= about 5 times as difficult. The point is that people don't use combinations like ApPLe23, capitalizing one letter because you must isn't exactly a huge gain. Particularly since most people will capitalize the first, since it's easiest. I do stick to alphanumeric passwords though, everything else always generate so much crap with character sets, keyboard layout etc.
What makes star-sellers star-sellers are a completely different discussion but I've listen and talked to sellers with decades of experience - I can assure you that "lying" has nothing to do with it. If lying where the key to selling I can assure you that this is exactly what they would teach sales people...
No, it's not the lying bit that makes them star sellers, but it was more in response to:
A good sales person wouldn't risk loosing credibility by withholding critical information or lying.
Critical information, perhaps not. But I've seen enough customers come out of meetings with very highly regarded salesmen thinking they're getting a Rolls Royce to the price of a Toyota - and they just touched on parts and maintenance because they were busy looking at the electric mirror adjustment. So at the very least a haphazard relation to the truth and a high tendency to make the customer forget critical questions and from getting close enough to see the duct tape and string. Don't get me wrong, it's an impressive performance worthy of a stage but I've been standing behind the cardboard often enough to know it's just that.
A good sales person wouldn't risk loosing credibility by withholding critical information or lying. This is not what sales people do. You need to understand that making a deal is not about presenting the features and non-features of your product/service and waiting for him to say "yes" or "no". Decision making is much, much more complex than that, especially in large deals.
Maybe your "software entrepreneur" business is so small it doesn't happen to you, but every large company I've seen the sales organization is about two things, finding as many things the customer could possibly want and then pushing whatever product the company has in that area. If they need an invoicing system, by gods you'll sell them your invoicing system. In larger systems even the consultants have trouble keeping up with all the modules and what they do, the sales people get a few powerpoint presentations, a short demo and then it's out to sell. If I had a dollar for every time I heard a salesman promise a feature I know he's got no clue whether is possible or not I'd be a millionaire. They just know hey it's an invoicing system, it probably all has the features an invoicing system should have so sure it can do that. Eventually a list of requirements will show up that'll get end up for the engineers to answer, but every level of creativity is used to say that yes we sorta somewhat can do this so we'll say yes.
At no point during any sales meeting I've been do have they taken up any challenge or difficulty we might encounter, except the general wishy-washy things about needing enough time from the right resources, quick decisions and so on. It's all about pushing the product's strengths and the opportunities you'll get, there's a lot of ground that's quickly covered which we know are mine fields, again maybe not lying but certainly dodging the topic. It's all flowers and sunshine until the contract is inked. That's why after almost sale I've seen the first meeting be a "down to earth" meeting, where we go through exactly how little is in scope compared to all the possibilities we've talked about. Where we cautiously start pointing out what are the "complex" parts of the project, meaning the parts we know the solution is iffy and customers protest. When we start pointing out choices with pros and cons. When we point out the limitations of the scope, which has typically always been scaled down for cost.
If shit really hits the fan down the line, it's always going to those who made it or set it up. I've only once seen a sales person get blamed for a feature that didn't exist at all, where we couldn't even make the slightest hint of delivering on the promises and those promises were made in writing and not communicated in the handover. It's everybody else that has so in some way try to clean up the mess, and with a lot of creative thinking we most of the time find a solution. Or we'll find a way to say that yes we do that, we don't do it the way you want it though but you didn't specify. None of that is due to the sales person though, he's just sold them the system and is just relying on everyone else it the later parts of the delivery chain to work it out. And every salesman I've heard thinks that he made the sales, if everyone "back there" can't deliver they are the problem not him. And star sellers still lie, they just make lies that it's very hard to catch.
Yet, generally, the societies that offer the fewest social services to their citizenry are often the ones with the highest corruption, while social democratic governments in Europe seem to have a lot less of this kind of thing.
There's no real meaningful correlation here, except that if you don't provide a service at all it obviously can't be corrupt. The Soviet Union was almost all government and massively corrupt. Transparency, accountability, clear rules and standards, functioning watchdogs both inside and outside the government and many other factors come to play. The difference is that with public services the public can demand oversight, while private companies generally don't talk about their internal business practices and certainly not take directions.
