If MS gets rid of a bunch of the Yahoo employees like some people are suggesting, Google will likely start throwing job offers their way.
From what I can tell, some of their FOSS developers may already be getting offers from Google, since the new Yahoo will likely be at the best unrewarding for those developers.
Which brings me to a question...what happens to Zimbra? Which is now a Yahoo product and a major competitor to Exchange...
The funniest thing about this whole buyout is that if the purchase goes through and M$ gets rid of the FOSS developers on Yahoo's staff, I am pretty certain that most of those developers will go to Google.
It's nice to see the promise of the original Video Toaster finally coming true. It might have taken 15 years, but we may truly have brought video production to the masses.
The problem with the Video Toaster was that all of the other equipment was so expensive because you still had to do the Analog-to-Digital-to-Analog conversion and what the Video Toaster really succeeded in doing was bringing cheaper equipment to the professionals (The Tonight Show, Seaquest DSV, and Babylon 5 to name a few all used Amiga 2000 based Video Toasters).
With todays all digital technology and the mass distribution that widely available broadband internet, directors are no longer limited by small budgets. One of the best examples of this is Robert Rodríguez serves as writer, producer, director, editor, director of photography, camera operator, steadicam operator, composer, production designer, visual effects supervisor, and sound editor on his films.
I think they were hoping that the next evolution was more of the same (bursts of high usage with a low bandwidth "background noise")...want to see how bad it's getting, look at any smaller residential college (under 5,000 students) and tell me they aren't struggling to keep up with all of these new services...
If just 1 in 10 users demand 1/2 meg of bandwidth all of the time, then a college of 3,000 residential students would have to keep a connection of 150MB/s just to cater to those users...and let me tell you, a school of that size is going to have trouble paying ~$6000/month for a full OC3 + bandwidth fees (~$100/meg/month or ~$150,000/month) just to make 300 users happy...this is of course on top of their standard E-Mail/Web/Administrative/Academic bandwidth...not to mention the 2,700 other students that are going to want at least a little bandwidth...
Hardware like Packeteer and CopySense help some, but not everywhere...and it's going to be much more difficult for ISPs to start using something like CopySense...
Here's a secret...your resedential broadband company doesn't really have enough bandwidth to support all of their users...but that's been ok in the past, because before P2P and before streaming HD video, the RATIO (thats a big word there) was good enough that it wasn't a problem for them...or to simplify it a little, they were (and still are) betting that when you want to visit/. and eat up some of their bandwidth at the head-end that your next door neighbor is not doing anything with his/her connection...
This methodology is actually a hold-over from the dialup era...at that time it was modem lines...we may have 5000 paying customers, but we only need to have 300 phone lines...
I don't know if you have ever priced a T1 line to your house, but you would probably be surprised if you haven't...1.5MB of guaranteed bandwidth is expensive...a 3MB down/328 up cable modem line is a STEAL at the prices they are giving...now if everyone suddenly has VOIP and IPTV, that's extra bandwidth usage that the system (and pricing structure) was never designed for...luckily, the dot-bomb era left a lot of dark fiber in cities and hopefully these companies can buy them up to keep giving us relatively cheap access...
And you bring up a good opportunity for sales of the machine...business machines for companies in developing countries...and how much more likely would they be to buy one if they knew that for every laptop they bought, they would be helping to pay for the children down the road to get laptops for school??? It certainly looks good on a local level...not to mention the infrastructure that will probably shoot up overnight to support/upgrade these new laptops...
Dell may not have a service center close by, but an enterprising school that has been issued these could easily open their repair shop to local businesses (for a fee of course)...
Yes, and if every inventor used this philosophy, we wouldn't have an automobile, airplane, television, radio, or computers...and a whole slew of other inventions that many of us "couldn't live without"...
There will always be disease, poverty, etc in the world...but this is actually about those very problems you are complaining about...this gives them the tools to "pull themselves up"...what's the saying? "Give a man a fish..."
And that's exactly the point...Mr. Negroponte may not have the medical know how to help cure AIDS/cancer or know how to build a water treatment system, but he is doing what he can to count...and maybe...just maybe...one of those laptops will get into the hands of someone that will become a doctor or civil engineer...
