Free means either ad-supported, or it means funded by someone hoping to turn a profit some other way, or as a loss leader for some other product. You don't get services like Netflix for Free. It's just not possible.
Without copyright we'd have a pot luck gathering of storage and bandwidth through torrents, the only thing you'd need at the top is a razor thin site with magnet links and a tracker with some ratio control. Sure it could never operate at $0 but "a friend of mine" is member on a private tracker with no fees, no ads and you get way, way more donation runs at Wikipedia. Even aside from price it's better than any service you could buy today, without content fees and bandwidth fees you could run "Netflix" on the loose change in your pocket.
I really doubt many people stick with Microsoft because of the brand or that they're fans. If they haven't switched it's because the alternatives haven't been viable. The way Apple are treating their Macs right now I wouldn't buy. As for Linux I've done that switch and used it as my primary desktop (2007-2010) but just the running annoyances were enough that I gave up after years of hoping the next release would finally be the one to shave off the rough edges. I did give it a go in a VM a little while ago but ran into a glitch pretty much right away and decided to wait a little longer. And I know some games I play with buddies simply won't work, that I'd need a Wintendo is a downside. I hoped Win8 would be the spiritual successor of Vista and Win10 the spiritual successor of Win7, but that's clearly not the case. But Win7 has another three years of support left so until then...
Microsoft might get sued if it doesn't patch certain vulnerabilities in time, so it can't have end-users interfering with its maintenance work.
[citation needed]
We have decades of history from Microsoft and the software industry as a whole and indeed product liability in general, has anyone ever been successfully sued for failing to enforce a patch, fix or recall on someone else's property after the user has been notified and has delayed, refused or ignored it? If I refuse to hand over my Samsung Note 7 it's not like Samsung can send a SWAT team to collect it. It's not like Ford can go impound cars that have ignored a recall. I can't think of any legal theory where Microsoft could be successfully sued because the user actively refuses to update.
The concept is simple, you're a guest in someone else's home. The host can of course decide who to invite, what they can do and how long they can stay. But it's pretty damn rude to tell someone they can crash on your couch and then on the day they're coming out of the blue go "sorry, don't want you on my couch because I don't trust you" without any clear reason. And everything else is sold out, leaving the guest with no other choice but to abort his trip and go home.
Don't mainframes kinda do the same thing today? I know they're not exactly mainstream but not everyhing is well suited to being done by a farm, where you really need serialization and global consistency. If you're Facebook or Google the page doesn't have to perfectly reflect changes someone did 0.01 second ago. If you're doing bank transactions or booking tickets then you really need to know if there's still money in the account or the seat is still free. NoSQL is great if you don't need all the guarantees of ACID SQL. Sadly some people think it's the "next gen" and can replace everything relational databases does today.
If you trust a consumer-grade device with state secrets then you have lost before you even began.
The 1990s called and want their 40 bit consumer-grade encryption back, today's systems use the same AES algorithm the US encrypts TOP SECRET information with. Maybe you haven't noticed the FBI is pissed because "consumer devices" are too good? The distinction between consumer and military grade has all but disappeared, except the military usually exists it operates in more extreme temperatures. But even that you have rugged civilian gear that mimics.
In what retarded country do you live that *theft* is not an action the police is reacting to immediately???
"Stop, thief!" maybe. An IP address the might indicate where some stolen property is? Around here they'd first have to subpoena the ISP for the subscriber's address. Then they'd have to go before a court and say we have probable cause and need a warrant. Then they have to show up at the suspect's house, where there might not be anybody home. Which might mean they need to force entry. If they come with no warrant or they leave again all they probably do is alert the suspect. After all that maybe they recover the stolen property. They still have to prove that person knew it was stolen property to prosecute the possession and they have to prove who stole it to prosecute theft. That's quite far from what the police consider an open and shut case and hardly the most serious form of crime they could solve...
This is a huge breath of fresh air where Microsoft spent a huge amount of energy trying to turn programmers into.net enterprise sales people forcing the entire microsoft ecosystem down our throats. The useless programmers adopted.net and went to work for government and big companies. The real programmers went elsewhere.
I know/. has a hard-on for the "real" programmers that work on self-driving cars, AIs like Watson or AlphaGo etc. but there's a lot of mundane software that makes the world go round. Writing a payroll system is never going to impress a CS expert, but people sure notice if they're not getting paid or paid to little and the IRS sure aren't happy if you haven't made the right tax deductions. And they change on external whims just like most business applications, it's not a CS problem where you can approach some form of ideal solution. A lot of these systems are written in C# or Java because they're "good enough" languages to write "good enough" software by "good enough" programmers.
