This trojan is no more based on P2P than any of the previous windows vulnerability based trojan/worm distributed malware.
I am worried that this is an attempt to superficially connect P2P with hacking and trojans, in an attempt to later get it banned or regulated in some way.
Still, attacking the surfers that are riding the wave doesnt save you from drowning when the wave hits you. The content industries can adapt to their new surroundings or they can claw desperately as they slide into the abyss.
This sort of "big picture in one paragraph and then apply it to everything" summary of human civilization has been tried before and falls apart because you end up making false generalizations.
You make a good point about people who control the content industries being threatened by P2P and the decentralization of creative efforts, but this has nothing to do with the development of agrarian or industrialized cultures. There are always similar courses of behavior when humans are confronted with great change, but drawing any tighter parallel is really an exercise in sophistry.
I can watch it on divx until then. No need to buy it 30 times like some of my friends have. I saw it enough times in the bloody theater.
This is bad and misunderstands cc theft
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The Universal Card
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Credit card thieves dont physically steal the card anymore. Most often they have their own card reader like this device and they will swipe your card an extra time under the table and pretend it didnt go through the first time.
A week or two later they make a fake card with your magnetic stripe and usually go on a 5000 dollar (the usual single day limit on most cards) spending spree and then fence the goods. The consumer discovers 5000 dollars on his card, usually from stuff purchased when he was in another state, at work, on the international space station, etc and calls the bank up. They issue a new card and reimburse the money.
This happened to me, and not ONCE did my card leave my wallet.
The only real solution to credit card thievery is to have intelligent software that tracks the spending habits of the legitimate user and requires extra verification before allowing out-of-the-ordinary purchases. Like if someone normally buys nothing but gas and groceriers with a credit card and suddenly buys 3000 dollars worth of stereo equipment 200 miles from where they live.... red flag!
Shirow was never really about telling interesting narratives. His manga were always a lot more like Gibson in that they would paint a compelling picture of the future and then raise a few thorny issues to make you realize that all the advances had drawbacks and unintended consequences as well.
Basically standard sci fi. His depictions of mecha and guns in the future were definitely among the more compelling and interesting ones found in anime/manga and the stories he told were good science fiction.
I'm glad that finaly they have the CG abilities to properly realize his works on the big screen. Black Magic M66(or whatever it was called exactly) was a shameful pile and made me dread the release of any Shirow based anime. After Ghost in the Shell I realized it would only be a matter of time before we saw Appleseed, which was IMO a much better storyline.
Re:Yeah, amazing news this is
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Hack Your Car
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· Score: 1
What part of engine internals _or_ drivetrain dont you understand?
Crankwalk issues in the 2G aside, I KNOW the DSM engines are strong. This is precisely why the car is capable of generating enough power to grenade the tranny so easily.
The MK3 supra would probably have been a better example of a car with engine reliability problems.
The real truth is that any turbo car will grenade its engine if you throw enough power at it. The candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as long.
Re:But if it wasn't for the smoke...
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Hack Your Car
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· Score: 1
Correct, catalytic converter removal will mess with emissions. I have never seen a catless car pass emissions, though I am sure it is possible with careful enough tuning (tho the car would probably run hot from the leanness necessary to burn enough the fuel to pass).
What is altered is entirely depenent on what the chip chooses to change. On some cars this can mean a lot of timing advance. On others it might mean leaning out a certain rpm zone. On others it might mean richening that same rpm zone. It is impossible to make generalizations about this.
Also, some places dont have smog testing. My catless turbo miata has been puffing black smoke for years now in sunny Florida.
Yeah, amazing news this is
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Hack Your Car
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· Score: 2, Informative
First off, chipping cars generally doesnt produce big gains EXCEPT with factory turbo cars.
This is because the pressure produced with the turbo is often controlled by a the computer, and altering the settings will raise the amount of air and fuel and thus the horsepower. Since modern turbos usually have fairly large air pumping capacity, the gains are quite large. A great example is the SRT4- the first 2 (warrantied!) factory upgrade stages are just a comptuer and injector swap which raises the boost. They massively overbuilt the drivetrain anticipating that people would engage in such acts.
