If Microsoft couldn't make money from their software, and Bill had decided to pump gas instead, where would you be today?
This sounds a bit like saying that if Ford had to give away his plans to build a Ford, we'd still all be driving a horse and carriage. I'm not saying it'd be the same or necessarily great, but people might still end up paying for features because otherwise they wouldn't exist, companies would need software that support their business and support services around it, there's value in data mining, software as a service and so on. It might not drive the current commercial off-the-self or shareware market but it'd not like we'd still be trying to bang rocks together either. There are after all people being paid to work on open source today and there'd be lot more if there was no closed source.
It's not just on hardware but also on software there's a huge increase in value for money, a lot of the software you could charge for in the past is now free or much, much cheaper under competition from free. I'm on an open source desktop now and while far from perfect, and while we might argue if the year of the Linux desktop will ever come I would argue that it is substantially better than last decade's Windows and Office and Photoshop. Because of closed source, or despite closed source? I think despite, without it we'd have first tier support, much higher number of users and potential developers and so on. Basically, the world would have done fine. Maybe there wouldn't be as many software development positions as today but just like we now educate auto mechanics and not horse tenders, society would adapt. If that's what you wanted to do, I'm sure there'd be the opportunity.
Why would you need an exterior door? Make it a double set of locking doors with CCTV to effectively make it a gate where no one can rush or sneak in and you should be all set. It won't help if you can threaten the door open but these days I think people would rather have a lethal fight in the cabin than surrender the cockpit.
I prefer the right to access to health care, however the one item left out of most every discussion I see is the requirement to actually lead a healthy life. Sorry, but why should the majority of people pay for other people's health problems caused by known bad habits, like smoking, drinking, and over eating?
I think that the first thing to note is that you already do. Even in the current private health insurance system they have very little idea what people are doing, all they are doing is trying to drop those who run into problems like a hot potato. That would happen to you too, no matter how healthy you've been.
Secondly, you may claim to live a healthy life but who's going to check? To have any idea if I'm leading a healthy life style or not, they'd have to get very close and personal on what I eat, drink, smoke, exercise and do in general now and in the past. Plus you're giving people huge incentive to under-report and downplay their vices, claim known health issues came suddenly without warning and whatnot.
Third, every time you talk about how smoking kills someone will drag up their old grandpa who smoked all his life and died at age 90. I know a guy who got cancer at 16, never smoked and never drunk alcohol. This is not a physics experiment with a strict causality. What it in practice means is that they'll deny as much as possible based on all factors that possibly might be involved.
Fourth, going after individual prices will probably kill any collective bargaining power, it'll always be a giant against the lone individual. If GM says their employees are unhappy with the health insurance and threaten to switch provider they *do* have market power. Granted, not an issue for public health care.
Fifth, and the main reason private health insurance *is* is so much more expensive than public health insurance is the whole system of evaluators, claim inspectors, complaints, court cases and whatnot to argue over who gets which coverage. What you suggest is setting up a huge bureaucracy the public sector doesn't have (though it has a different one) for the sake of... what, exactly? Increase their premiums? Deny them treatment? The people who take worst care of themselves are often incapable of paying anyway like mental cases, homeless, alcoholics and drug addicts.
Here's the practical reason, which admits the system isn't fair. It's not fair but it's still better value for money on doctors and hospitals to treat people than to spend it all on overhead instead. It's a bigger cake so there's more to go around, even if the distribution is a little more unjust. People can be honest with their doctors. People can get help for their vices. Some people may burden the system for their own poor health, but in total they burden it less.
Finally, and this is a bit nasty to say but from a strict economical perspective very healthy people that grow old and have many years of various aches and pains who need hearing aids and wheelchairs and years in a nursing home and go in and out of hospital can be just as bad for the health care economy as someone who exits quickly in his 50s from a heart attack. Young people have a tendency to either recover or die - both quite cheap, while elderly often never recover fully and require long periods of medical treatment which is expensive.
Ultimately, the worst penalty for being in bad health is being in bad health.
No relief to the employers either. They are competing with Europe and Japan and their competitors do not have to pay for health care. If GM did not have to pay 2000$ per vehicle to provide for health care for its 1 million employees and retirees between 1990 and 2004, it could have competed effectively with the imports.
You're just being creative with numbers. Here in Norway 7.8% of my income goes directly from my salary to the national health insurance, it's actually retained by the employer along with other taxes so I don't even see it. If my employer would pay my health insurance, my salary requirements would drop by 7.8%. If GM were to drop health insurance, people would either have to get personal insurance or the capacity in the public system must be expanded costing tax money meaning higher salary requirements for equal net result. Shifting the cost one way or the other won't matter unless one way is more efficient than the other - which it is, but that's another story.