To me they're basically craftsmen. You don't call an electrician useless if he knows how to wire up a house just like thousands of other electricians have wired up millions of similar homes before him. Same with yet another business form or business report just like thousands of other business forms or business reports before them. I know we try to make it all configuration and rule engines and whatnot but in my experience it becomes so complicated you'd need another layer of experts to set it up correctly. And then you often end up spending more time trying to solve the "general problem" than solving the actual problems ever would...
Nonsense. It's all UI. A command line is a UI. My car's steering wheels and pedals are a UI. A remote control is a UI. A UI where things slide around and hide themselves and whatnot is all UI. I'm the user. It's the interface.
While UX is a major buzzword, it is more than the UI. A car with and without power steering has the same UI, but the first one will have a much better UX. In my mind UI design asks how, UX design goes one step further and asks why. Like UI asks if you want gear shift with a stick on handles on the wheel, UX asks if you'd rather not have an automatic transmission. Or for that matter a self-driving car, are the pedals and wheel really the goal or are they just means for the end of getting from A to B? Of course it could be a problem if the UX guys decide "everybody" wants it this way and remove options from the UI, but it's an imperfect world.
Depends on what you consider real work. At my work the servers are beefy but my development environment is 90% SQL Server Management Studio, 10% Visual Studio and it just needs to build fairly simple projects calling SQL procedures for most the heavy lifting besides the actual data flows. That and JIRA and Outlook/Lync, I could probably run it off Intel's compute stick. I remember someone else here saying they were a web developer working off a chromebook or something like that. I do need the big screen, keyboard and mouse. The computing power I'd need locally could fit in a thimble.
Actually, it's often fruitless. But you don't know ahead of time which of it will become fruitful. It's like what the apocryphal CEO said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half" - and continued spending all that money on advertising.
Bad example, because before you usually put ads in TV, radio, newspapers, magazines and billboards, the customer showed up in one of your stores and paid in cash, the challenge was finding what cause lead to the desired effect. The Internet made the marketing industry click crazy and fortunately they're less in your face today but you still have tracking through referrals, shopping accounts, ad trackers, bonus cards and loyalty programs everywhere. Sure there's plenty room for used car salesmen and voodoo priests but marketing is much more empirical than in the past.
Basic research I feel is more like a tech tree where you can't "look ahead", this is not Civilization where if I discover atomic theory I know I can build nukes* and lasers afterwards. You don't know what new research opportunities will come and you don't know what applications it'll have, so how could you possibly know the effect? You have to discover that it exists and how it works first, then see if you can find an application for it. And even if you don't, the more you know about how the world works the easier it's to find new things to test rather than pile assumptions on top of assumptions.
* after the Manhattan project, if you wanted to nitpick.
First we build a thin aluminum can. Then we fly it 10000 meters up where there's no air to breathe and if you stop, you drop. It's not hard to make flying sound like a death trap.
I imagine if Musk is thinking it he's thinking underground Hyperloop, you have a tube and on the outside you have air supply. Emergency escape routes. Brakes that automatically engage when they lose power. Emergency overrun to physically bring it to a halt. Bad things could still happen of course, but -5g for 5s and you've gone from 900 km/h to zero in 640 meters. It would be like a nasty roller coaster but really the killer is impact. Hit something really hard (no, even at 900km/h air is not really hard) to stop in fractions of a seconds and you're in deep shit.
Another solution is to pass a law saying that all US citizen data has to be kept in servers in the US. The benefit is that foreign countries don't get to access our citizens' data as easily (Russia, China, Canada).
Which would be a massive legitimization of Russia and China's nationalistic social media policies to make people only use services under Putin and the CCP's control. If US data is not safe in the EU, why is EU data safe in the US? And you're flipping the situation on its head, only the US is crazy enough to demand data from an Irish subsidiary. You think Ireland would demand data from a US subsidiary through Irish courts? The US would go ballistic. The US is asking for other countries to accept what it would never itself accept.
An example, it is illegal for Americans to communicate with foreign governments for the purpose of affecting their response to US foreign policy; it is illegal for Americans to bribe foreign governments; it is illegal for Americans to have sex with minors in foreign countries. These laws are not legally controversial or gray areas, they are well-established.
Extra-territorial laws where Americans are required to simultaneously uphold both US and local law are well-established. Extra-territorial laws that compel Americans to break local law would be extremely controversial. If US law says you drive on the right and you go to Britain where people drive on the left then obviously you follow local law. If you can't do that, then you can't drive. If you can't do business in the EU without breaking local law, you can't do business there. The US supreme court can say what they want. If Microsoft complies then Ireland should start putting Microsoft Ireland executives in jail and file extradition charges against Microsoft's US executives for crimes in Ireland against Irish law until they stop. It's really that simple.
Authentication credentials that can't be hashed, can be stolen off your body, and can't be reset at will - but they do change with age, so maybe you can wait it out?