Well, you put the emphasis on JOBS yourself. Working hours only matter if you have work and the governments are going to have huge problems getting their budgets back in balance without cutting in public healthcare. Portugal, Ireland and Greece would all be bankrupt by now if not for the EU and the emergency loans are now putting the whole EU on the line as collateral. It's a make-or-break strategy, either they all rebound or it'll all come crashing down. The EU is not "too big to fail", the 1929 crash shows no market is that big. Right now I'd like to see in a few years forward in my crystal ball before I say Europe is going to do better than the US.
That said, I don't see how you could do much worse in healthcare than the US for the same amount of money. And they have a cultural obesity problem, that's sure to affect the life span, but that's a different discussion.
On the really broad lines my impression is that the US leaves it to the "invisible hand" of the market to fix everything. In most of Europe we'll employ any regulation we like as long as we treat all competitors equally. The free market is in the sandbox with the rules and limitations we choose, if say we want to clearly separate news from ads we just make a rule saying that you must, even if the "free market" would like to offer you a slush taking great kickbacks on their promotion. Rather than trust a market not to lie about "unlimited" Internet we tell them to either deliver or face sanctions. If we don't like your warranties we'll just give stronger protection in law.
Also, contrast the life of the average Frenchman to ours. They live longer, have more free time, have medical and JOBS.
Not so sure about jobs, French unemploment rate is at 9.7% which is about average for the Euro zone with 9.4% (pdf). Europe as a whole is just as screwed as the US, some countries like Germany are doing okay (6.1%) while others like Spain (20.7%) are completely screwed.
Anyway, I've found unemployment rates to lie quite a lot. Look at the US data, sure, compared to last year the unemployment rate is down from 9.6% to 9.1% but the participation rate is also down from 64.9% to 64.2%. So in reality less people work today (58.4%) compared to a year ago (58.7%), even though unemployment has "dropped". Of course there can be slight demographic changes too but the majority of those are people that have completely dropped out of the job market. The real number of people who'd like to work is probably a lot higher.
It might cost them some time, and possibly some money, but it wouldn't be at all impossible to rent some time on EC2 or a botnet to effectively create their own specialized rainbow table for the job.
If you can't reuse the table, it's not a rainbow table. Then it's simply a brute force attack.
The question is really what estimate you want, "best guess" or "worst case". If you say best guess half the missions would run shorter and half the missions would run longer, the problem is half would be considered a "failure" even if they did new and wonderful science. You'll never have the statistical basis to say if any probability is right, if scientists say this rover has a 80% chance of surviving 5 years we don't know if it's actually 20% or 2% or it's completely doomed, we'll never send enough copies to say.
That's why they want deliverables, things this rover will with almost certain probability deliver. The worst case estimate. Think about your computer, it might work for many, many years without problems. Would you like to guarantee that it'll work if we spend $100+ million dollars sending it to Mars? Hell no, because some of these fail. So you go over and triple check everything and finally promise that yes, this setup has been vetted over and over and it'll run 3 months without fail. If that's the 99% probability, it's no surprise the 50% probability is several years out there.
It does now, but slashdot seems really, really mod point starved as of late. Some discussions there looks like there's almost no one to mod, and when they do get mod points it's 5 now compared to 15 before.
No. You do realize most encryption algorithms are published for all to see, right? Unless Skype is doing something very stupid in the key exchange, it's just as secure as before.
Of course, had the competition stood still the YotLD would have come and gone. Around 2000 and Windows ME I thought it was close. Around 2007 and Vista I thought it was close again. Then Windows XP (playskool variant of win2k, but a consumer OS) and Windows 7 made some big leaps ahead again. So it never caught up, but it's still chasing...
They'll arrest me when they decide it's my time. (...) Meanwhile, I can do whatever I want.
This is not a lottery, that time is whenever you do something they don't want you to do. I don't mean what's illegal, for the most part they don't care unless it threatens them. In fact, quite probably things that are legal like say criticize the system, complain about injustice or demand more civil rights. Oppressive governments all love people who know to keep their head low and don't speak up, as long as you're a loyal pawn they hardly care what you do to other pawns. And don't piss off anyone with more power than you, or you will find your life on the shitlist. As long as you're a good carpet to step on, sure you can have all the freedom you want to crawl around.