This usually produces big gains in power, but can cause problems in two cases: 1) The turbo is very small compared to the engine and the turbo has to be overspun to produce a gain in power. This has been a big problem for the v6 twin turbo audi S4 and the 1.8T powered VW/Audi cars. They use extremely undersized turbos (to reduce lag) but this makes them very frail at high boost levels. This is why audi is going to a non-turbo V8 for the next version of the S4. Warranty claims are very hard to deny if the factory chip is swapped back in and the only damage is a pair of failed turbos. Its obvious what happened, but impossible to prove, especially when so many people are reporting these "random failures." 2) The engine internals or drivetrain are too frail. This tends to be far less common (since these parts are usually overengineered), but it does happen, especially on AWD turbo cars with decent sized turbos, like the AWD DSMs from the mid-early 90s (eclipse/laser/etc). These accidents tend to be very expensive, so the dealerships are usually a bit more careful about springing for warranty work. Often the damning evidence is the massively upgraded clutch which sent the power to the transmission, or the poorly tuned engine which melted a piston top or a valve.
On a car that isnt a factory turbo, all you can do is advance timing and adjust fuel delivery. Timing advance usually yields a little power but fuel delivery only yields power if the stock configuration is extremely rich (like on the Sentra Spec-V) or if the engine's volumetric efficiency is changed (cams/turbo/supercharger/etc added).
This second use is usually what a computer change is used for on a n/a car.
CMM is a huge fucking joke. Back when I worked at that shithole Keane, I got to work on a lot of CMM stuff. Ive since learned that the higher the CMM level of a company, the more likely it is that they produce nothing of value. You end up with 80 percent of the work effort spent generating meaningless paperwork instead of working (which is why consulting shops LOVE to have a high CMM level).
The billable hours are astronomical- it once took me two weeks of design approval and estimation paperwork to alter a single line of code to plug a security hole. That is two weeks actually doing the paperwork followed by another 3 weeks waiting to get it approved. The change took 30 seconds and 3 weeks later was approved for placement in a test environment. Meanwhile, in a different room, independent consultants were rewriting mission critical billing modules with no supervision at all. Fun stuff. This is what Accenture is outsourcing to india. Professional mediocrity.
What is the reason for this nonsense? Surely it exists for some reason? Of course! Billable time is the same regardless of how much you pay the warm bodies producing that time. Time can be consumed by generating body heat, or it can be consumed by producing high quality code that never needs to be fixed.
If you were a consulting firm, what would you do? (if you were a consultant you would leave for a non dead-end job of course) You hire the people who are willing to work for the absolute cheapest and fill rows of cubicles with them- these people will then do nothing but produce paperwork which justifies their billable time. You then have about 2 or 3 people per contract who actually do real work and get paid decent salaries. These are the guys that the seat warmers are "assisting on projects"- its a very lucrative scam.
The cost of living in FL is much lower than in CA. It is cheaper to hire programmers in FL. Some programming jobs moved to FL. I followed them- I took a pay cut but do very well thanks to the decreased cost of living. I can even afford a house now.
The cost of living in india is much lower than in FL. It is cheaper to hire programmers in india. I love indian food, I speak the language and wouldnt mind living there. Yet I cannot move there and work because I am not an indian citizen.
Thats the problem. There is an artificial barrier between countries that keeps their populations from mixing. There should be a corresponding barrier which keeps the jobs from wandering to where we cant follow them. Otherwise we are screwing ourselves.
I predict this will be a good year for outrage over outsourcing with the election and the "jobless recovery" underway.
This perception is the other problem with outsourcing.
My company has hundreds of ukranian programmers belching out java code as we speak. Unfortunately, only about 3 of them know what they are doing. Actually, make that 2, since one quit for better money (imagine that, more than 100 a week!). Yes, the good ones are the hardest to retain in ANY country.
It has taken this horde of programmers nearly a year and a half to produce a single decent product, under the heavy supervision of the remaining 2 good programmers there. There are still some odd design flaws and stupid architectural decisions made despite their supervision, but at least it finally runs and doesnt crash half the computers in the company anymore.
Do you see where I'm going? Anyone can belch out code in any language. It takes actual skill to do so in a way that doesnt require it to be completely rewritten every 6-12 months.
I have seen other companies in silicon valley that employeed entirely indian or entirely chinese staff with one intermediary who spoke both languages (not speaky mucha engrish). What if your intermediary has mediocre project management skills? What if your intermediary isnt accurately judging the quality of the code that your serfs produce? What if they are only giving you the $20k worth that you are paying them? Gosh, you might have a very buggy product after 3 years of development! Can you say "loss of potential sales followed by loss of your third round of VC funding?"
And no, I'm not telling you what company this is so you can sell your stock.
