision process of what to cut and the result is that the figures presented are often wildly misleading. It's not that hard in theory, just in practice...
Without hardware modifications, changing the performance of the car to any real degree (other than making it unable to run at all) is unlikely.
I don't think you understand just how much electronics is controlling your direction and speed these days. With all sorts of anti-spin, electronic stabilization, adaptive cruise control, collision detection and whatnot the computer can and will gas, brake and steer on its own and disregard what you do if it's programmed to. Trigger the auto-emergency braking system because you mucked with it and your car will suddenly break at maximum ability without any warning. Or how about refusing to follow the turn because you mucked with the electronic stabilization so the car thinks you have no grip to steer with? And unless there's hardwired safety limits you can probably do things that would make the car catch on fire, which could easily be a death trap in a tunnel. Don't mess with a ton of metal travelling at 50-100 mph unless you know exactly what you're doing.
Effectively, this closed the "hole" that the plaintiff's daughter used (well, to be fair, Apple can't fix bad parenting), wherein the parent downloaded an app, entered their password, and the child managed to ring up $200 worth of in-app purchases in 15 minutes or less.
Actually the grace period reset with each in-app purchase so if you handed it to them on a long drive or whatever it could be way more than 15 minutes. At least in one case here in Norway a kid racked up $1500 in somewhat over an hour on "Smurfberries". I think the company dropped that bill but I'm sure plenty other parents with smaller bills gave up the fight and paid the scammers.
So in other words, get-rich-quick schemes are what you're looking for. Keep on looking, AC. You'll find one that works, one day.
The way the AC formulated it, yes they do exist. To take one example I know about, Wordfeud is a one-man shop based on one good idea. It pulls in over $20k/day which will be millions of dollars over a year. The more your idea depends on execution and distribution and funding and whatnot, the less likely it's unique and that having the idea itself is particularly valuable. Facebook or for that matter Farmville is another example that you can make lots of money on something that doesn't require you to solve any particularly "hard" problems.
For example, with MP3s and portable music players I had the idea of a portable MP3 player before any came on the market. But I didn't have anything of what was required to produce and sell one, I didn't even have money to file patents and patent troll the companies that would. But I bet there were hundreds if not thousands of people that had put the same 2+2 together, even though it didn't exist in the market yet. Of course there's probably some truly great ideas that need sizable funding too, but the bigger the funding required the less likely the idea is the hard part.
Zero respect for IP is not ideal, and neither is absolute authority to enforce IP rights in all media and devices.
The problem is that there will be copies made - nothing can prevent me from using a microphone to record my speakers or a camera to record my TV or any other number of soft and hard hacks. And when that copy gets around, the MAFIAA wants the authority to control and inspect all the places people exchange files and all communication to make sure their IP isn't in it. That is an all but impossible and certainly totalitarian position. Imagine if shop owners were like this, yeah we have cameras and alarms and guards and whatnot but they're imperfect, someone will be able to steal from us. So we demand eBay and Craigslist and everywhere people offer second hand goods to be liable for any stolen goods people sell. It's not like they come with a magic [stolen] tag like in games, nor do they control direct private sales either.
Besides, it's not like zero respect for IP law equals zero respect or zero income for the creators. I could have pirated far more than I have because even risk-adjusted for the chance of a fine times the chance of getting caught it still comes out to practically nothing. Even with a total lack of means to force me to pay I do if I think it's a great song or series or movie or game or whatever. If massive file sharing would lead to a collapse of the entertainment industry it would already have happened, the effect of "I follow the law because it's the law, not because I agree with it" is not that strong. It's an illusion created by the distribution companies that without strong IP law and without them the world will collapse and the artists suffer. But it's not IP law that keeps people paying, it's to reward the artists. That wouldn't go away even if the law did.
But what about the people who really used to love using Torrents and such? They will very likely stop consuming Hollywood movies/U.S. TV Shows/MPAA-RIAA content altogether. Can you live without consuming this stuff at all? Yes, you very much can. Do you miss out on anything doing this? Only if you are a 14 year old teenager who thinks that to be "hip" or "in the loop", you need to see the latest incarnation of the Hollywood trash all your friends at school are talking about.