In the USA, between the lawyers, and HMOs and AMA, we have a defacto socialized system.
I built a car with square wheels, it's completely horrible so horse and buggy is much better.
A socialized system is based on the idea that people get treatment according to medical need, not their ability to pay for it. Doctors are not financially linked to the treatments they prescribe, so they have no incentive to do excessive tests or consultations nor to turn away poor patients in need, they get no kickbacks from references to specialists and so on. The focus is on effective allocation and use of resources, not what brings in the highest margins. For example there are typically waiting lists for surgery and you only want the patients there who need it, in the order they need it the most. Cost control is often benchmarking and per-patient refunds, that your hospital will deliver as effective as other hospitals. and you benchmark yourself against other countries. The bill is paid directly by the government from taxes, typically hospitals are public and they only hire private companies to deliver systems and services, not manage the hospital. That is, they may take bids for an x-ray system capable of taking 1000 x-rays/day, but the private company doesn't have any say in those gets x-rayed. The government may send patients to private clinics, but the government pays equally regardless of who the patient is and there will be a good medical reason for it.
What part of this does it any way resemble the US system? That you're all getting ripped off by a for-profit oligopoly has nothing to do with socialism at all. It's like trying to make the worst example in the world to prove it can't work. The US has picked the worst of both worlds.
Personally where I think they lost it is the "self-rescue" time travel when he was locked in the box. The whole part about not crossing your own timestream was what kept the series sane from the obvious solution - just go back in time and warn/stop/do something before it becomes a problem. Or indeed a future doctor can now show up and save the current one from anything. That was a limit to his power, when he became linked to the events he had to stay and fight, he couldn't just run back to the TARDIS and fix everything. Now he's just jumping around as he pleases, like in the Christmas special where he's rewriting the man's memories while he's standing there. Why is not that the answer to every villain now, go back in time and stop them from becoming villains? Now they have to hide his omnipotence behind absurdity, like it's all some kind of game to him. They need to dial back that mania a notch or two.
No, this is why they signed a deal with the devil. Everybody has been taking a crack at Nokia lately and they haven't been able to deal a single decent blow in return, iPhone and Android have been eating the aging Symbian for lunch and the Maemo/Meego replacements haven't been ready. They could of course become the latecomer to Android, but so many companies now make good Android phones they'd be sure to disappoint. So they went to bed with Microsoft, the market already then realized it was a mark of desperation sinking their stock price. Now we learn it's actually worse. I figure the layoffs are about to begin and who do you think that will be, the Microsoft Phone developers or the Qt developers?
But things aren't going to go back to the way things were. Qt is LGPL'd, they'd have an extremely hard time going back to a dual GPL/commercial license which is what funded Qt before Nokia bought them. Is "the community" going to pick that up with just as many full time developers to replace them? And with my experience with Qt (excellent) vs KDE (very mixed), do you want KDE teams taking over? And isn't their developer resources spread pretty thin as it is?
Face it, Nokia is going tight with Microsoft. I don't see how they could possibly want hold on to Qt as a sideshow to that, it's going to get sold out somehow or die a slow death starved of resources and priority. That they're keeping all the wheels turning right now is to try to make an exit on their $153 million investment, if they flat out halted everything the value would quickly drop to near zero. I just can't see it in their long term strategy, one way or another they'll go different ways.
Well, most of it is guesswork but it's becoming less and less guesswork. Take for example the number of planets. 20 years ago we didn't have a single confirmed extrasolar planet, now we're gathering statistics on them. True, we don't know what "habitable" is but we're approaching it from both angles:
1) We're trying to determine just how "earth-like" a planet is - this is a never ending story of orbit, mass, composition, satellites and whatnot getting closer and closer 2) We're trying to determine just how flexible life is looking at our extremophiles, how different can a planet be from earth and still be habitable.