The study shows that usage of P2P networks known to be heavily monitored by RIAA is down. This makes perfect sense to both the RIAA and to me, but the WHY is what makes all the difference. To admit why the traffic is really down would show that RIAA is hopelessly sliding into the abyss. It is so much easier for them to lie to themselves and their shareholders and say they are crushing the P2P threat to their business model.
But the p2p hydra has many heads.
RIAA is largely blind to the activity going on in the other networks, most of which are much harder to quickly traverse than gnutella or kazaa. Also, I imagine that no one has written a spidering program for them yet.
The other networks are flourishing right now. Without naming networks, the server count for my favorite p2p network is much higher than normal, as is the user count and the download speed. No one has gotten a warning letter or sued yet for activity on this network, to the best of my knowledge, although some german and spanish ISPs have begun to block the ports it uses.
Extra credit: Can you guess a name for this new network?
Although this is an interesting point, it isnt even necessary to focus on the buzzwords. There is a much steeper gradient of overhead and labor costs within the US than most people are aware of.
There is actually a big shift occuring within the united states. A lot of silicon valley programmers have left for cheaper places with lower salaries. I left about a year and a half ago to work near Tampa for about 20k less than I made in San Jose. Considering that there is no state income tax, houses cost about 1/20th the price and rent is half as much, the return on moving is immediate and large. I would say that my quality of life has increased greatly from when I lived in CA.
Businesses see this as well and are moving to cheaper regions to save on labor costs. Due to the low cost of living, you can hire people for less skilled positions at lower costs as well. And you retain all the benefits of having a business in the united states.
The real reason the tech slump looks so bad is that most of the news is coming out of the SF Bay Area, which has enormous living costs and is subject to a glut of skilled technical labor. Things are much better elsewhere in the country.
More mainstream than what? Automotive "hacking" has become so widespread that almost anyone who has a need and a few thousand dollars to spend on parts can "hack" their car's computer in every way imaginable.
I had to get a programmable (vs burning and soldering a new rom each time I changed the fuel or ign maps) ECU back when I added a turbo to my car.
Many of the best oem replacements are formerly what were known as "race computers" but are now often cheaper and much less complex than the stock computers they replace.
The "tractor beam" wont be stopping my car anytime soon, nor will it stop most of the cars out there capable of actually outrunning the police and their radios. And this doesnt even touch on cars that dont have extensive computerization like pre-efi Camaros. Daddy's camaro is probably carbeurated and uses a mechanical system for adjusting ignition timing. The cops would be better off just waiting for it to run out of gas.
Well, protest against it by leaving the company for a better paying job. The best way to punish companies like this is for them to see their best and brightest jump ship. Even if this happens on a "small" scale, it can stil have an enormous impact on productivity and profitability. The phenomenon of turnover is much more expensive than the mere cost of the lost productivity while they find a replacement.
I cant count the number of companies in this country that are mired in mediocrity because they insist on paying all their employees bottom dollar and having shitty performance metrics. All the crappy employees work just hard enough not to get fired and dont mind the mediocre pay because its about what they deserve anyway. The good employees who deserve more just hop around until they find someone smart enough to recognize their value and make use of it.
Oh no! The ISPs will block my favorite ports! I might have to change the settings of my P2P programs! Oh the inconvenience!
Seriously though. They are only doing this because when they go out of business they wont have any money with which to pay for frivolous lawsuits. Better now than never I guess.
And this lawsuit and ten million more like it, and a thousand clever laws and all the DRM in the world wont change the fact that their business model is fundamentally screwed and nothing is going to bring back the scarcity upon which their profits are based.
You can outlaw camcorders in video theaters in New York, but what if today's pirate is in Hong Kong? I saved 10 bucks by seeing Matrix Revolutions with chinese subtitles. It was barely worth watching for free (as I suspected), so I will definitely not be catching it in the theatere or on DVD.
Fuck you and your shitty sequels hollywood. I only pay for high quality product now. I intend to see return of king in the theaters and also get the trilogy DVD when the boxed set is released. I am an informed customer, only one of a growing group.
Yeah, the main flaw is when the predators expose a human population to the alien organism which Ripley first encounters hundreds (if not thousands) of years from now. If humans discover this encounter, the Alien movie should have occurred differently. If the encounter happens after the Aliens movies, we have to explain why the Predators didnt expose earth to the Aliens in the intervening thousands of years.
