It seems to me that the average television viewing person couldn't care less about science news. Unless it's groundbreaking and will most definitely change their lives they don't care and if it does, well then it's in the news anyway.
I don't see how you could claim this if it hasn't been properly tested. After all, why should people be particularly interested in people blowing each other up on the other side of the world, or in campaigns for politicians who might one day be running the country, even though virtually nothing will be likely to change in how they run the country? The fact is that the media concentrates on showing that kind of thing. It's there to watch.
A story about galaxies eating galaxies isn't exactly the climatic potential of scientific news reporting anyway. The main reason we see stories about galaxies at all is because they look shiny on TV and the topic will conveniently fill a gap with an entertaining distraction between other things that are spouted out by a media that's seriously broken.
There are plenty of science-related topics that are directly relevant to society and people who live in it, and which it might actually be beneficial for the media to report on. It might be that people wouldn't be interested in science unless it has flashy lights and lasts no longer than 2 minutes, but we really don't know because it's more cost-efficient to make talk shows that provoke people with noisy hosts and misinformation, or pseudo gameshows about social wierdos being trapped on artificial islands for months at a time and being psychologically manipulated into hating each other in front of cameras.
It's that they're against the very fundamental freedoms that the olympics represents.
The Olympics claim to represent a lot of things, but so does any typical political candidate (just as an anecdotal comparison). The IOC will claim anything that's convenient about the Olympics because it's nothing more than empty marketing designed to generate billions of dollars for corrupt officials and corporations. The claims of the games aren't backed up by actions or by strong and powerful statements, and it hasn't been for a long time. Bidding for the games is dominated by corruption and back-door dealings, and the games themselves became a brag-fest and a political tool a long time ago.
It's sad that the Olympic Games is given so much credibility and attention, but there's the modern media for you.
In the past, MS has effectively given away software -- in the form of licenses that could be used on two computers: so that a license bought for a work machine could be taken home and used on the home machine.
Yes but back when they actually did this, if you're thinking of the early '90s and before, they weren't doing it because they were being generous. Microsoft let people install their software on several PCs because they genuinely agreed that if someone's purchased a licence for software, they should be able to use it wherever they like. The catch on that statement was that Microsoft still didn't allow the same licence to be used in two places at the same time. (So if you had Word on your home PC, the kids couldn't legally use it while you were using it at work.) This was the standard way of selling software, and everyone did it. Before they dominated the market, Microsoft followed the trend.
This was never generosity, it was fairness. Microsoft sold the licence to use the software, not the licence to use it on a specific PC. Somewhere along the way, at about the same time that Microsoft started to dominate and control the trends, this all changed to become far more draconian. Now with DRM involved, it's gotten ridiculous to the extent that if Microsoft's software thinks it's been installed on multiple PCs, it'll cripple itself, even though there's a reasonable chance that it's wrong. (I've recently crippled Vista on 3 systems already by installing drivers for various USB crypto devices which caused it to think the hardware had changed on the next reboot.)
All of this means that people have to pay for several copies of identical Microsoft software several times, even though they'll only ever be using one of those copies at any time.
My dad's Dell PC was sold to him with a firewire card several years ago for some reason. I'm not sure why, but it makes me wonder if there are a lot of other Dell desktop PCs out there with them. I pulled it out last night (only coincidentally) because he wasn't using it and I needed a spare PCI slot to give him a wireless adapter.
Coalition governments seem to have a nasty tendency to break those coalitions, because they're not truly one government. They're parties agreeing to cooperate, under current circumstances, in a power sharing deal. I have long considered this to be one of the most delicate forms of democracy, only suitable for a fledgling government trying to find a final form.
Which coalition governments have you studied? There are many different ways to design a structure that encourages coalition governments, and they cater to different needs.
But, there is only one possible outcome of another Nader run. That is to draw votes away from Obama. If Nader runs and McCain wins then Nader bears the blame just like he bears the blame for getting Bush elected.
Perhaps Ralph Nader doesn't think the Democrats would be any better or worse than the Republicans. If this is the case, why should he or his supporters care in the slightest what Democrat supporters and Republican haters think?