Maybe there's life that's weirder than we can imagine, but these are just boundaries and if they cross, if we find planets that are so earth-like the life we *do* know could exist on them that would be a huge step. We are working on abiogenesis, with enough time we may discover exactly what conditions are necessary for life to begin, that is how tight the needle eye is. I doubt we could ever properly simulate life as such, but if we could show that primitive life would move towards more modern single-celled life I think the essence of evolution into more advanced life would follow.
By far the hardest to ever say if intelligent life like humans would ever evolve - I mean most species on earth do well and thrive without being that intelligent and have done for millions of years. Humanity almost went extinct 1.2 million years ago, we're rather crappy animals without tools, not being particularly strong or fast, no hide, no fur, no claws or teeth to scare anyone and our newborn defenseless. It takes a lot of energy to run our big brains, our evolutionary success was far from certain - it just seems so in retrospect as the tools have so far greater potential than even the toughest animal.
The problem is not keeping up with people online, it's that you never really find the time to spend with them. I particularly noticed it when I started studying, I had my "old friends" and my "study friends" which were completely disjoint social circles. Friday and saturday night there was different things going on, I could either be here or there. Take a thing as a birthday party, most people have it on saturday and there's only 52-53 of them each year, with 200 friends there's likely to be 4 a week. Or cabin trips or any other for of social gathering. You just can't keep a real social contact with that many people.
When the online content exist only to reduce a sale into a non-transferable personal license, don't expect consumers to be happy about it. Software licenses for single player games have all the essential characteristics of a sale - a one-time payment for a one-time delivery, except you don't get any of the rights and benefits of a sale.
Personally I love ordering from amazon.co.uk to Norway. Since it's just below the 200 NOK import duty limit and amazon gives me free shipping, I got the DVD version for about 22.86 euro, or less than half than on Steam's 49.99 euro. Steam is silly expensive, they just got people hooked.
Been DRM-free from day one on gog.com. So no big surprise there, also the idea that you need DRM to protect it before release is not meaningful. Encrypt the whole thing, release a universal one-key-to-decrypt-them-all on release day.
Why would it be all out on all vocational or all for fun? You'd think most people on slashdot would manage to solve this simple optimization problem. There's a life at work and a life outside work, plot them on a chart with those as the X and Y axis, what you think about the work and what you think about the leisure time with that job and that pay. Make some indifference curves describing how you'd balance work and pay. If you find a job with that you both like well and pays well then there's no doubt. It mostly depends on how much value you put on money for your leisure time, if your idea of fun is to go camping in the wilds at ~0$ then you don't need it, if your idea of fun is champagne and bling you'd take the high paying one to feed your habits.
Personally my impression is that there are good jobs and bad jobs in every line of work. I can't speak for anyone but myself but I don't do what I love. I do something I'm good at, that pays well, at a friendly employer. It was definitively mostly a pragmatist choice, a "good enough" work that lets me have have substantial financial muscle to pursue other things. I wouldn't do anything I hate or that'd eat 60+ hours of my week for a living, I also wouldn't do work I love and eat Ramen noodles and live in beat up closet of an apartment. The key is trying to live a good life 24 hours a day, not to have one part of your life that sucks and one that doesn't.
Well, under the current development model "2.6" is essentially static, It's like OS X always remaining OS X rather than move to OS XI, OS XII, OS XIII etc. as there's absolutely no work on a "2.7" branch and probably never will be.
The 2.6.x changes are far bigger than a 0.0.1 change should be, I mean it's the main development release. Making them 0.1 changes is more than reasonable. The stabilization team will get to move up from 4th to 3rd digit so 3.0.3 rather than 2.6.40.3. Simpler, shorter all around.
I thought the Linux community wasn't shy of just minor, incremental updates. If it ain't broke don't fix it, don't rock the boat etc. But I guess the marketing mentality somehow, somewhere, has taken over./looks at Gnome 3.0
Also are you arguing that Gnome 3 isn't a radical enough departure breaking enough eggs to warrant it's version number? Sounds to me like most people complain it's too different from Gnome 2.x. In this case, you seem to argue Linux 3.0 will be too similar to Linux 2.x. Is there a way to win here?