Handing them goods/infrastructure is the real injustice here...it's saying "We know you can't help yourself, so we're going to give it to you"...this leaves the knowledge outside of their grasp...
Then again, I may be out of line...exactly what is it that you do for a living???
The biggest reason I choose MySQL over anything else is speed...for the simple stuff...which is most web based apps...it's the fastest option...plus there's room to grow if you need to...
Ease of replication...MySQL is real easy to set up when it comes to replication, not only is it easy, but it's full featured...
Availability...it's available almost everywhere you go (most default installations of Linux and a good number of proprietary unicies...binary packages are available from MySQL for AIX, Solaris, MacOS, BSD, HP-UX, and Novell)...there are many software vendors that support MySQL as a backend database...not so many that support PostgreSQL...this is all handy when I'm trying to get a new application up and running...it's gotten so I don't even have to think about wetting up a new MySQL installation...
I would like to add that I run 2 PostgreSQL servers...but I have found it to be overly cumbersome for the majority of my applications.
This is why everyone should install the Netcraft Anti-Phishing Toolbar...unless they really know what they are doing (read IT professional)...
All of your users/customers should have this installed...besides rating the risk of the site based on previous reports, it would also have shown how long the site was registered...which even on this phishing site was probably a matter of days...as a matter of fact, I can see this as a good feature to include within Firefox...whenever you view the SSL certificate, show the domain registration info...
Looking at some of the domain registration info, it's obvious that including the DNS Admin, Organization, and Nameserver Organization, you would have easily identified a fake...
Even better yet, why not have a certification process for banks and such that could opt to have their ISP verify their identity...then when you visit their SSL site, your browser could display the verification info beside the "security lock"...
Of course, if you want to change the way the "Security Lock" works in browsers, in the US you could set something up with the FDIC that would use a DNS lookup similar to the way DNS Block Lists operate...only this one would tell you if the site was a valid banking site...I guess the "Lock" could change to a "$" or something if it was verified as a banking site...web sites could simply request the check in some way (HTTP header or something)...the header value could represent the type of site (US Banking Site...check with FDIC...)
This just isn't true. I've switched to digital as well, but the resolution of 35mm film is roughly 24 megapixels. This is still 3x the resolution of the best consumer digicams.
No it's not, it's actually closer to 16MP (and that's for ISO 50...which limits you pretty much to still subjects), but even assuming your 24MP figure, your argument doesn't hold up. Image quality is not simply a function of resolution...but a combination of resolution and noise.
For film, this "noise" is grain(still a big problem for film...this is largely a result of the quality of film that you use, but it's still high)...for digital the "noise" is called sensor noise(not so much a problem...and it's based on a fixed variable...the sensor). Here is a good comparison of film vs. digital and why digital SLR has surpassed 35mm...
If you want to save yourself the reading, the meat of the story is this...even an 8MP Point & Shoot digital has better image quality than a 35mm camera with ISO 50 Fuji Velvia film....
I would have to say that this does not sound like a bad idea to me. If such an event were to be recorded, there would likely be widespread impact. I figure a finding of this nature would have an effect on every facet of our lives... I don't think it would be a bad idea to let the government know...which would probably inform other governments, NASA, maybe a few key scientists (to verify the data), prepare a new budget (further research, missions, etc), and probably a few more folks that I can't think of right now (key spiritual leaders?)...if they didn't do that, I would probably be upset...
But it's even more likely that a single event would not trigger any such plan. It's more likely that it would gradually become public knowledge...first within SETI (the group of people actually interested in this sort of thing and the first to be called upon to verify the data), then among scientists and academics, and eventually become public knowledge through research, publications, and those working with said academics...
This is really nothing new. The Dreamcast uses/used a closed liquid cooling system that operated on convection (a single fan cooled one part of the closed loop)...
It worked for the Dreamcast...why not for the 360...what surprises me is that in 5 years, noone has come up with a better idea for cooling a console...I would really like to see a zero noise console...
The biggest reason I use GMail...well, 2 reasons...and they're pretty big...
1) They let me use POP3...I know fastmail.fm does too, but they make you go in and delete spam through their web interface....and not to mention they don't give as much storage space...
