You don't think someone, given enough time, would be able to brute-force your password? The use of Never in zeppepcs post would imply he means literally NEVER. Not "in a reasonable amount of time" or "within a timeframe that the information stored is still valuable" but NEVER IN ALL TIME!!!
No, and there's good physical arguments to "NEVER IN ALL TIME!!!" despiate your attempts at hyperbole. Currently the best theories we got suggests there's a lower entropy limit of kT*ln 2 (the Von Neumann-Landauer limit) per operation, which is on the order of 10^-23 joule. The energy of the sun via E=mc^2 is on the order of 10^47 joule. So at most you can do is 10^70 operations but 2^256 = ~10^77. In other words you can't get through the keyspace before you run out of energy, even taking ideal assumptions.
Granted, this doesn't account for all the matter in the universe. If you include that, you probably have to move to a 384 bit key but it's still quite finite as opposed to burning through every star in every galaxy in the observable universe. Of course, this is only if you have a 256-bit cipher with no cryptological attacks. AES256 is already shown to be flawed with a strength of only 119 bits, though that too is considered practically impossible but not nearly as physically impossible. But I'm sure we will find such a cipher, it's just that we'll never know when we're there.
You just made me realize nobody named Cole (Ashley Cole, Cheryl Cole, Nat King Cole) will ever have a law named after them. Everyone will just snicker and it'll never catch on.
Can evidence of even primitive life in galaxies so far away that they may not even exist now disprove all geocentric religions? (e.g. the Abrahamic faiths)
Not any more than evolution has managed to disprove the same religions, I'd wager. Oh there might be life elsewhere, but only man is created directly by God in his image and had Jesus Christ die for our sins. That's the true arrogance in those religions, not whether there's some überpowerful guy who runs the universe but that we humans are so important to him. If we were 7 billion whiny ants to him, God would still be God but religion wouldn't have nearly the same appeal.
If so, don't bother. That's what makes the huge difference between touch typing and hunt-n-peck typists. With touch typing all your fingers tend to be on the keyboard and you get a feel for where you are while I see most others do write/look/write/look/write/look, it's quite easy to see if you pay attention to their eyes. By keeping your eyes on the paragraph or block of code/query/whatever, you get a lot more mental focus on what you're doing than the mechanics of typing it. I do know the feel of what you're saying though, sometimes the big picture just "snaps" and you've suddenly got more to write than your fingers will keep up with but just get down the few critical ideas/revelations and really there is no such huge hurry in fleshing it out. Normally you then have to think a little more if you're doing it the right way anyway.
No, I don't think it's that important to fix but it seems like a very classic example of the US belief that free competition will always be superior, no matter how dysfunctional the market is. Oddly enough the phone system is one example where they finally invoked anti-trust, but all they did was create a bunch of mini-monopolies instead of one mega-monopoly. If an American reads that, they tend to think "ah, so they prop up unsuccessful businesses" but that's not what's happening.
For example, here the big telco (Telenor) has been forced to rent out their end user copper lines against a regulated fee so there's competition on the Internet service, other companies must rent/dig lines to the phone central, provide the DSL modems, customer support, control their own over-subscription, set their own policies with regards to IP addresses, servers, SLAs and so on. Other things can be instead of stimulus bills there can be prize money for users connected to the broadband network, not quite so many possibilities to cheat there. A consumer protection agency which makes sure that you actually get what they advertise, not just in a formal linguistic sense but in practical reality. For example you see very little of the word "unlimited" here, and "up to" means "what you'll normally get, but not guaranteed".
Another is health care, doesn't matter how dysfunctional that market is as long as the government isn't touching it. Or Microsoft's monopoly, at least the EU has tried to fight both the media player and browser monopoly though they're not doing too well against that giant. Just to take one mini-example, all the different cell phones had different chargers and they were grossly overcharging for the proprietary connector and used it as lock-in to keep you with the same brand. EU mandated a standard, and so it's a standard and you can now change phones all you like and use your old chargers. It's about generating competition through regulation, not destroying it. Of course you can do that too, but we have known very long that Soviet-style economy doesn't work, despite what the Americans think.