Slashdot Mirror
Apple23
aPple23
apPle23
appLe23
applE23
= about 5 times as difficult. The point is that people don't use combinations like ApPLe23, capitalizing one letter because you must isn't exactly a huge gain. Particularly since most people will capitalize the first, since it's easiest. I do stick to alphanumeric passwords though, everything else always generate so much crap with character sets, keyboard layout etc.
What makes star-sellers star-sellers are a completely different discussion but I've listen and talked to sellers with decades of experience - I can assure you that "lying" has nothing to do with it. If lying where the key to selling I can assure you that this is exactly what they would teach sales people...
No, it's not the lying bit that makes them star sellers, but it was more in response to:
A good sales person wouldn't risk loosing credibility by withholding critical information or lying.
Critical information, perhaps not. But I've seen enough customers come out of meetings with very highly regarded salesmen thinking they're getting a Rolls Royce to the price of a Toyota - and they just touched on parts and maintenance because they were busy looking at the electric mirror adjustment. So at the very least a haphazard relation to the truth and a high tendency to make the customer forget critical questions and from getting close enough to see the duct tape and string. Don't get me wrong, it's an impressive performance worthy of a stage but I've been standing behind the cardboard often enough to know it's just that.
A good sales person wouldn't risk loosing credibility by withholding critical information or lying. This is not what sales people do. You need to understand that making a deal is not about presenting the features and non-features of your product/service and waiting for him to say "yes" or "no". Decision making is much, much more complex than that, especially in large deals.
Maybe your "software entrepreneur" business is so small it doesn't happen to you, but every large company I've seen the sales organization is about two things, finding as many things the customer could possibly want and then pushing whatever product the company has in that area. If they need an invoicing system, by gods you'll sell them your invoicing system. In larger systems even the consultants have trouble keeping up with all the modules and what they do, the sales people get a few powerpoint presentations, a short demo and then it's out to sell. If I had a dollar for every time I heard a salesman promise a feature I know he's got no clue whether is possible or not I'd be a millionaire. They just know hey it's an invoicing system, it probably all has the features an invoicing system should have so sure it can do that. Eventually a list of requirements will show up that'll get end up for the engineers to answer, but every level of creativity is used to say that yes we sorta somewhat can do this so we'll say yes.
At no point during any sales meeting I've been do have they taken up any challenge or difficulty we might encounter, except the general wishy-washy things about needing enough time from the right resources, quick decisions and so on. It's all about pushing the product's strengths and the opportunities you'll get, there's a lot of ground that's quickly covered which we know are mine fields, again maybe not lying but certainly dodging the topic. It's all flowers and sunshine until the contract is inked. That's why after almost sale I've seen the first meeting be a "down to earth" meeting, where we go through exactly how little is in scope compared to all the possibilities we've talked about. Where we cautiously start pointing out what are the "complex" parts of the project, meaning the parts we know the solution is iffy and customers protest. When we start pointing out choices with pros and cons. When we point out the limitations of the scope, which has typically always been scaled down for cost.
If shit really hits the fan down the line, it's always going to those who made it or set it up. I've only once seen a sales person get blamed for a feature that didn't exist at all, where we couldn't even make the slightest hint of delivering on the promises and those promises were made in writing and not communicated in the handover. It's everybody else that has so in some way try to clean up the mess, and with a lot of creative thinking we most of the time find a solution. Or we'll find a way to say that yes we do that, we don't do it the way you want it though but you didn't specify. None of that is due to the sales person though, he's just sold them the system and is just relying on everyone else it the later parts of the delivery chain to work it out. And every salesman I've heard thinks that he made the sales, if everyone "back there" can't deliver they are the problem not him. And star sellers still lie, they just make lies that it's very hard to catch.
Yet, generally, the societies that offer the fewest social services to their citizenry are often the ones with the highest corruption, while social democratic governments in Europe seem to have a lot less of this kind of thing.
There's no real meaningful correlation here, except that if you don't provide a service at all it obviously can't be corrupt. The Soviet Union was almost all government and massively corrupt. Transparency, accountability, clear rules and standards, functioning watchdogs both inside and outside the government and many other factors come to play. The difference is that with public services the public can demand oversight, while private companies generally don't talk about their internal business practices and certainly not take directions.