The dark horse comics dont seriously address any of the timeline issues because they arent addressable. The Aliens and Predator scenarios are both too well fleshed out to be combined in a convincing fashion, thanks to all the sequels. They conflict with one another.
It really boils down to which works you view as canon. If you only accept the existance of the Predator alien concept and work it into the aliens timeline, then it works great. If you take the predator timeline and work in the alien organism, then it works great. But youre going to end up pissing off one group of fans either way. I personally vote for either mercifully letting the franchises die or for working the predator into the alien timeline.
The truth is that people still watch the Aliens sequels because the first two movies were very good and the monster was very interesting. The real problem is that the studios cant decide between telling an interesting story vs dragging out the series a bit longer and rehashing plots from earlier sequels. Alien 3 did not feel like a natural progression from Aliens, more like a step backwards.
If you count the people that have been unable to defend themselves in NYC, DC, LA, SF or any other places where guns arent allowed, then the number is quite high.
If you want to add in the questionable statistic of "all the disarmed people that the germans massacred during the Holocaust" then the number is astronomical.
Having grown up (18 years) in a high crime area where gun ownership was almost totally illegal but all the criminals had them anyway (New York City), I would have to say that I greatly prefer the tranquility of gun toting florida. Criminals ARE greatly deterred by the common knowldge that most of the populace has a gun, and a significant portion has it concealed on their body. No massacres or accidents yet (at least not that I know of).
Guns insure the safety and liberty of those that own them and carry them. This is why cops and soldiers carry them. On the most basic level, if someone wishes to take my car, they will have a much easier time of it if I am unarmed. This goes doubly for those intending to randomly massacre people in a crowded place. The guy sitting next to you at the lunch counter will respond much quicker than the local swat team (who will probably arrive after everything is over).
Disclaimer: I am an avid aliens fan and predator fan, and a semi-avid avp fan (despite the mediocre quality of the games outside of their value as homages to the original works). On their own, each of them are interesting science fiction movies that deal with unfriendly alien life forms that kill people on sight and are generally unpleasant.
Ok here are the cliff notes for the downloadable trailers: The "teaser" is just a bunch of very short clips from aliens and predator spliced together to demonstrate that the "alien" is the one from the movies with sigourney weaver, and the "predator" is the one type that Ahnold fought. Duh.
The longer preview film consists of a bunch of clips spliced together from the movies (mostly predator 1 and aliens) to make it seem like they have already started fliming. This trailer reveals several disappointing things:
The directors/screenwriter's only prior moviemaking experience is "resident evil." Danger Will Robinson! Alert alert! I didnt pay money to see Resident Evil and I thought it was mediocre. The only thing it did well was demonstrate why making movies out of console games is still a stupid idea (even after the blockbuster performance of Super Mario Brothers). Note that AvP builds on this shameful history.
They are focusing on giving the predators a million new flashy toys and seeing lots of aliens and predators kill each other- rather than actually telling an interesting story. Somethign either series hasnt seen since, oh, 1986 (AL|ENS).
The movie will take a steaming shit upon loads of separate Aliens and Predator canon. Why? One of the central flaws in combining the two genres is that the predator movies all take place in the present, and the alien movies all take place in the distant future. Combination movies that take place in the near future violate the aliens timeline in numerous obvious ways. Combination movies that take place in the distant future assume that the Predator species simply stopped interacting with the human species for a few centuries after meeting Danny Glover. It also means that you have to have a bigger budget in order to make everythign look like its in the future (vs the "near future" where everyone still drives GM products and has 80s hair).
Having a car with a programmable ECU that does datalogging and has an AC unit, I can tell you that the only time that the A/C consumes extra fuel is at idle, where the injectors have to supply fuel to an operating RPM that is about 200 rpm higher (if even). This is often the difference between operating the injectors at.70% duty cycle instead of.65% (I have fairly large injectors).
The rest of the time, the A/C consumes power, but the car does not expend extra gas to create this power. The car's output remains the same, there is just less left over to drive the wheels afterwards.
Why the fuck havent any of the major media outlets started talking about this? Why arent the democrats up in arms?
If this is even half true, then its HUGE. This would completely knock Watergate out of the history books. Can you imagine the outrage if this became widely known? This would deal an enormous deathblow to the christian right, the republican party and the bush family, amongst others. How many election results would have to be recalled? How many Bush family members would be thrown in jail? Would there be an impeachment?