Oh bullshit. Of all the things I could have been reading or watching or listening or playing games or doing some hobby or going somewhere or doing something I decided to sit down to watch that show. And I didn't just hit the "on" switch to gaze at whatever is on either, I specifically went online and got that show. Do I need it? Hell no, it's entertainment but I don't strictly speaking need most of the things in my life. You're just trying to belittle everyone that watches anything mainstream claiming they're only watching this turd because it's free. Your attitude is exactly the same as those old farts that didn't like how their kids were listening to this rock&roll trash. Sometimes my tastes are narrow, but if a fantasy-move like Lord of the Rings is a mainstream hit I don't have to hate it to be the art snob. I like some of that shit, so sue me.
However, the days when I would adjust my life to the TV schedule or even to physically be at the TV is long gone. If I want it out on my TV, my computer in a window while I do something else, my tablet, my phone, my media server for everything in the house, at a cabin, in a car player, whatever I want it to be up to me where and when I watch it. There was a time when we could time- and format-shift it, but they tried to make it go away. On top of that they want to surveillance everything I do to make sure there's none of their holy bits inside, and I don't like that one bit. I don't like being puppeteered in my own, stop selling me things with strings attached. It was yours, now it's mine, go away and let me do with it as I please. I'd vote Pirate Party any day and I'd still try to fund stuff I like, I know gratitude doesn't put food on the table.
As much as I like to see this kind of "stick it to the man" attitude, this is merely the exploitation of a loophole. This will not last. I'll be very interested in seeing what they come up with next though.
Personally I would suggest "The Pirate Browser" essentially TorBrowser configured to use a SE exit node and TPB as the home page. With the move to magnet links it really shouldn't be that much of a strain on the network and it'd be pretty damn big to block the entire TOR network... also the Pirate Party has recently been polling at >10% in Germany, if they can keep this up or increase more to the election next year this will get *really* interesting.
Yeah, I thought the article was about the rock group. I suddenly felt old, very, very old. Fortunately, it's not that bad. I'm just old.
Some years back here on slashdot someone was posting a flame about "being a dinosaur from the 256 color era" and I was like "uhm... I grew up with the Commodore 64 and it had 16 colors". When you're older than the dinosaurs at 24, the scale is pretty much blown. Old and getting older, lol.
What significant portion is that? I seriously doubt you can find anybody who has never run a proprietary binary on their Linux system. (...) While it is entirely correct for major Linux distributions to completely ignore or quarantine every bit of binary or non-free, nobody ever said that Linux should be a bad place to run binary distributions. Just ask the Opera folks about that.
True, but it's a long way from pragmatists who have used the nVidia blob or ran Opera into a paying games customer. A person who is 95% vegetarian but will eat meat if he's very hungry or there's not much other food doesn't make him a prime customer for a steak house. And the people who run Linux because it's free as in beer, well they're not likely to be very profitable customers. Most people tend to fall into one of those two categories. If you take away those two things, if you say you could get Windows or OS X or Linux for the same price and they all came as blobs... would you still run Linux?
And the other way around too, people that have gone through a bad time and come out on the other side develop a high loyalty and everyone around them knows that if shit happens you're cared for. It's the kind of intangible benefit that tend to keep people in one place, salary is measurable but work environment for the most part isn't. If you've got a good one, people are reluctant to leave. At least a little up in the system high turnover is generally one of the warning lights.
Crowds are everywhere, ever been to a mall around Christmas time? The point of killing people in flight is to create or magnify the fear of flying, which already combines a few others like claustrophobia, fear of heights, fear of asphyxiation, loss of engine power, being powerless to control the plane and so on. Killing a random crowd wouldn't actually focus that terror towards anything in particular and the sense of intimidation would soon pass.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot probably doesn't support the <b> tag in headlines ;)
So far 1334 delegates have been dealt out - 838 to Romney, only 88 initially to Ron Paul. Even if you believe that all of Santorum's and Gingrich's delegates would vote for Ron Paul all three of them together only add up to 496 delegates. There are currently 2286 - 1334 = 952 delegates left and Romney needs 1144 - 838 = 306 more to win or about 32%. Ron Paul has something like 15% support in the popular polls, but he's going to take 68% of the remaining delegates? On top of taking 100% of the freed delegates?