Well, you put the emphasis on JOBS yourself. Working hours only matter if you have work and the governments are going to have huge problems getting their budgets back in balance without cutting in public healthcare. Portugal, Ireland and Greece would all be bankrupt by now if not for the EU and the emergency loans are now putting the whole EU on the line as collateral. It's a make-or-break strategy, either they all rebound or it'll all come crashing down. The EU is not "too big to fail", the 1929 crash shows no market is that big. Right now I'd like to see in a few years forward in my crystal ball before I say Europe is going to do better than the US.
That said, I don't see how you could do much worse in healthcare than the US for the same amount of money. And they have a cultural obesity problem, that's sure to affect the life span, but that's a different discussion.
On the really broad lines my impression is that the US leaves it to the "invisible hand" of the market to fix everything. In most of Europe we'll employ any regulation we like as long as we treat all competitors equally. The free market is in the sandbox with the rules and limitations we choose, if say we want to clearly separate news from ads we just make a rule saying that you must, even if the "free market" would like to offer you a slush taking great kickbacks on their promotion. Rather than trust a market not to lie about "unlimited" Internet we tell them to either deliver or face sanctions. If we don't like your warranties we'll just give stronger protection in law.
Also, contrast the life of the average Frenchman to ours. They live longer, have more free time, have medical and JOBS.
Not so sure about jobs, French unemploment rate is at 9.7% which is about average for the Euro zone with 9.4% (pdf). Europe as a whole is just as screwed as the US, some countries like Germany are doing okay (6.1%) while others like Spain (20.7%) are completely screwed.
Anyway, I've found unemployment rates to lie quite a lot. Look at the US data, sure, compared to last year the unemployment rate is down from 9.6% to 9.1% but the participation rate is also down from 64.9% to 64.2%. So in reality less people work today (58.4%) compared to a year ago (58.7%), even though unemployment has "dropped". Of course there can be slight demographic changes too but the majority of those are people that have completely dropped out of the job market. The real number of people who'd like to work is probably a lot higher.
It might cost them some time, and possibly some money, but it wouldn't be at all impossible to rent some time on EC2 or a botnet to effectively create their own specialized rainbow table for the job.
If you can't reuse the table, it's not a rainbow table. Then it's simply a brute force attack.
The question is really what estimate you want, "best guess" or "worst case". If you say best guess half the missions would run shorter and half the missions would run longer, the problem is half would be considered a "failure" even if they did new and wonderful science. You'll never have the statistical basis to say if any probability is right, if scientists say this rover has a 80% chance of surviving 5 years we don't know if it's actually 20% or 2% or it's completely doomed, we'll never send enough copies to say.
That's why they want deliverables, things this rover will with almost certain probability deliver. The worst case estimate. Think about your computer, it might work for many, many years without problems. Would you like to guarantee that it'll work if we spend $100+ million dollars sending it to Mars? Hell no, because some of these fail. So you go over and triple check everything and finally promise that yes, this setup has been vetted over and over and it'll run 3 months without fail. If that's the 99% probability, it's no surprise the 50% probability is several years out there.
WTF does this not have +5 Informative?
It does now, but slashdot seems really, really mod point starved as of late. Some discussions there looks like there's almost no one to mod, and when they do get mod points it's 5 now compared to 15 before.
No. You do realize most encryption algorithms are published for all to see, right? Unless Skype is doing something very stupid in the key exchange, it's just as secure as before.
Of course, had the competition stood still the YotLD would have come and gone. Around 2000 and Windows ME I thought it was close. Around 2007 and Vista I thought it was close again. Then Windows XP (playskool variant of win2k, but a consumer OS) and Windows 7 made some big leaps ahead again. So it never caught up, but it's still chasing...
They'll arrest me when they decide it's my time. (...) Meanwhile, I can do whatever I want.
This is not a lottery, that time is whenever you do something they don't want you to do. I don't mean what's illegal, for the most part they don't care unless it threatens them. In fact, quite probably things that are legal like say criticize the system, complain about injustice or demand more civil rights. Oppressive governments all love people who know to keep their head low and don't speak up, as long as you're a loyal pawn they hardly care what you do to other pawns. And don't piss off anyone with more power than you, or you will find your life on the shitlist. As long as you're a good carpet to step on, sure you can have all the freedom you want to crawl around.
