Just like our survival instincts, we've forgotten that we, the customer, are in control of the companies. If they don't service us the way we want, we have the choice to go elsewhere. If there is no other option, we have the choice to not use their damned service.
Ah, the capitalist manifesto - almost as far detached from reality as the communist one. Yes, that's what all companies like you to believe even when they got you by the balls. And there's a mutual understanding with your competitors that price wars are bad so we'll all offer the same overpriced, underperforming service and your only real option is to exit the market altogether. No TV, no phone, no Internet... hey, how are you on slashdot at all? I'm pretty sure you're feeding one of those vendors that you rave about to be here. Unless you're on a small regional ISP, in which case they're paying the megacorps instead of you.
If you really believe that we don't need laws against false advertising, antitrust, first sale, price dumping, any of those consumer laws that give us rights. DRM is fine, if the market doesn't want DRM it'll be rejected - you don't own a DVD drive that supports CSS do you? Clearly that means you wanted it and an industry-wide association didn't shove it down your throat. Doesn't matter if you use it or not, you paid for it and they can say the public doesn't care and everyone has a DVD player that supports it. Same goes for any computer with DVI/HDCP or HDMI - which is now most computers bought in the last decade.
Reality is that the "invisible hand" of the market can be trussed up like a pig. Oh, you might be allowed to run around in a small pen to give you an illusion of freedom, but you're not going anywhere. Sometimes the government helps, but often it's more than enough that the government stands completely aside - which is something libertarians will never admit. You're only in control insofar that you could go all Amish on them and start your own self-sufficient agrarian society. As long as you don't want modern medicine or anything, because that's all ruled by megacorps too. But I guess 99.99% of us aren't willing to go there so then we deserve everything we get, right?
Firewire went to silicon heaven because USB was cheaper, smaller (connector-wise and cable-diameter-wise) and fully embraced by Intel.
Firewire had one thing going for it, the stability requirement for capturing DV tapes. Even with that I had to shut down most everything else to avoid framedrops. As soon as memory/HDD based cameras took over, I have no problem transfering 1080p full hd video over USB 2.0 - simply because now the USB controller can say "hey, sorry I dozed for a moment, could you send that again" unlike tape where you'd have to stop, rewind and replay to do that.
I guess you completely missed the part where they were allowed to see SOME time like other projects yet not other time, or where the project was supposed to show up in SOME overviews but not in others, sometimes in an anonymous form, or the costs should be real SOME places but not others. Yes, we had simple access lists and they were completely insufficient because all or nothing was rarely what was requested. And the exceptions broke all the simple rules like you can see all projects in that division, of course we could have access lists for every single one but they'd be micromanaged to death and it still wouldn't solve the above. So your "no problem" is a hopelessly impractical solution that still wouldn't actually work. But I guess that's why I'm paid to fix it after you hit a brick wall. Not that I'm charging $600m or anything, for that I'd build you a system that gives free blowjobs too.
As if the US hasn't got enough lawsuits. The thing is, it's far from always that it's the contractor that's delaying a project. I've met clients where I couldn't have beaten the requirements out of them with a wrench, they just haven't got them. I think the worst case I've ever seen was a workshop, called extra because they needed to "understand the problem better" with a clear agenda, 10 people in the room including pretty much the whole core group - and their responsibility to call in specialists if needed, though I don't see how it would be necessary - and one of them manages to say "We can't make a decision on this" on one of the core points of the agenda. If I had a temper, I'd just called off the workshop there and then but I just sighed and moved on with my agenda adding another point to the endless "no decision reached" list.
Usually, if you want just attendance like time in, time out that's not problem. If you start with tracking what they're working on, resource planning or internal/external billing, you're looking for a world of hurt.
