People like that will latch onto anything, it's like the people that take a tiny gap in some evolutionary chain and blow it up as a huge missing link, evolution is bunk and creationism is truth. They'll just pick something else and it'll go on, just like they've retconned that the earth is round and orbits the sun, not flat and the center of the universe. It doesn't matter how far science comes, someone will always manage to shoehorn in their religion.
Sadly, there's a quite large difference between anonymous speech and speech that gets pinned on the wrong man. If I put an anonymous note in everyone's mailbox most likely no one will be blamed. But if I use someone's WiFi, that person is likely to be blamed. The University is no better off, if they shield their users they catch the whole shit storm. Perhaps if most people wanted it, but reality is that most people want there to be some shade of gray where people are so mostly anonymous and left alone, but those that are nasty criminal whatever they can be tracked down. Today that layer is the IP layer, the average Joe can't map an IP to a person but an ISP can and the police can request it from the ISP. Or at least to the subscriber, who you can investigate further if it's a household member/tenant/open wifi/hacked pc or whatever.
Totally open networks or anonymous networks are too absolute for them, you can't have a system of law if you can't catch any criminals. This is probably going to be a BSD vs GPL-style flamewar but total freedom is anarchy. Nobody has to give a fuck what everyone else thinks, it doesn't matter if a law has 99.99% support if it doesn't have support with the 0.01% that actually break it. And for those who go all "sticks and stones may break my bones, but bits and bytes will never hurt me" I'll just Godwin this thread to say Hitler didn't kill many with his own two hands. Death threats don't get any less real just because they're over the Internet. There are things that are and should be crimes, even online. But that won't matter much if all investigations stop at a dead end.
Sadly, unless it's one of the big unsolved problems or it takes a PhD to even understand the problem it's probably been solved before. We had a math book that so barely mentioned perfect numbers, I spent a lot of time reaching a result that I felt was "new". Eventually it turns out I had recreated a proof that Euler did in the 18th century. At least it wasn't the Greek, every time you feel bright then you learn someone already figured this out 2000 years ago.
It was pretty hard, back then. But 65 years is a long time ago and tools that were state of the art back then are common today. While you need supercomputers to make "real" simulations, I bet this PC has enough power to run a basic boom-or-fizzle model of a nuke. Production technology, measurement tools, I really doubt 40s technology can be that hard to match. The difficulty has always been weapons-grade uranium (or plutonium). That's not exactly something you'd find in the corner store...
While it's hard to put this into a formal definition, there's a different between random observation in public and systemic surveillance. If you had a person that stayed two steps behind you everywhere you went and noticed everything you put in your grocery basket, took notes at the pub how many beers you were drinking, followed you home and knew where you slept and if you brought anyone with you home, most people would be seriously creeped out even though technically it all happens "in public". I'm not so worried about someone actually doing that, maybe you could if you put a whole team of undercover detectives on me but it's not practical to do on any scale.
With technology though the rules change. It becomes very possible to track everyone, all the time with relatively little manpower. Like the EU data retention directive that requires the location of all cell phone traffic be stored for 6-24 months. For a smart phone that checks for mail etc. in the background that's practically 24x7 surveillance, like we've all been radio tagged. For public transport they're pushing for electronic tickets, for private transport there's electronic toll road readers - it's not impossible to travel anonymously, just very impractical. Unless you want to fly, in which case it is impossible.
Same goes with money, they're fighting harder and harder for everyone to use electronic money. If I pay anyone over 1800$ in cash here in Norway, I can be held as an accessory to their tax fraud. What happens is that they don't wrap in surveillance, it's not some extra papers you fill in to have it logged. It's wrapped in convenience - online banks are so much simpler than the way we did before, oh and we keep a copy of all the records too. Same with cell phones, great invention. Oh and it also doubles as your tracking device. If I locked it around your ancle you'd protest, but if I can make 95%+ use it voluntarily 95%+ of the time, we can go after those "must have something to hide" people.