There are of course other benefits to GMail over other "free" e-mail services...Spam protection, Virus protection, they let you forward messages for other addresses through their service, etc...
As far as it being Beta... Google's search became popular while it was still in beta...it doesn't really mean much that GMail is still in beta...I'll pull a page from this guys book... "How many of you were using FireFox as your primary browser before it hit 1.0? Raise your hand..."
Then again this is exactly the reason why GMail is still in beta...Google is smart about making sure things work before they take them out of beta...
This may be true with high-end equipment (seperate PCI card for everything)...but it's not generally true. Most machines being sold today have integrated IDE contollers (that use alot more resources than SCSI)...by now SCSI (or something better) should be the standard...instead of IDE...that is now over a decade old...SATA might be the answer, but it's still too early to tell (SATA is still not the standard)...
Most machines also have integrated video that uses system RAM and extra CPU time...and then we get to the integrated (AC'97) sound (more system RAM and CPU time)...and soft-modems...USB (CPU hog...compared to Firewire)...the list goes on...
Yes, some high-end equipment goes toward the more seperate approach, but then again, there's always the exception to the rule...and it's obvious when you decide to buy a system with seperate components that this is going completely against the current x86 philosophy...
If you look at most of the machines being sold today, they are all integrated...and not because they are trying to make the system faster...or perform better...they are trying to make everything cheaper and that means "stealing" RAM and CPU cycles for every one of those "integrated" features...
You know, I've found this to mostly be untrue. And I don't think using Linux is a result of hating Microsoft (they could have equaly chosen Apple), but I think for some, hating Microsoft is a result of using Linux/Open Source Software...
Of course, the "Microsoft Hater" in the Amiga community mostly came out of a frustration with the "Microsoft Lover" that just couldn't understand why you didn't like DOS/Windows...it was more of a defense mechanism...today, most folks at least know what Linux is and are familiar with the "whys"...
To be honest, the biggest reason most Amiga fans have went to Linux is that it is somewhat familar...hackable UNIX-like OS with a fairly close knit community...runs on commodity hardware (a lot of Amiga fans hated the overpriced upgrades)...and it seems to be on the "cutting edge"...
I noticed something long ago...Amiga fanatics have mostly moved to Linux...why?
The Amiga was kept alive by the fans...and the fans are what keeps Linux (any GPLed software) alive at its heart...
The only thing that the PC is missing as far as the hardware goes is in the architecture...the Amiga had specilaized "co-processors" for everything (Video, Audio, I/O, etc)...this made it seem a lot faster than it really was...the PC is moving in the opposite direction (everything is offloaded to the main CPU)...
If you don't belive that Linux is where the Amiga fans have gone, take a look at Dyne:bolic...it follows many of the same ideas that the Amiga was founded upon....
First, No...my post is not FUD...and I think Unions are generally a bad thing...unions were intended to help workers, but today they hurt more than they help.
And I'm not arguing that companies are not hurt by shoplifting...
Third, what's wrong with getting rid of employees? Economic growth DEPENDS on getting rid of employees. The less people involved in getting a product to a consumer, the more people we can employ on providing other products.
I don't know what country you live in, but here in the US there are no more "production jobs"...factories/plants have all moved production to Mexico, India, and China...
If the company gets rid of an employee, saving the costs of paying that employee, competition will force those savings to get passed onto the consumer.
This is just wishful thinking...
That consumer will then spend that money they saved elsewhere - causing more people to be employed over there (or they'll save it, and it'll get invested somewhere else, causing more people to be employed over there.) The net result: More stuff!
I think I've heard this argument before...then again, I don't know if you've noticed, but unemployment is going up...if all technology brought more employment, we would not have such high unemployment...
There's a reason we all tend to have TV's, PC's, and cars, instead of being poor farmers or 60-80-hour week factory workers like we were in the 1800's: JOB ELIMINATION! Any job that can be eliminated by technology should be. If we're really good at it, technology will eliminate all jobs and we can spend all our time watching TV and still have all the stuff we want.
If you can't see how your conculusion here is an unattainable utopia, then there's no way I'm gonna help you...technology has certainly helped us as a society, but technology is not the answer for every problem...