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This trojan is no more based on P2P than any of the previous windows vulnerability based trojan/worm distributed malware.
I am worried that this is an attempt to superficially connect P2P with hacking and trojans, in an attempt to later get it banned or regulated in some way.
Still, attacking the surfers that are riding the wave doesnt save you from drowning when the wave hits you. The content industries can adapt to their new surroundings or they can claw desperately as they slide into the abyss.
This sort of "big picture in one paragraph and then apply it to everything" summary of human civilization has been tried before and falls apart because you end up making false generalizations.
You make a good point about people who control the content industries being threatened by P2P and the decentralization of creative efforts, but this has nothing to do with the development of agrarian or industrialized cultures. There are always similar courses of behavior when humans are confronted with great change, but drawing any tighter parallel is really an exercise in sophistry.
omg dude maybe you should get your sarcasm detector serviced lol warning light
The trilogy boxed set.
I can watch it on divx until then. No need to buy it 30 times like some of my friends have. I saw it enough times in the bloody theater.
Credit card thieves dont physically steal the card anymore. Most often they have their own card reader like this device and they will swipe your card an extra time under the table and pretend it didnt go through the first time.
A week or two later they make a fake card with your magnetic stripe and usually go on a 5000 dollar (the usual single day limit on most cards) spending spree and then fence the goods. The consumer discovers 5000 dollars on his card, usually from stuff purchased when he was in another state, at work, on the international space station, etc and calls the bank up. They issue a new card and reimburse the money.
This happened to me, and not ONCE did my card leave my wallet.
The only real solution to credit card thievery is to have intelligent software that tracks the spending habits of the legitimate user and requires extra verification before allowing out-of-the-ordinary purchases. Like if someone normally buys nothing but gas and groceriers with a credit card and suddenly buys 3000 dollars worth of stereo equipment 200 miles from where they live.... red flag!
Shirow was never really about telling interesting narratives. His manga were always a lot more like Gibson in that they would paint a compelling picture of the future and then raise a few thorny issues to make you realize that all the advances had drawbacks and unintended consequences as well.
Basically standard sci fi. His depictions of mecha and guns in the future were definitely among the more compelling and interesting ones found in anime/manga and the stories he told were good science fiction.
I'm glad that finaly they have the CG abilities to properly realize his works on the big screen. Black Magic M66(or whatever it was called exactly) was a shameful pile and made me dread the release of any Shirow based anime. After Ghost in the Shell I realized it would only be a matter of time before we saw Appleseed, which was IMO a much better storyline.
What part of engine internals _or_ drivetrain dont you understand?
Crankwalk issues in the 2G aside, I KNOW the DSM engines are strong. This is precisely why the car is capable of generating enough power to grenade the tranny so easily.
The MK3 supra would probably have been a better example of a car with engine reliability problems.
The real truth is that any turbo car will grenade its engine if you throw enough power at it. The candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as long.
Correct, catalytic converter removal will mess with emissions. I have never seen a catless car pass emissions, though I am sure it is possible with careful enough tuning (tho the car would probably run hot from the leanness necessary to burn enough the fuel to pass).
What is altered is entirely depenent on what the chip chooses to change. On some cars this can mean a lot of timing advance. On others it might mean leaning out a certain rpm zone. On others it might mean richening that same rpm zone. It is impossible to make generalizations about this.
Also, some places dont have smog testing. My catless turbo miata has been puffing black smoke for years now in sunny Florida.
First off, chipping cars generally doesnt produce big gains EXCEPT with factory turbo cars.
This is because the pressure produced with the turbo is often controlled by a the computer, and altering the settings will raise the amount of air and fuel and thus the horsepower. Since modern turbos usually have fairly large air pumping capacity, the gains are quite large. A great example is the SRT4- the first 2 (warrantied!) factory upgrade stages are just a comptuer and injector swap which raises the boost. They massively overbuilt the drivetrain anticipating that people would engage in such acts.
This usually produces big gains in power, but can cause problems in two cases:
1) The turbo is very small compared to the engine and the turbo has to be overspun to produce a gain in power. This has been a big problem for the v6 twin turbo audi S4 and the 1.8T powered VW/Audi cars. They use extremely undersized turbos (to reduce lag) but this makes them very frail at high boost levels. This is why audi is going to a non-turbo V8 for the next version of the S4. Warranty claims are very hard to deny if the factory chip is swapped back in and the only damage is a pair of failed turbos. Its obvious what happened, but impossible to prove, especially when so many people are reporting these "random failures."
