The judging is solely on the algorithm, by comparing the O(N) functions.
Hehe I once managed to put an expensive function inside the inner loop making a mostly O(N) function more like O(N^2)... that gets very noticable when you got 100k file hashes you're trying to match. It would have made a pretty good run for stupidest algorithm. But when you don't really have a benchmark, the results were correct it wasn't that obvious what I did wrong except it ran very, very slowly.
however for software, the model is radically different. once you're into "self-funding", the next version, once completed, is almost pure profit thanks to the internet. there's no "physical goods" to produce. if it's data, it can be hosted, and it can be distributed for virtually nothing. so under these circumstances, "pay what you like" actually makes sense.
Sure, but what's the incentive for people to pay if they know you're going to make it anyway? Say you wrote the first Harry Potter book, and it's a smashing success. What's the incentive for people to pay you for books 2-7? They know that even if you make $0.01/book on the next one, you're still going to make a lot more money than quitting and taking a normal job. "Pay what you like" only has an incentive to pay if at any time you have a credible threat to quit, which means you have pretty much all the downsides but no real upside. Once it is known you turn a pretty solid profit, people's willingness to give is going to take a nosedive. Or it's going to turn into a situation where people think you cry wolf, you call out for more money but no matter how badly it goes you put out a next version or offer to do it for less anyway. Of course there's good and bad sides to it, but I'm pretty sure the "pay what you like" model is going to be more about "how poor pay would you take?" rather than "what do I think this is worth?"
Because they know that's not how it's going to work. We're not going to have some silly court decision one day and the world wide web as we know it is shut down the next day. Oh they may use these silly little laws to shut down various shady or not-so-shady small sites, but google is not immidiately hurt by something being more rare to find, you will need more searches and a better search engine so you'll spent more time on google not less. If they manage to shut down popular "pirate" service people are likely to find out how filetype:torrent works for searching. They're so big they end up being assumed netural no matter how much shit people find through google. Perhaps it will eventually turn out to be a "First they came for..." that ends with "Then they came for google, and there was no one left to speak out for google" but I'm pretty sure they feel the world would straighten itself out long before they got there. The rest are either huge on corporate services or don't mind selling walled gardens already, the money is not in it. It's mostly a stream of ISPs and hosting providers and news sites and blogs that will have to fight this one, the rest aren't going to get involved. Even with the three strikes law Internet is such a necessity these days they know people will claw their way back on.
If you're paying for a server you're only likely to get a server, not development. If people can play it for free without the subscription or use alternate servers, the incentive to develop is really low. You can funnel lots of your profit into development only to have the business being taken over by someone providing cheaper hosting. Unless you start with exclusive content, in which care you're quickly back where it's only one server/network worth playing on.
The business has plenty of this problem on its own, just recently there was a huge crash in the media over artists now selling their CDs direct to grocery stores for 99 NOK (about $16.50 including 25% VAT) instead of the normal full price of 150-200 NOK ($25-$33). Angry Birds set a whole new standard for what a $1 game for an iPhone can and should do, suddenly games have to really justify costing $2-3 on the phone. Several people I've talked to have now made dollar games their price point, they generally don't buy anything above it. Without being crap I might add, many try to push the "only full price stuff is good and the rest is cheap crap they try pushing on you" and the lie is becoming too obvious. Either way you're going to lose sales, the question is just whether customers rejecting your offering or paying you too little is the better choice. I'd say that since it's pretty much sunk cost there's no such thing as selling yourself too cheap, it's just about making the people who would pay good money for it actually pay good money for it. Like I'm planning to buy Dragon Age 2 at full retail if the reviews are decent no matter what, but I'd happily take it for less if they're offering...
Since the customer can't unpack his basket while the cashier is finishing with the previous customer, time is lost.
This is the big difference. Many kinds of business have you draw a number if people can move swiftly to the counter and state their business. The cashier can scan items faster than you can get them on the band (or the 80 year old lady can, anyway) so a lot of time is saved by having the next customer's goods stacked and ready on the band. To make a CPU analogy, consider it a local pipeline for that execution unit keeping caches filled so far more of the time is spent productively and not idling. Pipeline stalls are not nice, but it's a lot better than not pipelining at all.
