Just for a moment, imagine that you are a creator of digital work that could be sold online, rather than being an AC troll. What possible reason would you have to prevent anyone, wherever they might be located in the world, from buying it?
Why does Hollywood prefer to release movies to cinemas first and disc/TV/streaming later? Why does a book come in hardcover before paperback? It's called maximizing revenue. I'm not saying it's good for the consumer, but if you don't understand why it could be good for business it's because you don't understand business.
Yes. The UK has not invoked article 50, they've almost passed a law authorizing the government to invoke it but even after that there's a negotiation period of up to two years where they will still be EU members. After that, who knows...
why we tolerate these people? I just realized I can't afford a house because of how the mathematics of mortgages work. I never bothered to do the math since I never thought I could buy one. After 10 years of paying down debt and saving I thought I was ready. Not so much. The way mortgage math works out you're paying almost all interest for the first 15 years of a 30 year loan (...) Not just all the cost, but all the _risk_ is on the home owner. The banks make sure they get their interest up front.
Not sure why you think this is some special mortgage math or evil in any way. Think of it as the big brother of credit card debt, the rest of the loan that you don't repay this month you push to next month and pay interest. The interest is at all times proportional to the amount of debt you push in front of you. Changing that is like asking to change the rocket equation, you get a lot more delta-v from the last galleon of fuel when the rocket is empty than the first galleon when the rocket is full and that's just how it is.
The rest is just distributing what funds you have left over to make down payments on the principal, if you want the monthly payments to be flat then the down payment must be small when the interest is big and the down payment big when the interest is small. But they don't really care how you structure that, if you want to pay in extra or pay in less most have options for that. What is immutable is that you'll always pay interest on the debt you push in front of you.
My problem with SpaceX's plan isn't the market - that's solid. My concern is that the faster you want to launch, the less you can tolerate failures. The time a failure leaves you unable to launch for is independent of how fast you're launching. The faster you launch, the sooner the time between failures. So an increasingly large percent of your time becomes time down due to failures. The only way to overcome this is to correspondingly boost reliability. Want to 10x launch rates? Better 10x reliability. It's a tall order. SpaceX is already on the low end on reliability (not terrible by rocketry standards, but not great), so they already have a deficit to overcome.
Assuming every failure means you have to ground every launch, it's not like the FAA grounds every airplane of that model when one is involved in a crash. Maybe they can split it into experimental and conservative configurations like say ten experimental launches without failure and they follow different rules, like you don't need a full root cause analysis only to proven the failure is probably related to the new configuration. Not saying it'll happen quite like SpaceX wants but if it becomes a high-volume industry I think the rules will adapt somehow so the world doesn't have to stop because one accident happened.
SEVENFOLD? At that rate, by the first half of the century after that, everyone will have died off! (unless we've figured out how to halt/reverse the aging process, and then "age" won't really matter).
Isn't extrapolation fun? Say the percent of the population that dies at 60-70-80-90 is 10%-80%-10%-1% and medical science bumps that to 1%-10%-80%-10%, being 80+ will go from quite rare to very common.
If you can get 512Gbits on one chip why are they expensive? Unless yields are low chips are not expensive to manufacture.
Lots of layers = lots of potential for flaws = lower yields. If there's a 99% of a good layer then for 64 layers you only have 0.99^64 = 52% chance of a good chip.
I'm in my 20s, and have a day job that doesn't require any programming skills. But I want to learn it nonetheless. I have done some research but people have varied opinions.
"Learning programming" is a bit like looking at box full of tools, is a hammer or a saw or a screwdriver best for the job? Well the question doesn't really make any sense until you've defined what you want to accomplish. Unless you just want to learn general concepts, in which case it doesn't really matter. Assign values, calculate values, create functions, acquire resources (like open a file), release resources (like closing a file), control flows like if/case statements, for/while loops, events, state etc. exists in pretty much all languages for a reason, the syntactic sugar may be a little different but the concepts are pretty generic.