Here's the interesting thing...watch what happens once these RFID tags are put into everything in sight...it's happening right now...
The retail stores claim that shoplifting costs us soooo much money...we need to raise the prices to offset the shoplifters...
Now, the question is, with RFID and scanners at every door, shoplifting will be all but a memory...if it's in the cart and it wasn't scanned, you need to pay for it or it's being stolen...right???
So by all accounts, prices should go down...
But this won't happen...why? Well, for all of their complaining, shoplifting only accounts for ~0.6% of all inventory...so even rounding up to a full 1%, that only means a $300.00 would only go down by $3.00...hardly worth mentioning...
What will be worth mentioning is the real reason why these stores are pushing for RFID...it's the same reason why they are pushing those self checkout lines and why they put those "buggy bins" outside of their stores...it's not convinience...it's employee reduction. And that's the real crime here...corporations don't care about their customers or their employees...if they can get rid of just 1 part-time, no-health-insurance employee for every store, that's worth more for them than any losses from theft...
This looks like a great game. I haven't picked up my DC in a while and would love to play this game, but it looks like everyones links to the images no longer work.
From what you say, I can actually see how the use of this device would help society....how you say???
Well, once the folks affected by age-related hearing loss (mostly retirees) start being exposed to this, the store may quickly find that a good chunk of those customers they may otherwise want to keep are not returning and will see the error of their ways...
This should in turn make these people think when using these methods in the future...
I think you want Perl Packager with the --filter option...there are a few filters that can be used with that (specifically PAR::Filter::Bleach), but if one of these won't work, then I'm afraid you are asking for something that simply doesn't exist...no security through obscurity and all of that...
NoScript has to be on the top of my list (right after Adblock and Greasemonkey)...Disabling JS globaly and only allowing it where it is necessary keeps out almost all ads...pages load faster, and you don't have to worry about information leaks...
Slashdot Mirror
If MS gets rid of a bunch of the Yahoo employees like some people are suggesting, Google will likely start throwing job offers their way.
From what I can tell, some of their FOSS developers may already be getting offers from Google, since the new Yahoo will likely be at the best unrewarding for those developers.
Which brings me to a question...what happens to Zimbra? Which is now a Yahoo product and a major competitor to Exchange...
The funniest thing about this whole buyout is that if the purchase goes through and M$ gets rid of the FOSS developers on Yahoo's staff, I am pretty certain that most of those developers will go to Google.
Try this extension with Thunderbird.
It's nice to see the promise of the original Video Toaster finally coming true. It might have taken 15 years, but we may truly have brought video production to the masses.
The problem with the Video Toaster was that all of the other equipment was so expensive because you still had to do the Analog-to-Digital-to-Analog conversion and what the Video Toaster really succeeded in doing was bringing cheaper equipment to the professionals (The Tonight Show, Seaquest DSV, and Babylon 5 to name a few all used Amiga 2000 based Video Toasters).
With todays all digital technology and the mass distribution that widely available broadband internet, directors are no longer limited by small budgets. One of the best examples of this is Robert Rodríguez serves as writer, producer, director, editor, director of photography, camera operator, steadicam operator, composer, production designer, visual effects supervisor, and sound editor on his films.
I think they were hoping that the next evolution was more of the same (bursts of high usage with a low bandwidth "background noise")...want to see how bad it's getting, look at any smaller residential college (under 5,000 students) and tell me they aren't struggling to keep up with all of these new services...
If just 1 in 10 users demand 1/2 meg of bandwidth all of the time, then a college of 3,000 residential students would have to keep a connection of 150MB/s just to cater to those users...and let me tell you, a school of that size is going to have trouble paying ~$6000/month for a full OC3 + bandwidth fees (~$100/meg/month or ~$150,000/month) just to make 300 users happy...this is of course on top of their standard E-Mail/Web/Administrative/Academic bandwidth...not to mention the 2,700 other students that are going to want at least a little bandwidth...
Hardware like Packeteer and CopySense help some, but not everywhere...and it's going to be much more difficult for ISPs to start using something like CopySense...