To take one example I got, one company I worked with insisted that sick leave was strictly a matter between the resource manager and that employee, and not for general display. Yet at the same time, they wanted lots of hours worked figures that'd essentially drill down to find the "missing" hours. Project managers were supposed to see what other projects the team was also working on, except if that was sick leave. To "fuzz" the data this had to be mixed with other administrative time so that others couldn't get good statistics on whether they were sick, study day, administrative meetings or whatever. But their immediate manager should of course get to drill down on those. After a lot of back and forth they decided data on an individual basis wasn't needed except in the real T&A system for salary, because we focused on overall project progress and resource planning. Then of course that became silly as project managers realized they had x hours tracked from a department, but not for each person from that department so they didn't know who over/underspent.
Another good example I have is from financials - wouldn't it be nice if you could staff up a project and have that immediately converted to a budget, then just whatever hardware/software/other costs? Also great for checking billing, one hour worked means we'll expect a bill from the consultant on that amount. Except uh-oh, now everyone who can book a consultant one hour and create a budget can see their rates. Things hard negotiated and best kept secret. The solutions to this were many and varied, but they were all hacks to make fudge numbers one place then real numbers other places and don't mix them up to create a complete mess. Oh yes and secret projects were always interesting, they were supposed to show up in total budgets but not be visible other places, I mean just titles like "Buyout of [foo]" was stock sensitive and complete no-no to see. But people still worked on it and needed to track time somewhere and some people sometimes needed to know what project it really was. The whole logic made you want to strangle someone.
Probably a combination of several things. First of all it's probably been a disconnect between the tactical operation of the project (let's approve of budget increase to get enhancements x and y, consulting help to solve problem z and so on) and the strategical operation (should this project be red-flagged and halted/abandoned). You'd be surprised how many organizations really lack that emergency brake and when the train wreck finally happens everybody wonders why it wasn't stopped before.
The second part is that for the most part projects aren't a scandal until they're officially scrapped. That means that in very political organizations you're looking to finish it somehow to back out gracefully. This leads to a high willingness to throw good money after bad, particularly if some of the key decision makers now hold high places in the organization. The only exception to this is when the new boss wants to deliberately throw the old boss' projects under the bus.
And finally since this is turning into criminal investigations and all, they probably sailed under false flag. You can string a client along pretty far if you have absolutely no ethics and make business cases that are utterly false yet plausible. They were probably given a lot of good lies about the system being right around the corner to working and a lot of good excuses for why it'd take just a little more money. At least if the City's project manager was a wimp - and he was either that or corrupt too.
Since the prices are comparable, "one gives me good graphics and the other sucks" isnt a hard choice to make.
The reason people have moaned about Intel's abysmal integrated performance is that it's been the low bar of the market, all those computers that weren't built to game and didn't have a discrete graphics card. Because it turns out a lot of people got a used computer from work or borrowed their dad's work machine or whatnot to game, using the integrated graphics. With the Sandy Bridge graphics Intel raised that low bar quite a bit. Even if you buy a business machine you get that graphics performance for "free" whether you like it or not. That's good for developers who can now rely on you having at least a little bit of GPU power, but it doesn't mean you buy integrated graphics for the graphics.
If you want a lot of CPU power and a lot of GPU power, the APU is the wrong solution. It then puts the two most power hungry chips in your computer on the same die. It is much, much easier to cool 2x100W chips than 1x200W chip so you'll go with discrete cards on the high end. And if you don't want the graphics, you don't want it to add too much to cost. Maybe this hits a market, but the market could just easily split and say either I'm happy with the Intel and it's a better CPU or I'm a gamer and would rather have a flexible discrete card than one inflexible combo. Unless there's some real tangible cost or performance benefits to the APU over equivalent CPU+dGPU.
Performance is one thing, it's not close in features or stability either. The 5850 was released in September 2009, I still can't get HDMI audio, there's no video acceleration, OpenGL is at 2.1 (card supports OpenGL 4.1) and last I checked it was rather easy to hang it. I'm not blaming the guys who work on it because they're few and working as hard as they can, but they're no match for the 100+ developer Catalyst team. It didn't help that in the long years where both ATI and nVidia were closed source the graphics stack really didn't get much love. But the info is there now, all it really needs is the manpower.