Well... to be a credible fraud by the company it has to be something they could get away with, like say if this was some tweaked/unlocked/flashed/whatever that'd actually boot if you put it in a computer. This is more like buying a car and finding out the engine is a cardboard prop. Some fly-by-night eBay scammer could do something like this, but no I don't think Fry's or Tiger Direct would be treated that differently.
Well, I just browsed through the list of articles proposed for deletion on Wikipedia. A lot of it, I'd say about 70% or so was articles about people or bands/albums/songs to be deleted on notability grounds. The rest were a mixed bag of general cleanup. The question is, notable compared to what? I can assure you that of all the samples I looked at, none would have qualified for an encyclopedia entry. None were anyone I'd be surprised to find missing.
I think if you want to include people of less notability, you have to just not have a notability criteria. FIDE has a list of 100,000 chess players? Sure whatever, drop them in. I want to add my elementary school class, drop them in. If I just want to list people out of the phone book living in my area, drop them in. If I want to add my whole family of obscure people from my genealogy project, drop them in. Every person that's played a sport at any level where they bothered taking names, drop them in. Every person ever mentioned in any news paper article or failed the first round of idol tryouts, drop them in. Maybe that'll be useful, maybe it'll just be a tangled mess of weird information, duplicate entries of same person or entries mixing up several people with the same name, shameless self-promotion, vandalism and harassment. I guess it's worth a try, I'm just not sure wikipedia is the place to try it.
The financial crash shows that capitalism does work to regulate banks; if they take too much risk they eventually lose out, lose all their money and go bankrupt, exactly what is meant to happen to companies that are poorly run in a capitalist economy. Pure capitalism works, as long as you are willing to accept that the way it regulates itself is through disaster.
In pure capitalism all the people with savings would be the bank's creditors during the bankruptcy negotiations. Since all they'd take over would be rotten loans and foreclosures, people would lose most of their savings. But because that'd create mass mayhem and the general collapse of the banking system their losses are covered by taking money from everyone else. So what if they go bankrupt? They gamble and if they win they cash out in stock options, dividends, bonuses and salaries. If they lose, they fold and start again while someone else picks up the tab. It's a classic thing very often done in the restaurant/pub/night club business. One company owns the property and rents it to the operating company, they accumulate as much debt as possible while paying the property company then fold. Then they start over with a new operating company.
The trouble is that Mars has an average atmospheric pressure of 0.6 kPa as opposed to Earth's 101.3 kPa. The reduced gravity will affect both lift of the balloon and the weight of the probe hanging below it so that cancels out. If we assume a hydrogen balloon though, the lift should be about 3x as large as on Earth based on gas density. My guesstimate is you need a balloon 70 times larger than on Earth to get the same lift. The balloon would have to be extremely thin and light and survive huge temperature changes without tearing and the probe would have to either produce the hydrogen or bring it all the way to Mars. Sounds doable but certainly not easy.
That's actually a very interesting point. Suppose you license some software to an organization under the GPL. The organization now has some of their employees work with the software. Does that constitute distribution?
No, it's the company's products and just because you get to use them doesn't make them yours. However, you can not distribute the tool to suppliers, customers, contractors or other legal entities without running into the GPL - which can get complicated. All of that is solvable but it's headaches many companies don't want.
True, though if what you need is sequential read/write performance then RAID0 will do that well at less cost and much higher capacity than an SSD. Normally the reason why you want that is because you're doing video capture or something similar that takes ungodly amounts of space, so RAID0 is pretty much a slam dunk here. It's the random read/write performance that is the reason for getting an SSD. In the 4k random read/write tests - which are easier for me to understand than IOPS as reading and writing lots of little files - the SSDs are king. And the reason they are so much better is mostly IOPS and seek time, not so much top speed though I'm sure that helps too.