Here's a secret...your resedential broadband company doesn't really have enough bandwidth to support all of their users...but that's been ok in the past, because before P2P and before streaming HD video, the RATIO (thats a big word there) was good enough that it wasn't a problem for them...or to simplify it a little, they were (and still are) betting that when you want to visit /. and eat up some of their bandwidth at the head-end that your next door neighbor is not doing anything with his/her connection...
This methodology is actually a hold-over from the dialup era...at that time it was modem lines...we may have 5000 paying customers, but we only need to have 300 phone lines...
I don't know if you have ever priced a T1 line to your house, but you would probably be surprised if you haven't...1.5MB of guaranteed bandwidth is expensive...a 3MB down/328 up cable modem line is a STEAL at the prices they are giving...now if everyone suddenly has VOIP and IPTV, that's extra bandwidth usage that the system (and pricing structure) was never designed for...luckily, the dot-bomb era left a lot of dark fiber in cities and hopefully these companies can buy them up to keep giving us relatively cheap access...
And you bring up a good opportunity for sales of the machine...business machines for companies in developing countries...and how much more likely would they be to buy one if they knew that for every laptop they bought, they would be helping to pay for the children down the road to get laptops for school??? It certainly looks good on a local level...not to mention the infrastructure that will probably shoot up overnight to support/upgrade these new laptops...
Dell may not have a service center close by, but an enterprising school that has been issued these could easily open their repair shop to local businesses (for a fee of course)...
Yes, and if every inventor used this philosophy, we wouldn't have an automobile, airplane, television, radio, or computers...and a whole slew of other inventions that many of us "couldn't live without"...
There will always be disease, poverty, etc in the world...but this is actually about those very problems you are complaining about...this gives them the tools to "pull themselves up"...what's the saying? "Give a man a fish..."
And that's exactly the point...Mr. Negroponte may not have the medical know how to help cure AIDS/cancer or know how to build a water treatment system, but he is doing what he can to count...and maybe...just maybe...one of those laptops will get into the hands of someone that will become a doctor or civil engineer...
Handing them goods/infrastructure is the real injustice here...it's saying "We know you can't help yourself, so we're going to give it to you"...this leaves the knowledge outside of their grasp...
Then again, I may be out of line...exactly what is it that you do for a living???
I don't think it's learning curve...it's a combination of bloat and poor documentation (very few references available) that make it cumbersome...
The biggest reason I choose MySQL over anything else is speed...for the simple stuff...which is most web based apps...it's the fastest option...plus there's room to grow if you need to...
Ease of replication...MySQL is real easy to set up when it comes to replication, not only is it easy, but it's full featured...
Availability...it's available almost everywhere you go (most default installations of Linux and a good number of proprietary unicies...binary packages are available from MySQL for AIX, Solaris, MacOS, BSD, HP-UX, and Novell)...there are many software vendors that support MySQL as a backend database...not so many that support PostgreSQL...this is all handy when I'm trying to get a new application up and running...it's gotten so I don't even have to think about wetting up a new MySQL installation...
I would like to add that I run 2 PostgreSQL servers...but I have found it to be overly cumbersome for the majority of my applications.
This is why everyone should install the Netcraft Anti-Phishing Toolbar...unless they really know what they are doing (read IT professional)...
All of your users/customers should have this installed...besides rating the risk of the site based on previous reports, it would also have shown how long the site was registered...which even on this phishing site was probably a matter of days...as a matter of fact, I can see this as a good feature to include within Firefox...whenever you view the SSL certificate, show the domain registration info...
Looking at some of the domain registration info, it's obvious that including the DNS Admin, Organization, and Nameserver Organization, you would have easily identified a fake...
Even better yet, why not have a certification process for banks and such that could opt to have their ISP verify their identity...then when you visit their SSL site, your browser could display the verification info beside the "security lock"...
Of course, if you want to change the way the "Security Lock" works in browsers, in the US you could set something up with the FDIC that would use a DNS lookup similar to the way DNS Block Lists operate...only this one would tell you if the site was a valid banking site...I guess the "Lock" could change to a "$" or something if it was verified as a banking site...web sites could simply request the check in some way (HTTP header or something)...the header value could represent the type of site (US Banking Site...check with FDIC...)