I think those in favor of biometric identification consider that features, not bugs. If it wasn't cost prohibitive they'd probably like to make a DNA swab of everyone too. You leave them by accident at crime scenes, you can extract them from anyone against their will even if they're migrants that have burned all their ids and while you might fool the odd scanner they're ridiculously hard to genuinely lose or forge which is why you occasionally see cold cases solved decades later. And practically you can only have one set at a time unlike names and ids, which is a tool of fraudsters and other shady characters everywhere. Biometrics are a GUID to your life for better and for worse.
It's obvious that you won't like it for yourself because you have very poor control over it. I want to control to who, when and how I identify myself to other people. On the other hand I do want to stop rapists, murderers, terrorists, human trafficking, benefit abuse, identity theft etc. even though it's obvious they don't want to be identified. Those goals are contradictory and you can't really eat your pie and have it too. And just like there's an issue with warrants and wiretaps it's becoming binary, either you're tracked everywhere or nowhere. So far, the trend is everywhere.
One of the issues is that UBI is different things to different people. Many argue that it will replace almost all other programs, but only if you want the high school dropout that'll take the "one bedroom studio, ramen, and a bag of pot and an World of Warcraft subscription" for a semester or two and lump him in with the faultless traffic accident victim who's fucked up pretty bad and has no realistic prospect of being employed ever again and will have to live at that level of poverty and zero additional aid for the rest of their lives.
Or we could start making value judgements about who "deserves" our help, who are capable of contributing, who has contributed, who's looking to contribute and what help have they already gotten and then we're pretty much back to the complexity where we started. I already pay taxes. If you want to give me a "UBI" all you have to do is adjust the income tax curve, paying out a UBI and then taxing me more to pay for it is just an exercise in how to create black labor and tax fraud.
The trouble with all that is branding. When the right wing start a debate they've got simple answers to complex problems. They're always the wrong answers, because if a problem has a simple answer then, well, by definition it's not complex. But those simple answers feel good, sound good, and just got a Demagogue elected President of the United States...
Norwegian here, you don't think socialists have simple answers? Some people have a [something] problem, let's regulate [something]. Which means that right now at 8:30 PM on a Monday I can't buy a damn beer at the store. We need more money for [good cause]? Increase taxes. I could work harder, but I don't. Why? Because on my marginal dollar I pay 25% + 8.7% + 8.2% = 40% taxes and 25% VAT on most things mean I lose another 15%. Sorry for 45 cents to the dollar I'll just get an easy job (37.5 hours/week, paid overtime, flexible hours) and be lower middle class. If was in the US I'd probably work 50-60 hours/week and make $200k.
Getting kickback from creating value is not a socialist virtue, if you got lots of money you can pay lots of money is their thinking. The day we run out of oil all hell will break loose because we're lazy and think everybody deserves good pay just for showing up at work or doing meaningless paper pusher jobs. And since I can't change the public opinion and tax system to reward hard work, I've decided if you can't beat them then join them. Even on cruise control I seem to get praise for good work, which is both cushy and a bit creepy at the same time. Maybe it's just that I can't stand all the stupid and make actual working solutions from time to time.
There isn't really a good solution to this. If everyone has the same price, then people in poor countries are likely to pirate.
And...? People who can't afford a Rolex are more likely to steal a Rolex too, is that a problem you should solve by adjusting the price? The flip side of "lowering prices for poor people" is "gouging wealthy people for being rich". We generally hate companies trying to size up our wallet to see just much they can fleece us for. Isn't that what we'd be asking companies to do? I want to be able to go on Amazon or eBay and get the best product to the best price anyone will offer. That's how capitalism, competition, supply and demand and voting with your wallet is supposed to work. Companies shop around for labor, consumers shop around for products and services. And maybe that's not working out so well for everybody, but letting them put region locks on things to screw us while they continue to shop around the whole world is worse than nothing.
The key difference between this and interfaces in Java seems to be push vs pull, does a class explicitly declare that it is say sortable or do you just check if it has functions that match something that's sortable. If you look at the example he does on page 8 with Shape.draw() and Cowboy.draw() sure you could be more explicit in the template requirements or you could demand that the cowboy explicitly has to say he's "drawable". To me Stroustrup's idea sounds a bit too much like the story about the blind man and the elephant, if you only touch it in enough places you can be sure it's an elephant. The obviously problem is that once you have a birth defect or amputee with only three legs, it all fails.
For example I might like to define a class "SequenceNumber" that has functions like setInitialValue(), getNextValue() etc. but lacks typical characteristics of a number like being able to add and subtract them, but I can still sort sequence numbers. If it's explicit I only have to declare it sortable and implement the necessary functions. If it looks at the "concept" number it'll say nope, you're not a real number because we can't add two of you together.