If you have the idea to create and sell something on your own, then you own it. If someone else or a company has an idea to create and sell something and hires you just to do the grunt work of making it, you do not own it. That's pretty normal except a group of programmers like yourself think that you should get paid for the work AND get to own someone else's idea / design. That's greed and arrogance on your part, plain and simple.
If you hire someone to build a brick wall, you get the wall but not all the tools and knowledge to build the wall. If you hire someone to program a brick wall for your game it's impossible to transfer just the wall, it'll be all the source code used to generate the wall unless you got some weird code-generating tricks. What most software developers don't want to do is sell away their toolbox, sure the client may have his idea of a building and it'll be his building but the method of building prefab walls is yours. Everything you learn about construction on this project, you bring to the next project because that's the structural capital of the construction firm. To my knowledge the company I work for has never done any project where we exclusively sign over all the code, if we did they'd have to pay us 10-100x times as much as we'd have to start from scratch building components and code snippets.
However, in an assignment, Copyright law specifically splits the copyright term into two parts. An assignment made when the work is created transfers rights to the assignee (usually the company) for about 1/2 the term (the time varies depending upon whether the author dies and some other factors, but it is usually a long time > 30 years). The copyright automatically reverts back to the original author, and the assignment agreement cannot override this rule. The law is written this way to give the authors a "second bite at the apple" in case a work they assign away for peanuts becomes very valuable later.
Other issues with both works for hire and assignments can include copyright rules in different countries (everything above is US law), although international treaties harmonize the law somewhat. An assignment of copyright in one jurisdiction might not be valid in another, so the assignee might not have exclusive rights globally without the correct agreements.
In particular I think this termination at half-term is very US specific, I have at least not seen anything like it in european copyright laws...
If someone pays you to perform work, they own all rights to that work. When I was married, we had a difficult time finding a photographer that agreed, and simply didn't do business with those that wanted to be paid for their work, and wanted to keep all rights to said photos for use in promotions and fees for reprints.
Part of it is of course that they expect the same total pay, don't expect to cut them off from the additional income and expect the base pay to remain the same. But I think the other part is that they start thinking of what a similar commercial work for hire would cost. The type where you get model releases and can use them in commercial promotions, magazines, websites and so on both in original and any form of derivate and sublicense those rights to others, which is quite pricy. Maybe they're thinking you want to set up a bridal gear shop and is looking to get a professional set of stock photos on the cheap by being your own models? Or have a deal with someone that wants to? If you ask for all the rights they will imagine the possibilities, even if you haven't.
No no you're mistaken, it's the Noble price as in Donna Noble as in the Doctor-Donna. It is awarded to wacky quantum discoveries with tons of British slang that could fit right in the script of any Doctor Who episode.
As much as your idea makes sense, the chances are his superiors will refuse because it's against policy or it will be seen as insubordination if the higher-ups become aware. They can easily claim that despite his local cost savings he is obstructing the architectural and strategic plans and increasing long term costs. A very expensive consultant report will agree with what the higher-ups want and that'll be the end of that and possibly his career. The only real moral leverage he has is that this is public money, a private company could do whatever the hell they like and it'd be nobody's business how deep they're in bed with Microsoft. But that doesn't mean that it's some employee-run collective that is managed differently from any other company, if he wants to use that he has to awaken the public and force them to reconsider at the policy level. Otherwise he'll just be as any other employee in the private sector ignoring management decisions.
According to the more detailed description of how this works, lights go across the letters and each time it passes a letter you want to add you need to concentrate. So it basically has a brain activity meter and can tell if you're thinking hard or not, it's not like you concentrate on the letter A and the machine reads it from your mind. I think your thoughts are quite safe for a long time to come.
My problem with SSDs isn't even the price per GB (which is bad enough). It's the amount of space, period. (...) When the drives come in at least 500 GB sizes, then I'll consider them.