Yeah, I remember that. There was this guy trying to push these, Microsoft Partner and all that showed it to us. The problem was that it was almost like a laptop without a keyboard, same design and everything as regular Windows. Nothing was really designed to be operated by your pudgy fingers, it just screamed impractical every time he had to effectively do single finger typing with his stylus. I think you can imagine yourself if the iPad was OS X without keyboard/mouse and not an overgrown iPhone.
I'm not going to say if the iPad is a fad or not, but this smells of Microsoft "We tried this, the customers didn't like it. This is just Apple making a fad!" Here's a newsflash for you: You did it wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. If tablets make sense at all, then at least Apple is doing tablets right. And they did it with a ton of existing iPhone apps designed for a multitouch interface right out of the gate, which is exactly what you didn't have. It's a thousand times better attempt than you made.
You can buy music, transfer it to any devices you own, make a thousand personal backup copies of it, destroy it, list it on Ebay for a billion dollars - and there's not a damned thing the label can do about it. What copyright restricts you from doing is making copies of music and distributing them without permission.
Your examples fall into two categories - destroying it or selling it is legally your right, because it doesn't involve copyright.
Space shifting to another device? Fair use. Backup copies? Fair use. Without fair use, you could never make any copies at all. USC 17106 says the copyright holder has the exclusive right
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
That's it, that's the whole quote with no exceptions or conditions. Unless any copies you make are fair use, they're illegal.
You could even calculate a hash before uploading, and skip the upload if the file is already somewhere in the cloud.
No, this is exactly what you can't do and what killed mp3.com. As pointless as it sounds to a computer scientist, it matters where the bits came from. They must come from YOUR copy, not someone else's copy and not some central master copy.
For example, I could have a hacked client that only passes you the correct checksum values, and suddenly you give me access to lots of files I don't have. How did that happen? Oh, Amazon committed copyright infringement. In fact, no matter what it's copyright infringement because they rely on borrowing your fair use rights. Since your fair use rights don't involve taking a copy of someone else's CD, neither do theirs.
The only way Amazon is safe is to let you access exactly what you uploaded, no more and no less. They can probably get by with deduplication as long as a skilled expert witness explains that everyone still have to upload their own copy and that it's simply a storage optimization. Anything else just crosses the border from ballsy to insane.
The most probable explaination is that Spirit died last Martian winter. The hope was that it was still alive but in deep hibernation mode and would eventually get enough power surplus to charge its batteries and reconnect with Earth. Now we're at peak power generation but Mars is still heating up a bit - just like in the northern hemisphere the summer solistice is in june but july/august are the warmest months. Normally it should have reconnected long before that, but if say the solar panels were partially damaged it could take this long for it to gather enough power. It's been a slim hope and it's getting even slimmer, pretty soon it's time to write off that possibility completely.
Dumbphones will go the way of word processing machines and PDAs. There just won't be a reason to make them, even if many people are satisfied by them, because the smartphone can serve both markets.
That would highly depend on the price of the cheapest smart phones. Dumbphones are ridiculously cheap, my parents gone some with no carrier lockin for less than 30$ each. They dial, they text and beyond that they don't desire any features except clear sound and a good battery life. Sure, if you can get an Android phone for that but I don't think we're there yet...
Sure they will... they go in, they don't back out and admit it's a failure unless it's horribly obvious. I wager somewhere between Zune (extremely low) and Xbox (in the game, but not a huge winner) in popularity, probably more like the Zune being fourth after Android, iOS and RIM in some order. See, the people that have dumbphones aren't interested in smart phones, and for those that want smart phones - particuarly a new generation of teens - WP7 is never going to get cool. RIM holds the business market, iOS has Apple's cult following, Android is a bit jack-of-all-trades and WP7 is... nowhere in particular.
You know, I think the judge recruitment pool would be rather low if you didn't allow those that have either stood as plaintiffs or defendants as lawyers. Because if they're biased then so is the EFF lawyer too, right? Or is that just the lawyers on the side you don't like.
Any good lawyer will - within reason - argue in the way his role demands. I don't think any lawyer could swear that he thought the client was telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth or that his side's legal theories or claims were correct - at least not anyone with more than a handful of cases.