2) The engine internals or drivetrain are too frail. This tends to be far less common (since these parts are usually overengineered), but it does happen, especially on AWD turbo cars with decent sized turbos, like the AWD DSMs from the mid-early 90s (eclipse/laser/etc). These accidents tend to be very expensive, so the dealerships are usually a bit more careful about springing for warranty work. Often the damning evidence is the massively upgraded clutch which sent the power to the transmission, or the poorly tuned engine which melted a piston top or a valve.
On a car that isnt a factory turbo, all you can do is advance timing and adjust fuel delivery. Timing advance usually yields a little power but fuel delivery only yields power if the stock configuration is extremely rich (like on the Sentra Spec-V) or if the engine's volumetric efficiency is changed (cams/turbo/supercharger/etc added).
This second use is usually what a computer change is used for on a n/a car.
YESSSSSS PRECIOUS this is the truth!
CMM is a huge fucking joke. Back when I worked at that shithole Keane, I got to work on a lot of CMM stuff. Ive since learned that the higher the CMM level of a company, the more likely it is that they produce nothing of value. You end up with 80 percent of the work effort spent generating meaningless paperwork instead of working (which is why consulting shops LOVE to have a high CMM level).
The billable hours are astronomical- it once took me two weeks of design approval and estimation paperwork to alter a single line of code to plug a security hole. That is two weeks actually doing the paperwork followed by another 3 weeks waiting to get it approved. The change took 30 seconds and 3 weeks later was approved for placement in a test environment. Meanwhile, in a different room, independent consultants were rewriting mission critical billing modules with no supervision at all. Fun stuff. This is what Accenture is outsourcing to india. Professional mediocrity.
What is the reason for this nonsense? Surely it exists for some reason? Of course! Billable time is the same regardless of how much you pay the warm bodies producing that time. Time can be consumed by generating body heat, or it can be consumed by producing high quality code that never needs to be fixed.
If you were a consulting firm, what would you do? (if you were a consultant you would leave for a non dead-end job of course) You hire the people who are willing to work for the absolute cheapest and fill rows of cubicles with them- these people will then do nothing but produce paperwork which justifies their billable time. You then have about 2 or 3 people per contract who actually do real work and get paid decent salaries. These are the guys that the seat warmers are "assisting on projects"- its a very lucrative scam.
This isnt a fucking troll! Are you mods retarded?
The cost of living in FL is much lower than in CA. It is cheaper to hire programmers in FL. Some programming jobs moved to FL. I followed them- I took a pay cut but do very well thanks to the decreased cost of living. I can even afford a house now.
The cost of living in india is much lower than in FL. It is cheaper to hire programmers in india. I love indian food, I speak the language and wouldnt mind living there. Yet I cannot move there and work because I am not an indian citizen.
Thats the problem. There is an artificial barrier between countries that keeps their populations from mixing. There should be a corresponding barrier which keeps the jobs from wandering to where we cant follow them. Otherwise we are screwing ourselves.
I predict this will be a good year for outrage over outsourcing with the election and the "jobless recovery" underway.
This perception is the other problem with outsourcing.
My company has hundreds of ukranian programmers belching out java code as we speak. Unfortunately, only about 3 of them know what they are doing. Actually, make that 2, since one quit for better money (imagine that, more than 100 a week!). Yes, the good ones are the hardest to retain in ANY country.
It has taken this horde of programmers nearly a year and a half to produce a single decent product, under the heavy supervision of the remaining 2 good programmers there. There are still some odd design flaws and stupid architectural decisions made despite their supervision, but at least it finally runs and doesnt crash half the computers in the company anymore.
Do you see where I'm going? Anyone can belch out code in any language. It takes actual skill to do so in a way that doesnt require it to be completely rewritten every 6-12 months.
I have seen other companies in silicon valley that employeed entirely indian or entirely chinese staff with one intermediary who spoke both languages (not speaky mucha engrish). What if your intermediary has mediocre project management skills? What if your intermediary isnt accurately judging the quality of the code that your serfs produce? What if they are only giving you the $20k worth that you are paying them? Gosh, you might have a very buggy product after 3 years of development! Can you say "loss of potential sales followed by loss of your third round of VC funding?"
And no, I'm not telling you what company this is so you can sell your stock.