Here's my solution using yahoo, they offer 500 aliases for you. Make a new one, sign up with the alias, redirect that to your "legal spam" folder. If you ever want to get rid of a company and its business partners and whoever else got their hands on that email, delete the alias. That is a very final opt-out. I wished I had done that long ago, because it saves you tons of spam. Of course you need to have a normal email as well and if others get that it can be spammed, but that problem would be a lot smaller.
Smarter as in intelligence, no. But people are more Internet-savvy than they used to be. And young people meet the spam barrage before they have a life savings to give to a Nigerian prince. Just like people have gotten quite used to the horseless carriages (read: cars), even though I doubt our IQ is that different from 100 years ago.
Lawyers have in the past decried software legal aids as providing customers with less than the best service possible (thus preserving their positions), but as we see computer chess games surpass even the best human opponents you can well assume a computer could do far more research and connect far more dots than the finest legal mind ever could, in mere seconds.
The same day you can point a computer to wikipedia and have Lt. Cmdr. Data. And no, Watson doesn't come close. Sure you can throw together some keyword software but to actually parse and understand what a legal text really is about, apply it to your case and give you something like a legal argument would take far more strong AI than what's available.
Chess is in many ways ridiculously simple, the positions are finite, the rules absolute. But your legal case is not exactly like any other legal case and good luck trying to map all the rules like "the right to free speech" but it actually means drawings too and it doesn't mean shouting fire in a crowded theater. Without a huge number of abstract concepts beyond what's in the text itself you'll get nowhere.
I've got no belief that throwing people in a hole will set them straight. On the other hand, I'd be pretty scared of a prison system that didn't discourage crime. A legal system where you get convicted but the punishment is a raised finger and "Please don't do that again" won't do much good. Yes, perhaps in some cases you can take away the reason for their crimes like making them kick the drug habit, but far from all criminals are junkies. A lot of them steal simply because they can and you can't cure that by giving them free things.
We did try that with some of the roaming thieves for a while, the result was they acted like legal squatters. They kept stealing from all the neighbors, they trashed their own place and before they left they stole everything that wasn't nailed down. It was like pure consumption, not a care in the world for preserving anything. We just threw them a free party and when they were done they moved on to trash somewhere else. Fines are of course a joke because they have no income and anything they steal won't be used to pay fines.
Largely the crime itself is risk free, because almost anything that can bring that burglar to harm is illegal unless your life is in immediate danger which is interpreted very strictly. As long as he turns and runs you'd better let him run or else you might end up on charges for injuring him. While he's likely to get a minimal penalty for any injury he causes you while trying to flee. My country is pretty much the direct opposite of Texas, they have all the rights even when in the middle of robbing me blind.
The "catch-and-release" here in Norway means that we have people who are convicted of 25+ crimes a year (not 25+ trials, we gather them up) and that's just what they're caught for. The overall solve rate is 43% so probably well over 50 crimes a year. I don't know what is working, but the all too lenient system here also isn't working very well. Each of those crimes have victims, but it doesn't seem stopping more people from becoming victims is a priority at all. Why should I risk being assaulted to give you another chance?
Since there's no telling if you have the same model or even brand of network, this conversation is a bit like "The fruit I ate had a hard shell, I almost cracked a tooth" "Mine didn't, perhaps your fruit was defective?" It's another easy way to blame something else, because how many have spare identical netbooks to rule that out? Sure it could happen, but it's far from the most likely explanation.
Yes. Firefox costs nothing, every platform on which version 4 ran is also supported by 5, Firefox is seldom mission critical software
I think you vastly underestimate the number of companies who use mission critical software via a browser these days, which makes the browser mission critical. Just like a server isn't much use if the app is fine but the OS is broken.
Because it will force companies to re-evaluate their position with Oracle, why Oracle is even relevant in today's market is still a mystery
Because if you need Oracle, you need Oracle. What I do wonder is why so many that don't need Oracle use it, because it's a beast in every way. Even if I went all big and enterprisey I think the costs of running two database systems is lower than trying to be an all-Oracle shop.