It's like a fencing match and there's no such thing as unsportsmanlike. If the opponent isn't paying attention or don't know the rules, then a swift stab to the guts will end it. It doesn't have to be right, it doesn't have to be fair, if your client won then you did your job. Consider it a bit like hiring a hacker - a popular idea around here - if you hire someone used at skirting the law, they'll see one that does.
Well, true but it's a lot easier to verify a cracked key than it is to find it. If someone, somehow could guess those abbreviations and keywords and provide a plausible decryption it would be quite likely be the right answer. Almost no one can do strong crypto in their head, the solution is probably simple and it's easy to dismiss all the solutions that work like "if you XOR it with 0x745634FA66354345363EBD4647347546FABC346856324957967 you get the secret message" kind.
If you seriously want to deal with everyone accessing everything through your IP address. Be prepared for a world of pain, particularly as a private individual where people will automatically assume you are the guilty one. Honestly, TOR is better off when the system is closed and everything is on.onion sites. There's much less hassle for everyone involved that way.
UID >2000000 and blog.com. Coincidentally the same problem with anonymous networks, except it's more extreme there. No, goatse is not the worst you can see.
It's not true for any of them. We've just seen a bunch of financial analysts nearly bankrupt the country and create another Great Depression.
Ah, but a financial analyst doesn't work for the country. His job if he sees a market fluctuation of any kind isn't to stop it, but to take advantage of it. If he advised his customers to sell high before the impending crash and to buy low at the worst of it, he did his job.
The result you get when each person decides individually very often doesn't add up to what's best collectively. I could fairly easily show you that the distribution of doctors is suboptimal, because they want the good positions rather than be on all the odd little places who need one, some are nearly impossible to staff up. Statistically that quite probably kills some people each year, but we don't want a communist system (real kind, not just European socialism) where you commandeer doctors to go. I remember there was an interview not long ago from some cold hellhole in Siberia, the local doctor there had been commandeered out during the Soviet regime and stayed there. When he retired/died nobody thought there'd be any replacement, even though they very much needed one. But one that'd been to a major city and taken a doctor's exam had so many other better options.
While the GP is putting the point very harshly, I think it was that "Just because I'm smarter than you doesn't make it my job to solve your problems".
I do have quite a few exceptions to that, I think basic needs (food, water, clothes, shelter, healthcare etc.) should be available for everyone, that there should be institutions like police and courts and rights to an attorney, that opportunities should be given like public education, that there should be systems to take care of the sick, elderly, physically handicapped, mentally insane and so on. But then I'm one of those European commies;) However on the whole I don't feel it's my job to improve the life of a McDonalds worker who is so reasonably getting by flipping burgers. He earns his money, he can live out of his paycheck and I live out of mine. I don't owe him anything just because my job is better than his, I'm not going to make a different career choice to make his life better.
And don't talk about ability, unless I'm completely mistaken these people are not taking any more risks or putting in any more effort than any of the other MIT grads that continue to work as productive engineers.
That has never been the issue. In the financial industry you can make big money if you're really bright for the same reason that CEOs make the big bucks, instead of making decisions over lots of people you make decisions over lots of money. There's a helluva lot more inept executives who have run a whole business into the ground than there are inept engineers that have managed to run an otherwise sound business of significant size into the ground. In the financial industry, you will start out managing a tiny client portfolio but if you're skilled that can grow 10x, 100x, 1000x because the one who is the best of the bunch gets to manage the big clients or the big funds, handling hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.
Even if you're an exceptionally bright engineer, you can't replace a whole engineering department. But it's quite doable for someone to manage a billion dollar portfolio just as well as a million dollar portfolio, if only they get the chance. Of course the flip side is that poorly skilled people don't last long in finance, if your analysis sucks and the market beats you every time you might still sell to mom and pop savers but you'll never get any real responsibility or the big bucks. But everyone thinks they got what it takes. Same with real estate agents, the papers like to pull up the guy who manages to sell the million dollar luxury apartments and get fat commissions but he's the exception, not the rule.