The adds will promise an "always on" connection and speeds up to X - when and as available. Nothing more.
Yes, but there's two versions of that: 1) Most of the time, under normal circumstances, you typically get what's advertized 2) Under extremely ideal conditions on a quiet night you might get what's advertized
I do have a 20 Mbit residential connection, and I have the former. My ToS is as wooly as everybody else's, there's no guaranteed QoS but there are consumer protections in place to make sure you know what you get. If it'd been 20 Mbit burst and lower sustained, they'd have to say so. If there's a cap they have to inform about it. Normally, and I'm talking about 90%+ of the time, it'll go full speed when I want and I've never gotten a complaint no matter how much I download or upload and I think my biggest sustained download was around 500GB and upload 60GB.
I have no idea why people, and it seems Americans in general, accept Kafka-like contracts where there's hidden terms that'll get you terminated if you violate them. I'm not talking about one and one consumer trying to dispute their right to terminate, I'm talking about a consumer protection agency that'll slap them for dishonest contracts. They're more than heavily weighted in favor of the service provider already, the least you should demand are clear conditions for using it.
I don't think the clothes I buy at Target are worn by a "star"... but I could be wrong, mainly because I don't pay attention to such things. I buy clothes there because... I like the styles, and the prices are cheap. I discovered this simply by walking past them in the store.
The mind is a complex beast, but what we do know it's associative. For example when you hear a particular song, you might suddenly find yourself thinking about some special time they played that song. Those emotions "rub off" on the song itself and makes you feel happy just hearing the song. It's the same with ads, you're not going to like take commands from ads. What it will do is link these products to people that are cool, rich, famous, sexy or funny so those thoughts will rub off on the product. In a way, the mind is much better at remembering this than our conscious stream of thought - we'd be overwhelmed otherwise - and the marketers know to use it. You think you're looking at the product, but your mind is really pulling up these associations that say "cool people wear this" and believe it or not, it's what makes people pick one shirt over the other almost similar shirt in the other rack. If people realized they'd feel like a puppet on strings and very few want that, I think it's more likely you've been well marketed to than not marketed to.
There's many simple cures for this one as a mass market thing - vanity for one. Everybody thinks they're above average important and a lot of customers will be insulted that they're not deemed important enough. A lot of people will feel ripped off for having to pay more than the next guy for "no reason" in their opinion, I remember amazon played with this a little while but quickly stopped. There's the easy possibility for arbitrage, if a "trendy" friend of mine doesn't want something but I do, I can setup it up so he buys it at reduced price, I get it and we split the profits. I think a set of dependent PQ-curves should cover this nicely, you have a PQ for leaders and a PQ curve for followers that is a function of number of leaders buying. Then you optimize for the marginal unit where your marginal losses for leaders equals your marginal profits for the followers. It gets more complicated with many tiers but I don't see a real problem modeling it and nothing that'll break much of typical economics.
Maybe they've wrapping it in a new packing, but this doesn't seem very different from the way it's always been - you have those who pay full price, those who get rebates, those who get promotional copies for free and those you have to sponsor, that is to say pay just to use your product and it's all a sliding scale. Like a friend of mine, he's often organizing dinners and such and when he's there alone items will "disappear" off the bill. Why? Because he'll be bringing in a bunch of people who'll spend a lot of money. A colleague of mine used to be quite good at his sport, he's not good enough they'd sponsor him anymore but if he asks he'll always get a "special price" because there's a value to having a veteran walking around in that brand. This sort of stuff happens all the time, and it's been done a million different ways of referrer discounts up to and including MLM schemes where it doesn't just get cheaper there's money flowing out at the top. This just seem like a slightly more organized version.
Those are not mutually exclusive, what makes him an extremist is that he's an exclusionist. He does not want free software to work with or for anything other than free software, even the GPL is a compromise on his ideals. His ideal license wouldn't let you run proprietary software on top of Linux or using binary firmware and modules or in a proprietary VM to protect you against yourself and the evils of non-free software, the only reason it's permitted is that GNU had no free kernel and was dependent on proprietary UNIX so they had to. He doesn't want a world where you have any choice but to use free software and he's not looking to do it by virtue of being better than everyone else but by strangling the competition. I can tell you that if Microsoft or Apple talked about excluding open source the way he talks about excluding proprietary software, you'd see burning outrage.