(3) You don't quit a 26 mile marathon at mile 22. Paul's come all this way, and only has two more months to go.
The problem with your analogy is that Romney is on mile 22, Ron Paul around mile 8 and you're still claiming he's going to win. Finishing for the sake of finishing is fine, but you only come across as one of Ron's wildly delusional fanboys.
Assuming that it operates 25 years without a glitch, that it's never damaged in a storm, that it never requires an electrician, that no kids find it fun to throw rocks at your roof or whatever. Sounds like you're more than breaking even but I'd budget something for maintenance, nothing ever seems to be quite as zero maintenance as promised.
The number of games that don't work via Wine is an ever-shrinking list,
Really? My experience was that it was an ever growing list of new games that did not work. Maybe eventually, somewhat with some tweaks you could almost somehow run them eventually, but many stayed unplayable for years. Of course many games do work so you can game on Linux, but this very much depends on whether you find this a glass half full or glass half empty situation...
What feature bloat? If you don't use the new features, you don't incur any cost. No bloat.
I'm fairly fluent in three languages, but if I switched between them at random during a conversation depending on which one lets me express myself better I would just have created an insanely complex language with enormous redundancy and extremely inconsistent pronunciation and grammar that would be massive pain for anyone else to learn. You can't simply say "well now you can express everything you could in one language and much, much more" and pretend that's an advantage with no drawbacks. Or even if it's the same language and you're writing a book with each author contributing a page each you wouldn't want the style to change radically from page to page, particularly when editors constantly go in and redo a page here and paragraph there.
I don't think it's possible to completely avoid code style wars, but if there's one generally accepted "best practice" way of doing things - and I don't necessarily mean in your team or in your company but in the language ecosystem and all your new hires too - then everyone can understand a code base much faster and is more productive. Consistency is huge, you want everything to behave in predictable ways. Not to mention basic training time, how long until you know the language features? The more you add to it, the worse it gets because unlike human languages working code doesn't get replaced no matter how archaic the language. Of course there's such a thing as too sparse a language too, but for the most part I'd say less is more even if it doesn't solve everything optimally.
Yes, but those parties can also choose to NOT give up the information, and they really shouldn't. You shouldn't tell a cop what time of day it is unless there is a subpeona. Telcos not talking unless they have a subpeona is a perfectly fine policy.
This may be just a rumor, but I hear a lot of people talk to cops because they want crimes solved. Victims, witnesses, people keeping records of various sorts. Obviously if you are or might become a suspect then STFU and getting a lawyer is good advice, but it's not like most people intentionally sabotage the police from doing their job. Overall I'm happy if they get the people that steal, rob, assault and rape people off the streets not to mention all that defraud, embezzle and so on even if I don't agree with every law they have to enforce. On the whole I'd rather live with them than in a lawless country.
The question is when it stops becoming "theirs" and starts becoming "mine", if I rent an apartment can the landlord let the police search it without warrant? If I lease a car can the leasing company give permission to search my trunk without warrant? Can the phone company give out my calls to the police without warrant? Can my ISP give out my Internet traffic to the police without warrant? Can the police scan my home with an IR camera without warrant? Can they attach a GPS transmitter to my car without warrant?
I mean obviously I don't own the phone lines, yet we still think the phone call is "mine" just like a letter being sent is either mine or the recipient's, not the post office's property. But if someone hands me a bag of drugs and tells me to deliver to their other guy then I'm screwed, "it's not mine I was just carrying it for someone else" doesn't fly. Obviously they've decided that in this case possession trumps ownership. A "reasonable expectation of privacy" is almost a circular definition because where you get it you come to expect it and where you don't get it you don't expect it either.
Or just mishits because they're angry, I had one colleague at a former workplace who was replying to a friend making his goodbyes and wrote a rather fiery mail on how unhappy he was with things himself and might soon join him. Except he hit "Reply to all" instead of "Reply", fortunately he's the kind of guy that can bounce that off but that was a 9.5/10 on the email screw-up scale. I'll reserve a perfect ten for broadcasting highly intimate personal details, which fortunately I haven't seen yet. There's such a thing as too much information....
I think in any democracy, from time to time, we all agree with Churchill when elections don't go the way we think they should: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."