The study shows that usage of P2P networks known to be heavily monitored by RIAA is down. This makes perfect sense to both the RIAA and to me, but the WHY is what makes all the difference. To admit why the traffic is really down would show that RIAA is hopelessly sliding into the abyss. It is so much easier for them to lie to themselves and their shareholders and say they are crushing the P2P threat to their business model.
But the p2p hydra has many heads.
RIAA is largely blind to the activity going on in the other networks, most of which are much harder to quickly traverse than gnutella or kazaa. Also, I imagine that no one has written a spidering program for them yet.
The other networks are flourishing right now. Without naming networks, the server count for my favorite p2p network is much higher than normal, as is the user count and the download speed. No one has gotten a warning letter or sued yet for activity on this network, to the best of my knowledge, although some german and spanish ISPs have begun to block the ports it uses.
Extra credit: Can you guess a name for this new network?
Although this is an interesting point, it isnt even necessary to focus on the buzzwords. There is a much steeper gradient of overhead and labor costs within the US than most people are aware of.
There is actually a big shift occuring within the united states. A lot of silicon valley programmers have left for cheaper places with lower salaries. I left about a year and a half ago to work near Tampa for about 20k less than I made in San Jose. Considering that there is no state income tax, houses cost about 1/20th the price and rent is half as much, the return on moving is immediate and large. I would say that my quality of life has increased greatly from when I lived in CA.
Businesses see this as well and are moving to cheaper regions to save on labor costs. Due to the low cost of living, you can hire people for less skilled positions at lower costs as well. And you retain all the benefits of having a business in the united states.
The real reason the tech slump looks so bad is that most of the news is coming out of the SF Bay Area, which has enormous living costs and is subject to a glut of skilled technical labor. Things are much better elsewhere in the country.
More mainstream than what? Automotive "hacking" has become so widespread that almost anyone who has a need and a few thousand dollars to spend on parts can "hack" their car's computer in every way imaginable.
I had to get a programmable (vs burning and soldering a new rom each time I changed the fuel or ign maps) ECU back when I added a turbo to my car.
Many of the best oem replacements are formerly what were known as "race computers" but are now often cheaper and much less complex than the stock computers they replace.
The "tractor beam" wont be stopping my car anytime soon, nor will it stop most of the cars out there capable of actually outrunning the police and their radios. And this doesnt even touch on cars that dont have extensive computerization like pre-efi Camaros. Daddy's camaro is probably carbeurated and uses a mechanical system for adjusting ignition timing. The cops would be better off just waiting for it to run out of gas.
Well, protest against it by leaving the company for a better paying job. The best way to punish companies like this is for them to see their best and brightest jump ship. Even if this happens on a "small" scale, it can stil have an enormous impact on productivity and profitability. The phenomenon of turnover is much more expensive than the mere cost of the lost productivity while they find a replacement.
I cant count the number of companies in this country that are mired in mediocrity because they insist on paying all their employees bottom dollar and having shitty performance metrics. All the crappy employees work just hard enough not to get fired and dont mind the mediocre pay because its about what they deserve anyway. The good employees who deserve more just hop around until they find someone smart enough to recognize their value and make use of it.
Oh no! The ISPs will block my favorite ports! I might have to change the settings of my P2P programs! Oh the inconvenience!
Seriously though. They are only doing this because when they go out of business they wont have any money with which to pay for frivolous lawsuits. Better now than never I guess.
And this lawsuit and ten million more like it, and a thousand clever laws and all the DRM in the world wont change the fact that their business model is fundamentally screwed and nothing is going to bring back the scarcity upon which their profits are based.
You can outlaw camcorders in video theaters in New York, but what if today's pirate is in Hong Kong? I saved 10 bucks by seeing Matrix Revolutions with chinese subtitles. It was barely worth watching for free (as I suspected), so I will definitely not be catching it in the theatere or on DVD.
Fuck you and your shitty sequels hollywood. I only pay for high quality product now. I intend to see return of king in the theaters and also get the trilogy DVD when the boxed set is released. I am an informed customer, only one of a growing group.
1.
A portable self-contained device to manipulate Traffic Signals.
Not a phreak box.
Created by Remote Control
Date: June, 14 1988
2.
Old hat.
Yeah, the main flaw is when the predators expose a human population to the alien organism which Ripley first encounters hundreds (if not thousands) of years from now. If humans discover this encounter, the Alien movie should have occurred differently. If the encounter happens after the Aliens movies, we have to explain why the Predators didnt expose earth to the Aliens in the intervening thousands of years.