As long as we're talking sysadmin duties, which imply that you have ONE admin to many boxes. If it's any kind of setting that a user should have to touch, please make it part of the GUI. A good GUI is infinitely more structured and helpful than a long, long flat man page of cli switches. The reason you want a CLI is scripting, not user friendliness.
I think gifts in direct relation like to parents/children/siblings/SO are okay because you have at least some clue what they need/want and children may get presents from pretty much everyone. But all these gifts to and from distant family that I meet a few times a year at family gatherings are rather pointless. Mostly it ends up with a useless exchange of trinkets that neither of us would have bought on our own, and there's no net gift like with children. I have money, they have money and it's only a matter of priority if I want it - if it's outside that budget you wouldn't give it as a Christmas gift anyway. I'm not militant about it like the GP is but I've gradually built non-gift agreements with people that tend to give just as uninspired gifts as I eventually end up buying because I have to have a present but I got no clue what they need and I already got it up to here with Christmas shopping. Either you have to drag a wish out of them - and it's no fun shopping on command - or you end up buying blind.
It's a lean tree, but I still have my money instead of some cruft and go buy myself something nice. I'm very happy with the present I got for my parents though, and think they'll be pleasantly surprised. But that is because I know them, because I know them well enough to come up with something they'd need that they didn't tell me they needed. A few years back I bought a... well, kind of high-quality traditionally decorated pullover for my dad that he'd never asked for, but that I figured if he had one of those he'd use it. I was dead on the money and it's become his favorite garnment for many kinds of occasions. That kind of buying is fun and it also makes sense, it's gifts that are used and treasured. So they really span the whole scale, which is why I'd much rather take fewer and more on target gifts. If you still want to send some kind of token I'm not forgotten then a Christmas card will do just fine.
You wildly underestimate people's ability and tendency to make ramarks in fields, issues and cases they know very little about. And even if that weren't true, unless you specifically said "I did" it was always a friend who told you about his experiences. In short, you've got a bit much paranoia.
Corporations are on whatever side their profits are. If they're selling land mines, they're opposed to a ban on land mines. If they're doing something that makes them appear to have a moral compass, it's just for the PR and involves making the greatest possible boast for the least possible cost. Actual results are irrelevant except as to use in further PR. Their money has changed side, so they changed side. Wave dollar bills if you want them back.
Having said all of that, I think it's pretty clear that they've not committed any crime and that the law is being twisted by those with their own agenda to try and make them criminals. What they offered was realistically little different to what Google or Bing or Yahoo already do, albeit with a target user base with a more specific interest. I have zero issue with private individuals acting within the law to undermine what many people see as an unjust set of rules
That's pretty much the difference between the USPS and a drug mule, one operates a general transport company and the other specializes in transporting drugs. If you want it applied to copyright I suggest you read the US Sumpreme Court ruling against Grokster, where they in a 9-0 verdict found targeting lawbreakers as a market gives you secondary liability for their actions.
The "kadunk-kadunk" of freight trains is pretty much limited to freight trains, because the thumb is really annoying for the passengers. Modern passenger trains on a modern railroad track are awfully quiet and awfully quick. Plus if you're trying to hold a conversation on the cell phone in a noisy environment, you often mentally shut out everything else to focus on the voice. So it's not so much "there's noise" as in "this noise I *shouldn't* ignore". Same as in my office landscape when people think holding a conversation across the room is a good idea, I just mentally shut it out. For the office it'll save your sanity, on a railroad crossing it might kill you.
No, it isn't. "On the Internet" is where you should assume everything "public" will end up. Or put another way, you should always assune the whole world is watching anything you do in public. This was a good idea before the Internet, and it's a better idea now.