This could be trivially avoided by having the possibility to supplement class definitions as implementing additional interfaces, like here's a library with the Circle shape header and I say it's a drawable even though it doesn't say so itself. It'll still have to actually fulfill the interface, but that way you're not bound by the ones supplied by the library. Since that's purely a synthetic check on whether your code should be able to call that code I don't see how that should be a problem.
If one knows their native language plus English, they'll have the vast majority of the world's knowledge at their fingertips.
And tools. For every mainstream app there's ten obscure apps that haven't been translated to your language. And other people interested in the same things you are. The Internet has made a vast difference here, dubs / subtitles / translations worked pretty well for broadcast and print media and international calls was rare. And I don't mean just chit-chats, go on eBay and the whole world is your marketplace as long as you pay shipping. There are so many other benefits to language convergence that you won't get through more translations.
There's really no credible competitor to English because there's no other big pairings. If you know two major languages it's likely Chinese/English, Spanish/English, French/English, Portuguese/English, Japanese/English, Arabic/English, Russian/English, German/English, Hindi/English etc. you just don't find many Chinese/Spanish or Hindi/Portuguese speakers. If you look at the EU it's quite clear that 94% now learn English and fewer people learn French and German, I don't have the numbers for Spanish or Portuguese but I'm guessing the trend is the same.
Sure it's always possible that English is locally going a little backwards like that Spanish is creeping up into the US but for the world as a whole there's no debate. Particularly since China as the only potential challenger has put huge effort into English proficiency, giving everybody else much less reason to learn Chinese instead. I know linguists hate it but I think that's misunderstood, if all you needed to know was your native language and English most can be bi-lingual. If you should learn your Amazon tribe's language, Portuguese, Spanish and English then it's for the few.
The problem with 3D is the glasses - without the glasses, 3D would be a nice enhancement, much like color.
Well maybe... but if I'm watching a GoT episode do I really want to feel like I'm flipping from being 1m away from a combat scene to suddenly being 50 meters up in the air overlooking the battlefield and back down to 1m again in a matter of seconds? Just saying that maybe we want some kind of grounding that we're really watching a screen and not teleporting around.
Yeah we've seen the "no commercials" promise before when cable TV was becoming a thing and it was bullshit then too. They'll only stay away from commercials long enough to get a subscriber base. Commercials are where most of the money is and it will be hard for them to ignore that fact. I have a hard time imagining Netflix being immune to the siren's call of that much cash forever.
Is it really? Take the Superbowl which is one of the few items where we have pretty much all the numbers. In 2014 there was 49 minutes 15 seconds of commercials, $4.5 million average per 30 second slot and 111.4 million viewers. That works out to a little less than $4 per viewer. So if you offered $5 to watch it ad-free you'd be beating the advertisers. That's not bad for about four hours of entertainment with both a football game and the half time show and it's supposed to be super-expensive compared to normal ads. Granted one display != one viewer so they'd have to charge more than $5 but still I bet there's a lot of people who'd like to out-bid the advertisers.
The real reason net neutrality is on the ropes is this: the idea was barely discussed by anyone during the election, in comparison to other issues. The companies that stand to profit from net neutrality are electronic media companies, and the companies that stand to profit from its removal are electronic infrastructure companies, and both will continue their fight under the covers. There wasn't much input from the electorate on the topic at all this cycle.
Actually I think it's way more old media vs new media, here in Norway where the main broadband revolution was DSL from telcos and the fiber revolution was lead by a former power company the "electronic infrastructure companies" seem pretty happy just to sell you bits and bytes. My impression is that in the US it's different because so large a part of the American population get their broadband through cable. It seems both bandwidth caps and anti-net neutrality gouging is primarily driven by cable companies wanting to drive customers to their own services instead of using online services and remain the gatekeeper and middle man between the content and the customers.
Yes, and we already have that. There are people who die every day waiting for a transplant organ. There's a limited amount available so they must be rationed and someone (or a panel of people most likely) has to determine where the limited supply will do the most good.
That's what other western countries do. The US goes by who has the best health insurance, like how big of a bill can we justify sending...
Yes. Timing is the key to understanding it. Sanders would have defeated Trump easily. The timing of the releases were carefully placed so as to build suspicion with independants while not hurting her primary bid. Then once she clenched that, proof that it was a rigged primary sent a lot of independants away from the DNC to either Green, Libertarian, and even a number to Trump. If they had released it all in the beginning, we would be swearing in Sanders tomorrow.
Let's not forget that the DNC wanted Trump to win the Republican nomination. So first Trump let Hillary drag him center stage as the enemy, then he let her eliminate Sanders before landing a final blow nobody saw coming until late election night? If all of that was planned Machiavelli could take lessons from him. If could simply be that they know the media has the attention span of a humming bird on speed, let's just pace this out so we get a good buzz and can keep it going until the election and that the rest was plain lucky. It's either that or we're in a Bond movie.