Unlike mechanical drives which have a very clear sweet spot the SSD prices scale almost linearly with size. Actually I have no problems finding a 512GB SSD in stock here in Norway. The downside is that it costs 1800$ with or 1450$ without VAT, exactly double what the 256GB version costs.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like prices will go down much until Q4 when Intel get their next generation flash chips going. What is happening though is that many of the high-end controllers are massively increasing performance for a relatively small increase in price. For example my Vertex has about 10MB/s random 4k write on an unaligned partition, the Vertex LE is now doing 50MB/s. Random reads have gone from 35MB/s on my Vertex to almost 80MB/s on the latest Crucial C300s. So you may have to wait a bit longer, but the difference will be even more amazing when you switch.
That's what he did all the way to the bank, yes. You're assuming he bought into what he was saying, while I suspect that he and his lawyer brother riled each other up trying to find the most absurd but plausible-sounding legal fillings and PR statements to inflate the stock price over killing a bottle of scotch and released everything they managed to say with a straight face. No player ever announces himself as such, the whole "poor victimized CEO that's been screwed over by IBM and had his precious IP stolen" is playing the act. His apparent ignorance that the whole lawsuit was basically a sham based on IP rights they didn't own is more of the same. He misled people, got lots of money and got away with it. In my book that's a very successful and intelligent con man, despite the faulty moral compass. I suspect if he read your post he'd go "lok, I got you soooooooo fooled".
However back to the original poster's point, I suspect that religion provided an organizational foundation or focus that allowed social groups to grow beyond the natural size of primate tribal groups. That allowed those cultural groups to tackle bigger problems than those accessible to pure tribal groups and gave them a competitive advantage. The altruistic components of many religions also probably make those groups more resistant to natural disasters since they can draw upon a greater geographical base which is more likely to have some part that escaped the disaster. Whether those advantages are still necessary in an era with nationalism and democratic institutions is an open question. However it would appears that the significant decline of religious adherence in many Westernized countries is an answer to that question.
Actually I think the primary competitive driver is that to a religious person God/Allah/gods/karma always knows whether you've been good or bad and that there's always a reward or punishment even if you see none of it in life. Whether it's justice, purpose, comfort or hope you need then God can provide where scientists and philosophers can't. Even those that aren't very religious can say things like "I hope you burn in Hell" - we all hope someone will right the wrongs in the end. Or even in life we'd like to hope people get what's coming to them. It's a lot easier, despite the befuddlement, to accept that something is a punishment from God for your sins rather than being a random statistical outlier who won the inverse lottery. For us standing on the outside, it looks like irrational behavior together all these people acting irrationally are together stronger than every single individual maximizing only for themselves.
For some uses yes it's choke full of niche medical equipment and other lucrative business. But if you start talking about standardization and using common tools, then you have to start herding cats. If you ask a doctor to draw the organization chart they are often the senior medical expertize on this area with them on top and the management hierarchy is just the overhead coordinating the medical units. Even with the exchange of skills they aren't working on any true collaboration, most of the time it's one doctor, one patient. It becomes their patients, their way of doing it, their medical records. So along comes this electronic patient journal and everything has to be in this format. You will meet resistance and they have a trump card in pushing medical reasons like poorer data quality and health care in front of their own unwillingness to change. The result is a very fractured health system, we are working on a regional project now and each local hospital have their own system with wildly different versions and access methods and whatnot. Luckily we're not the ones dealing with that mess, but someone is...
If you want a practical application for the everyday user, look at HD video. Many people might have interest in recording HD video and processing it in various ways. We've just recently reached the point where many computers can handle a single 1080p stream. But what happens when someone wants to download HD video from their camcorder, record an HD over-the-air broadcast, have a three-way HD video chat with their friends, while downloading some files in the background and running a video conversion for the HD video they just edited of their wedding footage? Until that becomes easy, we have a ways to go.
Downloading from camera => file transfer of compressed stream from memory card/HDD Recording a TV show => save compressed stream Three way HD video chat => more limited by Internet bandwidth than computers
Yes, editing HD video is still heavy but it doesn't take a super special computer anymore. A regular high-end desktop will do just fine unless you try to construct a situation where you combine many clips with lots of effects.