Besides, there's a lot of skill overlap particularly in mathematics. If you can't grok that, you'll never get far in finance and the same is true for most of the hard sciences. So it's really no surprise that they're competing for some of the same people. Particularly if you go into statistics and probability, feedback systems and things like that the tools are much the same. Though if you want your systems to act rationally, you'd better stick to science...
The only thing I would like to see is a free software/free driver challenge between the two.
Well that would be a walkover because nVidia doesn't play in that category. Whatever you may have heard of the Nouveau driver, it is not done by nVidia, they don't want the project, they don't help them with documentation, specifications or answer questions. It is not in any shape or form nVidia's project.
The only thing nVidia has open sourced - and even that is arguable since it was obfuscated - is an extremely simple 2D only driver, which is in maintenance mode and will never support Fermi+ graphics cards, DisplayPort or any form of acceleration. Now they ask you to limp on the VESA driver until you can install their proprietary driver.
To be honest I don't get the Nouveau project at all, fair enough maybe these people have nVidia cards they want to make work but it looks like mission impossible. At least with AMD you do have the company's specs and backing and still it seems a very hard problem to solve. And you could work on all the common issues in the open source stack, of which there are plenty...
Google doesn't have to keep anybody in - the people want to be there!
First off, quite a few users will use whatever search engine is in their browser - that's Bing's market share right there. If you get word out Chrome or Firefox is better, you also won a Google search user. Second or as a consequence of the first, who controls the defaults matter. Google has a deal with Mozilla, obviously they don't need a deal with themselves. Less money spent and no risk they'll partner with someone else.
So they put up a Google platform for cell phones. You want to ship a cellphone on that platform but with a different search engine? Sure you can, but you know they won't because you never step on your partner's toes without reason. Google wouldn't react formally but your service level would take a hit, everybody knows you'd get a lower priority. I think Google has a pretty good idea of what they're doing...
Yes. That is why they're now negotiating for a deal to do it. And despite the buzzword compliance, it could be pretty sweet if you get to both download your music and have it available on an online streaming service as well as upload your own music to add to the online streaming. I'm not holding my breath for it though, I'm sure there'll be some gotchas.
I doubt I could write anything past a basic calculator in assembler, but it's been proven several times I could code in circles around some of those that call themselves programmers. By far the most difficult thing I've found in complex non-OOP code is the memory management of inits and cleanups. If you change a code's path and somehow miss a cleanup step, you get memory leaks and seven kinds of hell. You always have to make sure all the t's are crossed and i's are dotted. It can be done and everything written in C in proof of it, but it's not for the faint of heart.
To be an object is primarily a self-contained entity that can clean up its own mess. If it has children, it should also tell them to clean up their mess so that I can delete just the top level object. This is the essence of the QObject in Qt. That also goes for any file handles, network sockets, database connections and whatever else it's holding onto. In the real world, I do have state. If I try connecting to a network, there will be a delay and unless I want to block everything I have to buffer the data I was going to send somehow until the connection is ready. If the connection fails, I have to clear out that data. What when someone trips over the network cord? If the client clicks an "Abort" button? If I have timers that I need to wait for? I have to respond to such things and you're about to reinvent the event loop.
I'm not sure what the deal with parallelization is, I've managed to use both worker/queue and thread pools to deal with that efficiently. With signals and slots I've never felt that my applications were so modular in any other language as they are in C++/Qt. They have their inputs and outputs but otherwise you can rearrange the pieces pretty much any way you want like a bunch of legos.
Maybe it's not the style for the 10000-core supercomputer, but I think you get very, very far just being skilled at using what you have. I think the analogy of tools in a toolbox is wrong, it's more like writing a book half in English, half in French according to what language you feel expresses it the best. The result is mostly that a) very few understand it and b) they don't work well together. That said, there's a helluva lot that can be improved about OOP languages.
Slashdot Mirror
People like that will latch onto anything, it's like the people that take a tiny gap in some evolutionary chain and blow it up as a huge missing link, evolution is bunk and creationism is truth. They'll just pick something else and it'll go on, just like they've retconned that the earth is round and orbits the sun, not flat and the center of the universe. It doesn't matter how far science comes, someone will always manage to shoehorn in their religion.