But that's exactly the point, before the internet you didn't need to assume it'd end up there. How many "Star Wars Kid"s do you think there was before him that didn't turn into a media circus seen by hundreds of millions? And you can bet that if you're ever caught on a video like that, there's someone kind enough to add "hey I know this guy, that Bill Bingsly from my school" and after that you might as well duct tape it on your forehead. That and cell phone cameras, there's a million embarrassing public moments that were a huge laugh to the people present, but that weren't caught on camera. Sure, you can talk principles and theory but the fact is that Internet is like "public" hooked up a megaphone and a 1000w amp taking things from "Danny got a peek of us naked" to "Everybody in school has seen the clip in slow-mo by now and I just want to die" kind of embarrassment.
The difference between corporations and citizens is that a for-profit corporation exists for the sole purpose of making money.
So it seems does many people, it's certainly within the choice of human lifestyles. The problem is more that corporations work on an opposing cycle to elections. In non-election years politicians pass your bills to build goodwill and get campaign contributions, in election years they use that money to make people forget who much a corporate shill they've been.
Except people don't stack as well vertically as screens do. Two lines of people fine, Three or four rows of people is seriously crowded for those who have people on all sides. Oh it can happen for a few minutes but not for a gaming night, not unless there's real space to sit and then it'd take more than a 10" screen to see ok from the back row.
If there's one thing I don't do, it's buy software that isn't written yet. Maybe under some limited conditions in custom software both otherwise, let me know when you're done and what you're charging for it and I'll consider it.
Sorry, but when I think computers I also think a lot of networking, storage, databases, security and so on that don't feel very covered by "computing", which sounds limited to algorithms and calculations. "Computer Science" is not that terrible a name to describe the overall field of all things, hardware and software, application and architecture design, algorithm design and implementation, project and code management, application and use of computers and so on. And by the last one I mean everything from "How can I make a letter?" to "How can we use computers and a honking big particle accelerator to find the Higgs particle?" Computing Science sounds like some subfield of algorithm design that maybe covers implementation with caches, pipelines, assembler optimizations and such or maybe not.
I think the abuse is of the word "science" because it mingles people who take a driver's license with someone who takes a PhD in how people drive. It's not Compuster Science 101, it's just Computers 101. Anything that calls itself CS101 should get down to the very basics of how a processor core fetches instructions and executes them, with a simple memory-as-drawers analogy of retrieving and storing information. I'm not sure you need to go into a programming language at all, just explain how first grade math looks to a computer then slowly expand on that. That is to me the fundamentals of computer science, not the fundamentals of computers.
Don't worry, it's only the eternal cycle of integration and modularization. DHS is part of the "kitchen sink" phase, where everything should be gathered under one roof to get coordinated. Then they'll figure out that what the groups actually do have very little to do with each other so they'll either become detached units within the DHS or create spin-off departments. It's like "The Lion King" for business and governments, the cycle is always in change but in the end it's not going anywhere.
Meh, this is turning out to a textbook example of why companies don't do the right thing. Right now I bet Google wish they'd deleted the data, buried the case, burned the records and none of those involved were ever heard from ever again.... ok maybe not the last part, but seriously? When you know the result of admitting jaywalking is to be take out back and put before an execution squad, you're not going to find many turning themselves in.
You don't get it, censorship is the free market solution. You reason from the assumption that people base their purchasing decisions only on what products they offer for them, and not what products they offer to others. That is simply false, the reason most US companies don't offer AO products is because a large fraction of US consumers would boycott their stores for lacking family-friendly values or some such BS. Likewise many companies don't want their products sold near AO products like showing them in the same cinema because of the "taint" it carries. So from a straight profit-maximizing reasoning companies censor, because the market wants them to censor.
It's not just the religious nuts that think this way, you do get very far telling an animal rights activist "Yes, we test on animals but THIS product isn't tested on animals so come buy it." People are using their market power to shape the whole market, not just individual products. In the fairy tale market economics independent alternatives should show up to serve those markets, but it's not that easy when no "family friendly" mall will even let you set up a store, you can't get advertising anywhere because that'd turn away "family friendly" readers, it all get boxed in and reaches only a fraction of its potential audience who'd have no problem with an AO product on the (top) shelf.
The problem here is that the victim checked that it had cleared, by which time, IMHO, it should be too late for the bank to reverse the transaction.