Well if I was sick I wouldn't take a poll, I'd go see a doctor. But if you're looking for a way to run the country, then taking a poll is a good idea? Democracy makes plenty mistakes, the only saving grace is really that we're all in on it. It doesn't not stop you from banging your head on the wall shouting "OMG you've got to be kidding me they can't be this stupid, didn't you learn anything from last time?!" And it's obvious that what's good for the majority is not always what's good for the people, like the classic about two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner. You can blow more holes than a swiss chess in an argument that democracy provides an optimal solution, it's fairly obvious that it doesn't. But like Churchill said, we haven't found a better practical solution.
No.
A negotiated restructuring is not the same as a default.
No matter how you slice it or play at words, it isn't the same.
Greece first passed a law lowering the trigger value for their collective action clause (CAC) from 95% to 66% in best Star Wars fashion: "I've altered our deal. Pray that I don't alter it further" then a few days later activated their CAC to force the participation from 83.5% to 95.7% - the remaining 4.3% was in foreign jurisdiction where they couldn't do this money grab. The result of this is that all rating companies declared this as a default because:
As we have previously stated, we may view an issuer's unilateral change of the original terms and conditions of an obligation as a de facto restructuring and thus a default by Standard & Poor's published definition
In short, Greece did not reach a voluntary deal. They changed the deal without the consent of the debt holders. The credit default swaps (CDS) were triggered. Nobody that matters (and hint: Greece doesn't matter) considers this anything but a default. In fact, they probably made it worse for themselves and any other country with national debt. Don't like the deal? Pass a law and make a new one...
Somehow I don't see the problem with either solution:
a) Dark matter is real. Then we have a whole new class of matter to investigate.
b) Dark matter is not real. Then we have a new understanding of the forces around us.
So what if it's real? The existence of dark matter particles would be a discovery about the size of finding the Higgs boson. It'd be way outside the Standard Model as we know it. We just need something more tangible on what exactly it is...
How about countries that are allegedly already democratic? Like, say, Greece, Spain, Italy, Ireland...
It's okay if both wolves agree to oppress the sheep, as long as it was put to a democratic vote. ;)
How is that worse than, eg., forgetting to put the wheel nuts back on after you rotated the tires?
Somehow that doesn't sound like a very convincing argument we should give people more opportunities to mess up their car. People can do a lot of stupid shit with a car already, mostly from the driver's seat and I'd rather eliminate them from that too. If driverless cars were real I know several people I'd recommend them to for their own, their passengers and everyone else's safety. Frankly I think many of them know it but public transportation doesn't work for them and taxi all the time gets too expensive so they keep driving until you take it from them over their cold dead body (and hopefully not a traffic accident victim's body).
You're assuming the message was for the spider and not for everyone who has a spider in their house. And the message is that if you carry a service we don't like, we'll make sure to inflict as much damage as possible when we come for it. You get a pretty good self-censoring effect out of it. Same reason TOR doesn't scale very well, you'd have to be mildly insane to run an exit node as a private person.
It's one of the things they teach you to watch out for in business school. Why it keeps happening over and over and over again, I have no idea.
Because it's hard to get accurate activity-based costs (ABC) when things share infrastructure and you reuse components and overhead like HR, sales or legal are doing things that can't be directly allocated to a product. For example one ancient legacy system requires some rather arcane skills that you spend three times as long to find a new maintainer for as your standard C# or Java application, trust me that's not internally allocated correctly in any business I know about. Another thing is that the marginal savings are often miscalculated, if you cut your staff by 10% you'll typically not cut your payroll overhead 10% because you still need systems for salaries and overtime and travel and taxes and so on, sure it's a little less of it but all the skills and all the systems must be maintained.
Even if you presume that you've managed to achieve all this and correctly map all costs to activities, it's not like you can take one business offering out and not have it affect your other service lines. People want one-stop solutions and if you can offer services X, Y and Z you've got a much better chance than if you just offer X and Y even though Z wasn't very profitable. The same goes with customers, there are many that have tried getting rid of the unprofitable customers only to have the profitable ones disappear as well. Think for example if you are a computer professional and recommend the less knowledgeable people to a store you know is good, you may be less profitable than them because you're an expert and pick the best deals but if they lose you they lose everyone asking you for advice too.
