One minor nit to pick... that's not socialism. Socialism has very little to do with who owns the means of production or capital.
That is at best incredibly misleading, if they can all agree on something it's that a factory owner reaping all the profits while the employees are sweatshop workers is not socialism. True, it's not a strict requirement as the government can hire private companies so costs are socialized but execution is privatized, but "in lieu of markets" the owner won't have many other choices. Most countries today don't subscribe to the idea that everything should be socialized in a plan economy, but the parts that are socialized are typically also served by the public sector or private companies that exist solely to work for the government. Here in Norway 34.5% of the working population now work for the public sector, even more on behalf of the government and that is no coincidence. And that doesn't count that some very dominant directions in socialism like marxism has seen social ownership as essential.
As for the correlation between "socialism" and totalitarianism... would you classify the Scandinavian states as particularly totalitarian?
While there's no totalitarianism in it, there's a very clear tendencies to surveillance and social interference in what people can and can't do. The first is usually justified by fairness, in order for each person to pay their appropriate share the government must know everything, our version of the IRS knows so much I don't even have to fill out the tax form. My employer reports in, the banks report in, stocks and funds are reported, the property registry reports in, the car registry reports in and so on, unless you have special deductibles, foreign holdings or something like that you literally don't need to do a thing. The second is usually to protect some weak group, because 1% would develop a gambling addiction the other 99% can't have casinos and things like that. Just like there's a collectivist-individualist axis to the economic policy, there's also one to the social policy. So while we're in many ways very liberal, I also can't get a beer on 7 PM on Saturday if I've run out. It's not the Soviet Union but I think many Americans would be freaked out by it.
So if prior agreement paid 100% of development costs, and if Firefox can keep its market share up, they should have three times their development budget
And Google has three times the incentive to convert a Firefox user into a Chrome user. Those go hand in hand, the more money they have to pay Mozilla the more business sense developing and advertising Chrome makes and the more they can justify paying for applications to bundle Chrome. So far they've mostly been busy slaughtering IE, but with it dropping to less than 40% they are going to start looking at taking users from each other. Even for Google $300 million isn't slump change.
It would be interesting to know if this were true, not as a percentage of the market but in terms of total volume (number of users, number of searches done using Firefox, ie something actually somewhat relevant to how Google derives revenue).
If you wanted a first-order approximation to the business value you could start with adjusting for market share per country and GDP. A user in the US is far more valuable than a user from some poor country in Africa. Global market share is more a popularity contest indicating where the market might be going.
1GB is fine for phones but just isn't much for tablets and netbooks.
From "640kb is enough for everybody" (okay, maybe he didn't say it) to "1GB is fine for phones" in 30 years. I so badly want to go back with a time machine and show them one, and after they're amazed and all that and ask what kind of important things we use it for I'll just say "well, mostly we use it to play Angry Birds".
So here we have Intel putting their low cost product on their high cost process and claiming a victory?
Developing the process is ungodly expensive, pushing out chips is not. Why wouldn't Intel use their state of the art process? It's not like it would be cheaper to produce on 40/45nm, far from it.
I don't think in the long run they can continue this game but it's fun to see them attempting it.
Well, it's the game Intel's been running since the 1980s and has kept AMD a distant second even when their chip designers have been smoking crack. Smaller process = more dies/wafer and so higher margins and more money to funnel back into R&D.
Do I believe everything Intel says? Hell no. But their tick-tocks have been steady as clockwork, while for example graphics cards are now finally starting to move off 40nm with the HD7970. Intel's never had to cancel a process to my knowledge, like TSMC had to scrap their 32nm process. And recently GloFo was in the news because AMD had to scrap their 28nm process and start over at TSMC with gate-last. That burns vast amounts of cash and delays your products for a double kick in the balls. Meanwhile apparently Intel got a die shrink to 22nm and 3D transistors ready to go, since specs and prices for Ivy Bridge have been leaking all over the place. Can Intel do low-power design? Yes. No. Maybe. But if they can keep their process improvements coming on time and with decent yields, they'll be hell to compete with anyway.