What's even worse are the cases where they get a free pass by paying the class action settlement, like the Google book deal. At least in a slightly less world you'd get your two dollar coupon but at least they'd have to stop any further infringements, not carry on breaking the law with the court's blessing. Current copyright laws are awful but one private company essentially ceasing it is even more awful.
But the sheer force of speed is also beyond people's grasp. At 0.9c it doesn't matter what it is, it's got kinetic energy enough to be more than a bomb even if it's full of feathers. A quick search indicates the formula is E_k = mc^2( 1/(v/c)^2 -1 ) that for a 2000 kg projectile at 0.9c would be 7.7*10^20 joules or 183 gigatons. And it's not spherical, 99% of the force will be in the direction of the impact like a shaped detonation. I'd rather not check what that'll do.
Well, they're most likely not friends because they're on facebook and yet possibly friends in real life. I have people as facebook "friends" which has done nothing except share an elementary school class with me, and I didn't even hang out with them back them. So they friended me - lord knows how, I don't even remember their names so either they got a better memory than me or an old school book, but it'd be somewhat rude to ignore them so ok... I accept but I don't even message them and they don't message me either. Real world friends? Yeah some are on facebook but not all, if you have IRL contact you don't need facebook contact.
IMHO just as thre's a 7-year stature of limitations on law, so too should employers have a limitation on how far back they can dig. Anything that predates this decade should be irrelevant
Your posts suggests a (x) legal ( ) social ( ) technical ( ) vigilante solution to the problem. This won't work because...
(x) You expect employers to give a reason for not hiring you (x) You expect employers to be honest about the reason for not hiring you (x) You think it possible to somehow split up life in two parts (x) There's no way to know what information they looked at (x) They wouldn't reveal the other candidates and their experience to you
There's not a job in the world where you can't get dismissed with "Well, you were a very good candidate but didn't quite make it to the head of the line." and if pushed "You didn't seem [vague personality trait like enthusiastic, interested, confident] enough for the position." You weren't there in the other interviews, maybe they really did have a better candidate. It's extremely hard to prove a negative, maybe you can fish out a race/gender bias with enough hires but trying to prove why exactly you weren't hired is near impossible. If you tried to push the issue legally, what would you think if you were on the jury? That this is some paranoid delusional who sues because he's managed to conjure up this great conspiracy theory that information about him online cost him the job, or that simply he wasn't their choice? It happens to x-1 of the x people applying for any job, you know.
No, the only real solution here is cultural change and you can see an self-feeding trend that people are willing to talk about more when other people do too. It sure could bite people in the ass but it could also lead to hiring managers realizing this isn't a particularly bad or abnormal person, When Big Brother started it was like "OMG they're getitng drunk and having sex on TV", these days they have to gangbang the whole set to catch some headlines. Ultimately it's not like getting drunk and having sex makes you a very unusual person, except the cameras. And the numbers of celebs and sports idols and animal activists and housewifes and whatnot showing up nude ultimately together signalize "no big deal". I'm sure there'll still be asshats but if there's few enough you can simply pass on those who don't approve of your life style.
Linux can't cure idiocy. But the repositories are a pretty solid base of tools before they start wanting to shoot themselves in the foot. How many people are infected by the time they're done warezing up their computer with "basic" tools like Windows itself, MS Office etc? Quite many. How many people block or are blocked from patches because they're not a "genuine" install? It would help.
P.S. PDF is quite safe, Adobe PDF Reader on the other hand is not but luckily us Linux users in general don't use it. Same goes for flash, hopefully HTML5 will make it much less common because it's the flash player that is crappy, the standard is quite fine.
What did you expect, seriously? A mutiny of the courts? A political jab at the election process or the parties and congressmen and senators? They are parts of the checks and balances but they couldn't rebel against the system without breaking the division of power. Courts refusing to enforce copyright law despite Congress being, at least in some form, explicitly granted the authority in the constitution would break the most fundamental rules. You might as well have the President issuing laws by decree and Congress holding trials of political opponents if you go down that path. I don't think they're more clueless about reality than most other people, in fact probably far less. But even a judge that knows he and pretty much everyone else is speeding can't very well dismiss a guy standing trial for a speeding ticket.
They don't want to have a very long experience gap between new players and "regular" players. You get to grind your way up to 90, getting up to 80 gets easier. That's the way it's always been, so everybody can complain about how "easy" it's become but really they're just trying to keep people together. It's not "fair" but it's a game, if the endgame was a target that kept moving further and further away for new players it'd eventually become some place they'd never reach.