Finally, apart from when you're talking about opening or closing business lines the work to allocate costs is in itself seen as meaningless overhead, internal prices and internal billing is often a very hated subject. Managers start focusing on how the bill is split rather than the customers, the market and the products or services you're delivering and contributing to the overall bottom line. And since managers are typically measured on their own performance they don't have a real interest in a fair distribution of costs, those that are underbilled resist change and the overbilled want to turn the tables on them. Add the same level of power plays throughout the decision process of what to cut and the result is that the figures presented are often wildly misleading. It's not that hard in theory, just in practice...
Without hardware modifications, changing the performance of the car to any real degree (other than making it unable to run at all) is unlikely.
I don't think you understand just how much electronics is controlling your direction and speed these days. With all sorts of anti-spin, electronic stabilization, adaptive cruise control, collision detection and whatnot the computer can and will gas, brake and steer on its own and disregard what you do if it's programmed to. Trigger the auto-emergency braking system because you mucked with it and your car will suddenly break at maximum ability without any warning. Or how about refusing to follow the turn because you mucked with the electronic stabilization so the car thinks you have no grip to steer with? And unless there's hardwired safety limits you can probably do things that would make the car catch on fire, which could easily be a death trap in a tunnel. Don't mess with a ton of metal travelling at 50-100 mph unless you know exactly what you're doing.
Effectively, this closed the "hole" that the plaintiff's daughter used (well, to be fair, Apple can't fix bad parenting), wherein the parent downloaded an app, entered their password, and the child managed to ring up $200 worth of in-app purchases in 15 minutes or less.
Actually the grace period reset with each in-app purchase so if you handed it to them on a long drive or whatever it could be way more than 15 minutes. At least in one case here in Norway a kid racked up $1500 in somewhat over an hour on "Smurfberries". I think the company dropped that bill but I'm sure plenty other parents with smaller bills gave up the fight and paid the scammers.
So in other words, get-rich-quick schemes are what you're looking for. Keep on looking, AC. You'll find one that works, one day.
The way the AC formulated it, yes they do exist. To take one example I know about, Wordfeud is a one-man shop based on one good idea. It pulls in over $20k/day which will be millions of dollars over a year. The more your idea depends on execution and distribution and funding and whatnot, the less likely it's unique and that having the idea itself is particularly valuable. Facebook or for that matter Farmville is another example that you can make lots of money on something that doesn't require you to solve any particularly "hard" problems.
For example, with MP3s and portable music players I had the idea of a portable MP3 player before any came on the market. But I didn't have anything of what was required to produce and sell one, I didn't even have money to file patents and patent troll the companies that would. But I bet there were hundreds if not thousands of people that had put the same 2+2 together, even though it didn't exist in the market yet. Of course there's probably some truly great ideas that need sizable funding too, but the bigger the funding required the less likely the idea is the hard part.
Zero respect for IP is not ideal, and neither is absolute authority to enforce IP rights in all media and devices.
The problem is that there will be copies made - nothing can prevent me from using a microphone to record my speakers or a camera to record my TV or any other number of soft and hard hacks. And when that copy gets around, the MAFIAA wants the authority to control and inspect all the places people exchange files and all communication to make sure their IP isn't in it. That is an all but impossible and certainly totalitarian position. Imagine if shop owners were like this, yeah we have cameras and alarms and guards and whatnot but they're imperfect, someone will be able to steal from us. So we demand eBay and Craigslist and everywhere people offer second hand goods to be liable for any stolen goods people sell. It's not like they come with a magic [stolen] tag like in games, nor do they control direct private sales either.
Besides, it's not like zero respect for IP law equals zero respect or zero income for the creators. I could have pirated far more than I have because even risk-adjusted for the chance of a fine times the chance of getting caught it still comes out to practically nothing. Even with a total lack of means to force me to pay I do if I think it's a great song or series or movie or game or whatever. If massive file sharing would lead to a collapse of the entertainment industry it would already have happened, the effect of "I follow the law because it's the law, not because I agree with it" is not that strong. It's an illusion created by the distribution companies that without strong IP law and without them the world will collapse and the artists suffer. But it's not IP law that keeps people paying, it's to reward the artists. That wouldn't go away even if the law did.