Even if it's not part of your job, there's a very clear conflict of interest between your responsibilities as an employee helping your team and your own moonlighting as a software developer. You clearly see this as doing something in addition to your job, but you should be aware that many will see this as doing something instead of your job. Every time you answer "nope, only do system administration" then go back and write some more code you're looking to sell back to them any perceived unhelpfulness could be seen as an act of disloyalty. As a consultant I can also tell you that people are either internal or external, they're not going to let you sit on the "inside" and gather tons of useful intelligence that you can use to sell them stuff from the "outside". One of those careers is going to end very quickly, if not both.
From your description I'd also say there is considerable risk that you've already in some way used internal company information in developing your application, not just generic skills. What you don't want is them going to their lawyer saying "I have this employee that's been holding back information, developing tools for our processes and is now trying to force me into paying him extra for it! Can he really do this? Is this legal?" and even if you're right, you'll spend the next years fighting out the finer points of the legalese in your employment contract and your code is in legal limbo. Most likely you will settle and agree to hand over the code as unemployment and lawyer bills don't go well together. A cynic might even consider that this is the likely endgame so they can get that code for free, whether you like it or not.
Look, I can agree with your basic sentiment that you shouldn't expect something for nothing, but then you should come to an agreement with your employer first. Right now you're effectively a mole, secretly running a side business - or at least a would-be side business - under the guise of a regular employee. I don't think there's any way you can spring this on them that will look good. Either hand it over in the hope you'll get something for going "above and beyond" or delete it and chalk it up as a learning experience. Or try making a deal now and slowly release your software as if you were developing it, but if they won't pay then they won't pay. That it's already written isn't going to change that, it only tells them tat if you say no you get $0 for your work and something is better than nothing so they'll offer you a pittance or no deal.
The question is whether or not it will contract back to where it would have been had it not been for pumping up the economy for loans first. Just today I read an article about the wages offered in Spain and Italy now (source, in Norwegian so via Google Translate) and you practically can't get permanent employment anymore. They're being forced into intern or temp contracts which make minimum wage or less with little to no benefits.
A salary of 1,000 euros a month is about to become an unattainable dream.
That's $1300/mo or $15-16k/year, I think a minimum wage job in the US is around $10-14k/year. He was offered a 1-year contract for half that, $7-8k/year working 10 hour days. Another woman with a master degree says she makes 300 euro = less than $400 a month and yet:
Among the 30 in our class, I am among those who make the best career.
They can pretend what they want with the GNP figures but Europe is experiencing a really bad crunch now for those that haven't already got a permanent position - those are quite well protected, unlike in the US but the rest is going to hell. Same with the US, a lot of people aren't in the unemployment records simply because they're either trying to study their way through the crisis, have given up or don't get more benefits so they don't count in the statistics. And in a really bad crunch where the government should be trying to fire up the economy they're almost broke - in case of Greece, Portugal and Ireland really broke - and have to hit the brakes hard for a double crunch. I don't think we're at the bottom yet, it will get worse before it gets better.
The future of libraries is in question. If you don't have to go there to borrow books, what are they for?
I think the most important thing that the benefit of having a library disappears with ebooks, there's no reuse of books. What books are available only depend on the computer, not what is in the shelves or who other have been borrowing it. So you really should take one step back and see why do we have libraries, and if those people could be served some other way. For example, we could say that it's because the underprivileged should have access to books, okay. Perhaps we then instead of funding libraries should give these people some ecredits to use at ebook stores, like a gift card only good for ebooks. If you want to read fine, if not well the credits were there just like the library was. Maybe some ereader/eplayer booths for those who don't have their own and maybe some people you can ask for help, but otherwise it's use your own device. Instead of the academic library, the educational institution will just enroll you in a student database and you get student access to journals, without going to the school library. In all honesty, I don't really see much need for having to gather it all in one physical location anymore.