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You don't think someone, given enough time, would be able to brute-force your password? The use of Never in zeppepcs post would imply he means literally NEVER. Not "in a reasonable amount of time" or "within a timeframe that the information stored is still valuable" but NEVER IN ALL TIME!!!
No, and there's good physical arguments to "NEVER IN ALL TIME!!!" despiate your attempts at hyperbole. Currently the best theories we got suggests there's a lower entropy limit of kT*ln 2 (the Von Neumann-Landauer limit) per operation, which is on the order of 10^-23 joule. The energy of the sun via E=mc^2 is on the order of 10^47 joule. So at most you can do is 10^70 operations but 2^256 = ~10^77. In other words you can't get through the keyspace before you run out of energy, even taking ideal assumptions.
Granted, this doesn't account for all the matter in the universe. If you include that, you probably have to move to a 384 bit key but it's still quite finite as opposed to burning through every star in every galaxy in the observable universe. Of course, this is only if you have a 256-bit cipher with no cryptological attacks. AES256 is already shown to be flawed with a strength of only 119 bits, though that too is considered practically impossible but not nearly as physically impossible. But I'm sure we will find such a cipher, it's just that we'll never know when we're there.
You just made me realize nobody named Cole (Ashley Cole, Cheryl Cole, Nat King Cole) will ever have a law named after them. Everyone will just snicker and it'll never catch on.
Can evidence of even primitive life in galaxies so far away that they may not even exist now disprove all geocentric religions? (e.g. the Abrahamic faiths)
Not any more than evolution has managed to disprove the same religions, I'd wager. Oh there might be life elsewhere, but only man is created directly by God in his image and had Jesus Christ die for our sins. That's the true arrogance in those religions, not whether there's some überpowerful guy who runs the universe but that we humans are so important to him. If we were 7 billion whiny ants to him, God would still be God but religion wouldn't have nearly the same appeal.
If so, don't bother. That's what makes the huge difference between touch typing and hunt-n-peck typists. With touch typing all your fingers tend to be on the keyboard and you get a feel for where you are while I see most others do write/look/write/look/write/look, it's quite easy to see if you pay attention to their eyes. By keeping your eyes on the paragraph or block of code/query/whatever, you get a lot more mental focus on what you're doing than the mechanics of typing it. I do know the feel of what you're saying though, sometimes the big picture just "snaps" and you've suddenly got more to write than your fingers will keep up with but just get down the few critical ideas/revelations and really there is no such huge hurry in fleshing it out. Normally you then have to think a little more if you're doing it the right way anyway.
No, I don't think it's that important to fix but it seems like a very classic example of the US belief that free competition will always be superior, no matter how dysfunctional the market is. Oddly enough the phone system is one example where they finally invoked anti-trust, but all they did was create a bunch of mini-monopolies instead of one mega-monopoly. If an American reads that, they tend to think "ah, so they prop up unsuccessful businesses" but that's not what's happening.
For example, here the big telco (Telenor) has been forced to rent out their end user copper lines against a regulated fee so there's competition on the Internet service, other companies must rent/dig lines to the phone central, provide the DSL modems, customer support, control their own over-subscription, set their own policies with regards to IP addresses, servers, SLAs and so on. Other things can be instead of stimulus bills there can be prize money for users connected to the broadband network, not quite so many possibilities to cheat there. A consumer protection agency which makes sure that you actually get what they advertise, not just in a formal linguistic sense but in practical reality. For example you see very little of the word "unlimited" here, and "up to" means "what you'll normally get, but not guaranteed".
Another is health care, doesn't matter how dysfunctional that market is as long as the government isn't touching it. Or Microsoft's monopoly, at least the EU has tried to fight both the media player and browser monopoly though they're not doing too well against that giant. Just to take one mini-example, all the different cell phones had different chargers and they were grossly overcharging for the proprietary connector and used it as lock-in to keep you with the same brand. EU mandated a standard, and so it's a standard and you can now change phones all you like and use your old chargers. It's about generating competition through regulation, not destroying it. Of course you can do that too, but we have known very long that Soviet-style economy doesn't work, despite what the Americans think.