But what about the people who really used to love using Torrents and such? They will very likely stop consuming Hollywood movies/U.S. TV Shows/MPAA-RIAA content altogether. Can you live without consuming this stuff at all? Yes, you very much can. Do you miss out on anything doing this? Only if you are a 14 year old teenager who thinks that to be "hip" or "in the loop", you need to see the latest incarnation of the Hollywood trash all your friends at school are talking about.
Oh bullshit. Of all the things I could have been reading or watching or listening or playing games or doing some hobby or going somewhere or doing something I decided to sit down to watch that show. And I didn't just hit the "on" switch to gaze at whatever is on either, I specifically went online and got that show. Do I need it? Hell no, it's entertainment but I don't strictly speaking need most of the things in my life. You're just trying to belittle everyone that watches anything mainstream claiming they're only watching this turd because it's free. Your attitude is exactly the same as those old farts that didn't like how their kids were listening to this rock&roll trash. Sometimes my tastes are narrow, but if a fantasy-move like Lord of the Rings is a mainstream hit I don't have to hate it to be the art snob. I like some of that shit, so sue me.
However, the days when I would adjust my life to the TV schedule or even to physically be at the TV is long gone. If I want it out on my TV, my computer in a window while I do something else, my tablet, my phone, my media server for everything in the house, at a cabin, in a car player, whatever I want it to be up to me where and when I watch it. There was a time when we could time- and format-shift it, but they tried to make it go away. On top of that they want to surveillance everything I do to make sure there's none of their holy bits inside, and I don't like that one bit. I don't like being puppeteered in my own, stop selling me things with strings attached. It was yours, now it's mine, go away and let me do with it as I please. I'd vote Pirate Party any day and I'd still try to fund stuff I like, I know gratitude doesn't put food on the table.
As much as I like to see this kind of "stick it to the man" attitude, this is merely the exploitation of a loophole. This will not last. I'll be very interested in seeing what they come up with next though.
Personally I would suggest "The Pirate Browser" essentially TorBrowser configured to use a SE exit node and TPB as the home page. With the move to magnet links it really shouldn't be that much of a strain on the network and it'd be pretty damn big to block the entire TOR network... also the Pirate Party has recently been polling at >10% in Germany, if they can keep this up or increase more to the election next year this will get *really* interesting.
Not to mention free radiation... how healthy is it to be that close to RTGs for extended periods of time? How much shielding do you need?
Yeah, I thought the article was about the rock group. I suddenly felt old, very, very old. Fortunately, it's not that bad. I'm just old.
Some years back here on slashdot someone was posting a flame about "being a dinosaur from the 256 color era" and I was like "uhm... I grew up with the Commodore 64 and it had 16 colors". When you're older than the dinosaurs at 24, the scale is pretty much blown. Old and getting older, lol.
What significant portion is that? I seriously doubt you can find anybody who has never run a proprietary binary on their Linux system. (...) While it is entirely correct for major Linux distributions to completely ignore or quarantine every bit of binary or non-free, nobody ever said that Linux should be a bad place to run binary distributions. Just ask the Opera folks about that.
True, but it's a long way from pragmatists who have used the nVidia blob or ran Opera into a paying games customer. A person who is 95% vegetarian but will eat meat if he's very hungry or there's not much other food doesn't make him a prime customer for a steak house. And the people who run Linux because it's free as in beer, well they're not likely to be very profitable customers. Most people tend to fall into one of those two categories. If you take away those two things, if you say you could get Windows or OS X or Linux for the same price and they all came as blobs... would you still run Linux?
And the other way around too, people that have gone through a bad time and come out on the other side develop a high loyalty and everyone around them knows that if shit happens you're cared for. It's the kind of intangible benefit that tend to keep people in one place, salary is measurable but work environment for the most part isn't. If you've got a good one, people are reluctant to leave. At least a little up in the system high turnover is generally one of the warning lights.
Crowds are everywhere, ever been to a mall around Christmas time? The point of killing people in flight is to create or magnify the fear of flying, which already combines a few others like claustrophobia, fear of heights, fear of asphyxiation, loss of engine power, being powerless to control the plane and so on. Killing a random crowd wouldn't actually focus that terror towards anything in particular and the sense of intimidation would soon pass.