But yes, it is becoming more centralized, centrally controlled, and proprietary all the time. That's being driven by the choices of several billion non-technical users who don't grasp how critically important it is to maintain openness and decentralization. I do not believe Facebook would have succeeded with the tech-literate users of the 1980's internet. It took the eternal september crowd to make that happen.
While they may not value openness and decentralization as much as you do, I think non-technical users value choice. Don't like Netflix? Sign up for Hulu. Don't like Spotify? Sign up for Tidal. Don't like YouTube? Put it on Vimeo. It's more choice with less effort than they're used to, even if they're all proprietary. It's what people are used to, they go to car shop and there's Audi and Ford and Mercedes. Building one from parts and blueprints or DIY kits are for a select few, it's not a skill they have nor want. They just want it to run when they turn the key.
That's what an index fund is, more or less. This sounds more like a custom portfolio, you tell the robo-adviser what kind of investment profile you want and it suggests stocks or combinations of stock to match your preference. Matching up investors with potential investments is a lot of what brokers do.
Now, it is true that the standard reasoning given for why possession (as opposed to production) of child pornography is illegal is very much at odds with the idea of keeping the site live, in that they're ostensibly re-victimizing those portrayed in the CP sites they permit to live.
From what I understand operating a site means they didn't just enable people to download what was already posted, but also to continue creating new posts and distribute more material. I think the best analogy would probably be knowing about a drug smuggling tunnel and take over operation with undercover agents rather than shut it down, even though they can't control what is smuggled or where it'd end up.
Nobody is entrapped, because it takes bad intent to use a smuggling tunnel in the first place. The drug lord and the junkie would still exist and they'd find other routes, but how responsible are you if the junkie OD'd on drugs you intentionally let through? Morally, it stinks pretty bad. Legally, no tunnel operator could pin all the blame on the mules. The cops are in on the conspiracy, they have their share of the guilt for the results.
Work coding into math courses, if not, out right replace some. There has to be a way to teach programming that allows for students to also pick up all of the concepts taught in algebra courses.
That sounds like an odd class to me, I think I'd struggle with learning new math concepts and new programming concepts at the same time. Maybe you could do paired lessons where you have one hour math theory, one hour implementing a tool using that math. A math formula would often be just a function though, you'd learn very little about structuring software (objects, attributes, functions, interfaces, properties), flow control (if/for/while etc.), GUIs, network, databases, validating input and error handling, i18n, version control or anything else not strictly related to the actual formula. I think they're different classes, really.
Were steam engines created with the sole purpose of replacing human labor? Nope. What about power tools, cars and computers? Nope, nope, nope. Automation? YEP.
Does it matter if it was the sole reason, when in fact it made lots of workers redundant? Besides, one of the big reasons for automation is consistency in processes much like the assembly line did for manufacturing, the printing press did for copying text and so on. Hand made cars weren't just labor intensive but they were also much more individual with parts tweaked to work together. For example while Uber treats their drivers shitty, they treat all their drivers equally shitty. You're not playing favorites as is so often the case in office politics.
Seriously, in all this doom and gloom I find it's totally lost that automation will also be a big benefit to everyone else who don't lose their jobs. Self-driving cars = cheaper transport = cheaper goods, cheaper taxis and cheaper public transportation. It could create new markets that raise the standard of living, for example I'm a terrible and lazy chef. I could go out to eat more, but then it's not in the comfort of my own home and while there's certainly some costly food items you're paying quite a bit for the preparation, presentation and service. I'd pay a lot of money for a robot that could cook me restaurant quality meals 365 days a year, make freshly baked bread and pastries, freshly squeezed orange juice, bake cookies, mix drinks and so on.
And it would cut down on the cost of supporting other people. Here's a house built by robots, costs less. Here's food and water produced by robot farmers, sent by robot cars, prepared by robot chefs, costs less. If you get sick we'll have our robot doctor diagnose and treat you, costs less. Here's a robot teacher, free education in any subject at any difficulty. If you want to sit and play WoW all day maybe we shouldn't care because you barely cost society anything, it's another few seconds of work for robots that we churn out by the millions. You work, you get money to do cooler things. If you don't, no big deal. Bringing down that "base cost" of your life makes it much less important to get tax revenue so society balances out.