That you only have fake choices in politics is mostly due to the fucked up US system. And very often you have false choices with your wallet, you get to pick from a number of mega-corporations and they're all equally bad. Too bad for GoDaddy they didn't realize that they run a dime a dozen business that people can switch from with hardly any penalty. But I hardly think it sells me on the idea that the free market would solve everything.
Fraudulent Removal of Copyright Notice. - Any person who, with fraudulent intent, removes or alters any notice of copyright appearing on a copy of a copyrighted work shall be fined not more than $2,500.
Of course that's on top of any damage claim you can get from actual copyright infringement, but removing any copyright notice is criminal.
How would I now know if decisions are made because of what users want or of what google wants?
Why should it be the way users want? If Red Hat pays people to work on the kernel, they work on what Red Hat want not what "users" in general want. If Google pays Firefox's bills, why wouldn't they be doing what Google wants? Apart from the extremely small minority that's contributed to Firefox, most of their users are simply product like TV viewers. The money made = number of people watching * number of ads, it never makes sense to made of those zero because then the total is obviously also zero. In other words, Only instead of being a means to serve ads, they're a means to serve search requests that serve ads. The only different is that being OSS, you can fork and go your own pay. Or pay them to go your way. But they don't become your pets to commandeer around just because you use the product, OSS or not.
Well copyright is essential to the media companies, not so much the tech companies. Even if the media companies got their wet dream, we'd still need the Internet for Google and YouTube and online banking and Amazon and eBay and Spotify and iTunes and Netflix and whatever else. So SOPA passes and they get to try a little whack-a-mole with domain names, how long until someone discovers I don't know, IP addresses? That Firefox plug-in that routes around it? DNS resolution from a third party DNS server? DNS resolution over TOR?
They aren't really afraid of losing their customers, the only two things they're afraid of is getting the bill to implement some silly control scheme or getting the liability for users they can't possibly stop. That's why you don't see them really throwing their weight behind it. And even if they got rid of TPB, they'd also have to try getting rid of all the file hosting sites. They're at least as large a source of copyrighted material these days as torrents.
For all the rant and rage, internal email + smartphones are practically IM devices if you want, internal delivery has always been quick and painless. External e-mails are another matter, but by volume that's a small part of it.
So you call, and two minutes into the conversation it goes "I need to take a look at that log file..." or any other crunch time/shit hit the fan moment, then what? I leave my phone on 24x7 too, because I expect everyone to have good graces and not call me at 3 AM unless it's a really big emergency. It's a matter of culture, if you have to implement technical measures to stop people from acting like sociopaths you're doing it wrong. If people max the rules, then it won't be a nice place to work no matter what.
Perhaps that was only the case if you had the "download license automatically" checkbox ticked in the preferences?
At least in some version of WMP this was the default. This lead to pages like this. It says so on the page too:
By default, Windows Media Player will attempt to acquire a license when you try to play the secure content if one was not issued to you by the content provider when you downloaded the content.
TRUE inovation will always happen at places where people need something new to fix a problem. It will never really happen at places where people want to make a quick buck with it.
What about "our customers are leaving us for the competition", is that a problem? Of course they try all sorts of other and sometimes quite innovative ways of keeping the customers too, but sometimes corporations do innovate to make a buck;)
Well that, but at least when it's a <1% system it's about getting out of that Catch 22 where nothing supports Linux because it has no market share and it has no market share because nothing supports it. Mac users are a small minority too, but they get a way different treatment because they're just a bit too big to ignore - and are probably more profitable per user, but that's another story. If only a very small minority can't make something work, it's their problem. If businesses start losing significant amounts of money on it, it's their problem.
Which is also why SQL injection attacks exist, everything you send to the server is data. If you take that data and execute it as code, well duh you've just created an exploit. Never, ever trust anything coming from the user.
Eventually though, NASA and ESA are going to have to send ordinary people up, if they ever intend to do any kind of space based manufacturing, or permanent space based habitats. People aren't going to like jumping through insane hurdles, just to be a space janitor. Best just to hire a regular janitor that meets some core competencies so he doesn't blow himself out an airlock or get water into an instrument panel.