This just isn't true. I've switched to digital as well, but the resolution of 35mm film is roughly 24 megapixels. This is still 3x the resolution of the best consumer digicams.
No it's not, it's actually closer to 16MP (and that's for ISO 50...which limits you pretty much to still subjects), but even assuming your 24MP figure, your argument doesn't hold up. Image quality is not simply a function of resolution...but a combination of resolution and noise.
For film, this "noise" is grain(still a big problem for film...this is largely a result of the quality of film that you use, but it's still high)...for digital the "noise" is called sensor noise(not so much a problem...and it's based on a fixed variable...the sensor). Here is a good comparison of film vs. digital and why digital SLR has surpassed 35mm...
If you want to save yourself the reading, the meat of the story is this...even an 8MP Point & Shoot digital has better image quality than a 35mm camera with ISO 50 Fuji Velvia film....
I would have to say that this does not sound like a bad idea to me. If such an event were to be recorded, there would likely be widespread impact. I figure a finding of this nature would have an effect on every facet of our lives... I don't think it would be a bad idea to let the government know...which would probably inform other governments, NASA, maybe a few key scientists (to verify the data), prepare a new budget (further research, missions, etc), and probably a few more folks that I can't think of right now (key spiritual leaders?)...if they didn't do that, I would probably be upset...
But it's even more likely that a single event would not trigger any such plan. It's more likely that it would gradually become public knowledge...first within SETI (the group of people actually interested in this sort of thing and the first to be called upon to verify the data), then among scientists and academics, and eventually become public knowledge through research, publications, and those working with said academics...
This is really nothing new. The Dreamcast uses/used a closed liquid cooling system that operated on convection (a single fan cooled one part of the closed loop)...
It worked for the Dreamcast...why not for the 360...what surprises me is that in 5 years, noone has come up with a better idea for cooling a console...I would really like to see a zero noise console...
The biggest reason I use GMail...well, 2 reasons...and they're pretty big...
... Google's search became popular while it was still in beta...it doesn't really mean much that GMail is still in beta...I'll pull a page from this guys book... "How many of you were using FireFox as your primary browser before it hit 1.0? Raise your hand..."
1) They let me use POP3...I know fastmail.fm does too, but they make you go in and delete spam through their web interface....and not to mention they don't give as much storage space...
2) Gmail Filesystem...
There are of course other benefits to GMail over other "free" e-mail services...Spam protection, Virus protection, they let you forward messages for other addresses through their service, etc...
As far as it being Beta
Then again this is exactly the reason why GMail is still in beta...Google is smart about making sure things work before they take them out of beta...
This may be true with high-end equipment (seperate PCI card for everything)...but it's not generally true. Most machines being sold today have integrated IDE contollers (that use alot more resources than SCSI)...by now SCSI (or something better) should be the standard...instead of IDE...that is now over a decade old...SATA might be the answer, but it's still too early to tell (SATA is still not the standard)...
Most machines also have integrated video that uses system RAM and extra CPU time...and then we get to the integrated (AC'97) sound (more system RAM and CPU time)...and soft-modems...USB (CPU hog...compared to Firewire)...the list goes on...
Yes, some high-end equipment goes toward the more seperate approach, but then again, there's always the exception to the rule...and it's obvious when you decide to buy a system with seperate components that this is going completely against the current x86 philosophy...
If you look at most of the machines being sold today, they are all integrated...and not because they are trying to make the system faster...or perform better...they are trying to make everything cheaper and that means "stealing" RAM and CPU cycles for every one of those "integrated" features...
You know, I've found this to mostly be untrue. And I don't think using Linux is a result of hating Microsoft (they could have equaly chosen Apple), but I think for some, hating Microsoft is a result of using Linux/Open Source Software...
Of course, the "Microsoft Hater" in the Amiga community mostly came out of a frustration with the "Microsoft Lover" that just couldn't understand why you didn't like DOS/Windows...it was more of a defense mechanism...today, most folks at least know what Linux is and are familiar with the "whys"...
To be honest, the biggest reason most Amiga fans have went to Linux is that it is somewhat familar...hackable UNIX-like OS with a fairly close knit community...runs on commodity hardware (a lot of Amiga fans hated the overpriced upgrades)...and it seems to be on the "cutting edge"...