Yeah, that's exactly what's not happening. The banks can take the money back up to two months after deposit. Taking unknown checks is economic extreme sports with no safety net.
Right. And then they would say, I'm not going to spend my money delivering to those people out in the country. The postal service has the responsibility to deliver to every region of the country. A private company doesn't have the same responsibility. We could make it a prerequisite for whoever wins the contract, but then they would raise the prices significantly.
Which would then prove that the USPS is an effective organization, that has just been given an expensive mission then? Sure you can get a system that costs half what the USPS does but only does half too, seriously if private companies can't compete in an apples-to-apples bid to take over what's the point? What is wrong with the government negotiating a SLA on behalf of the people of what is to be delivered? These are our requirements. These are our penalties for failing to meet those requirements. Seriously, I've never understood the US on this, giving it all to one company then letting them have free reign is just to ask people to lube up and bend over. Most every such regulated industry here in Norway has strings attached, which is considered fair as long as all bidders compete under the same conditions.
don't forget the other side to that. if banks eat the loss, then costs of transfers would go up, and/or banks will refuse to do transfers. It'll also go back to the previous mechanism where transfers take lots longer to clear (weeks or even,onths) before money is available. and direct deposit goes out the window, too.
I imagine by "direct deposit" you mean businesses mailing in paychecks to be paid to employee accounts or something like that? The whole problem with checks is that you have to match what's deposited with what's issued. I can go into my online bank now and issue a payment today and it'll be in your account in the morning, fully settled between the banks. That money is gone, has left my account, left the bank and isn't coming back unless I sue you to get it back. My paycheck comes straight to my account each month like clockwork the same way, it's settled the same night it's transferred into my account. That way all the instructions come from my account and I can't transfer money I don't have to do frauds like this. It's a lot harder taking control of my bank account that uses a code calculator than it is to make a piece of paper that looks like it came from my bank with a signature that looks like mine, after all I've signed quite a few places.
Sure, you can claim there's a few advantages to checks, but most of them are negated in that who really trusts a check that hasn't cleared? By the time it's cleared - the provisionally cleared you talk of here - you could have gotten yourself to an online bank, a telephone bank, a bank office and had the money electronically transfered or found an ATM and handed over cash. That is if you're not carrying around a cell phone capable of the same, usually you need a small code calculator as well but it's all pocket size. And if you have a terminal you don't even need that, the offline solution terminals use is pretty much like checks, you use the card, id and signature. That way it's up to the business to decide if they want things online, for example most taxis are now online so they know if you can pay the taxi ride or not or if the card is reported stolen. It's not quite that easy to issue an APB of a stolen checkbook, don't accept these checks.
Aw, not more Ayn Rand nonsense. Those who have power manipulate those who don't, it can be like in China where the government manipulates corporations or in the US where corporations manipulate the government. Same with the branches of government where Congress is trying to tell the President what to do, the President is trying to tell Congress what to do and they both have their run-ins with the Judicial branch too. And they pretty much all try to manipulate the public, because the people are powerful but unorganized and uninformed so easily swayed by media campaigns. Do you know what they all have in common? When one side wins and gains too much power, the people loses and you can't solve it by putting the power somewhere "better". You have to try to set up a system of checks and balances, knowing full well that each part will try to break out of them and it won't be a perfect balance but hopefully there will be a balance. Yeah ok if the government and business break all checks and balances and go facist on us that'd be bad. It'd also be bad if Obama breaks all checks and balances and declares himself absolute rules of the United American Empire under Emperor Obama I. Granted, the former might be slightly more probable than the latter but they're not very revolutionary ideas, you can find most variations in the history books.
You can have terabytes of RAM, and performance will be still determined by how often few megabytes of L1 and L2 CPU cache are updated from your giant but slow RAM.
Which is a million times better than back when we had too little RAM, and if you... hit.... swap... everything.... would..... go...... extremely......slow.......and......you'd...... go..... crazy..... waiting...... for...... the....... smallest....... thing........ to.......... finish.