Unfortunately, almost no matter how quickly by the time the company figures it out it's too late for everybody that worked there. Besides, I think it's the indian version of a dotcom bubble - if you just throw enough money at it it'll end up being some skilled IT people there in the end, even if it was a bad investment. Just like the dotcoms got most people online even though they tanked themselves.
I think it's really simple, for example even though I consider my bank account balance private there's probably quite a few people at the bank that at least theoretically could look at it. If I use Google apps to write a letter I consider private, it's in much the same situation. And yet, most letters I write are significantly less important or private than my bank accounts. "I can't put my letters on Google, or people would see what I write" is a bit like "I can't put my money in the bank, or people would see how much money I have". Many companies live that way too having outsourced all their basic IT, for the most part this works fine. I can see how Google doesn't provide total anonymity or privacy yet good enough for many people and those remaining people it isn't possible for Google to serve.
If you want total privacy and anonymity, you can't rely on anyone else. You have to do it all on your own computer, use anonymous networks, connect directly with your peers and not over backbones like email or facebook or skype, in short it's a whole different game. And if you're really paranoid about it, you probably want to encrypt and physically secure and make tempest-proof and screened software and... the list really goes on and on, and it doesn't stop until your computer is as secure as the deepest vault at the Pentagon. Google apps isn't the place for Top Secret documents and if that's your standard then neither it is for you.
It's all a matter of using it with reason. If you're using a google web app to edit pictures before putting them on your facebook or myspace or photo sharing site, what have you lost? Nothing. You were going to put them online at the mercy of a company and their privacy policy anyway. Which may or may not be a good idea in the first place, but at least it's fairly consistent.
IMO Its better for your career (in the long run) and sanity to work in some hypothetical burger joint on $6/hr for a GOOD boss than somewhere on $60,000 for an asshole who won't let you get any useful experience under your belt or otherwise let you progress.
If the latter is per year. If it's per hour you can paint me in lipstick and call me Sue if that makes you happy.
Every 4/8/12 years the US decides that it's greener on the other side of the fence and there's no reason to think that will change, the only ones who could change the system is the duopolists themselves. They know all the dividing lines people won't cross which prevent a third party from ever uniting and becoming a real threat in a winner-takes-it-all system. If it's bipartisan, they know they can basically piss in the face of their voters and exactly nothing will happen.
That is one of the favorite things with the European system, if parties do stupid things they lose rating points, many rating points as people go to adjacent parties. In contrast, voting for the Democrats because you tihnk your fellow Republicans are acting like idiots or vice versa it a much bigger step. You basicly miss a vote that says "I mostly agree with the politics, but not the people. I'm voting in this other similar party." That is why you meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
He uses this code "for(ss = s->ss; ss; ss = ss->ss);" as an example of bad code: "For those of you that are interested, the line traverses a linked-list of sources and sub-sources to process the values inside. But it took a good deal of research to figure that out, because there were no comments and the variable names, well, suck." Well, I read that and said to myself, "It's traversing a linked list."
If you see the pattern yes, but the naming is just horrible. "for(ss = s->first; ss; ss = ss->next)" would be quite easily understandable. Plus it'd match the typical first/last next/prev way of naming usually done in a doubly linked list. I would not immediately understand that, particularly not if it wasn't obvious from the function that it would be looping through anything.
I think everyone should be forced to do what I did when I programmed on my TI-82 calculator, it had no autocompletion and variable names were painful to repeat so they became single letters. I could do quite advanced stuff as long as I kept working on it and had it fresh in memory. Tried looking at it later, it was a complete clusterfuck to dechipher.
This guy looks lof the same caliber, s->ss and ss->ss as member variables? I mean in a function you can use almost any lame naming and people should be able to figure it out because the whole purpose of the variable is right there in the function, but if it's not clear what the members are you have to dig through the whole class and find when, why and how it's being set and/or used.
I don't really mind pointers, but they have a way of adding a very confusing layer of indirection that often makes it unnecessarily complicated to understand what's doing on.
Might as well ask them to pull out a gun and shoot their own foot. What should be changed are browser defaults to "delete new cookies on exit", and make it a special opt-in to allow the site to set permanent cookies. If I go to the cookies page after a surfing session, there are tons and tons of sites that have no legitimate reason to leave cookies other than to track me. Permanent cookies should be handled by a info bar in the same way as popup windows, "Allow this site to set permantent cookies?". That would cut down cookie abuse massively.
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If Microsoft couldn't make money from their software, and Bill had decided to pump gas instead, where would you be today?