In the USA, between the lawyers, and HMOs and AMA, we have a defacto socialized system.
I built a car with square wheels, it's completely horrible so horse and buggy is much better.
A socialized system is based on the idea that people get treatment according to medical need, not their ability to pay for it. Doctors are not financially linked to the treatments they prescribe, so they have no incentive to do excessive tests or consultations nor to turn away poor patients in need, they get no kickbacks from references to specialists and so on. The focus is on effective allocation and use of resources, not what brings in the highest margins. For example there are typically waiting lists for surgery and you only want the patients there who need it, in the order they need it the most. Cost control is often benchmarking and per-patient refunds, that your hospital will deliver as effective as other hospitals. and you benchmark yourself against other countries. The bill is paid directly by the government from taxes, typically hospitals are public and they only hire private companies to deliver systems and services, not manage the hospital. That is, they may take bids for an x-ray system capable of taking 1000 x-rays/day, but the private company doesn't have any say in those gets x-rayed. The government may send patients to private clinics, but the government pays equally regardless of who the patient is and there will be a good medical reason for it.
What part of this does it any way resemble the US system? That you're all getting ripped off by a for-profit oligopoly has nothing to do with socialism at all. It's like trying to make the worst example in the world to prove it can't work. The US has picked the worst of both worlds.
Well, he's a plastic duplicate - maybe his mind can't change the way a human would. Compared to all the other stuff, that's more than plausible.
Personally where I think they lost it is the "self-rescue" time travel when he was locked in the box. The whole part about not crossing your own timestream was what kept the series sane from the obvious solution - just go back in time and warn/stop/do something before it becomes a problem. Or indeed a future doctor can now show up and save the current one from anything. That was a limit to his power, when he became linked to the events he had to stay and fight, he couldn't just run back to the TARDIS and fix everything. Now he's just jumping around as he pleases, like in the Christmas special where he's rewriting the man's memories while he's standing there. Why is not that the answer to every villain now, go back in time and stop them from becoming villains? Now they have to hide his omnipotence behind absurdity, like it's all some kind of game to him. They need to dial back that mania a notch or two.
No, this is why they signed a deal with the devil. Everybody has been taking a crack at Nokia lately and they haven't been able to deal a single decent blow in return, iPhone and Android have been eating the aging Symbian for lunch and the Maemo/Meego replacements haven't been ready. They could of course become the latecomer to Android, but so many companies now make good Android phones they'd be sure to disappoint. So they went to bed with Microsoft, the market already then realized it was a mark of desperation sinking their stock price. Now we learn it's actually worse. I figure the layoffs are about to begin and who do you think that will be, the Microsoft Phone developers or the Qt developers?
But things aren't going to go back to the way things were. Qt is LGPL'd, they'd have an extremely hard time going back to a dual GPL/commercial license which is what funded Qt before Nokia bought them. Is "the community" going to pick that up with just as many full time developers to replace them? And with my experience with Qt (excellent) vs KDE (very mixed), do you want KDE teams taking over? And isn't their developer resources spread pretty thin as it is?
Face it, Nokia is going tight with Microsoft. I don't see how they could possibly want hold on to Qt as a sideshow to that, it's going to get sold out somehow or die a slow death starved of resources and priority. That they're keeping all the wheels turning right now is to try to make an exit on their $153 million investment, if they flat out halted everything the value would quickly drop to near zero. I just can't see it in their long term strategy, one way or another they'll go different ways.
Well, most of it is guesswork but it's becoming less and less guesswork. Take for example the number of planets. 20 years ago we didn't have a single confirmed extrasolar planet, now we're gathering statistics on them. True, we don't know what "habitable" is but we're approaching it from both angles:
1) We're trying to determine just how "earth-like" a planet is - this is a never ending story of orbit, mass, composition, satellites and whatnot getting closer and closer
2) We're trying to determine just how flexible life is looking at our extremophiles, how different can a planet be from earth and still be habitable.