Sorry to disappoint, but I find that unlikely. Here in Norway there's many thousands of people working offshore on oil fields and they all have to follow considerably more stringent health conditions than others. There are requirements for sight, hearing, no cardiovascular diseases, no brain dysfunctions like epilepsy, no psychological conditions, no diabetes, no substance abuse, good lung functions, full mobility, no medication that make rescue difficult like sedatives, no pregnancies over 28 weeks, there are weight limits - granted a rather generous 120 kg - and so on. And people are jumping to work offshore because it pays well. Even if you're just looking for a space janitor you can get one in perfect health at a relatively minor premium. And as long as there's good safety reasons for it, they'll get permission to exclude everyone else. The space industry would have to get really far before you'll be able to make any kind of anti-discrimination argument to let everyone and their dog up there.
Basically any file type that can have a link to a webpage embedded, I believe both.MPG and.WMV are capable of this
No, just WMV. But "intelligent" players like Windows Media Player would "helpfully" realize that a WMV file renamed to MPG, AVI etc. was actually a WMV file and play it as such anyway. There's no reason for a movie format to contain such a link, it's for DRM'd WMV files that are supposed to take you to a page explaining how to buy access to it. Whoever came up with that scheme was stupid and I don't know any other player than WMP that ever supported it, since it was 99.99% used for malware and 0.01% for legitimate uses.
The new user may be years away from doing an apt-get. But they can pick from a list, because they have all been to a Restaurant in the past.
It'll do about as much good as an untranslated Thai menu, people know what food is when they order. Okay, so you've decided that you should try this "Linux" thing. But, wait there's so many distros like OpenSuse, Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, Mint but okay most recommend Ubuntu. But wait, even if you've picked Ubuntu they're still going go give you a choice of GNOME, KDE, XFCE and maybe even some more obscure ones and I dare you to explain that as simply as you could a menu of beef, chicken and fish. Okay so it's not a big thing but too many applications decide to put the user at a crossroads, here I need you to take some apparently important decision before you can even begin using it. If you already know you'd like it to behave differently than the default it should be easy to find a settings or options menu, if you don't then making you take some kind of choice more or less on random isn't actually helping anyone. It's just intimidating to the user, like if you don't know the answers to these questions then maybe you shouldn't really be using this application. Oh, and it's available from GUI package management tools as well, you just have to know you want it....
Also, I'm rather confused as to how VLIW4 can be superior to SIMD for just about any workload - the entire point of the switch was that VLIW4 had dependency limitations that prevented its compute power from being fully utilized at all times, whereas SIMD is closer to full utilization.
BitCoin is one of the few algorithms that didn't run into those limitations. So SIMD is much better for computing in general, but actually a drawback for BitCoin.
The Higgs boson is completely different to gravity and is only needed to explain why fundamental particles e.g. electron has a mass.
I'm not sure I understand how a 115â"130 GeV/c^2 Higgs boson can give mass to a 0.5 MeV/c^2 electron. I understand a scalar field, even if you forget about gravity some particles would be harder to push around than others, they have more mass. Higgs somehow creates this drag because the other particles are swimming in an ocean of Higgs bosons or something like that? I'd understand a quantification of mass, that in reactions mass suddenly appears at specific energies which is so more or less gather is part of this symmetry breaking. But the Higgs seems far bigger like an extremely massive particle, not something that "makes up" part of the electron.
The other part which might be a bit naive, according to Newton gravity is proportional to mass, so if mass is caused by Higgs wouldn't that make gravity dependent on Higgs? If you managed to neutralize the Higgs field, wouldn't you then also neutralize gravity? Or could mass and gravity actually be independent? Every time I ask a question I feel I get at least two more new ones....
Some have it as the first choice, but not all are so single minded as to not offer a choice like Ubuntu.
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop and log in to KDE. All the *buntu variants actually point to the same repositories, you pick one during download but if you want more they're an apt-get away. I'd call it one less confusing step for a new user, how should he know how to answer? Give him the defaults of what he downloaded and trust that power users can use 30 seconds on Google to find out...