This sounds a bit like saying that if Ford had to give away his plans to build a Ford, we'd still all be driving a horse and carriage. I'm not saying it'd be the same or necessarily great, but people might still end up paying for features because otherwise they wouldn't exist, companies would need software that support their business and support services around it, there's value in data mining, software as a service and so on. It might not drive the current commercial off-the-self or shareware market but it'd not like we'd still be trying to bang rocks together either. There are after all people being paid to work on open source today and there'd be lot more if there was no closed source.
It's not just on hardware but also on software there's a huge increase in value for money, a lot of the software you could charge for in the past is now free or much, much cheaper under competition from free. I'm on an open source desktop now and while far from perfect, and while we might argue if the year of the Linux desktop will ever come I would argue that it is substantially better than last decade's Windows and Office and Photoshop. Because of closed source, or despite closed source? I think despite, without it we'd have first tier support, much higher number of users and potential developers and so on. Basically, the world would have done fine. Maybe there wouldn't be as many software development positions as today but just like we now educate auto mechanics and not horse tenders, society would adapt. If that's what you wanted to do, I'm sure there'd be the opportunity.
Why would you need an exterior door? Make it a double set of locking doors with CCTV to effectively make it a gate where no one can rush or sneak in and you should be all set. It won't help if you can threaten the door open but these days I think people would rather have a lethal fight in the cabin than surrender the cockpit.
I prefer the right to access to health care, however the one item left out of most every discussion I see is the requirement to actually lead a healthy life. Sorry, but why should the majority of people pay for other people's health problems caused by known bad habits, like smoking, drinking, and over eating?
I think that the first thing to note is that you already do. Even in the current private health insurance system they have very little idea what people are doing, all they are doing is trying to drop those who run into problems like a hot potato. That would happen to you too, no matter how healthy you've been.
Secondly, you may claim to live a healthy life but who's going to check? To have any idea if I'm leading a healthy life style or not, they'd have to get very close and personal on what I eat, drink, smoke, exercise and do in general now and in the past. Plus you're giving people huge incentive to under-report and downplay their vices, claim known health issues came suddenly without warning and whatnot.
Third, every time you talk about how smoking kills someone will drag up their old grandpa who smoked all his life and died at age 90. I know a guy who got cancer at 16, never smoked and never drunk alcohol. This is not a physics experiment with a strict causality. What it in practice means is that they'll deny as much as possible based on all factors that possibly might be involved.
Fourth, going after individual prices will probably kill any collective bargaining power, it'll always be a giant against the lone individual. If GM says their employees are unhappy with the health insurance and threaten to switch provider they *do* have market power. Granted, not an issue for public health care.
Fifth, and the main reason private health insurance *is* is so much more expensive than public health insurance is the whole system of evaluators, claim inspectors, complaints, court cases and whatnot to argue over who gets which coverage. What you suggest is setting up a huge bureaucracy the public sector doesn't have (though it has a different one) for the sake of... what, exactly? Increase their premiums? Deny them treatment? The people who take worst care of themselves are often incapable of paying anyway like mental cases, homeless, alcoholics and drug addicts.
Here's the practical reason, which admits the system isn't fair. It's not fair but it's still better value for money on doctors and hospitals to treat people than to spend it all on overhead instead. It's a bigger cake so there's more to go around, even if the distribution is a little more unjust. People can be honest with their doctors. People can get help for their vices. Some people may burden the system for their own poor health, but in total they burden it less.
Finally, and this is a bit nasty to say but from a strict economical perspective very healthy people that grow old and have many years of various aches and pains who need hearing aids and wheelchairs and years in a nursing home and go in and out of hospital can be just as bad for the health care economy as someone who exits quickly in his 50s from a heart attack. Young people have a tendency to either recover or die - both quite cheap, while elderly often never recover fully and require long periods of medical treatment which is expensive.
Ultimately, the worst penalty for being in bad health is being in bad health.
No relief to the employers either. They are competing with Europe and Japan and their competitors do not have to pay for health care. If GM did not have to pay 2000$ per vehicle to provide for health care for its 1 million employees and retirees between 1990 and 2004, it could have competed effectively with the imports.
You're just being creative with numbers. Here in Norway 7.8% of my income goes directly from my salary to the national health insurance, it's actually retained by the employer along with other taxes so I don't even see it. If my employer would pay my health insurance, my salary requirements would drop by 7.8%. If GM were to drop health insurance, people would either have to get personal insurance or the capacity in the public system must be expanded costing tax money meaning higher salary requirements for equal net result. Shifting the cost one way or the other won't matter unless one way is more efficient than the other - which it is, but that's another story.