Internet trolls and video game griefers are just as broken in real life as you've always suspected, according to a new psychology paper by Canadian researchers. It turns out that the same folks who love to disrupt online conversations for the"lulz" are likely to also exhibit some pretty nasty personality traits in general.
Well, no shit... someone who looks at all the things they could do in their spare time and decides to use it on making other people miserable has personality issues? I can understand theft, fraud and sabotage and to some degree revenge because it's for a purpose. But the kind of people who slash the seats on the bus for no gain, no fame, no particular target in mind just pissing in the well for the hell of it.... I don't get it.
Some ask others to do a several hour jobs for them for free. (I'd mention a common factor for these type of questions if it weren't racist to do so.)
They work for a cheap outsourcing company that hire developers who are barely computer literate, so they try to get someone else to do their job? I don't think ethnicity has anything to do with it, though many of them are located in the same country...
Welfare has a very different meaning outside the US. It does not bear a negative connotation unlike there.
The system does not, the recipients are a very mixed bag. On the one hand, most of us are proud that we have a system that will take care of everyone from cradle to grave with many forms of social security and benefits of various kinds. I don't want to see people living in tent camps or people who can't get treatment because they lack health insurance and that we take care of people that are injured, sick and infirm, mentally challenged and so on. That we have a work life that has regulated vacations, sick days, maternity leave, paternity leave, overtime to allow employees to combine work and family life and to prevent employees from being abused. Long resignation periods, unemployment benefits and re-education programs to allow people caught by shifting needs to find new work without drastic and abrupt changes.
All of that said, it's a constant balance between the worthy recipients and people who just want to be welfare queens, that don't want to work but play the system to get every benefit they can have and commit fraud to get benefits they don't. And it's tough, because every so often there's people in the media who'd genuinely would like to work and pay taxes and contribute to society but who also genuinely can't who feel they're under constant suspicion and looked down on by other people as lazy bums who simply won't work. And I don't have any good solution for that because we need those control systems, we can't base ourselves on trust alone. There are people who claim unemployment benefits and work off the record. There are people who claim to be a single mum and get extra support while actually living as a couple. There are people who've tricked the doctor to get disability benefit who seem very healthy the rest of the time.
But that we want the system, no doubt. Even though there's always disagreements about particular forms and implementations of benefits programs, overall we want them.
Why did they do it? It's obvious: it's the bait on the hook to get you to break git and your open source projects (even CURRENT ones) that compete with them.
Sounds like a non-starter for distributed development to me. I imagine this is to make git work differently in a corporate environment where for the average developer if the master repo/server goes down it's not your problem. And perhaps for infosec reasons on proprietary code, who made a complete copy of the source code. This seems more like Microsoft adapting to use open source tools instead of their own proprietary tools like TFS.
Malware makers have used DRM'd WMVs to launch IE to the exploit page of their choice for more than a decade, maybe two. The only media player I know dumb enough to load it by default is Microsoft's own, if you use VLC or really any other player you're safe.
I can't see an Apple only processor wining over Intel, either. At minimum, Intel's process advantage would have to be nullified and I can't see that happening until scaling comes to a full stop.
Well Intel has been very tight lipped about die sizes lately but the 14nm Broadwell-U has 1.3 billion transistors in 82 mm^2 and 1.9 billion transistors in 133 mm^2 so 15-16 million transistors/mm^2, same with the Xeon E5-2600 v4 it's 7.2 billion in 456 mm^2 so 16 million/mm^2 too and they haven't had a die shrink since. Apple's 16nm A10 that's in the latest iPhones have 3.3 billion transistors in 125 mm^2 die size so 26 million transistors/mm^2, it might not be an apples to apples comparison but seems to me like Apple is already ahead in density. It's probably easier on a low-power chip, but really I don't think Intel is ahead anymore.
Not exactly sure why this is news anyway... it's like "What can you do on a public street?" vs "What can you do on a public street if you're a major Hollywood production that has applied for all the right permits?" and the answer to the latter is pretty much everything. If you have a legitimate reason and you're willing to go through all the paperwork you're probably not the problem. Particularly not if you have professional stuntmen and a huge liability insurance, then you can probably get special permits for just about anything as long as the general public is at a safe distance.