Slashdot Mirror
Free means either ad-supported, or it means funded by someone hoping to turn a profit some other way, or as a loss leader for some other product. You don't get services like Netflix for Free. It's just not possible.
Without copyright we'd have a pot luck gathering of storage and bandwidth through torrents, the only thing you'd need at the top is a razor thin site with magnet links and a tracker with some ratio control. Sure it could never operate at $0 but "a friend of mine" is member on a private tracker with no fees, no ads and you get way, way more donation runs at Wikipedia. Even aside from price it's better than any service you could buy today, without content fees and bandwidth fees you could run "Netflix" on the loose change in your pocket.
I really doubt many people stick with Microsoft because of the brand or that they're fans. If they haven't switched it's because the alternatives haven't been viable. The way Apple are treating their Macs right now I wouldn't buy. As for Linux I've done that switch and used it as my primary desktop (2007-2010) but just the running annoyances were enough that I gave up after years of hoping the next release would finally be the one to shave off the rough edges. I did give it a go in a VM a little while ago but ran into a glitch pretty much right away and decided to wait a little longer. And I know some games I play with buddies simply won't work, that I'd need a Wintendo is a downside. I hoped Win8 would be the spiritual successor of Vista and Win10 the spiritual successor of Win7, but that's clearly not the case. But Win7 has another three years of support left so until then...
Microsoft might get sued if it doesn't patch certain vulnerabilities in time, so it can't have end-users interfering with its maintenance work.
[citation needed]
We have decades of history from Microsoft and the software industry as a whole and indeed product liability in general, has anyone ever been successfully sued for failing to enforce a patch, fix or recall on someone else's property after the user has been notified and has delayed, refused or ignored it? If I refuse to hand over my Samsung Note 7 it's not like Samsung can send a SWAT team to collect it. It's not like Ford can go impound cars that have ignored a recall. I can't think of any legal theory where Microsoft could be successfully sued because the user actively refuses to update.
The concept is simple, you're a guest in someone else's home. The host can of course decide who to invite, what they can do and how long they can stay. But it's pretty damn rude to tell someone they can crash on your couch and then on the day they're coming out of the blue go "sorry, don't want you on my couch because I don't trust you" without any clear reason. And everything else is sold out, leaving the guest with no other choice but to abort his trip and go home.
Don't mainframes kinda do the same thing today? I know they're not exactly mainstream but not everyhing is well suited to being done by a farm, where you really need serialization and global consistency. If you're Facebook or Google the page doesn't have to perfectly reflect changes someone did 0.01 second ago. If you're doing bank transactions or booking tickets then you really need to know if there's still money in the account or the seat is still free. NoSQL is great if you don't need all the guarantees of ACID SQL. Sadly some people think it's the "next gen" and can replace everything relational databases does today.
If you trust a consumer-grade device with state secrets then you have lost before you even began.
The 1990s called and want their 40 bit consumer-grade encryption back, today's systems use the same AES algorithm the US encrypts TOP SECRET information with. Maybe you haven't noticed the FBI is pissed because "consumer devices" are too good? The distinction between consumer and military grade has all but disappeared, except the military usually exists it operates in more extreme temperatures. But even that you have rugged civilian gear that mimics.
In what retarded country do you live that *theft* is not an action the police is reacting to immediately???
"Stop, thief!" maybe. An IP address the might indicate where some stolen property is? Around here they'd first have to subpoena the ISP for the subscriber's address. Then they'd have to go before a court and say we have probable cause and need a warrant. Then they have to show up at the suspect's house, where there might not be anybody home. Which might mean they need to force entry. If they come with no warrant or they leave again all they probably do is alert the suspect. After all that maybe they recover the stolen property. They still have to prove that person knew it was stolen property to prosecute the possession and they have to prove who stole it to prosecute theft. That's quite far from what the police consider an open and shut case and hardly the most serious form of crime they could solve...
This is a huge breath of fresh air where Microsoft spent a huge amount of energy trying to turn programmers into .net enterprise sales people forcing the entire microsoft ecosystem down our throats. The useless programmers adopted .net and went to work for government and big companies. The real programmers went elsewhere.
I know /. has a hard-on for the "real" programmers that work on self-driving cars, AIs like Watson or AlphaGo etc. but there's a lot of mundane software that makes the world go round. Writing a payroll system is never going to impress a CS expert, but people sure notice if they're not getting paid or paid to little and the IRS sure aren't happy if you haven't made the right tax deductions. And they change on external whims just like most business applications, it's not a CS problem where you can approach some form of ideal solution. A lot of these systems are written in C# or Java because they're "good enough" languages to write "good enough" software by "good enough" programmers.