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The judging is solely on the algorithm, by comparing the O(N) functions.
Hehe I once managed to put an expensive function inside the inner loop making a mostly O(N) function more like O(N^2)... that gets very noticable when you got 100k file hashes you're trying to match. It would have made a pretty good run for stupidest algorithm. But when you don't really have a benchmark, the results were correct it wasn't that obvious what I did wrong except it ran very, very slowly.
however for software, the model is radically different. once you're into "self-funding", the next version, once completed, is almost pure profit thanks to the internet. there's no "physical goods" to produce. if it's data, it can be hosted, and it can be distributed for virtually nothing. so under these circumstances, "pay what you like" actually makes sense.
Sure, but what's the incentive for people to pay if they know you're going to make it anyway? Say you wrote the first Harry Potter book, and it's a smashing success. What's the incentive for people to pay you for books 2-7? They know that even if you make $0.01/book on the next one, you're still going to make a lot more money than quitting and taking a normal job. "Pay what you like" only has an incentive to pay if at any time you have a credible threat to quit, which means you have pretty much all the downsides but no real upside. Once it is known you turn a pretty solid profit, people's willingness to give is going to take a nosedive. Or it's going to turn into a situation where people think you cry wolf, you call out for more money but no matter how badly it goes you put out a next version or offer to do it for less anyway. Of course there's good and bad sides to it, but I'm pretty sure the "pay what you like" model is going to be more about "how poor pay would you take?" rather than "what do I think this is worth?"
Because they know that's not how it's going to work. We're not going to have some silly court decision one day and the world wide web as we know it is shut down the next day. Oh they may use these silly little laws to shut down various shady or not-so-shady small sites, but google is not immidiately hurt by something being more rare to find, you will need more searches and a better search engine so you'll spent more time on google not less. If they manage to shut down popular "pirate" service people are likely to find out how filetype:torrent works for searching. They're so big they end up being assumed netural no matter how much shit people find through google. Perhaps it will eventually turn out to be a "First they came for..." that ends with "Then they came for google, and there was no one left to speak out for google" but I'm pretty sure they feel the world would straighten itself out long before they got there. The rest are either huge on corporate services or don't mind selling walled gardens already, the money is not in it. It's mostly a stream of ISPs and hosting providers and news sites and blogs that will have to fight this one, the rest aren't going to get involved. Even with the three strikes law Internet is such a necessity these days they know people will claw their way back on.
If you're paying for a server you're only likely to get a server, not development. If people can play it for free without the subscription or use alternate servers, the incentive to develop is really low. You can funnel lots of your profit into development only to have the business being taken over by someone providing cheaper hosting. Unless you start with exclusive content, in which care you're quickly back where it's only one server/network worth playing on.
The business has plenty of this problem on its own, just recently there was a huge crash in the media over artists now selling their CDs direct to grocery stores for 99 NOK (about $16.50 including 25% VAT) instead of the normal full price of 150-200 NOK ($25-$33). Angry Birds set a whole new standard for what a $1 game for an iPhone can and should do, suddenly games have to really justify costing $2-3 on the phone. Several people I've talked to have now made dollar games their price point, they generally don't buy anything above it. Without being crap I might add, many try to push the "only full price stuff is good and the rest is cheap crap they try pushing on you" and the lie is becoming too obvious. Either way you're going to lose sales, the question is just whether customers rejecting your offering or paying you too little is the better choice. I'd say that since it's pretty much sunk cost there's no such thing as selling yourself too cheap, it's just about making the people who would pay good money for it actually pay good money for it. Like I'm planning to buy Dragon Age 2 at full retail if the reviews are decent no matter what, but I'd happily take it for less if they're offering...
Since the customer can't unpack his basket while the cashier is finishing with the previous customer, time is lost.
This is the big difference. Many kinds of business have you draw a number if people can move swiftly to the counter and state their business. The cashier can scan items faster than you can get them on the band (or the 80 year old lady can, anyway) so a lot of time is saved by having the next customer's goods stacked and ready on the band. To make a CPU analogy, consider it a local pipeline for that execution unit keeping caches filled so far more of the time is spent productively and not idling. Pipeline stalls are not nice, but it's a lot better than not pipelining at all.