In the United States, the Federal Rules of Evidence do not recognize doctor-patient privilege. At the state level, the extent of the privilege varies depending on the law of the applicable jurisdiction.
If you can't claim privilege on the doctor, you probably can't claim it on medical equipment either. Here in Norway it's the other way around, we've found that the need for everyone to be able to seek medical aid is greater than the need for healthcare personnel to aid in criminal investigations, except when there's a clear threat of harm or to identify those involved in accidents and disasters. That is to say the police can certainly request drug tests, DNA tests, blood alcohol checks and such but they can't ask healthcare personnel to repeat what you told them. Not even with a court order.
Following that principle, I think the pacemaker data would be considered privileged here or at least it should, that is you're not going to be forced to choose between having a pacemaker and giving the police a tool with which to convict you. It's not something that should be granted lightly but I think attorney-client, clergy and a few others should. I'd certainly rank doctor-patient more worthy than spousal privilege, which is actually protected by US law. It's a bit odd when they can compel the rest of your family, blood is thicker than water but not in this case.
If there were mass popular demand for it, carriers would already offer at least limited versions of it
For most carriers they've earned more by skimming off ordinary people who can't be bothered for two weeks vacation. For those who really call international a lot (immigrants and such) there has been SIM cards and callback services focusing on cheap international calls for a long time. Skype and such has also eaten huge chunks of that market. You're right people don't care much... but I remember when there was a "local rate" and "national rate" here in Norway, only ~5 million people so more like county and state calls for the US. And "day rate" and "night rate" and a ton of other variations I'd rather just forget. For quite some years now it was one price, whole country all hours. Now they most just include a ton of minutes in the subscription price and what 99% care about is the data cap.
With gigabit fibers everywhere I call bullshit on anyone saying international traffic costs tons more than local trafiic. Look at the Internet, it's one flat rate no matter what machine in the world I connect to so once you hit fiber I'd argue the costs of bouncing it around are trivial. So I say the price ought to be capped to max(local provider's price, your home price) like if you'd pay 3 cents/min at home and locals pay 5 cents/min you can at most be charged 5 cents/min. Same for GBs of data traffic. To flip the problem on its head, how would this be in the US? Do you have to change to ten different providers or pay exorbitant roaming fees if you drive coast to coast? No. I'm sure the costs are different in California and Montana but you pay for poor density through lower coverage.
They're a tech-bling company the same way Rolex is a watch-bling company and Rolls-Royce a car-bling company. The reason they're "not a tech company" to nerds is that we measure function but nobody cares about how accurately a Rolex can tell time or the MPG of a Rolls-Royce. Sure the Rolex needs to tell time and the Rolls-Royce doesn't do much good hanging from a tow truck, but tech specs aren't the most important. You also don't use sheer lace from Victoria's Secret as a sports bra or test what stilettos make the best running shoes. That said, I don't think anyone would say Rolex is a fashion company, not a watch company. Apple is just not the kind of tech company that wants to compete on most bang for the buck.
I know nothing about Austrian law, but in America this lock system would have been ILLEGAL, and I am astonished that something like this was ever designed and installed. It is a blatant violation of every fire code I have ever seen. Locking people out is fine, but you NEVER NEVER NEVER lock people IN, nor do you ever design something where human safety depends on software or electricity. Egress should always be possible using only mechanical means.
EU law is rarely softer than US law when it comes to consumer safety, so I doubt they were actually trapped. The problem is probably that this was tied into breaking the glass and setting off the fire alarm with sirens and unlocking all the rooms. While you could silence the sirens, everything would be open to theft and also you wouldn't have a working alarm in case of an actual fire so they probably asked their guests to stay while they tried to resolve it some other way. There's no requirement that the emergency exit should be functional as a backup system.
Slashdot Mirror
Just for a moment, imagine that you are a creator of digital work that could be sold online, rather than being an AC troll. What possible reason would you have to prevent anyone, wherever they might be located in the world, from buying it?