Wouldn't LEO be safer because the drag there is much higher, so debris will quickly pass through and fall down to Earth? Unlike GEOish-orbits where I got the impression it'd be circling for a very long time.
I think it's much more likely that they felt they "knew" what he was up to, and were on a fishing expedition to try to get some real evidence. But fishing expeditions are illegal; that's the point.
But it would not be illegal for an undercover officer to follow him around, the police doesn't need probable cause for that. At least I've never heard of the police being charged with stalking and given a restraining order, no matter how long they've been watching as long as they don't step into 4th amendment territory. The question is if this should require a warrant or not. Because the general "let's just hang around / follow him a bit and see what he's up to" is pretty standard police work.
Re:I think I speak for the world at large here.
on
Opera 11.50 Released
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I guess you didn't get the memo, Firefox is copying a different browser now. Opera is a browser that survived despite being first payware then adware while IE and Mozilla was giving it away, it was that good. Sadly they went freeware too late and never caught the wave as Firefox broke the IE monopoly, otherwise they could have been where Chrome is today. The last releases haven't been all that, sure it's still a great browser but it doesn't really pack anything unique anymore. Between Microsoft, Mozilla, Google and Apple I don't think Opera will ever make any serious progress on the desktop. I stayed with it from version 5 to 10 but they lost me to Chrome and I think it's just a core of diehards that keep the marketshare they got.
Actually both for PIN codes, lottery numbers etc. people are very often using birth dates and such. Since a lot of people are born on 10-19th and 20-29th of a month, well.... it doesn't apply to 0 though because people don't think they're born on the 06th. It might look close to Benford's law but really it's not.
Well, variations of that have been tried and it's no miracle cure. Technically the interface functions can still exist, but they no longer function as advertised. And it's one thing if it's simply broken, another if it's unstable or leaking memory due to browser changes. Or just works conditionally, like adblock working until it tries parsing a regex that uses some particular function - with branching that can depend on the content of the web page and the user settings. It might catch some incompatibilities, but far from all.
Yes and no. Releases are fine, as long as they add features in a backwards-compatible matter. This is 4.0, all plugin interfaces are stable for the 4.x series. The thing is that with major version numbers, you can't tell because there's nothing bigger. What's the interface for version 5-6-7 going to be like? They could break *everything*, so no plugin is guaranteed compatible. You have to either force them on and pray, or hope the maintainer is on top of the game every few months. Chrome doesn't care because they don't need to care, It also tends to bring a little responsibility to developers if they have to support their bloopers for a while, then you start making sure what you have is really what you want not just a WIP.
Well, they always have to deal with the fact that different people want to but at different prices. But if they just slowly drop the price they're not losing anything.
First the guy willing to pay $60 buys it @60. Then the reseller would buy it @40. Then the family buys 3 copies @20 - remember it's play once so one copy is no good if each want to play the whole game.
Apart from some slight NPV issues (time is money) they still get every sale they could possibly make without losing any business to second-hand sales, family sharing, flea markets or whatever. It's not perfect pricing in which each customer is gouged to exactly what he is willing to pay, but it's strictly better than a market with second hand sales.
First sales can always be managed through price. What it effectively means is that they get a cut from every sale, as well as getting more sales because people that grew tired of the game or outgrew it (give it to your kid brother in 5 years?) can't pass it on.
If you were going to buy it for $60 and resell it to Gamestop for $20 who'd resell it for $30 then Capcom can simply start the new game price at $40 and get the first sale ($60-$20). Then they can drop it to $30 to get the second sale. They now get $70 in revenue instead of $60 and the profit from both sales. In no possible way is this bad for them.
I think Mozilla has completely lost sight of how much the corporate cleanup they've caused has led to more compliant html and more competent developers all around the world. How many that first saw it at school or at work and tried it at home. How many were trained (don't laugh) to use it at work. By making a bit of effort for the business, you enlist the whole corporate IT world which is far bigger than Mozilla or even Microsoft. Or you say "fuck you" and think you can convince all the home users on your own. Good luck with that now after giving a whole lot of IT professionals a sucker punch.