As long as we're talking sysadmin duties, which imply that you have ONE admin to many boxes. If it's any kind of setting that a user should have to touch, please make it part of the GUI. A good GUI is infinitely more structured and helpful than a long, long flat man page of cli switches. The reason you want a CLI is scripting, not user friendliness.
I think gifts in direct relation like to parents/children/siblings/SO are okay because you have at least some clue what they need/want and children may get presents from pretty much everyone. But all these gifts to and from distant family that I meet a few times a year at family gatherings are rather pointless. Mostly it ends up with a useless exchange of trinkets that neither of us would have bought on our own, and there's no net gift like with children. I have money, they have money and it's only a matter of priority if I want it - if it's outside that budget you wouldn't give it as a Christmas gift anyway. I'm not militant about it like the GP is but I've gradually built non-gift agreements with people that tend to give just as uninspired gifts as I eventually end up buying because I have to have a present but I got no clue what they need and I already got it up to here with Christmas shopping. Either you have to drag a wish out of them - and it's no fun shopping on command - or you end up buying blind.
It's a lean tree, but I still have my money instead of some cruft and go buy myself something nice. I'm very happy with the present I got for my parents though, and think they'll be pleasantly surprised. But that is because I know them, because I know them well enough to come up with something they'd need that they didn't tell me they needed. A few years back I bought a... well, kind of high-quality traditionally decorated pullover for my dad that he'd never asked for, but that I figured if he had one of those he'd use it. I was dead on the money and it's become his favorite garnment for many kinds of occasions. That kind of buying is fun and it also makes sense, it's gifts that are used and treasured. So they really span the whole scale, which is why I'd much rather take fewer and more on target gifts. If you still want to send some kind of token I'm not forgotten then a Christmas card will do just fine.
You wildly underestimate people's ability and tendency to make ramarks in fields, issues and cases they know very little about. And even if that weren't true, unless you specifically said "I did" it was always a friend who told you about his experiences. In short, you've got a bit much paranoia.
Corporations are on whatever side their profits are. If they're selling land mines, they're opposed to a ban on land mines. If they're doing something that makes them appear to have a moral compass, it's just for the PR and involves making the greatest possible boast for the least possible cost. Actual results are irrelevant except as to use in further PR. Their money has changed side, so they changed side. Wave dollar bills if you want them back.
Having said all of that, I think it's pretty clear that they've not committed any crime and that the law is being twisted by those with their own agenda to try and make them criminals. What they offered was realistically little different to what Google or Bing or Yahoo already do, albeit with a target user base with a more specific interest. I have zero issue with private individuals acting within the law to undermine what many people see as an unjust set of rules
That's pretty much the difference between the USPS and a drug mule, one operates a general transport company and the other specializes in transporting drugs. If you want it applied to copyright I suggest you read the US Sumpreme Court ruling against Grokster, where they in a 9-0 verdict found targeting lawbreakers as a market gives you secondary liability for their actions.
The "kadunk-kadunk" of freight trains is pretty much limited to freight trains, because the thumb is really annoying for the passengers. Modern passenger trains on a modern railroad track are awfully quiet and awfully quick. Plus if you're trying to hold a conversation on the cell phone in a noisy environment, you often mentally shut out everything else to focus on the voice. So it's not so much "there's noise" as in "this noise I *shouldn't* ignore". Same as in my office landscape when people think holding a conversation across the room is a good idea, I just mentally shut it out. For the office it'll save your sanity, on a railroad crossing it might kill you.
No, it isn't. "On the Internet" is where you should assume everything "public" will end up. Or put another way, you should always assune the whole world is watching anything you do in public. This was a good idea before the Internet, and it's a better idea now.