Why does Hollywood prefer to release movies to cinemas first and disc/TV/streaming later? Why does a book come in hardcover before paperback? It's called maximizing revenue. I'm not saying it's good for the consumer, but if you don't understand why it could be good for business it's because you don't understand business.
I live in the UK. Can I has streaming pleez?
Yes. The UK has not invoked article 50, they've almost passed a law authorizing the government to invoke it but even after that there's a negotiation period of up to two years where they will still be EU members. After that, who knows...
why we tolerate these people? I just realized I can't afford a house because of how the mathematics of mortgages work. I never bothered to do the math since I never thought I could buy one. After 10 years of paying down debt and saving I thought I was ready. Not so much. The way mortgage math works out you're paying almost all interest for the first 15 years of a 30 year loan (...) Not just all the cost, but all the _risk_ is on the home owner. The banks make sure they get their interest up front.
Not sure why you think this is some special mortgage math or evil in any way. Think of it as the big brother of credit card debt, the rest of the loan that you don't repay this month you push to next month and pay interest. The interest is at all times proportional to the amount of debt you push in front of you. Changing that is like asking to change the rocket equation, you get a lot more delta-v from the last galleon of fuel when the rocket is empty than the first galleon when the rocket is full and that's just how it is.
The rest is just distributing what funds you have left over to make down payments on the principal, if you want the monthly payments to be flat then the down payment must be small when the interest is big and the down payment big when the interest is small. But they don't really care how you structure that, if you want to pay in extra or pay in less most have options for that. What is immutable is that you'll always pay interest on the debt you push in front of you.
My problem with SpaceX's plan isn't the market - that's solid. My concern is that the faster you want to launch, the less you can tolerate failures. The time a failure leaves you unable to launch for is independent of how fast you're launching. The faster you launch, the sooner the time between failures. So an increasingly large percent of your time becomes time down due to failures. The only way to overcome this is to correspondingly boost reliability. Want to 10x launch rates? Better 10x reliability. It's a tall order. SpaceX is already on the low end on reliability (not terrible by rocketry standards, but not great), so they already have a deficit to overcome.
Assuming every failure means you have to ground every launch, it's not like the FAA grounds every airplane of that model when one is involved in a crash. Maybe they can split it into experimental and conservative configurations like say ten experimental launches without failure and they follow different rules, like you don't need a full root cause analysis only to proven the failure is probably related to the new configuration. Not saying it'll happen quite like SpaceX wants but if it becomes a high-volume industry I think the rules will adapt somehow so the world doesn't have to stop because one accident happened.
SEVENFOLD? At that rate, by the first half of the century after that, everyone will have died off! (unless we've figured out how to halt/reverse the aging process, and then "age" won't really matter).
Isn't extrapolation fun? Say the percent of the population that dies at 60-70-80-90 is 10%-80%-10%-1% and medical science bumps that to 1%-10%-80%-10%, being 80+ will go from quite rare to very common.
If you can get 512Gbits on one chip why are they expensive? Unless yields are low chips are not expensive to manufacture.
Lots of layers = lots of potential for flaws = lower yields. If there's a 99% of a good layer then for 64 layers you only have 0.99^64 = 52% chance of a good chip.
I'm in my 20s, and have a day job that doesn't require any programming skills. But I want to learn it nonetheless. I have done some research but people have varied opinions.
"Learning programming" is a bit like looking at box full of tools, is a hammer or a saw or a screwdriver best for the job? Well the question doesn't really make any sense until you've defined what you want to accomplish. Unless you just want to learn general concepts, in which case it doesn't really matter. Assign values, calculate values, create functions, acquire resources (like open a file), release resources (like closing a file), control flows like if/case statements, for/while loops, events, state etc. exists in pretty much all languages for a reason, the syntactic sugar may be a little different but the concepts are pretty generic.
But yes, it is becoming more centralized, centrally controlled, and proprietary all the time. That's being driven by the choices of several billion non-technical users who don't grasp how critically important it is to maintain openness and decentralization. I do not believe Facebook would have succeeded with the tech-literate users of the 1980's internet. It took the eternal september crowd to make that happen.