To me they're basically craftsmen. You don't call an electrician useless if he knows how to wire up a house just like thousands of other electricians have wired up millions of similar homes before him. Same with yet another business form or business report just like thousands of other business forms or business reports before them. I know we try to make it all configuration and rule engines and whatnot but in my experience it becomes so complicated you'd need another layer of experts to set it up correctly. And then you often end up spending more time trying to solve the "general problem" than solving the actual problems ever would...
Nonsense. It's all UI. A command line is a UI. My car's steering wheels and pedals are a UI. A remote control is a UI. A UI where things slide around and hide themselves and whatnot is all UI. I'm the user. It's the interface.
While UX is a major buzzword, it is more than the UI. A car with and without power steering has the same UI, but the first one will have a much better UX. In my mind UI design asks how, UX design goes one step further and asks why. Like UI asks if you want gear shift with a stick on handles on the wheel, UX asks if you'd rather not have an automatic transmission. Or for that matter a self-driving car, are the pedals and wheel really the goal or are they just means for the end of getting from A to B? Of course it could be a problem if the UX guys decide "everybody" wants it this way and remove options from the UI, but it's an imperfect world.
Depends on what you consider real work. At my work the servers are beefy but my development environment is 90% SQL Server Management Studio, 10% Visual Studio and it just needs to build fairly simple projects calling SQL procedures for most the heavy lifting besides the actual data flows. That and JIRA and Outlook/Lync, I could probably run it off Intel's compute stick. I remember someone else here saying they were a web developer working off a chromebook or something like that. I do need the big screen, keyboard and mouse. The computing power I'd need locally could fit in a thimble.
Actually, it's often fruitless. But you don't know ahead of time which of it will become fruitful. It's like what the apocryphal CEO said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half" - and continued spending all that money on advertising.
Bad example, because before you usually put ads in TV, radio, newspapers, magazines and billboards, the customer showed up in one of your stores and paid in cash, the challenge was finding what cause lead to the desired effect. The Internet made the marketing industry click crazy and fortunately they're less in your face today but you still have tracking through referrals, shopping accounts, ad trackers, bonus cards and loyalty programs everywhere. Sure there's plenty room for used car salesmen and voodoo priests but marketing is much more empirical than in the past.
Basic research I feel is more like a tech tree where you can't "look ahead", this is not Civilization where if I discover atomic theory I know I can build nukes* and lasers afterwards. You don't know what new research opportunities will come and you don't know what applications it'll have, so how could you possibly know the effect? You have to discover that it exists and how it works first, then see if you can find an application for it. And even if you don't, the more you know about how the world works the easier it's to find new things to test rather than pile assumptions on top of assumptions.
* after the Manhattan project, if you wanted to nitpick.
What could go wrong? (gasp)
First we build a thin aluminum can. Then we fly it 10000 meters up where there's no air to breathe and if you stop, you drop. It's not hard to make flying sound like a death trap.
I imagine if Musk is thinking it he's thinking underground Hyperloop, you have a tube and on the outside you have air supply. Emergency escape routes. Brakes that automatically engage when they lose power. Emergency overrun to physically bring it to a halt. Bad things could still happen of course, but -5g for 5s and you've gone from 900 km/h to zero in 640 meters. It would be like a nasty roller coaster but really the killer is impact. Hit something really hard (no, even at 900km/h air is not really hard) to stop in fractions of a seconds and you're in deep shit.
Another solution is to pass a law saying that all US citizen data has to be kept in servers in the US. The benefit is that foreign countries don't get to access our citizens' data as easily (Russia, China, Canada).
Which would be a massive legitimization of Russia and China's nationalistic social media policies to make people only use services under Putin and the CCP's control. If US data is not safe in the EU, why is EU data safe in the US? And you're flipping the situation on its head, only the US is crazy enough to demand data from an Irish subsidiary. You think Ireland would demand data from a US subsidiary through Irish courts? The US would go ballistic. The US is asking for other countries to accept what it would never itself accept.
An example, it is illegal for Americans to communicate with foreign governments for the purpose of affecting their response to US foreign policy; it is illegal for Americans to bribe foreign governments; it is illegal for Americans to have sex with minors in foreign countries. These laws are not legally controversial or gray areas, they are well-established.
Extra-territorial laws where Americans are required to simultaneously uphold both US and local law are well-established. Extra-territorial laws that compel Americans to break local law would be extremely controversial. If US law says you drive on the right and you go to Britain where people drive on the left then obviously you follow local law. If you can't do that, then you can't drive. If you can't do business in the EU without breaking local law, you can't do business there. The US supreme court can say what they want. If Microsoft complies then Ireland should start putting Microsoft Ireland executives in jail and file extradition charges against Microsoft's US executives for crimes in Ireland against Irish law until they stop. It's really that simple.
Authentication credentials that can't be hashed, can be stolen off your body, and can't be reset at will - but they do change with age, so maybe you can wait it out?