Maybe there's life that's weirder than we can imagine, but these are just boundaries and if they cross, if we find planets that are so earth-like the life we *do* know could exist on them that would be a huge step. We are working on abiogenesis, with enough time we may discover exactly what conditions are necessary for life to begin, that is how tight the needle eye is. I doubt we could ever properly simulate life as such, but if we could show that primitive life would move towards more modern single-celled life I think the essence of evolution into more advanced life would follow.
By far the hardest to ever say if intelligent life like humans would ever evolve - I mean most species on earth do well and thrive without being that intelligent and have done for millions of years. Humanity almost went extinct 1.2 million years ago, we're rather crappy animals without tools, not being particularly strong or fast, no hide, no fur, no claws or teeth to scare anyone and our newborn defenseless. It takes a lot of energy to run our big brains, our evolutionary success was far from certain - it just seems so in retrospect as the tools have so far greater potential than even the toughest animal.
The problem is not keeping up with people online, it's that you never really find the time to spend with them. I particularly noticed it when I started studying, I had my "old friends" and my "study friends" which were completely disjoint social circles. Friday and saturday night there was different things going on, I could either be here or there. Take a thing as a birthday party, most people have it on saturday and there's only 52-53 of them each year, with 200 friends there's likely to be 4 a week. Or cabin trips or any other for of social gathering. You just can't keep a real social contact with that many people.
When the online content exist only to reduce a sale into a non-transferable personal license, don't expect consumers to be happy about it. Software licenses for single player games have all the essential characteristics of a sale - a one-time payment for a one-time delivery, except you don't get any of the rights and benefits of a sale.
Personally I love ordering from amazon.co.uk to Norway. Since it's just below the 200 NOK import duty limit and amazon gives me free shipping, I got the DVD version for about 22.86 euro, or less than half than on Steam's 49.99 euro. Steam is silly expensive, they just got people hooked.
Been DRM-free from day one on gog.com. So no big surprise there, also the idea that you need DRM to protect it before release is not meaningful. Encrypt the whole thing, release a universal one-key-to-decrypt-them-all on release day.
Why would it be all out on all vocational or all for fun? You'd think most people on slashdot would manage to solve this simple optimization problem. There's a life at work and a life outside work, plot them on a chart with those as the X and Y axis, what you think about the work and what you think about the leisure time with that job and that pay. Make some indifference curves describing how you'd balance work and pay. If you find a job with that you both like well and pays well then there's no doubt. It mostly depends on how much value you put on money for your leisure time, if your idea of fun is to go camping in the wilds at ~0$ then you don't need it, if your idea of fun is champagne and bling you'd take the high paying one to feed your habits.
Personally my impression is that there are good jobs and bad jobs in every line of work. I can't speak for anyone but myself but I don't do what I love. I do something I'm good at, that pays well, at a friendly employer. It was definitively mostly a pragmatist choice, a "good enough" work that lets me have have substantial financial muscle to pursue other things. I wouldn't do anything I hate or that'd eat 60+ hours of my week for a living, I also wouldn't do work I love and eat Ramen noodles and live in beat up closet of an apartment. The key is trying to live a good life 24 hours a day, not to have one part of your life that sucks and one that doesn't.
Well, under the current development model "2.6" is essentially static, It's like OS X always remaining OS X rather than move to OS XI, OS XII, OS XIII etc. as there's absolutely no work on a "2.7" branch and probably never will be.
The 2.6.x changes are far bigger than a 0.0.1 change should be, I mean it's the main development release. Making them 0.1 changes is more than reasonable. The stabilization team will get to move up from 4th to 3rd digit so 3.0.3 rather than 2.6.40.3. Simpler, shorter all around.
I thought the Linux community wasn't shy of just minor, incremental updates. If it ain't broke don't fix it, don't rock the boat etc. But I guess the marketing mentality somehow, somewhere, has taken over. /looks at Gnome 3.0
Also are you arguing that Gnome 3 isn't a radical enough departure breaking enough eggs to warrant it's version number? Sounds to me like most people complain it's too different from Gnome 2.x. In this case, you seem to argue Linux 3.0 will be too similar to Linux 2.x. Is there a way to win here?