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One minor nit to pick... that's not socialism. Socialism has very little to do with who owns the means of production or capital.
That is at best incredibly misleading, if they can all agree on something it's that a factory owner reaping all the profits while the employees are sweatshop workers is not socialism. True, it's not a strict requirement as the government can hire private companies so costs are socialized but execution is privatized, but "in lieu of markets" the owner won't have many other choices. Most countries today don't subscribe to the idea that everything should be socialized in a plan economy, but the parts that are socialized are typically also served by the public sector or private companies that exist solely to work for the government. Here in Norway 34.5% of the working population now work for the public sector, even more on behalf of the government and that is no coincidence. And that doesn't count that some very dominant directions in socialism like marxism has seen social ownership as essential.
As for the correlation between "socialism" and totalitarianism... would you classify the Scandinavian states as particularly totalitarian?
While there's no totalitarianism in it, there's a very clear tendencies to surveillance and social interference in what people can and can't do. The first is usually justified by fairness, in order for each person to pay their appropriate share the government must know everything, our version of the IRS knows so much I don't even have to fill out the tax form. My employer reports in, the banks report in, stocks and funds are reported, the property registry reports in, the car registry reports in and so on, unless you have special deductibles, foreign holdings or something like that you literally don't need to do a thing. The second is usually to protect some weak group, because 1% would develop a gambling addiction the other 99% can't have casinos and things like that. Just like there's a collectivist-individualist axis to the economic policy, there's also one to the social policy. So while we're in many ways very liberal, I also can't get a beer on 7 PM on Saturday if I've run out. It's not the Soviet Union but I think many Americans would be freaked out by it.
So if prior agreement paid 100% of development costs, and if Firefox can keep its market share up, they should have three times their development budget
And Google has three times the incentive to convert a Firefox user into a Chrome user. Those go hand in hand, the more money they have to pay Mozilla the more business sense developing and advertising Chrome makes and the more they can justify paying for applications to bundle Chrome. So far they've mostly been busy slaughtering IE, but with it dropping to less than 40% they are going to start looking at taking users from each other. Even for Google $300 million isn't slump change.
It would be interesting to know if this were true, not as a percentage of the market but in terms of total volume (number of users, number of searches done using Firefox, ie something actually somewhat relevant to how Google derives revenue).
If you wanted a first-order approximation to the business value you could start with adjusting for market share per country and GDP. A user in the US is far more valuable than a user from some poor country in Africa. Global market share is more a popularity contest indicating where the market might be going.
1GB is fine for phones but just isn't much for tablets and netbooks.
From "640kb is enough for everybody" (okay, maybe he didn't say it) to "1GB is fine for phones" in 30 years. I so badly want to go back with a time machine and show them one, and after they're amazed and all that and ask what kind of important things we use it for I'll just say "well, mostly we use it to play Angry Birds".
So here we have Intel putting their low cost product on their high cost process and claiming a victory?
Developing the process is ungodly expensive, pushing out chips is not. Why wouldn't Intel use their state of the art process? It's not like it would be cheaper to produce on 40/45nm, far from it.
I don't think in the long run they can continue this game but it's fun to see them attempting it.
Well, it's the game Intel's been running since the 1980s and has kept AMD a distant second even when their chip designers have been smoking crack. Smaller process = more dies/wafer and so higher margins and more money to funnel back into R&D.
Do I believe everything Intel says? Hell no. But their tick-tocks have been steady as clockwork, while for example graphics cards are now finally starting to move off 40nm with the HD7970. Intel's never had to cancel a process to my knowledge, like TSMC had to scrap their 32nm process. And recently GloFo was in the news because AMD had to scrap their 28nm process and start over at TSMC with gate-last. That burns vast amounts of cash and delays your products for a double kick in the balls. Meanwhile apparently Intel got a die shrink to 22nm and 3D transistors ready to go, since specs and prices for Ivy Bridge have been leaking all over the place. Can Intel do low-power design? Yes. No. Maybe. But if they can keep their process improvements coming on time and with decent yields, they'll be hell to compete with anyway.