The dark horse comics dont seriously address any of the timeline issues because they arent addressable. The Aliens and Predator scenarios are both too well fleshed out to be combined in a convincing fashion, thanks to all the sequels. They conflict with one another.
It really boils down to which works you view as canon. If you only accept the existance of the Predator alien concept and work it into the aliens timeline, then it works great. If you take the predator timeline and work in the alien organism, then it works great. But youre going to end up pissing off one group of fans either way. I personally vote for either mercifully letting the franchises die or for working the predator into the alien timeline.
The truth is that people still watch the Aliens sequels because the first two movies were very good and the monster was very interesting. The real problem is that the studios cant decide between telling an interesting story vs dragging out the series a bit longer and rehashing plots from earlier sequels. Alien 3 did not feel like a natural progression from Aliens, more like a step backwards.
Mod this up. This needed to be said.
If you count the people that have been unable to defend themselves in NYC, DC, LA, SF or any other places where guns arent allowed, then the number is quite high.
If you want to add in the questionable statistic of "all the disarmed people that the germans massacred during the Holocaust" then the number is astronomical.
Having grown up (18 years) in a high crime area where gun ownership was almost totally illegal but all the criminals had them anyway (New York City), I would have to say that I greatly prefer the tranquility of gun toting florida. Criminals ARE greatly deterred by the common knowldge that most of the populace has a gun, and a significant portion has it concealed on their body. No massacres or accidents yet (at least not that I know of).
Guns insure the safety and liberty of those that own them and carry them. This is why cops and soldiers carry them. On the most basic level, if someone wishes to take my car, they will have a much easier time of it if I am unarmed. This goes doubly for those intending to randomly massacre people in a crowded place. The guy sitting next to you at the lunch counter will respond much quicker than the local swat team (who will probably arrive after everything is over).
Disclaimer: I am an avid aliens fan and predator fan, and a semi-avid avp fan (despite the mediocre quality of the games outside of their value as homages to the original works). On their own, each of them are interesting science fiction movies that deal with unfriendly alien life forms that kill people on sight and are generally unpleasant.
Ok here are the cliff notes for the downloadable trailers:
The "teaser" is just a bunch of very short clips from aliens and predator spliced together to demonstrate that the "alien" is the one from the movies with sigourney weaver, and the "predator" is the one type that Ahnold fought. Duh.
The longer preview film consists of a bunch of clips spliced together from the movies (mostly predator 1 and aliens) to make it seem like they have already started fliming. This trailer reveals several disappointing things:
The directors/screenwriter's only prior moviemaking experience is "resident evil." Danger Will Robinson! Alert alert! I didnt pay money to see Resident Evil and I thought it was mediocre. The only thing it did well was demonstrate why making movies out of console games is still a stupid idea (even after the blockbuster performance of Super Mario Brothers). Note that AvP builds on this shameful history.
They are focusing on giving the predators a million new flashy toys and seeing lots of aliens and predators kill each other- rather than actually telling an interesting story. Somethign either series hasnt seen since, oh, 1986 (AL|ENS).
The movie will take a steaming shit upon loads of separate Aliens and Predator canon. Why? One of the central flaws in combining the two genres is that the predator movies all take place in the present, and the alien movies all take place in the distant future. Combination movies that take place in the near future violate the aliens timeline in numerous obvious ways. Combination movies that take place in the distant future assume that the Predator species simply stopped interacting with the human species for a few centuries after meeting Danny Glover. It also means that you have to have a bigger budget in order to make everythign look like its in the future (vs the "near future" where everyone still drives GM products and has 80s hair).
Having a car with a programmable ECU that does datalogging and has an AC unit, I can tell you that the only time that the A/C consumes extra fuel is at idle, where the injectors have to supply fuel to an operating RPM that is about 200 rpm higher (if even). This is often the difference between operating the injectors at .70% duty cycle instead of .65% (I have fairly large injectors).
The rest of the time, the A/C consumes power, but the car does not expend extra gas to create this power. The car's output remains the same, there is just less left over to drive the wheels afterwards.
Why the fuck havent any of the major media outlets started talking about this? Why arent the democrats up in arms?
If this is even half true, then its HUGE. This would completely knock Watergate out of the history books. Can you imagine the outrage if this became widely known? This would deal an enormous deathblow to the christian right, the republican party and the bush family, amongst others. How many election results would have to be recalled? How many Bush family members would be thrown in jail? Would there be an impeachment?