Pretty hard to fit any of those, except for credit cards, into your wallet. How *do* you fit an intern in there, anyways?
You tell them to get in there and make it their problem to find a way.
Sadly, there's a quite large difference between anonymous speech and speech that gets pinned on the wrong man. If I put an anonymous note in everyone's mailbox most likely no one will be blamed. But if I use someone's WiFi, that person is likely to be blamed. The University is no better off, if they shield their users they catch the whole shit storm. Perhaps if most people wanted it, but reality is that most people want there to be some shade of gray where people are so mostly anonymous and left alone, but those that are nasty criminal whatever they can be tracked down. Today that layer is the IP layer, the average Joe can't map an IP to a person but an ISP can and the police can request it from the ISP. Or at least to the subscriber, who you can investigate further if it's a household member/tenant/open wifi/hacked pc or whatever.
Totally open networks or anonymous networks are too absolute for them, you can't have a system of law if you can't catch any criminals. This is probably going to be a BSD vs GPL-style flamewar but total freedom is anarchy. Nobody has to give a fuck what everyone else thinks, it doesn't matter if a law has 99.99% support if it doesn't have support with the 0.01% that actually break it. And for those who go all "sticks and stones may break my bones, but bits and bytes will never hurt me" I'll just Godwin this thread to say Hitler didn't kill many with his own two hands. Death threats don't get any less real just because they're over the Internet. There are things that are and should be crimes, even online. But that won't matter much if all investigations stop at a dead end.
Sadly, unless it's one of the big unsolved problems or it takes a PhD to even understand the problem it's probably been solved before. We had a math book that so barely mentioned perfect numbers, I spent a lot of time reaching a result that I felt was "new". Eventually it turns out I had recreated a proof that Euler did in the 18th century. At least it wasn't the Greek, every time you feel bright then you learn someone already figured this out 2000 years ago.
It was pretty hard, back then. But 65 years is a long time ago and tools that were state of the art back then are common today. While you need supercomputers to make "real" simulations, I bet this PC has enough power to run a basic boom-or-fizzle model of a nuke. Production technology, measurement tools, I really doubt 40s technology can be that hard to match. The difficulty has always been weapons-grade uranium (or plutonium). That's not exactly something you'd find in the corner store...
While it's hard to put this into a formal definition, there's a different between random observation in public and systemic surveillance. If you had a person that stayed two steps behind you everywhere you went and noticed everything you put in your grocery basket, took notes at the pub how many beers you were drinking, followed you home and knew where you slept and if you brought anyone with you home, most people would be seriously creeped out even though technically it all happens "in public". I'm not so worried about someone actually doing that, maybe you could if you put a whole team of undercover detectives on me but it's not practical to do on any scale.
With technology though the rules change. It becomes very possible to track everyone, all the time with relatively little manpower. Like the EU data retention directive that requires the location of all cell phone traffic be stored for 6-24 months. For a smart phone that checks for mail etc. in the background that's practically 24x7 surveillance, like we've all been radio tagged. For public transport they're pushing for electronic tickets, for private transport there's electronic toll road readers - it's not impossible to travel anonymously, just very impractical. Unless you want to fly, in which case it is impossible.
Same goes with money, they're fighting harder and harder for everyone to use electronic money. If I pay anyone over 1800$ in cash here in Norway, I can be held as an accessory to their tax fraud. What happens is that they don't wrap in surveillance, it's not some extra papers you fill in to have it logged. It's wrapped in convenience - online banks are so much simpler than the way we did before, oh and we keep a copy of all the records too. Same with cell phones, great invention. Oh and it also doubles as your tracking device. If I locked it around your ancle you'd protest, but if I can make 95%+ use it voluntarily 95%+ of the time, we can go after those "must have something to hide" people.