Even if it's not part of your job, there's a very clear conflict of interest between your responsibilities as an employee helping your team and your own moonlighting as a software developer. You clearly see this as doing something in addition to your job, but you should be aware that many will see this as doing something instead of your job. Every time you answer "nope, only do system administration" then go back and write some more code you're looking to sell back to them any perceived unhelpfulness could be seen as an act of disloyalty. As a consultant I can also tell you that people are either internal or external, they're not going to let you sit on the "inside" and gather tons of useful intelligence that you can use to sell them stuff from the "outside". One of those careers is going to end very quickly, if not both.
From your description I'd also say there is considerable risk that you've already in some way used internal company information in developing your application, not just generic skills. What you don't want is them going to their lawyer saying "I have this employee that's been holding back information, developing tools for our processes and is now trying to force me into paying him extra for it! Can he really do this? Is this legal?" and even if you're right, you'll spend the next years fighting out the finer points of the legalese in your employment contract and your code is in legal limbo. Most likely you will settle and agree to hand over the code as unemployment and lawyer bills don't go well together. A cynic might even consider that this is the likely endgame so they can get that code for free, whether you like it or not.
Look, I can agree with your basic sentiment that you shouldn't expect something for nothing, but then you should come to an agreement with your employer first. Right now you're effectively a mole, secretly running a side business - or at least a would-be side business - under the guise of a regular employee. I don't think there's any way you can spring this on them that will look good. Either hand it over in the hope you'll get something for going "above and beyond" or delete it and chalk it up as a learning experience. Or try making a deal now and slowly release your software as if you were developing it, but if they won't pay then they won't pay. That it's already written isn't going to change that, it only tells them tat if you say no you get $0 for your work and something is better than nothing so they'll offer you a pittance or no deal.
And she doesn't live next door, I checked ;)
The question is whether or not it will contract back to where it would have been had it not been for pumping up the economy for loans first. Just today I read an article about the wages offered in Spain and Italy now (source, in Norwegian so via Google Translate) and you practically can't get permanent employment anymore. They're being forced into intern or temp contracts which make minimum wage or less with little to no benefits.
A salary of 1,000 euros a month is about to become an unattainable dream.
That's $1300/mo or $15-16k/year, I think a minimum wage job in the US is around $10-14k/year. He was offered a 1-year contract for half that, $7-8k/year working 10 hour days. Another woman with a master degree says she makes 300 euro = less than $400 a month and yet:
Among the 30 in our class, I am among those who make the best career.
They can pretend what they want with the GNP figures but Europe is experiencing a really bad crunch now for those that haven't already got a permanent position - those are quite well protected, unlike in the US but the rest is going to hell. Same with the US, a lot of people aren't in the unemployment records simply because they're either trying to study their way through the crisis, have given up or don't get more benefits so they don't count in the statistics. And in a really bad crunch where the government should be trying to fire up the economy they're almost broke - in case of Greece, Portugal and Ireland really broke - and have to hit the brakes hard for a double crunch. I don't think we're at the bottom yet, it will get worse before it gets better.
The future of libraries is in question. If you don't have to go there to borrow books, what are they for?
I think the most important thing that the benefit of having a library disappears with ebooks, there's no reuse of books. What books are available only depend on the computer, not what is in the shelves or who other have been borrowing it. So you really should take one step back and see why do we have libraries, and if those people could be served some other way. For example, we could say that it's because the underprivileged should have access to books, okay. Perhaps we then instead of funding libraries should give these people some ecredits to use at ebook stores, like a gift card only good for ebooks. If you want to read fine, if not well the credits were there just like the library was. Maybe some ereader/eplayer booths for those who don't have their own and maybe some people you can ask for help, but otherwise it's use your own device. Instead of the academic library, the educational institution will just enroll you in a student database and you get student access to journals, without going to the school library. In all honesty, I don't really see much need for having to gather it all in one physical location anymore.