While they may not value openness and decentralization as much as you do, I think non-technical users value choice. Don't like Netflix? Sign up for Hulu. Don't like Spotify? Sign up for Tidal. Don't like YouTube? Put it on Vimeo. It's more choice with less effort than they're used to, even if they're all proprietary. It's what people are used to, they go to car shop and there's Audi and Ford and Mercedes. Building one from parts and blueprints or DIY kits are for a select few, it's not a skill they have nor want. They just want it to run when they turn the key.
That's what an index fund is, more or less. This sounds more like a custom portfolio, you tell the robo-adviser what kind of investment profile you want and it suggests stocks or combinations of stock to match your preference. Matching up investors with potential investments is a lot of what brokers do.
Now, it is true that the standard reasoning given for why possession (as opposed to production) of child pornography is illegal is very much at odds with the idea of keeping the site live, in that they're ostensibly re-victimizing those portrayed in the CP sites they permit to live.
From what I understand operating a site means they didn't just enable people to download what was already posted, but also to continue creating new posts and distribute more material. I think the best analogy would probably be knowing about a drug smuggling tunnel and take over operation with undercover agents rather than shut it down, even though they can't control what is smuggled or where it'd end up.
Nobody is entrapped, because it takes bad intent to use a smuggling tunnel in the first place. The drug lord and the junkie would still exist and they'd find other routes, but how responsible are you if the junkie OD'd on drugs you intentionally let through? Morally, it stinks pretty bad. Legally, no tunnel operator could pin all the blame on the mules. The cops are in on the conspiracy, they have their share of the guilt for the results.
Work coding into math courses, if not, out right replace some. There has to be a way to teach programming that allows for students to also pick up all of the concepts taught in algebra courses.
That sounds like an odd class to me, I think I'd struggle with learning new math concepts and new programming concepts at the same time. Maybe you could do paired lessons where you have one hour math theory, one hour implementing a tool using that math. A math formula would often be just a function though, you'd learn very little about structuring software (objects, attributes, functions, interfaces, properties), flow control (if/for/while etc.), GUIs, network, databases, validating input and error handling, i18n, version control or anything else not strictly related to the actual formula. I think they're different classes, really.
Were steam engines created with the sole purpose of replacing human labor? Nope. What about power tools, cars and computers? Nope, nope, nope. Automation? YEP.
Does it matter if it was the sole reason, when in fact it made lots of workers redundant? Besides, one of the big reasons for automation is consistency in processes much like the assembly line did for manufacturing, the printing press did for copying text and so on. Hand made cars weren't just labor intensive but they were also much more individual with parts tweaked to work together. For example while Uber treats their drivers shitty, they treat all their drivers equally shitty. You're not playing favorites as is so often the case in office politics.
Seriously, in all this doom and gloom I find it's totally lost that automation will also be a big benefit to everyone else who don't lose their jobs. Self-driving cars = cheaper transport = cheaper goods, cheaper taxis and cheaper public transportation. It could create new markets that raise the standard of living, for example I'm a terrible and lazy chef. I could go out to eat more, but then it's not in the comfort of my own home and while there's certainly some costly food items you're paying quite a bit for the preparation, presentation and service. I'd pay a lot of money for a robot that could cook me restaurant quality meals 365 days a year, make freshly baked bread and pastries, freshly squeezed orange juice, bake cookies, mix drinks and so on.
And it would cut down on the cost of supporting other people. Here's a house built by robots, costs less. Here's food and water produced by robot farmers, sent by robot cars, prepared by robot chefs, costs less. If you get sick we'll have our robot doctor diagnose and treat you, costs less. Here's a robot teacher, free education in any subject at any difficulty. If you want to sit and play WoW all day maybe we shouldn't care because you barely cost society anything, it's another few seconds of work for robots that we churn out by the millions. You work, you get money to do cooler things. If you don't, no big deal. Bringing down that "base cost" of your life makes it much less important to get tax revenue so society balances out.