I noticed something long ago...Amiga fanatics have mostly moved to Linux...why?
The Amiga was kept alive by the fans...and the fans are what keeps Linux (any GPLed software) alive at its heart...
The only thing that the PC is missing as far as the hardware goes is in the architecture...the Amiga had specilaized "co-processors" for everything (Video, Audio, I/O, etc)...this made it seem a lot faster than it really was...the PC is moving in the opposite direction (everything is offloaded to the main CPU)...
If you don't belive that Linux is where the Amiga fans have gone, take a look at Dyne:bolic...it follows many of the same ideas that the Amiga was founded upon....
No, the BLS statistics are BS...the long and the short of it...if you aren't collecting unemployment benefits, you aren't counted...
First, No...my post is not FUD...and I think Unions are generally a bad thing...unions were intended to help workers, but today they hurt more than they help.
And I'm not arguing that companies are not hurt by shoplifting...
Third, what's wrong with getting rid of employees? Economic growth DEPENDS on getting rid of employees. The less people involved in getting a product to a consumer, the more people we can employ on providing other products.
I don't know what country you live in, but here in the US there are no more "production jobs"...factories/plants have all moved production to Mexico, India, and China...
If the company gets rid of an employee, saving the costs of paying that employee, competition will force those savings to get passed onto the consumer.
This is just wishful thinking...
That consumer will then spend that money they saved elsewhere - causing more people to be employed over there (or they'll save it, and it'll get invested somewhere else, causing more people to be employed over there.) The net result: More stuff!
I think I've heard this argument before...then again, I don't know if you've noticed, but unemployment is going up...if all technology brought more employment, we would not have such high unemployment...
There's a reason we all tend to have TV's, PC's, and cars, instead of being poor farmers or 60-80-hour week factory workers like we were in the 1800's: JOB ELIMINATION! Any job that can be eliminated by technology should be. If we're really good at it, technology will eliminate all jobs and we can spend all our time watching TV and still have all the stuff we want.
If you can't see how your conculusion here is an unattainable utopia, then there's no way I'm gonna help you...technology has certainly helped us as a society, but technology is not the answer for every problem...
Here's the interesting thing...watch what happens once these RFID tags are put into everything in sight...it's happening right now...
The retail stores claim that shoplifting costs us soooo much money...we need to raise the prices to offset the shoplifters...
Now, the question is, with RFID and scanners at every door, shoplifting will be all but a memory...if it's in the cart and it wasn't scanned, you need to pay for it or it's being stolen...right???
So by all accounts, prices should go down...
But this won't happen...why? Well, for all of their complaining, shoplifting only accounts for ~0.6% of all inventory...so even rounding up to a full 1%, that only means a $300.00 would only go down by $3.00...hardly worth mentioning...
What will be worth mentioning is the real reason why these stores are pushing for RFID...it's the same reason why they are pushing those self checkout lines and why they put those "buggy bins" outside of their stores...it's not convinience...it's employee reduction. And that's the real crime here...corporations don't care about their customers or their employees...if they can get rid of just 1 part-time, no-health-insurance employee for every store, that's worth more for them than any losses from theft...
This looks like a great game. I haven't picked up my DC in a while and would love to play this game, but it looks like everyones links to the images no longer work.
From what you say, I can actually see how the use of this device would help society....how you say???
Well, once the folks affected by age-related hearing loss (mostly retirees) start being exposed to this, the store may quickly find that a good chunk of those customers they may otherwise want to keep are not returning and will see the error of their ways...
This should in turn make these people think when using these methods in the future...
I think you want Perl Packager with the --filter option...there are a few filters that can be used with that (specifically PAR::Filter::Bleach), but if one of these won't work, then I'm afraid you are asking for something that simply doesn't exist...no security through obscurity and all of that...
NoScript has to be on the top of my list (right after Adblock and Greasemonkey)...Disabling JS globaly and only allowing it where it is necessary keeps out almost all ads...pages load faster, and you don't have to worry about information leaks...
Some others I use...BetterSearch, LinkPreview, Outfoxed, BugMeNot, del.icio.us and Farky...