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Just like our survival instincts, we've forgotten that we, the customer, are in control of the companies. If they don't service us the way we want, we have the choice to go elsewhere. If there is no other option, we have the choice to not use their damned service.
Ah, the capitalist manifesto - almost as far detached from reality as the communist one. Yes, that's what all companies like you to believe even when they got you by the balls. And there's a mutual understanding with your competitors that price wars are bad so we'll all offer the same overpriced, underperforming service and your only real option is to exit the market altogether. No TV, no phone, no Internet... hey, how are you on slashdot at all? I'm pretty sure you're feeding one of those vendors that you rave about to be here. Unless you're on a small regional ISP, in which case they're paying the megacorps instead of you.
If you really believe that we don't need laws against false advertising, antitrust, first sale, price dumping, any of those consumer laws that give us rights. DRM is fine, if the market doesn't want DRM it'll be rejected - you don't own a DVD drive that supports CSS do you? Clearly that means you wanted it and an industry-wide association didn't shove it down your throat. Doesn't matter if you use it or not, you paid for it and they can say the public doesn't care and everyone has a DVD player that supports it. Same goes for any computer with DVI/HDCP or HDMI - which is now most computers bought in the last decade.
Reality is that the "invisible hand" of the market can be trussed up like a pig. Oh, you might be allowed to run around in a small pen to give you an illusion of freedom, but you're not going anywhere. Sometimes the government helps, but often it's more than enough that the government stands completely aside - which is something libertarians will never admit. You're only in control insofar that you could go all Amish on them and start your own self-sufficient agrarian society. As long as you don't want modern medicine or anything, because that's all ruled by megacorps too. But I guess 99.99% of us aren't willing to go there so then we deserve everything we get, right?
Firewire went to silicon heaven because USB was cheaper, smaller (connector-wise and cable-diameter-wise) and fully embraced by Intel.
Firewire had one thing going for it, the stability requirement for capturing DV tapes. Even with that I had to shut down most everything else to avoid framedrops. As soon as memory/HDD based cameras took over, I have no problem transfering 1080p full hd video over USB 2.0 - simply because now the USB controller can say "hey, sorry I dozed for a moment, could you send that again" unlike tape where you'd have to stop, rewind and replay to do that.
I guess you completely missed the part where they were allowed to see SOME time like other projects yet not other time, or where the project was supposed to show up in SOME overviews but not in others, sometimes in an anonymous form, or the costs should be real SOME places but not others. Yes, we had simple access lists and they were completely insufficient because all or nothing was rarely what was requested. And the exceptions broke all the simple rules like you can see all projects in that division, of course we could have access lists for every single one but they'd be micromanaged to death and it still wouldn't solve the above. So your "no problem" is a hopelessly impractical solution that still wouldn't actually work. But I guess that's why I'm paid to fix it after you hit a brick wall. Not that I'm charging $600m or anything, for that I'd build you a system that gives free blowjobs too.
First you get it into US law, then you convince the rest of the world to "harmonize" their laws. Almost a SOP for megacorps.
As if the US hasn't got enough lawsuits. The thing is, it's far from always that it's the contractor that's delaying a project. I've met clients where I couldn't have beaten the requirements out of them with a wrench, they just haven't got them. I think the worst case I've ever seen was a workshop, called extra because they needed to "understand the problem better" with a clear agenda, 10 people in the room including pretty much the whole core group - and their responsibility to call in specialists if needed, though I don't see how it would be necessary - and one of them manages to say "We can't make a decision on this" on one of the core points of the agenda. If I had a temper, I'd just called off the workshop there and then but I just sighed and moved on with my agenda adding another point to the endless "no decision reached" list.
Usually, if you want just attendance like time in, time out that's not problem. If you start with tracking what they're working on, resource planning or internal/external billing, you're looking for a world of hurt.