Internet trolls and video game griefers are just as broken in real life as you've always suspected, according to a new psychology paper by Canadian researchers. It turns out that the same folks who love to disrupt online conversations for the"lulz" are likely to also exhibit some pretty nasty personality traits in general.
Well, no shit... someone who looks at all the things they could do in their spare time and decides to use it on making other people miserable has personality issues? I can understand theft, fraud and sabotage and to some degree revenge because it's for a purpose. But the kind of people who slash the seats on the bus for no gain, no fame, no particular target in mind just pissing in the well for the hell of it.... I don't get it.
Some ask others to do a several hour jobs for them for free. (I'd mention a common factor for these type of questions if it weren't racist to do so.)
They work for a cheap outsourcing company that hire developers who are barely computer literate, so they try to get someone else to do their job? I don't think ethnicity has anything to do with it, though many of them are located in the same country...
Welfare has a very different meaning outside the US. It does not bear a negative connotation unlike there.
The system does not, the recipients are a very mixed bag. On the one hand, most of us are proud that we have a system that will take care of everyone from cradle to grave with many forms of social security and benefits of various kinds. I don't want to see people living in tent camps or people who can't get treatment because they lack health insurance and that we take care of people that are injured, sick and infirm, mentally challenged and so on. That we have a work life that has regulated vacations, sick days, maternity leave, paternity leave, overtime to allow employees to combine work and family life and to prevent employees from being abused. Long resignation periods, unemployment benefits and re-education programs to allow people caught by shifting needs to find new work without drastic and abrupt changes.
All of that said, it's a constant balance between the worthy recipients and people who just want to be welfare queens, that don't want to work but play the system to get every benefit they can have and commit fraud to get benefits they don't. And it's tough, because every so often there's people in the media who'd genuinely would like to work and pay taxes and contribute to society but who also genuinely can't who feel they're under constant suspicion and looked down on by other people as lazy bums who simply won't work. And I don't have any good solution for that because we need those control systems, we can't base ourselves on trust alone. There are people who claim unemployment benefits and work off the record. There are people who claim to be a single mum and get extra support while actually living as a couple. There are people who've tricked the doctor to get disability benefit who seem very healthy the rest of the time.
But that we want the system, no doubt. Even though there's always disagreements about particular forms and implementations of benefits programs, overall we want them.
Why did they do it? It's obvious: it's the bait on the hook to get you to break git and your open source projects (even CURRENT ones) that compete with them.
Sounds like a non-starter for distributed development to me. I imagine this is to make git work differently in a corporate environment where for the average developer if the master repo/server goes down it's not your problem. And perhaps for infosec reasons on proprietary code, who made a complete copy of the source code. This seems more like Microsoft adapting to use open source tools instead of their own proprietary tools like TFS.
Malware makers have used DRM'd WMVs to launch IE to the exploit page of their choice for more than a decade, maybe two. The only media player I know dumb enough to load it by default is Microsoft's own, if you use VLC or really any other player you're safe.
I can't see an Apple only processor wining over Intel, either. At minimum, Intel's process advantage would have to be nullified and I can't see that happening until scaling comes to a full stop.
Well Intel has been very tight lipped about die sizes lately but the 14nm Broadwell-U has 1.3 billion transistors in 82 mm^2 and 1.9 billion transistors in 133 mm^2 so 15-16 million transistors/mm^2, same with the Xeon E5-2600 v4 it's 7.2 billion in 456 mm^2 so 16 million/mm^2 too and they haven't had a die shrink since. Apple's 16nm A10 that's in the latest iPhones have 3.3 billion transistors in 125 mm^2 die size so 26 million transistors/mm^2, it might not be an apples to apples comparison but seems to me like Apple is already ahead in density. It's probably easier on a low-power chip, but really I don't think Intel is ahead anymore.
Not exactly sure why this is news anyway... it's like "What can you do on a public street?" vs "What can you do on a public street if you're a major Hollywood production that has applied for all the right permits?" and the answer to the latter is pretty much everything. If you have a legitimate reason and you're willing to go through all the paperwork you're probably not the problem. Particularly not if you have professional stuntmen and a huge liability insurance, then you can probably get special permits for just about anything as long as the general public is at a safe distance.