Well... to be a credible fraud by the company it has to be something they could get away with, like say if this was some tweaked/unlocked/flashed/whatever that'd actually boot if you put it in a computer. This is more like buying a car and finding out the engine is a cardboard prop. Some fly-by-night eBay scammer could do something like this, but no I don't think Fry's or Tiger Direct would be treated that differently.
Well, I just browsed through the list of articles proposed for deletion on Wikipedia. A lot of it, I'd say about 70% or so was articles about people or bands/albums/songs to be deleted on notability grounds. The rest were a mixed bag of general cleanup. The question is, notable compared to what? I can assure you that of all the samples I looked at, none would have qualified for an encyclopedia entry. None were anyone I'd be surprised to find missing.
I think if you want to include people of less notability, you have to just not have a notability criteria. FIDE has a list of 100,000 chess players? Sure whatever, drop them in. I want to add my elementary school class, drop them in. If I just want to list people out of the phone book living in my area, drop them in. If I want to add my whole family of obscure people from my genealogy project, drop them in. Every person that's played a sport at any level where they bothered taking names, drop them in. Every person ever mentioned in any news paper article or failed the first round of idol tryouts, drop them in. Maybe that'll be useful, maybe it'll just be a tangled mess of weird information, duplicate entries of same person or entries mixing up several people with the same name, shameless self-promotion, vandalism and harassment. I guess it's worth a try, I'm just not sure wikipedia is the place to try it.
The financial crash shows that capitalism does work to regulate banks; if they take too much risk they eventually lose out, lose all their money and go bankrupt, exactly what is meant to happen to companies that are poorly run in a capitalist economy. Pure capitalism works, as long as you are willing to accept that the way it regulates itself is through disaster.
In pure capitalism all the people with savings would be the bank's creditors during the bankruptcy negotiations. Since all they'd take over would be rotten loans and foreclosures, people would lose most of their savings. But because that'd create mass mayhem and the general collapse of the banking system their losses are covered by taking money from everyone else. So what if they go bankrupt? They gamble and if they win they cash out in stock options, dividends, bonuses and salaries. If they lose, they fold and start again while someone else picks up the tab. It's a classic thing very often done in the restaurant/pub/night club business. One company owns the property and rents it to the operating company, they accumulate as much debt as possible while paying the property company then fold. Then they start over with a new operating company.
The trouble is that Mars has an average atmospheric pressure of 0.6 kPa as opposed to Earth's 101.3 kPa. The reduced gravity will affect both lift of the balloon and the weight of the probe hanging below it so that cancels out. If we assume a hydrogen balloon though, the lift should be about 3x as large as on Earth based on gas density. My guesstimate is you need a balloon 70 times larger than on Earth to get the same lift. The balloon would have to be extremely thin and light and survive huge temperature changes without tearing and the probe would have to either produce the hydrogen or bring it all the way to Mars. Sounds doable but certainly not easy.
That's actually a very interesting point. Suppose you license some software to an organization under the GPL. The organization now has some of their employees work with the software. Does that constitute distribution?
No, it's the company's products and just because you get to use them doesn't make them yours. However, you can not distribute the tool to suppliers, customers, contractors or other legal entities without running into the GPL - which can get complicated. All of that is solvable but it's headaches many companies don't want.
True, though if what you need is sequential read/write performance then RAID0 will do that well at less cost and much higher capacity than an SSD. Normally the reason why you want that is because you're doing video capture or something similar that takes ungodly amounts of space, so RAID0 is pretty much a slam dunk here. It's the random read/write performance that is the reason for getting an SSD. In the 4k random read/write tests - which are easier for me to understand than IOPS as reading and writing lots of little files - the SSDs are king. And the reason they are so much better is mostly IOPS and seek time, not so much top speed though I'm sure that helps too.
If you have the idea to create and sell something on your own, then you own it. If someone else or a company has an idea to create and sell something and hires you just to do the grunt work of making it, you do not own it. That's pretty normal except a group of programmers like yourself think that you should get paid for the work AND get to own someone else's idea / design. That's greed and arrogance on your part, plain and simple.