The adds will promise an "always on" connection and speeds up to X - when and as available. Nothing more.
Yes, but there's two versions of that:
1) Most of the time, under normal circumstances, you typically get what's advertized
2) Under extremely ideal conditions on a quiet night you might get what's advertized
I do have a 20 Mbit residential connection, and I have the former. My ToS is as wooly as everybody else's, there's no guaranteed QoS but there are consumer protections in place to make sure you know what you get. If it'd been 20 Mbit burst and lower sustained, they'd have to say so. If there's a cap they have to inform about it. Normally, and I'm talking about 90%+ of the time, it'll go full speed when I want and I've never gotten a complaint no matter how much I download or upload and I think my biggest sustained download was around 500GB and upload 60GB.
I have no idea why people, and it seems Americans in general, accept Kafka-like contracts where there's hidden terms that'll get you terminated if you violate them. I'm not talking about one and one consumer trying to dispute their right to terminate, I'm talking about a consumer protection agency that'll slap them for dishonest contracts. They're more than heavily weighted in favor of the service provider already, the least you should demand are clear conditions for using it.
I don't think the clothes I buy at Target are worn by a "star" ... but I could be wrong, mainly because I don't pay attention to such things. I buy clothes there because ... I like the styles, and the prices are cheap. I discovered this simply by walking past them in the store.
The mind is a complex beast, but what we do know it's associative. For example when you hear a particular song, you might suddenly find yourself thinking about some special time they played that song. Those emotions "rub off" on the song itself and makes you feel happy just hearing the song. It's the same with ads, you're not going to like take commands from ads. What it will do is link these products to people that are cool, rich, famous, sexy or funny so those thoughts will rub off on the product. In a way, the mind is much better at remembering this than our conscious stream of thought - we'd be overwhelmed otherwise - and the marketers know to use it. You think you're looking at the product, but your mind is really pulling up these associations that say "cool people wear this" and believe it or not, it's what makes people pick one shirt over the other almost similar shirt in the other rack. If people realized they'd feel like a puppet on strings and very few want that, I think it's more likely you've been well marketed to than not marketed to.
There's many simple cures for this one as a mass market thing - vanity for one. Everybody thinks they're above average important and a lot of customers will be insulted that they're not deemed important enough. A lot of people will feel ripped off for having to pay more than the next guy for "no reason" in their opinion, I remember amazon played with this a little while but quickly stopped. There's the easy possibility for arbitrage, if a "trendy" friend of mine doesn't want something but I do, I can setup it up so he buys it at reduced price, I get it and we split the profits. I think a set of dependent PQ-curves should cover this nicely, you have a PQ for leaders and a PQ curve for followers that is a function of number of leaders buying. Then you optimize for the marginal unit where your marginal losses for leaders equals your marginal profits for the followers. It gets more complicated with many tiers but I don't see a real problem modeling it and nothing that'll break much of typical economics.
Maybe they've wrapping it in a new packing, but this doesn't seem very different from the way it's always been - you have those who pay full price, those who get rebates, those who get promotional copies for free and those you have to sponsor, that is to say pay just to use your product and it's all a sliding scale. Like a friend of mine, he's often organizing dinners and such and when he's there alone items will "disappear" off the bill. Why? Because he'll be bringing in a bunch of people who'll spend a lot of money. A colleague of mine used to be quite good at his sport, he's not good enough they'd sponsor him anymore but if he asks he'll always get a "special price" because there's a value to having a veteran walking around in that brand. This sort of stuff happens all the time, and it's been done a million different ways of referrer discounts up to and including MLM schemes where it doesn't just get cheaper there's money flowing out at the top. This just seem like a slightly more organized version.
Stallman is a visionary, not an "extremenist".
Those are not mutually exclusive, what makes him an extremist is that he's an exclusionist. He does not want free software to work with or for anything other than free software, even the GPL is a compromise on his ideals. His ideal license wouldn't let you run proprietary software on top of Linux or using binary firmware and modules or in a proprietary VM to protect you against yourself and the evils of non-free software, the only reason it's permitted is that GNU had no free kernel and was dependent on proprietary UNIX so they had to. He doesn't want a world where you have any choice but to use free software and he's not looking to do it by virtue of being better than everyone else but by strangling the competition. I can tell you that if Microsoft or Apple talked about excluding open source the way he talks about excluding proprietary software, you'd see burning outrage.
What's even worse are the cases where they get a free pass by paying the class action settlement, like the Google book deal. At least in a slightly less world you'd get your two dollar coupon but at least they'd have to stop any further infringements, not carry on breaking the law with the court's blessing. Current copyright laws are awful but one private company essentially ceasing it is even more awful.