I think those in favor of biometric identification consider that features, not bugs. If it wasn't cost prohibitive they'd probably like to make a DNA swab of everyone too. You leave them by accident at crime scenes, you can extract them from anyone against their will even if they're migrants that have burned all their ids and while you might fool the odd scanner they're ridiculously hard to genuinely lose or forge which is why you occasionally see cold cases solved decades later. And practically you can only have one set at a time unlike names and ids, which is a tool of fraudsters and other shady characters everywhere. Biometrics are a GUID to your life for better and for worse.
It's obvious that you won't like it for yourself because you have very poor control over it. I want to control to who, when and how I identify myself to other people. On the other hand I do want to stop rapists, murderers, terrorists, human trafficking, benefit abuse, identity theft etc. even though it's obvious they don't want to be identified. Those goals are contradictory and you can't really eat your pie and have it too. And just like there's an issue with warrants and wiretaps it's becoming binary, either you're tracked everywhere or nowhere. So far, the trend is everywhere.
One of the issues is that UBI is different things to different people. Many argue that it will replace almost all other programs, but only if you want the high school dropout that'll take the "one bedroom studio, ramen, and a bag of pot and an World of Warcraft subscription" for a semester or two and lump him in with the faultless traffic accident victim who's fucked up pretty bad and has no realistic prospect of being employed ever again and will have to live at that level of poverty and zero additional aid for the rest of their lives.
Or we could start making value judgements about who "deserves" our help, who are capable of contributing, who has contributed, who's looking to contribute and what help have they already gotten and then we're pretty much back to the complexity where we started. I already pay taxes. If you want to give me a "UBI" all you have to do is adjust the income tax curve, paying out a UBI and then taxing me more to pay for it is just an exercise in how to create black labor and tax fraud.
The trouble with all that is branding. When the right wing start a debate they've got simple answers to complex problems. They're always the wrong answers, because if a problem has a simple answer then, well, by definition it's not complex. But those simple answers feel good, sound good, and just got a Demagogue elected President of the United States...
Norwegian here, you don't think socialists have simple answers? Some people have a [something] problem, let's regulate [something]. Which means that right now at 8:30 PM on a Monday I can't buy a damn beer at the store. We need more money for [good cause]? Increase taxes. I could work harder, but I don't. Why? Because on my marginal dollar I pay 25% + 8.7% + 8.2% = 40% taxes and 25% VAT on most things mean I lose another 15%. Sorry for 45 cents to the dollar I'll just get an easy job (37.5 hours/week, paid overtime, flexible hours) and be lower middle class. If was in the US I'd probably work 50-60 hours/week and make $200k.
Getting kickback from creating value is not a socialist virtue, if you got lots of money you can pay lots of money is their thinking. The day we run out of oil all hell will break loose because we're lazy and think everybody deserves good pay just for showing up at work or doing meaningless paper pusher jobs. And since I can't change the public opinion and tax system to reward hard work, I've decided if you can't beat them then join them. Even on cruise control I seem to get praise for good work, which is both cushy and a bit creepy at the same time. Maybe it's just that I can't stand all the stupid and make actual working solutions from time to time.
There isn't really a good solution to this. If everyone has the same price, then people in poor countries are likely to pirate.
And...? People who can't afford a Rolex are more likely to steal a Rolex too, is that a problem you should solve by adjusting the price? The flip side of "lowering prices for poor people" is "gouging wealthy people for being rich". We generally hate companies trying to size up our wallet to see just much they can fleece us for. Isn't that what we'd be asking companies to do? I want to be able to go on Amazon or eBay and get the best product to the best price anyone will offer. That's how capitalism, competition, supply and demand and voting with your wallet is supposed to work. Companies shop around for labor, consumers shop around for products and services. And maybe that's not working out so well for everybody, but letting them put region locks on things to screw us while they continue to shop around the whole world is worse than nothing.
The key difference between this and interfaces in Java seems to be push vs pull, does a class explicitly declare that it is say sortable or do you just check if it has functions that match something that's sortable. If you look at the example he does on page 8 with Shape.draw() and Cowboy.draw() sure you could be more explicit in the template requirements or you could demand that the cowboy explicitly has to say he's "drawable". To me Stroustrup's idea sounds a bit too much like the story about the blind man and the elephant, if you only touch it in enough places you can be sure it's an elephant. The obviously problem is that once you have a birth defect or amputee with only three legs, it all fails.
For example I might like to define a class "SequenceNumber" that has functions like setInitialValue(), getNextValue() etc. but lacks typical characteristics of a number like being able to add and subtract them, but I can still sort sequence numbers. If it's explicit I only have to declare it sortable and implement the necessary functions. If it looks at the "concept" number it'll say nope, you're not a real number because we can't add two of you together.