To take one example I got, one company I worked with insisted that sick leave was strictly a matter between the resource manager and that employee, and not for general display. Yet at the same time, they wanted lots of hours worked figures that'd essentially drill down to find the "missing" hours. Project managers were supposed to see what other projects the team was also working on, except if that was sick leave. To "fuzz" the data this had to be mixed with other administrative time so that others couldn't get good statistics on whether they were sick, study day, administrative meetings or whatever. But their immediate manager should of course get to drill down on those. After a lot of back and forth they decided data on an individual basis wasn't needed except in the real T&A system for salary, because we focused on overall project progress and resource planning. Then of course that became silly as project managers realized they had x hours tracked from a department, but not for each person from that department so they didn't know who over/underspent.
Another good example I have is from financials - wouldn't it be nice if you could staff up a project and have that immediately converted to a budget, then just whatever hardware/software/other costs? Also great for checking billing, one hour worked means we'll expect a bill from the consultant on that amount. Except uh-oh, now everyone who can book a consultant one hour and create a budget can see their rates. Things hard negotiated and best kept secret. The solutions to this were many and varied, but they were all hacks to make fudge numbers one place then real numbers other places and don't mix them up to create a complete mess. Oh yes and secret projects were always interesting, they were supposed to show up in total budgets but not be visible other places, I mean just titles like "Buyout of [foo]" was stock sensitive and complete no-no to see. But people still worked on it and needed to track time somewhere and some people sometimes needed to know what project it really was. The whole logic made you want to strangle someone.
Probably a combination of several things. First of all it's probably been a disconnect between the tactical operation of the project (let's approve of budget increase to get enhancements x and y, consulting help to solve problem z and so on) and the strategical operation (should this project be red-flagged and halted/abandoned). You'd be surprised how many organizations really lack that emergency brake and when the train wreck finally happens everybody wonders why it wasn't stopped before.
The second part is that for the most part projects aren't a scandal until they're officially scrapped. That means that in very political organizations you're looking to finish it somehow to back out gracefully. This leads to a high willingness to throw good money after bad, particularly if some of the key decision makers now hold high places in the organization. The only exception to this is when the new boss wants to deliberately throw the old boss' projects under the bus.
And finally since this is turning into criminal investigations and all, they probably sailed under false flag. You can string a client along pretty far if you have absolutely no ethics and make business cases that are utterly false yet plausible. They were probably given a lot of good lies about the system being right around the corner to working and a lot of good excuses for why it'd take just a little more money. At least if the City's project manager was a wimp - and he was either that or corrupt too.
Since the prices are comparable, "one gives me good graphics and the other sucks" isnt a hard choice to make.
The reason people have moaned about Intel's abysmal integrated performance is that it's been the low bar of the market, all those computers that weren't built to game and didn't have a discrete graphics card. Because it turns out a lot of people got a used computer from work or borrowed their dad's work machine or whatnot to game, using the integrated graphics. With the Sandy Bridge graphics Intel raised that low bar quite a bit. Even if you buy a business machine you get that graphics performance for "free" whether you like it or not. That's good for developers who can now rely on you having at least a little bit of GPU power, but it doesn't mean you buy integrated graphics for the graphics.
If you want a lot of CPU power and a lot of GPU power, the APU is the wrong solution. It then puts the two most power hungry chips in your computer on the same die. It is much, much easier to cool 2x100W chips than 1x200W chip so you'll go with discrete cards on the high end. And if you don't want the graphics, you don't want it to add too much to cost. Maybe this hits a market, but the market could just easily split and say either I'm happy with the Intel and it's a better CPU or I'm a gamer and would rather have a flexible discrete card than one inflexible combo. Unless there's some real tangible cost or performance benefits to the APU over equivalent CPU+dGPU.
Performance is one thing, it's not close in features or stability either. The 5850 was released in September 2009, I still can't get HDMI audio, there's no video acceleration, OpenGL is at 2.1 (card supports OpenGL 4.1) and last I checked it was rather easy to hang it. I'm not blaming the guys who work on it because they're few and working as hard as they can, but they're no match for the 100+ developer Catalyst team. It didn't help that in the long years where both ATI and nVidia were closed source the graphics stack really didn't get much love. But the info is there now, all it really needs is the manpower.