If you hire someone to build a brick wall, you get the wall but not all the tools and knowledge to build the wall. If you hire someone to program a brick wall for your game it's impossible to transfer just the wall, it'll be all the source code used to generate the wall unless you got some weird code-generating tricks. What most software developers don't want to do is sell away their toolbox, sure the client may have his idea of a building and it'll be his building but the method of building prefab walls is yours. Everything you learn about construction on this project, you bring to the next project because that's the structural capital of the construction firm. To my knowledge the company I work for has never done any project where we exclusively sign over all the code, if we did they'd have to pay us 10-100x times as much as we'd have to start from scratch building components and code snippets.
However, in an assignment, Copyright law specifically splits the copyright term into two parts. An assignment made when the work is created transfers rights to the assignee (usually the company) for about 1/2 the term (the time varies depending upon whether the author dies and some other factors, but it is usually a long time > 30 years). The copyright automatically reverts back to the original author, and the assignment agreement cannot override this rule. The law is written this way to give the authors a "second bite at the apple" in case a work they assign away for peanuts becomes very valuable later.
Other issues with both works for hire and assignments can include copyright rules in different countries (everything above is US law), although international treaties harmonize the law somewhat. An assignment of copyright in one jurisdiction might not be valid in another, so the assignee might not have exclusive rights globally without the correct agreements.
In particular I think this termination at half-term is very US specific, I have at least not seen anything like it in european copyright laws...
At least in this case I've never heard of them getting paid if you want to tear down a wall and extend the house, despite changing the floor plan.
If someone pays you to perform work, they own all rights to that work. When I was married, we had a difficult time finding a photographer that agreed, and simply didn't do business with those that wanted to be paid for their work, and wanted to keep all rights to said photos for use in promotions and fees for reprints.
Part of it is of course that they expect the same total pay, don't expect to cut them off from the additional income and expect the base pay to remain the same. But I think the other part is that they start thinking of what a similar commercial work for hire would cost. The type where you get model releases and can use them in commercial promotions, magazines, websites and so on both in original and any form of derivate and sublicense those rights to others, which is quite pricy. Maybe they're thinking you want to set up a bridal gear shop and is looking to get a professional set of stock photos on the cheap by being your own models? Or have a deal with someone that wants to? If you ask for all the rights they will imagine the possibilities, even if you haven't.
No no you're mistaken, it's the Noble price as in Donna Noble as in the Doctor-Donna. It is awarded to wacky quantum discoveries with tons of British slang that could fit right in the script of any Doctor Who episode.
As much as your idea makes sense, the chances are his superiors will refuse because it's against policy or it will be seen as insubordination if the higher-ups become aware. They can easily claim that despite his local cost savings he is obstructing the architectural and strategic plans and increasing long term costs. A very expensive consultant report will agree with what the higher-ups want and that'll be the end of that and possibly his career. The only real moral leverage he has is that this is public money, a private company could do whatever the hell they like and it'd be nobody's business how deep they're in bed with Microsoft. But that doesn't mean that it's some employee-run collective that is managed differently from any other company, if he wants to use that he has to awaken the public and force them to reconsider at the policy level. Otherwise he'll just be as any other employee in the private sector ignoring management decisions.
One of the more insightful things I've read in a while, in fact I made it my sig :)
According to the more detailed description of how this works, lights go across the letters and each time it passes a letter you want to add you need to concentrate. So it basically has a brain activity meter and can tell if you're thinking hard or not, it's not like you concentrate on the letter A and the machine reads it from your mind. I think your thoughts are quite safe for a long time to come.
My problem with SSDs isn't even the price per GB (which is bad enough). It's the amount of space, period. (...) When the drives come in at least 500 GB sizes, then I'll consider them.