This could be trivially avoided by having the possibility to supplement class definitions as implementing additional interfaces, like here's a library with the Circle shape header and I say it's a drawable even though it doesn't say so itself. It'll still have to actually fulfill the interface, but that way you're not bound by the ones supplied by the library. Since that's purely a synthetic check on whether your code should be able to call that code I don't see how that should be a problem.
If one knows their native language plus English, they'll have the vast majority of the world's knowledge at their fingertips.
And tools. For every mainstream app there's ten obscure apps that haven't been translated to your language. And other people interested in the same things you are. The Internet has made a vast difference here, dubs / subtitles / translations worked pretty well for broadcast and print media and international calls was rare. And I don't mean just chit-chats, go on eBay and the whole world is your marketplace as long as you pay shipping. There are so many other benefits to language convergence that you won't get through more translations.
There's really no credible competitor to English because there's no other big pairings. If you know two major languages it's likely Chinese/English, Spanish/English, French/English, Portuguese/English, Japanese/English, Arabic/English, Russian/English, German/English, Hindi/English etc. you just don't find many Chinese/Spanish or Hindi/Portuguese speakers. If you look at the EU it's quite clear that 94% now learn English and fewer people learn French and German, I don't have the numbers for Spanish or Portuguese but I'm guessing the trend is the same.
Sure it's always possible that English is locally going a little backwards like that Spanish is creeping up into the US but for the world as a whole there's no debate. Particularly since China as the only potential challenger has put huge effort into English proficiency, giving everybody else much less reason to learn Chinese instead. I know linguists hate it but I think that's misunderstood, if all you needed to know was your native language and English most can be bi-lingual. If you should learn your Amazon tribe's language, Portuguese, Spanish and English then it's for the few.
The problem with 3D is the glasses - without the glasses, 3D would be a nice enhancement, much like color.
Well maybe... but if I'm watching a GoT episode do I really want to feel like I'm flipping from being 1m away from a combat scene to suddenly being 50 meters up in the air overlooking the battlefield and back down to 1m again in a matter of seconds? Just saying that maybe we want some kind of grounding that we're really watching a screen and not teleporting around.
Yeah we've seen the "no commercials" promise before when cable TV was becoming a thing and it was bullshit then too. They'll only stay away from commercials long enough to get a subscriber base. Commercials are where most of the money is and it will be hard for them to ignore that fact. I have a hard time imagining Netflix being immune to the siren's call of that much cash forever.
Is it really? Take the Superbowl which is one of the few items where we have pretty much all the numbers. In 2014 there was 49 minutes 15 seconds of commercials, $4.5 million average per 30 second slot and 111.4 million viewers. That works out to a little less than $4 per viewer. So if you offered $5 to watch it ad-free you'd be beating the advertisers. That's not bad for about four hours of entertainment with both a football game and the half time show and it's supposed to be super-expensive compared to normal ads. Granted one display != one viewer so they'd have to charge more than $5 but still I bet there's a lot of people who'd like to out-bid the advertisers.
The real reason net neutrality is on the ropes is this: the idea was barely discussed by anyone during the election, in comparison to other issues. The companies that stand to profit from net neutrality are electronic media companies, and the companies that stand to profit from its removal are electronic infrastructure companies, and both will continue their fight under the covers. There wasn't much input from the electorate on the topic at all this cycle.
Actually I think it's way more old media vs new media, here in Norway where the main broadband revolution was DSL from telcos and the fiber revolution was lead by a former power company the "electronic infrastructure companies" seem pretty happy just to sell you bits and bytes. My impression is that in the US it's different because so large a part of the American population get their broadband through cable. It seems both bandwidth caps and anti-net neutrality gouging is primarily driven by cable companies wanting to drive customers to their own services instead of using online services and remain the gatekeeper and middle man between the content and the customers.
Yes, and we already have that. There are people who die every day waiting for a transplant organ. There's a limited amount available so they must be rationed and someone (or a panel of people most likely) has to determine where the limited supply will do the most good.
That's what other western countries do. The US goes by who has the best health insurance, like how big of a bill can we justify sending...
Yes. Timing is the key to understanding it. Sanders would have defeated Trump easily. The timing of the releases were carefully placed so as to build suspicion with independants while not hurting her primary bid. Then once she clenched that, proof that it was a rigged primary sent a lot of independants away from the DNC to either Green, Libertarian, and even a number to Trump. If they had released it all in the beginning, we would be swearing in Sanders tomorrow.
Let's not forget that the DNC wanted Trump to win the Republican nomination. So first Trump let Hillary drag him center stage as the enemy, then he let her eliminate Sanders before landing a final blow nobody saw coming until late election night? If all of that was planned Machiavelli could take lessons from him. If could simply be that they know the media has the attention span of a humming bird on speed, let's just pace this out so we get a good buzz and can keep it going until the election and that the rest was plain lucky. It's either that or we're in a Bond movie.