Here's my solution using yahoo, they offer 500 aliases for you. Make a new one, sign up with the alias, redirect that to your "legal spam" folder. If you ever want to get rid of a company and its business partners and whoever else got their hands on that email, delete the alias. That is a very final opt-out. I wished I had done that long ago, because it saves you tons of spam. Of course you need to have a normal email as well and if others get that it can be spammed, but that problem would be a lot smaller.
Smarter as in intelligence, no. But people are more Internet-savvy than they used to be. And young people meet the spam barrage before they have a life savings to give to a Nigerian prince. Just like people have gotten quite used to the horseless carriages (read: cars), even though I doubt our IQ is that different from 100 years ago.
Lawyers have in the past decried software legal aids as providing customers with less than the best service possible (thus preserving their positions), but as we see computer chess games surpass even the best human opponents you can well assume a computer could do far more research and connect far more dots than the finest legal mind ever could, in mere seconds.
The same day you can point a computer to wikipedia and have Lt. Cmdr. Data. And no, Watson doesn't come close. Sure you can throw together some keyword software but to actually parse and understand what a legal text really is about, apply it to your case and give you something like a legal argument would take far more strong AI than what's available.
Chess is in many ways ridiculously simple, the positions are finite, the rules absolute. But your legal case is not exactly like any other legal case and good luck trying to map all the rules like "the right to free speech" but it actually means drawings too and it doesn't mean shouting fire in a crowded theater. Without a huge number of abstract concepts beyond what's in the text itself you'll get nowhere.
I've got no belief that throwing people in a hole will set them straight. On the other hand, I'd be pretty scared of a prison system that didn't discourage crime. A legal system where you get convicted but the punishment is a raised finger and "Please don't do that again" won't do much good. Yes, perhaps in some cases you can take away the reason for their crimes like making them kick the drug habit, but far from all criminals are junkies. A lot of them steal simply because they can and you can't cure that by giving them free things.
We did try that with some of the roaming thieves for a while, the result was they acted like legal squatters. They kept stealing from all the neighbors, they trashed their own place and before they left they stole everything that wasn't nailed down. It was like pure consumption, not a care in the world for preserving anything. We just threw them a free party and when they were done they moved on to trash somewhere else. Fines are of course a joke because they have no income and anything they steal won't be used to pay fines.
Largely the crime itself is risk free, because almost anything that can bring that burglar to harm is illegal unless your life is in immediate danger which is interpreted very strictly. As long as he turns and runs you'd better let him run or else you might end up on charges for injuring him. While he's likely to get a minimal penalty for any injury he causes you while trying to flee. My country is pretty much the direct opposite of Texas, they have all the rights even when in the middle of robbing me blind.
The "catch-and-release" here in Norway means that we have people who are convicted of 25+ crimes a year (not 25+ trials, we gather them up) and that's just what they're caught for. The overall solve rate is 43% so probably well over 50 crimes a year. I don't know what is working, but the all too lenient system here also isn't working very well. Each of those crimes have victims, but it doesn't seem stopping more people from becoming victims is a priority at all. Why should I risk being assaulted to give you another chance?
Since there's no telling if you have the same model or even brand of network, this conversation is a bit like "The fruit I ate had a hard shell, I almost cracked a tooth" "Mine didn't, perhaps your fruit was defective?" It's another easy way to blame something else, because how many have spare identical netbooks to rule that out? Sure it could happen, but it's far from the most likely explanation.
Yes. Firefox costs nothing, every platform on which version 4 ran is also supported by 5, Firefox is seldom mission critical software
I think you vastly underestimate the number of companies who use mission critical software via a browser these days, which makes the browser mission critical. Just like a server isn't much use if the app is fine but the OS is broken.
Because it will force companies to re-evaluate their position with Oracle, why Oracle is even relevant in today's market is still a mystery
Because if you need Oracle, you need Oracle. What I do wonder is why so many that don't need Oracle use it, because it's a beast in every way. Even if I went all big and enterprisey I think the costs of running two database systems is lower than trying to be an all-Oracle shop.