Yeah, I remember that. There was this guy trying to push these, Microsoft Partner and all that showed it to us. The problem was that it was almost like a laptop without a keyboard, same design and everything as regular Windows. Nothing was really designed to be operated by your pudgy fingers, it just screamed impractical every time he had to effectively do single finger typing with his stylus. I think you can imagine yourself if the iPad was OS X without keyboard/mouse and not an overgrown iPhone.
I'm not going to say if the iPad is a fad or not, but this smells of Microsoft "We tried this, the customers didn't like it. This is just Apple making a fad!" Here's a newsflash for you: You did it wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. If tablets make sense at all, then at least Apple is doing tablets right. And they did it with a ton of existing iPhone apps designed for a multitouch interface right out of the gate, which is exactly what you didn't have. It's a thousand times better attempt than you made.
You can buy music, transfer it to any devices you own, make a thousand personal backup copies of it, destroy it, list it on Ebay for a billion dollars - and there's not a damned thing the label can do about it. What copyright restricts you from doing is making copies of music and distributing them without permission.
Your examples fall into two categories - destroying it or selling it is legally your right, because it doesn't involve copyright.
Space shifting to another device? Fair use. Backup copies? Fair use. Without fair use, you could never make any copies at all. USC 17106 says the copyright holder has the exclusive right
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
That's it, that's the whole quote with no exceptions or conditions. Unless any copies you make are fair use, they're illegal.
You could even calculate a hash before uploading, and skip the upload if the file is already somewhere in the cloud.
No, this is exactly what you can't do and what killed mp3.com. As pointless as it sounds to a computer scientist, it matters where the bits came from. They must come from YOUR copy, not someone else's copy and not some central master copy.
For example, I could have a hacked client that only passes you the correct checksum values, and suddenly you give me access to lots of files I don't have. How did that happen? Oh, Amazon committed copyright infringement. In fact, no matter what it's copyright infringement because they rely on borrowing your fair use rights. Since your fair use rights don't involve taking a copy of someone else's CD, neither do theirs.
The only way Amazon is safe is to let you access exactly what you uploaded, no more and no less. They can probably get by with deduplication as long as a skilled expert witness explains that everyone still have to upload their own copy and that it's simply a storage optimization. Anything else just crosses the border from ballsy to insane.
The most probable explaination is that Spirit died last Martian winter. The hope was that it was still alive but in deep hibernation mode and would eventually get enough power surplus to charge its batteries and reconnect with Earth. Now we're at peak power generation but Mars is still heating up a bit - just like in the northern hemisphere the summer solistice is in june but july/august are the warmest months. Normally it should have reconnected long before that, but if say the solar panels were partially damaged it could take this long for it to gather enough power. It's been a slim hope and it's getting even slimmer, pretty soon it's time to write off that possibility completely.
Dumbphones will go the way of word processing machines and PDAs. There just won't be a reason to make them, even if many people are satisfied by them, because the smartphone can serve both markets.
That would highly depend on the price of the cheapest smart phones. Dumbphones are ridiculously cheap, my parents gone some with no carrier lockin for less than 30$ each. They dial, they text and beyond that they don't desire any features except clear sound and a good battery life. Sure, if you can get an Android phone for that but I don't think we're there yet...
Sure they will... they go in, they don't back out and admit it's a failure unless it's horribly obvious. I wager somewhere between Zune (extremely low) and Xbox (in the game, but not a huge winner) in popularity, probably more like the Zune being fourth after Android, iOS and RIM in some order. See, the people that have dumbphones aren't interested in smart phones, and for those that want smart phones - particuarly a new generation of teens - WP7 is never going to get cool. RIM holds the business market, iOS has Apple's cult following, Android is a bit jack-of-all-trades and WP7 is... nowhere in particular.
You know, I think the judge recruitment pool would be rather low if you didn't allow those that have either stood as plaintiffs or defendants as lawyers. Because if they're biased then so is the EFF lawyer too, right? Or is that just the lawyers on the side you don't like.
Any good lawyer will - within reason - argue in the way his role demands. I don't think any lawyer could swear that he thought the client was telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth or that his side's legal theories or claims were correct - at least not anyone with more than a handful of cases.