But that's exactly the point, before the internet you didn't need to assume it'd end up there. How many "Star Wars Kid"s do you think there was before him that didn't turn into a media circus seen by hundreds of millions? And you can bet that if you're ever caught on a video like that, there's someone kind enough to add "hey I know this guy, that Bill Bingsly from my school" and after that you might as well duct tape it on your forehead. That and cell phone cameras, there's a million embarrassing public moments that were a huge laugh to the people present, but that weren't caught on camera. Sure, you can talk principles and theory but the fact is that Internet is like "public" hooked up a megaphone and a 1000w amp taking things from "Danny got a peek of us naked" to "Everybody in school has seen the clip in slow-mo by now and I just want to die" kind of embarrassment.
The difference between corporations and citizens is that a for-profit corporation exists for the sole purpose of making money.
So it seems does many people, it's certainly within the choice of human lifestyles. The problem is more that corporations work on an opposing cycle to elections. In non-election years politicians pass your bills to build goodwill and get campaign contributions, in election years they use that money to make people forget who much a corporate shill they've been.
Except people don't stack as well vertically as screens do. Two lines of people fine, Three or four rows of people is seriously crowded for those who have people on all sides. Oh it can happen for a few minutes but not for a gaming night, not unless there's real space to sit and then it'd take more than a 10" screen to see ok from the back row.
Minecraft Reaches Beta Status, Price Goes Up
If there's one thing I don't do, it's buy software that isn't written yet. Maybe under some limited conditions in custom software both otherwise, let me know when you're done and what you're charging for it and I'll consider it.
Sorry, but when I think computers I also think a lot of networking, storage, databases, security and so on that don't feel very covered by "computing", which sounds limited to algorithms and calculations. "Computer Science" is not that terrible a name to describe the overall field of all things, hardware and software, application and architecture design, algorithm design and implementation, project and code management, application and use of computers and so on. And by the last one I mean everything from "How can I make a letter?" to "How can we use computers and a honking big particle accelerator to find the Higgs particle?" Computing Science sounds like some subfield of algorithm design that maybe covers implementation with caches, pipelines, assembler optimizations and such or maybe not.
I think the abuse is of the word "science" because it mingles people who take a driver's license with someone who takes a PhD in how people drive. It's not Compuster Science 101, it's just Computers 101. Anything that calls itself CS101 should get down to the very basics of how a processor core fetches instructions and executes them, with a simple memory-as-drawers analogy of retrieving and storing information. I'm not sure you need to go into a programming language at all, just explain how first grade math looks to a computer then slowly expand on that. That is to me the fundamentals of computer science, not the fundamentals of computers.
Don't worry, it's only the eternal cycle of integration and modularization. DHS is part of the "kitchen sink" phase, where everything should be gathered under one roof to get coordinated. Then they'll figure out that what the groups actually do have very little to do with each other so they'll either become detached units within the DHS or create spin-off departments. It's like "The Lion King" for business and governments, the cycle is always in change but in the end it's not going anywhere.
Meh, this is turning out to a textbook example of why companies don't do the right thing. Right now I bet Google wish they'd deleted the data, buried the case, burned the records and none of those involved were ever heard from ever again.... ok maybe not the last part, but seriously? When you know the result of admitting jaywalking is to be take out back and put before an execution squad, you're not going to find many turning themselves in.
You don't get it, censorship is the free market solution. You reason from the assumption that people base their purchasing decisions only on what products they offer for them, and not what products they offer to others. That is simply false, the reason most US companies don't offer AO products is because a large fraction of US consumers would boycott their stores for lacking family-friendly values or some such BS. Likewise many companies don't want their products sold near AO products like showing them in the same cinema because of the "taint" it carries. So from a straight profit-maximizing reasoning companies censor, because the market wants them to censor.
It's not just the religious nuts that think this way, you do get very far telling an animal rights activist "Yes, we test on animals but THIS product isn't tested on animals so come buy it." People are using their market power to shape the whole market, not just individual products. In the fairy tale market economics independent alternatives should show up to serve those markets, but it's not that easy when no "family friendly" mall will even let you set up a store, you can't get advertising anywhere because that'd turn away "family friendly" readers, it all get boxed in and reaches only a fraction of its potential audience who'd have no problem with an AO product on the (top) shelf.