But the sheer force of speed is also beyond people's grasp. At 0.9c it doesn't matter what it is, it's got kinetic energy enough to be more than a bomb even if it's full of feathers. A quick search indicates the formula is E_k = mc^2( 1/(v/c)^2 -1 ) that for a 2000 kg projectile at 0.9c would be 7.7*10^20 joules or 183 gigatons. And it's not spherical, 99% of the force will be in the direction of the impact like a shaped detonation. I'd rather not check what that'll do.
Well, they're most likely not friends because they're on facebook and yet possibly friends in real life. I have people as facebook "friends" which has done nothing except share an elementary school class with me, and I didn't even hang out with them back them. So they friended me - lord knows how, I don't even remember their names so either they got a better memory than me or an old school book, but it'd be somewhat rude to ignore them so ok... I accept but I don't even message them and they don't message me either. Real world friends? Yeah some are on facebook but not all, if you have IRL contact you don't need facebook contact.
Actually according to Chinese media this crack focuses on eradicating pornography.
Hopefully it'll be the beginning of the end for the Chinese government - just for the opportunity to name it "The pr0n revolution".
IMHO just as thre's a 7-year stature of limitations on law, so too should employers have a limitation on how far back they can dig. Anything that predates this decade should be irrelevant
Your posts suggests a
(x) legal
( ) social
( ) technical
( ) vigilante
solution to the problem. This won't work because...
(x) You expect employers to give a reason for not hiring you
(x) You expect employers to be honest about the reason for not hiring you
(x) You think it possible to somehow split up life in two parts
(x) There's no way to know what information they looked at
(x) They wouldn't reveal the other candidates and their experience to you
There's not a job in the world where you can't get dismissed with "Well, you were a very good candidate but didn't quite make it to the head of the line." and if pushed "You didn't seem [vague personality trait like enthusiastic, interested, confident] enough for the position." You weren't there in the other interviews, maybe they really did have a better candidate. It's extremely hard to prove a negative, maybe you can fish out a race/gender bias with enough hires but trying to prove why exactly you weren't hired is near impossible. If you tried to push the issue legally, what would you think if you were on the jury? That this is some paranoid delusional who sues because he's managed to conjure up this great conspiracy theory that information about him online cost him the job, or that simply he wasn't their choice? It happens to x-1 of the x people applying for any job, you know.
No, the only real solution here is cultural change and you can see an self-feeding trend that people are willing to talk about more when other people do too. It sure could bite people in the ass but it could also lead to hiring managers realizing this isn't a particularly bad or abnormal person, When Big Brother started it was like "OMG they're getitng drunk and having sex on TV", these days they have to gangbang the whole set to catch some headlines. Ultimately it's not like getting drunk and having sex makes you a very unusual person, except the cameras. And the numbers of celebs and sports idols and animal activists and housewifes and whatnot showing up nude ultimately together signalize "no big deal". I'm sure there'll still be asshats but if there's few enough you can simply pass on those who don't approve of your life style.
Linux can't cure idiocy. But the repositories are a pretty solid base of tools before they start wanting to shoot themselves in the foot. How many people are infected by the time they're done warezing up their computer with "basic" tools like Windows itself, MS Office etc? Quite many. How many people block or are blocked from patches because they're not a "genuine" install? It would help.
P.S. PDF is quite safe, Adobe PDF Reader on the other hand is not but luckily us Linux users in general don't use it. Same goes for flash, hopefully HTML5 will make it much less common because it's the flash player that is crappy, the standard is quite fine.
What did you expect, seriously? A mutiny of the courts? A political jab at the election process or the parties and congressmen and senators? They are parts of the checks and balances but they couldn't rebel against the system without breaking the division of power. Courts refusing to enforce copyright law despite Congress being, at least in some form, explicitly granted the authority in the constitution would break the most fundamental rules. You might as well have the President issuing laws by decree and Congress holding trials of political opponents if you go down that path. I don't think they're more clueless about reality than most other people, in fact probably far less. But even a judge that knows he and pretty much everyone else is speeding can't very well dismiss a guy standing trial for a speeding ticket.
You mean that you'd leave your loved ones to face it alone?
You mean your mom when she comes down to the basement?
They don't want to have a very long experience gap between new players and "regular" players. You get to grind your way up to 90, getting up to 80 gets easier. That's the way it's always been, so everybody can complain about how "easy" it's become but really they're just trying to keep people together. It's not "fair" but it's a game, if the endgame was a target that kept moving further and further away for new players it'd eventually become some place they'd never reach.