It's like a fencing match and there's no such thing as unsportsmanlike. If the opponent isn't paying attention or don't know the rules, then a swift stab to the guts will end it. It doesn't have to be right, it doesn't have to be fair, if your client won then you did your job. Consider it a bit like hiring a hacker - a popular idea around here - if you hire someone used at skirting the law, they'll see one that does.
Well, true but it's a lot easier to verify a cracked key than it is to find it. If someone, somehow could guess those abbreviations and keywords and provide a plausible decryption it would be quite likely be the right answer. Almost no one can do strong crypto in their head, the solution is probably simple and it's easy to dismiss all the solutions that work like "if you XOR it with 0x745634FA66354345363EBD4647347546FABC346856324957967 you get the secret message" kind.
If you seriously want to deal with everyone accessing everything through your IP address. Be prepared for a world of pain, particularly as a private individual where people will automatically assume you are the guilty one. Honestly, TOR is better off when the system is closed and everything is on .onion sites. There's much less hassle for everyone involved that way.
Ugh. Goatse. You asshole.
UID >2000000 and blog.com. Coincidentally the same problem with anonymous networks, except it's more extreme there. No, goatse is not the worst you can see.
He did say that he doubted anyone in Japan could do the job.
And the grandparent's retort was that they have sumo wrestlers, so there was no reason to doubt. Perhaps this will clue you in.
Sorry, it's all my fault. I think the editor read this comment I made and took it seriously. My bad.
It's not true for any of them. We've just seen a bunch of financial analysts nearly bankrupt the country and create another Great Depression.
Ah, but a financial analyst doesn't work for the country. His job if he sees a market fluctuation of any kind isn't to stop it, but to take advantage of it. If he advised his customers to sell high before the impending crash and to buy low at the worst of it, he did his job.
The result you get when each person decides individually very often doesn't add up to what's best collectively. I could fairly easily show you that the distribution of doctors is suboptimal, because they want the good positions rather than be on all the odd little places who need one, some are nearly impossible to staff up. Statistically that quite probably kills some people each year, but we don't want a communist system (real kind, not just European socialism) where you commandeer doctors to go. I remember there was an interview not long ago from some cold hellhole in Siberia, the local doctor there had been commandeered out during the Soviet regime and stayed there. When he retired/died nobody thought there'd be any replacement, even though they very much needed one. But one that'd been to a major city and taken a doctor's exam had so many other better options.
While the GP is putting the point very harshly, I think it was that "Just because I'm smarter than you doesn't make it my job to solve your problems".
I do have quite a few exceptions to that, I think basic needs (food, water, clothes, shelter, healthcare etc.) should be available for everyone, that there should be institutions like police and courts and rights to an attorney, that opportunities should be given like public education, that there should be systems to take care of the sick, elderly, physically handicapped, mentally insane and so on. But then I'm one of those European commies ;) However on the whole I don't feel it's my job to improve the life of a McDonalds worker who is so reasonably getting by flipping burgers. He earns his money, he can live out of his paycheck and I live out of mine. I don't owe him anything just because my job is better than his, I'm not going to make a different career choice to make his life better.
And don't talk about ability, unless I'm completely mistaken these people are not taking any more risks or putting in any more effort than any of the other MIT grads that continue to work as productive engineers.
That has never been the issue. In the financial industry you can make big money if you're really bright for the same reason that CEOs make the big bucks, instead of making decisions over lots of people you make decisions over lots of money. There's a helluva lot more inept executives who have run a whole business into the ground than there are inept engineers that have managed to run an otherwise sound business of significant size into the ground. In the financial industry, you will start out managing a tiny client portfolio but if you're skilled that can grow 10x, 100x, 1000x because the one who is the best of the bunch gets to manage the big clients or the big funds, handling hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.
Even if you're an exceptionally bright engineer, you can't replace a whole engineering department. But it's quite doable for someone to manage a billion dollar portfolio just as well as a million dollar portfolio, if only they get the chance. Of course the flip side is that poorly skilled people don't last long in finance, if your analysis sucks and the market beats you every time you might still sell to mom and pop savers but you'll never get any real responsibility or the big bucks. But everyone thinks they got what it takes. Same with real estate agents, the papers like to pull up the guy who manages to sell the million dollar luxury apartments and get fat commissions but he's the exception, not the rule.