That you only have fake choices in politics is mostly due to the fucked up US system. And very often you have false choices with your wallet, you get to pick from a number of mega-corporations and they're all equally bad. Too bad for GoDaddy they didn't realize that they run a dime a dozen business that people can switch from with hardly any penalty. But I hardly think it sells me on the idea that the free market would solve everything.
Yes. USC 17506(d):
Fraudulent Removal of Copyright Notice. - Any person who, with fraudulent intent, removes or alters any notice of copyright appearing on a copy of a copyrighted work shall be fined not more than $2,500.
Of course that's on top of any damage claim you can get from actual copyright infringement, but removing any copyright notice is criminal.
How would I now know if decisions are made because of what users want or of what google wants?
Why should it be the way users want? If Red Hat pays people to work on the kernel, they work on what Red Hat want not what "users" in general want. If Google pays Firefox's bills, why wouldn't they be doing what Google wants? Apart from the extremely small minority that's contributed to Firefox, most of their users are simply product like TV viewers. The money made = number of people watching * number of ads, it never makes sense to made of those zero because then the total is obviously also zero. In other words, Only instead of being a means to serve ads, they're a means to serve search requests that serve ads. The only different is that being OSS, you can fork and go your own pay. Or pay them to go your way. But they don't become your pets to commandeer around just because you use the product, OSS or not.
Well copyright is essential to the media companies, not so much the tech companies. Even if the media companies got their wet dream, we'd still need the Internet for Google and YouTube and online banking and Amazon and eBay and Spotify and iTunes and Netflix and whatever else. So SOPA passes and they get to try a little whack-a-mole with domain names, how long until someone discovers I don't know, IP addresses? That Firefox plug-in that routes around it? DNS resolution from a third party DNS server? DNS resolution over TOR?
They aren't really afraid of losing their customers, the only two things they're afraid of is getting the bill to implement some silly control scheme or getting the liability for users they can't possibly stop. That's why you don't see them really throwing their weight behind it. And even if they got rid of TPB, they'd also have to try getting rid of all the file hosting sites. They're at least as large a source of copyrighted material these days as torrents.
For all the rant and rage, internal email + smartphones are practically IM devices if you want, internal delivery has always been quick and painless. External e-mails are another matter, but by volume that's a small part of it.
So you call, and two minutes into the conversation it goes "I need to take a look at that log file..." or any other crunch time/shit hit the fan moment, then what? I leave my phone on 24x7 too, because I expect everyone to have good graces and not call me at 3 AM unless it's a really big emergency. It's a matter of culture, if you have to implement technical measures to stop people from acting like sociopaths you're doing it wrong. If people max the rules, then it won't be a nice place to work no matter what.
Perhaps that was only the case if you had the "download license automatically" checkbox ticked in the preferences?
At least in some version of WMP this was the default. This lead to pages like this. It says so on the page too:
By default, Windows Media Player will attempt to acquire a license when you try to play the secure content if one was not issued to you by the content provider when you downloaded the content.
TRUE inovation will always happen at places where people need something new to fix a problem. It will never really happen at places where people want to make a quick buck with it.
What about "our customers are leaving us for the competition", is that a problem? Of course they try all sorts of other and sometimes quite innovative ways of keeping the customers too, but sometimes corporations do innovate to make a buck ;)
Well that, but at least when it's a <1% system it's about getting out of that Catch 22 where nothing supports Linux because it has no market share and it has no market share because nothing supports it. Mac users are a small minority too, but they get a way different treatment because they're just a bit too big to ignore - and are probably more profitable per user, but that's another story. If only a very small minority can't make something work, it's their problem. If businesses start losing significant amounts of money on it, it's their problem.
Which is also why SQL injection attacks exist, everything you send to the server is data. If you take that data and execute it as code, well duh you've just created an exploit. Never, ever trust anything coming from the user.
Eventually though, NASA and ESA are going to have to send ordinary people up, if they ever intend to do any kind of space based manufacturing, or permanent space based habitats. People aren't going to like jumping through insane hurdles, just to be a space janitor. Best just to hire a regular janitor that meets some core competencies so he doesn't blow himself out an airlock or get water into an instrument panel.