Wouldn't LEO be safer because the drag there is much higher, so debris will quickly pass through and fall down to Earth? Unlike GEOish-orbits where I got the impression it'd be circling for a very long time.
I think it's much more likely that they felt they "knew" what he was up to, and were on a fishing expedition to try to get some real evidence. But fishing expeditions are illegal; that's the point.
But it would not be illegal for an undercover officer to follow him around, the police doesn't need probable cause for that. At least I've never heard of the police being charged with stalking and given a restraining order, no matter how long they've been watching as long as they don't step into 4th amendment territory. The question is if this should require a warrant or not. Because the general "let's just hang around / follow him a bit and see what he's up to" is pretty standard police work.
I guess you didn't get the memo, Firefox is copying a different browser now. Opera is a browser that survived despite being first payware then adware while IE and Mozilla was giving it away, it was that good. Sadly they went freeware too late and never caught the wave as Firefox broke the IE monopoly, otherwise they could have been where Chrome is today. The last releases haven't been all that, sure it's still a great browser but it doesn't really pack anything unique anymore. Between Microsoft, Mozilla, Google and Apple I don't think Opera will ever make any serious progress on the desktop. I stayed with it from version 5 to 10 but they lost me to Chrome and I think it's just a core of diehards that keep the marketshare they got.
Actually both for PIN codes, lottery numbers etc. people are very often using birth dates and such. Since a lot of people are born on 10-19th and 20-29th of a month, well.... it doesn't apply to 0 though because people don't think they're born on the 06th. It might look close to Benford's law but really it's not.
Well, variations of that have been tried and it's no miracle cure. Technically the interface functions can still exist, but they no longer function as advertised. And it's one thing if it's simply broken, another if it's unstable or leaking memory due to browser changes. Or just works conditionally, like adblock working until it tries parsing a regex that uses some particular function - with branching that can depend on the content of the web page and the user settings. It might catch some incompatibilities, but far from all.
Yes and no. Releases are fine, as long as they add features in a backwards-compatible matter. This is 4.0, all plugin interfaces are stable for the 4.x series. The thing is that with major version numbers, you can't tell because there's nothing bigger. What's the interface for version 5-6-7 going to be like? They could break *everything*, so no plugin is guaranteed compatible. You have to either force them on and pray, or hope the maintainer is on top of the game every few months. Chrome doesn't care because they don't need to care, It also tends to bring a little responsibility to developers if they have to support their bloopers for a while, then you start making sure what you have is really what you want not just a WIP.
Well, they always have to deal with the fact that different people want to but at different prices. But if they just slowly drop the price they're not losing anything.
First the guy willing to pay $60 buys it @60.
Then the reseller would buy it @40.
Then the family buys 3 copies @20 - remember it's play once so one copy is no good if each want to play the whole game.
Apart from some slight NPV issues (time is money) they still get every sale they could possibly make without losing any business to second-hand sales, family sharing, flea markets or whatever. It's not perfect pricing in which each customer is gouged to exactly what he is willing to pay, but it's strictly better than a market with second hand sales.
First sales can always be managed through price. What it effectively means is that they get a cut from every sale, as well as getting more sales because people that grew tired of the game or outgrew it (give it to your kid brother in 5 years?) can't pass it on.
If you were going to buy it for $60 and resell it to Gamestop for $20 who'd resell it for $30 then Capcom can simply start the new game price at $40 and get the first sale ($60-$20). Then they can drop it to $30 to get the second sale. They now get $70 in revenue instead of $60 and the profit from both sales. In no possible way is this bad for them.
I think Mozilla has completely lost sight of how much the corporate cleanup they've caused has led to more compliant html and more competent developers all around the world. How many that first saw it at school or at work and tried it at home. How many were trained (don't laugh) to use it at work. By making a bit of effort for the business, you enlist the whole corporate IT world which is far bigger than Mozilla or even Microsoft. Or you say "fuck you" and think you can convince all the home users on your own. Good luck with that now after giving a whole lot of IT professionals a sucker punch.