Besides, there's a lot of skill overlap particularly in mathematics. If you can't grok that, you'll never get far in finance and the same is true for most of the hard sciences. So it's really no surprise that they're competing for some of the same people. Particularly if you go into statistics and probability, feedback systems and things like that the tools are much the same. Though if you want your systems to act rationally, you'd better stick to science...
The only thing I would like to see is a free software/free driver challenge between the two.
Well that would be a walkover because nVidia doesn't play in that category. Whatever you may have heard of the Nouveau driver, it is not done by nVidia, they don't want the project, they don't help them with documentation, specifications or answer questions. It is not in any shape or form nVidia's project.
The only thing nVidia has open sourced - and even that is arguable since it was obfuscated - is an extremely simple 2D only driver, which is in maintenance mode and will never support Fermi+ graphics cards, DisplayPort or any form of acceleration. Now they ask you to limp on the VESA driver until you can install their proprietary driver.
To be honest I don't get the Nouveau project at all, fair enough maybe these people have nVidia cards they want to make work but it looks like mission impossible. At least with AMD you do have the company's specs and backing and still it seems a very hard problem to solve. And you could work on all the common issues in the open source stack, of which there are plenty...
Google doesn't have to keep anybody in - the people want to be there!
First off, quite a few users will use whatever search engine is in their browser - that's Bing's market share right there. If you get word out Chrome or Firefox is better, you also won a Google search user. Second or as a consequence of the first, who controls the defaults matter. Google has a deal with Mozilla, obviously they don't need a deal with themselves. Less money spent and no risk they'll partner with someone else.
So they put up a Google platform for cell phones. You want to ship a cellphone on that platform but with a different search engine? Sure you can, but you know they won't because you never step on your partner's toes without reason. Google wouldn't react formally but your service level would take a hit, everybody knows you'd get a lower priority. I think Google has a pretty good idea of what they're doing...
Yes. That is why they're now negotiating for a deal to do it. And despite the buzzword compliance, it could be pretty sweet if you get to both download your music and have it available on an online streaming service as well as upload your own music to add to the online streaming. I'm not holding my breath for it though, I'm sure there'll be some gotchas.
I doubt I could write anything past a basic calculator in assembler, but it's been proven several times I could code in circles around some of those that call themselves programmers. By far the most difficult thing I've found in complex non-OOP code is the memory management of inits and cleanups. If you change a code's path and somehow miss a cleanup step, you get memory leaks and seven kinds of hell. You always have to make sure all the t's are crossed and i's are dotted. It can be done and everything written in C in proof of it, but it's not for the faint of heart.
To be an object is primarily a self-contained entity that can clean up its own mess. If it has children, it should also tell them to clean up their mess so that I can delete just the top level object. This is the essence of the QObject in Qt. That also goes for any file handles, network sockets, database connections and whatever else it's holding onto. In the real world, I do have state. If I try connecting to a network, there will be a delay and unless I want to block everything I have to buffer the data I was going to send somehow until the connection is ready. If the connection fails, I have to clear out that data. What when someone trips over the network cord? If the client clicks an "Abort" button? If I have timers that I need to wait for? I have to respond to such things and you're about to reinvent the event loop.
I'm not sure what the deal with parallelization is, I've managed to use both worker/queue and thread pools to deal with that efficiently. With signals and slots I've never felt that my applications were so modular in any other language as they are in C++/Qt. They have their inputs and outputs but otherwise you can rearrange the pieces pretty much any way you want like a bunch of legos.
Maybe it's not the style for the 10000-core supercomputer, but I think you get very, very far just being skilled at using what you have. I think the analogy of tools in a toolbox is wrong, it's more like writing a book half in English, half in French according to what language you feel expresses it the best. The result is mostly that a) very few understand it and b) they don't work well together. That said, there's a helluva lot that can be improved about OOP languages.