The problem here is that the victim checked that it had cleared, by which time, IMHO, it should be too late for the bank to reverse the transaction.
Yeah, that's exactly what's not happening. The banks can take the money back up to two months after deposit. Taking unknown checks is economic extreme sports with no safety net.
Right. And then they would say, I'm not going to spend my money delivering to those people out in the country. The postal service has the responsibility to deliver to every region of the country. A private company doesn't have the same responsibility. We could make it a prerequisite for whoever wins the contract, but then they would raise the prices significantly.
Which would then prove that the USPS is an effective organization, that has just been given an expensive mission then? Sure you can get a system that costs half what the USPS does but only does half too, seriously if private companies can't compete in an apples-to-apples bid to take over what's the point? What is wrong with the government negotiating a SLA on behalf of the people of what is to be delivered? These are our requirements. These are our penalties for failing to meet those requirements. Seriously, I've never understood the US on this, giving it all to one company then letting them have free reign is just to ask people to lube up and bend over. Most every such regulated industry here in Norway has strings attached, which is considered fair as long as all bidders compete under the same conditions.
don't forget the other side to that. if banks eat the loss, then costs of transfers would go up, and/or banks will refuse to do transfers. It'll also go back to the previous mechanism where transfers take lots longer to clear (weeks or even ,onths) before money is available. and direct deposit goes out the window, too.
I imagine by "direct deposit" you mean businesses mailing in paychecks to be paid to employee accounts or something like that? The whole problem with checks is that you have to match what's deposited with what's issued. I can go into my online bank now and issue a payment today and it'll be in your account in the morning, fully settled between the banks. That money is gone, has left my account, left the bank and isn't coming back unless I sue you to get it back. My paycheck comes straight to my account each month like clockwork the same way, it's settled the same night it's transferred into my account. That way all the instructions come from my account and I can't transfer money I don't have to do frauds like this. It's a lot harder taking control of my bank account that uses a code calculator than it is to make a piece of paper that looks like it came from my bank with a signature that looks like mine, after all I've signed quite a few places.
Sure, you can claim there's a few advantages to checks, but most of them are negated in that who really trusts a check that hasn't cleared? By the time it's cleared - the provisionally cleared you talk of here - you could have gotten yourself to an online bank, a telephone bank, a bank office and had the money electronically transfered or found an ATM and handed over cash. That is if you're not carrying around a cell phone capable of the same, usually you need a small code calculator as well but it's all pocket size. And if you have a terminal you don't even need that, the offline solution terminals use is pretty much like checks, you use the card, id and signature. That way it's up to the business to decide if they want things online, for example most taxis are now online so they know if you can pay the taxi ride or not or if the card is reported stolen. It's not quite that easy to issue an APB of a stolen checkbook, don't accept these checks.
Aw, not more Ayn Rand nonsense. Those who have power manipulate those who don't, it can be like in China where the government manipulates corporations or in the US where corporations manipulate the government. Same with the branches of government where Congress is trying to tell the President what to do, the President is trying to tell Congress what to do and they both have their run-ins with the Judicial branch too. And they pretty much all try to manipulate the public, because the people are powerful but unorganized and uninformed so easily swayed by media campaigns. Do you know what they all have in common? When one side wins and gains too much power, the people loses and you can't solve it by putting the power somewhere "better". You have to try to set up a system of checks and balances, knowing full well that each part will try to break out of them and it won't be a perfect balance but hopefully there will be a balance. Yeah ok if the government and business break all checks and balances and go facist on us that'd be bad. It'd also be bad if Obama breaks all checks and balances and declares himself absolute rules of the United American Empire under Emperor Obama I. Granted, the former might be slightly more probable than the latter but they're not very revolutionary ideas, you can find most variations in the history books.
You can have terabytes of RAM, and performance will be still determined by how often few megabytes of L1 and L2 CPU cache are updated from your giant but slow RAM.
Which is a million times better than back when we had too little RAM, and if you... hit.... swap... everything.... would..... go...... extremely......slow.......and......you'd...... go..... crazy..... waiting...... for...... the....... smallest....... thing........ to.......... finish.