Sorry to disappoint, but I find that unlikely. Here in Norway there's many thousands of people working offshore on oil fields and they all have to follow considerably more stringent health conditions than others. There are requirements for sight, hearing, no cardiovascular diseases, no brain dysfunctions like epilepsy, no psychological conditions, no diabetes, no substance abuse, good lung functions, full mobility, no medication that make rescue difficult like sedatives, no pregnancies over 28 weeks, there are weight limits - granted a rather generous 120 kg - and so on. And people are jumping to work offshore because it pays well. Even if you're just looking for a space janitor you can get one in perfect health at a relatively minor premium. And as long as there's good safety reasons for it, they'll get permission to exclude everyone else. The space industry would have to get really far before you'll be able to make any kind of anti-discrimination argument to let everyone and their dog up there.
Basically any file type that can have a link to a webpage embedded, I believe both .MPG and .WMV are capable of this
No, just WMV. But "intelligent" players like Windows Media Player would "helpfully" realize that a WMV file renamed to MPG, AVI etc. was actually a WMV file and play it as such anyway. There's no reason for a movie format to contain such a link, it's for DRM'd WMV files that are supposed to take you to a page explaining how to buy access to it. Whoever came up with that scheme was stupid and I don't know any other player than WMP that ever supported it, since it was 99.99% used for malware and 0.01% for legitimate uses.
The new user may be years away from doing an apt-get. But they can pick from a list, because they have all been to a Restaurant in the past.
It'll do about as much good as an untranslated Thai menu, people know what food is when they order. Okay, so you've decided that you should try this "Linux" thing. But, wait there's so many distros like OpenSuse, Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, Mint but okay most recommend Ubuntu. But wait, even if you've picked Ubuntu they're still going go give you a choice of GNOME, KDE, XFCE and maybe even some more obscure ones and I dare you to explain that as simply as you could a menu of beef, chicken and fish. Okay so it's not a big thing but too many applications decide to put the user at a crossroads, here I need you to take some apparently important decision before you can even begin using it. If you already know you'd like it to behave differently than the default it should be easy to find a settings or options menu, if you don't then making you take some kind of choice more or less on random isn't actually helping anyone. It's just intimidating to the user, like if you don't know the answers to these questions then maybe you shouldn't really be using this application. Oh, and it's available from GUI package management tools as well, you just have to know you want it....
Also, I'm rather confused as to how VLIW4 can be superior to SIMD for just about any workload - the entire point of the switch was that VLIW4 had dependency limitations that prevented its compute power from being fully utilized at all times, whereas SIMD is closer to full utilization.
BitCoin is one of the few algorithms that didn't run into those limitations. So SIMD is much better for computing in general, but actually a drawback for BitCoin.
The Higgs boson is completely different to gravity and is only needed to explain why fundamental particles e.g. electron has a mass.
I'm not sure I understand how a 115â"130 GeV/c^2 Higgs boson can give mass to a 0.5 MeV/c^2 electron. I understand a scalar field, even if you forget about gravity some particles would be harder to push around than others, they have more mass. Higgs somehow creates this drag because the other particles are swimming in an ocean of Higgs bosons or something like that? I'd understand a quantification of mass, that in reactions mass suddenly appears at specific energies which is so more or less gather is part of this symmetry breaking. But the Higgs seems far bigger like an extremely massive particle, not something that "makes up" part of the electron.
The other part which might be a bit naive, according to Newton gravity is proportional to mass, so if mass is caused by Higgs wouldn't that make gravity dependent on Higgs? If you managed to neutralize the Higgs field, wouldn't you then also neutralize gravity? Or could mass and gravity actually be independent? Every time I ask a question I feel I get at least two more new ones....
Some have it as the first choice, but not all are so single minded as to not offer a choice like Ubuntu.
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop and log in to KDE. All the *buntu variants actually point to the same repositories, you pick one during download but if you want more they're an apt-get away. I'd call it one less confusing step for a new user, how should he know how to answer? Give him the defaults of what he downloaded and trust that power users can use 30 seconds on Google to find out...