Unfortunately, almost no matter how quickly by the time the company figures it out it's too late for everybody that worked there. Besides, I think it's the indian version of a dotcom bubble - if you just throw enough money at it it'll end up being some skilled IT people there in the end, even if it was a bad investment. Just like the dotcoms got most people online even though they tanked themselves.
I think it's really simple, for example even though I consider my bank account balance private there's probably quite a few people at the bank that at least theoretically could look at it. If I use Google apps to write a letter I consider private, it's in much the same situation. And yet, most letters I write are significantly less important or private than my bank accounts. "I can't put my letters on Google, or people would see what I write" is a bit like "I can't put my money in the bank, or people would see how much money I have". Many companies live that way too having outsourced all their basic IT, for the most part this works fine. I can see how Google doesn't provide total anonymity or privacy yet good enough for many people and those remaining people it isn't possible for Google to serve.
If you want total privacy and anonymity, you can't rely on anyone else. You have to do it all on your own computer, use anonymous networks, connect directly with your peers and not over backbones like email or facebook or skype, in short it's a whole different game. And if you're really paranoid about it, you probably want to encrypt and physically secure and make tempest-proof and screened software and... the list really goes on and on, and it doesn't stop until your computer is as secure as the deepest vault at the Pentagon. Google apps isn't the place for Top Secret documents and if that's your standard then neither it is for you.
It's all a matter of using it with reason. If you're using a google web app to edit pictures before putting them on your facebook or myspace or photo sharing site, what have you lost? Nothing. You were going to put them online at the mercy of a company and their privacy policy anyway. Which may or may not be a good idea in the first place, but at least it's fairly consistent.
IMO Its better for your career (in the long run) and sanity to work in some hypothetical burger joint on $6/hr for a GOOD boss than somewhere on $60,000 for an asshole who won't let you get any useful experience under your belt or otherwise let you progress.
If the latter is per year. If it's per hour you can paint me in lipstick and call me Sue if that makes you happy.
How stupid do they think we are?
Every 4/8/12 years the US decides that it's greener on the other side of the fence and there's no reason to think that will change, the only ones who could change the system is the duopolists themselves. They know all the dividing lines people won't cross which prevent a third party from ever uniting and becoming a real threat in a winner-takes-it-all system. If it's bipartisan, they know they can basically piss in the face of their voters and exactly nothing will happen.
That is one of the favorite things with the European system, if parties do stupid things they lose rating points, many rating points as people go to adjacent parties. In contrast, voting for the Democrats because you tihnk your fellow Republicans are acting like idiots or vice versa it a much bigger step. You basicly miss a vote that says "I mostly agree with the politics, but not the people. I'm voting in this other similar party." That is why you meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
The reasons are held secret for reasons of national security. Doh.
He uses this code "for(ss = s->ss; ss; ss = ss->ss);" as an example of bad code: "For those of you that are interested, the line traverses a linked-list of sources and sub-sources to process the values inside. But it took a good deal of research to figure that out, because there were no comments and the variable names, well, suck." Well, I read that and said to myself, "It's traversing a linked list."
If you see the pattern yes, but the naming is just horrible. "for(ss = s->first; ss; ss = ss->next)" would be quite easily understandable. Plus it'd match the typical first/last next/prev way of naming usually done in a doubly linked list. I would not immediately understand that, particularly not if it wasn't obvious from the function that it would be looping through anything.
I think everyone should be forced to do what I did when I programmed on my TI-82 calculator, it had no autocompletion and variable names were painful to repeat so they became single letters. I could do quite advanced stuff as long as I kept working on it and had it fresh in memory. Tried looking at it later, it was a complete clusterfuck to dechipher.
This guy looks lof the same caliber, s->ss and ss->ss as member variables? I mean in a function you can use almost any lame naming and people should be able to figure it out because the whole purpose of the variable is right there in the function, but if it's not clear what the members are you have to dig through the whole class and find when, why and how it's being set and/or used.
I don't really mind pointers, but they have a way of adding a very confusing layer of indirection that often makes it unnecessarily complicated to understand what's doing on.
Might as well ask them to pull out a gun and shoot their own foot. What should be changed are browser defaults to "delete new cookies on exit", and make it a special opt-in to allow the site to set permanent cookies. If I go to the cookies page after a surfing session, there are tons and tons of sites that have no legitimate reason to leave cookies other than to track me. Permanent cookies should be handled by a info bar in the same way as popup windows, "Allow this site to set permantent cookies?". That would cut down cookie abuse massively.