In full compliance with the Bill of Rights, in other words. Are we supposed to be outraged anyway?
Probably not, according to Wikipedia:
In the United States, the Federal Rules of Evidence do not recognize doctor-patient privilege. At the state level, the extent of the privilege varies depending on the law of the applicable jurisdiction.
If you can't claim privilege on the doctor, you probably can't claim it on medical equipment either. Here in Norway it's the other way around, we've found that the need for everyone to be able to seek medical aid is greater than the need for healthcare personnel to aid in criminal investigations, except when there's a clear threat of harm or to identify those involved in accidents and disasters. That is to say the police can certainly request drug tests, DNA tests, blood alcohol checks and such but they can't ask healthcare personnel to repeat what you told them. Not even with a court order.
Following that principle, I think the pacemaker data would be considered privileged here or at least it should, that is you're not going to be forced to choose between having a pacemaker and giving the police a tool with which to convict you. It's not something that should be granted lightly but I think attorney-client, clergy and a few others should. I'd certainly rank doctor-patient more worthy than spousal privilege, which is actually protected by US law. It's a bit odd when they can compel the rest of your family, blood is thicker than water but not in this case.
If there were mass popular demand for it, carriers would already offer at least limited versions of it
For most carriers they've earned more by skimming off ordinary people who can't be bothered for two weeks vacation. For those who really call international a lot (immigrants and such) there has been SIM cards and callback services focusing on cheap international calls for a long time. Skype and such has also eaten huge chunks of that market. You're right people don't care much... but I remember when there was a "local rate" and "national rate" here in Norway, only ~5 million people so more like county and state calls for the US. And "day rate" and "night rate" and a ton of other variations I'd rather just forget. For quite some years now it was one price, whole country all hours. Now they most just include a ton of minutes in the subscription price and what 99% care about is the data cap.
With gigabit fibers everywhere I call bullshit on anyone saying international traffic costs tons more than local trafiic. Look at the Internet, it's one flat rate no matter what machine in the world I connect to so once you hit fiber I'd argue the costs of bouncing it around are trivial. So I say the price ought to be capped to max(local provider's price, your home price) like if you'd pay 3 cents/min at home and locals pay 5 cents/min you can at most be charged 5 cents/min. Same for GBs of data traffic. To flip the problem on its head, how would this be in the US? Do you have to change to ten different providers or pay exorbitant roaming fees if you drive coast to coast? No. I'm sure the costs are different in California and Montana but you pay for poor density through lower coverage.
They're a tech-bling company the same way Rolex is a watch-bling company and Rolls-Royce a car-bling company. The reason they're "not a tech company" to nerds is that we measure function but nobody cares about how accurately a Rolex can tell time or the MPG of a Rolls-Royce. Sure the Rolex needs to tell time and the Rolls-Royce doesn't do much good hanging from a tow truck, but tech specs aren't the most important. You also don't use sheer lace from Victoria's Secret as a sports bra or test what stilettos make the best running shoes. That said, I don't think anyone would say Rolex is a fashion company, not a watch company. Apple is just not the kind of tech company that wants to compete on most bang for the buck.
But if you want to pursue the American Dream of having it all ([snip] big wife and big kids), you need to earn big bucks for that.
You have it wrong, you need to earn big macs. Plenty big macs.
I know nothing about Austrian law, but in America this lock system would have been ILLEGAL, and I am astonished that something like this was ever designed and installed. It is a blatant violation of every fire code I have ever seen. Locking people out is fine, but you NEVER NEVER NEVER lock people IN, nor do you ever design something where human safety depends on software or electricity. Egress should always be possible using only mechanical means.
EU law is rarely softer than US law when it comes to consumer safety, so I doubt they were actually trapped. The problem is probably that this was tied into breaking the glass and setting off the fire alarm with sirens and unlocking all the rooms. While you could silence the sirens, everything would be open to theft and also you wouldn't have a working alarm in case of an actual fire so they probably asked their guests to stay while they tried to resolve it some other way. There's no requirement that the emergency exit should be functional as a backup system.