Unlike mechanical drives which have a very clear sweet spot the SSD prices scale almost linearly with size. Actually I have no problems finding a 512GB SSD in stock here in Norway. The downside is that it costs 1800$ with or 1450$ without VAT, exactly double what the 256GB version costs.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like prices will go down much until Q4 when Intel get their next generation flash chips going. What is happening though is that many of the high-end controllers are massively increasing performance for a relatively small increase in price. For example my Vertex has about 10MB/s random 4k write on an unaligned partition, the Vertex LE is now doing 50MB/s. Random reads have gone from 35MB/s on my Vertex to almost 80MB/s on the latest Crucial C300s. So you may have to wait a bit longer, but the difference will be even more amazing when you switch.
Bwahahahahahaha!!!!!
That's what he did all the way to the bank, yes. You're assuming he bought into what he was saying, while I suspect that he and his lawyer brother riled each other up trying to find the most absurd but plausible-sounding legal fillings and PR statements to inflate the stock price over killing a bottle of scotch and released everything they managed to say with a straight face. No player ever announces himself as such, the whole "poor victimized CEO that's been screwed over by IBM and had his precious IP stolen" is playing the act. His apparent ignorance that the whole lawsuit was basically a sham based on IP rights they didn't own is more of the same. He misled people, got lots of money and got away with it. In my book that's a very successful and intelligent con man, despite the faulty moral compass. I suspect if he read your post he'd go "lok, I got you soooooooo fooled".
However back to the original poster's point, I suspect that religion provided an organizational foundation or focus that allowed social groups to grow beyond the natural size of primate tribal groups. That allowed those cultural groups to tackle bigger problems than those accessible to pure tribal groups and gave them a competitive advantage. The altruistic components of many religions also probably make those groups more resistant to natural disasters since they can draw upon a greater geographical base which is more likely to have some part that escaped the disaster. Whether those advantages are still necessary in an era with nationalism and democratic institutions is an open question. However it would appears that the significant decline of religious adherence in many Westernized countries is an answer to that question.
Actually I think the primary competitive driver is that to a religious person God/Allah/gods/karma always knows whether you've been good or bad and that there's always a reward or punishment even if you see none of it in life. Whether it's justice, purpose, comfort or hope you need then God can provide where scientists and philosophers can't. Even those that aren't very religious can say things like "I hope you burn in Hell" - we all hope someone will right the wrongs in the end. Or even in life we'd like to hope people get what's coming to them. It's a lot easier, despite the befuddlement, to accept that something is a punishment from God for your sins rather than being a random statistical outlier who won the inverse lottery. For us standing on the outside, it looks like irrational behavior together all these people acting irrationally are together stronger than every single individual maximizing only for themselves.
For some uses yes it's choke full of niche medical equipment and other lucrative business. But if you start talking about standardization and using common tools, then you have to start herding cats. If you ask a doctor to draw the organization chart they are often the senior medical expertize on this area with them on top and the management hierarchy is just the overhead coordinating the medical units. Even with the exchange of skills they aren't working on any true collaboration, most of the time it's one doctor, one patient. It becomes their patients, their way of doing it, their medical records. So along comes this electronic patient journal and everything has to be in this format. You will meet resistance and they have a trump card in pushing medical reasons like poorer data quality and health care in front of their own unwillingness to change. The result is a very fractured health system, we are working on a regional project now and each local hospital have their own system with wildly different versions and access methods and whatnot. Luckily we're not the ones dealing with that mess, but someone is...
If you want a practical application for the everyday user, look at HD video. Many people might have interest in recording HD video and processing it in various ways. We've just recently reached the point where many computers can handle a single 1080p stream. But what happens when someone wants to download HD video from their camcorder, record an HD over-the-air broadcast, have a three-way HD video chat with their friends, while downloading some files in the background and running a video conversion for the HD video they just edited of their wedding footage? Until that becomes easy, we have a ways to go.
Downloading from camera => file transfer of compressed stream from memory card/HDD
Recording a TV show => save compressed stream
Three way HD video chat => more limited by Internet bandwidth than computers
Yes, editing HD video is still heavy but it doesn't take a super special computer anymore. A regular high-end desktop will do just fine unless you try to construct a situation where you combine many clips with lots of effects.