Besides, if Nader continues to draw votes from one particular side of a two-party system, it might actually motivate that side to realise that the system is quite screwed up, and push for changes to fix it.
I'm not a US citizen and it doesn't bother me a lot what happens except to the extent where the US stamps its foot over the rest of the world, but I find watching things from the outside quite interesting.
I have a feeling this is going to turn out like Prohibition did. Despite the fact that it gets banned, everybody still does it, the authorities are powerless to stop it, and in the end, the authorities who puts those laws in place get moved aside by those who want those laws repealed.
I think this will be more likely once the baby boomer population has moved on, and government is inherited by people who've spent more time growing up and living in an information-centric world rather than a paper one. Right now, especially in the UK I'd imagine, there is an over-representation of people in their 60's voting and running a lot of things in society. Many of them have probably learnt only what they needed to to get by as far as electronic media is concerned, and that's the basis they'll use for deciding if something is good or bad.
The whole purpose of the copyright is to ensure progress, not individual riches.
With respect, I think you're confusing copyright with USA copyright, the latter of which was originally defined in the US constitution as being for the purpose of encouraging progress (in so many words). In other countries it's not so defined. eg. The Statute of Anne, which originally defined copyright in Great Britian, also referred to the "moral rights" of authors and their families, and could be extended to a meaning that authors should have exclusive rights over their creations forever.
Seriously. At what point do we consider a country so dangerous that we will not longer do business with it? When do we finally say "go screw yourself" to dangerous governments?
Well however abhorrent it might seem when you consider alleged working conditions and underhanded spying tactics from both governments, continuing business relations with a country like China makes sure that there are less incentives for those on either side to want to start attacking and killing the other. Cutting China off from the western world would probably result in another cold war sort of scenario, and I doubt the US (or anyone) wants that.
There should be an expectation that a modern OS will require more RAM and CPU than an OS released 7 years ago.
Why? An Operating System should let a user control their computer, and Vista doesn't even do that half the time if you consider all the places where Microsoft has decided that DRM and faulty counterfeit detection is more important than their users' freedom to actually be in control of their own property. I'd much rather the memory was reserved for applications which I could choose to have installed or removed at my own discretion.
The whole concept of Vista and its design goals is to give corporations control over how people do things, to force people to spend money unnecessarily, and to make people's legal rights meaningless. It's not an Operating System, or at best it's a horrible Operating System.
Indeed there's nothing wrong with Vista. Except of course the operating system.
Absolutely. I could probably tolerate many of the shortcomings of Vista, but as far as I'm concerned, an Operating System should never ever intentionally cripple a user's access to their computer unless that's the intention of the user. As soon as the OS does that, it's no longer an Operating System.
We've been creating a new Vista Enterprise Desktop build at work and I've been trying to work with an experimental image of it, mostly because I have to update some of our internal software. The stupid thing locks up and claims to be counterfeit every time I try to install drivers for the various cryptography devices that we need. It's causing no end of frustration, because we don't want to have to re-activate it every time someone has to install new driver software and I'm now getting paranoid about installing anything just in case it chokes.
Microsoft has finally put its priority of controlling everyone and everything for their own commercial gain above my own right to control my PC, and that's why I'll never install Vista on my home computer unless they disable this DRM and "Genuine Advantage" crap, or at the very least fix it so that it never has false positives, which I personally don't think is possible. Admittedly this is easier for me because I haven't been running Windows at home since Windows 98, but Microsoft's crossed the line if they ever wanted me to come back. All of that putting up with the issues of not as easily being able to open proprietary Microsoft documents and videos and use cheaper proprietary hardware suddenly became well worth it, because at least I know my PC isn't going to randomly leap out at me one day and arbitrarily decide that I'm not worthy of using it for the things I need to do.
Moreover, a well-designed voting system should be 100% accurate in the counting of votes because of, not despite, the removal of humans from the counting process. The problem is that so far, no commercially available electronic voting system exists yet that has been well designed.
I don't think a well designed voting should necessarily have to be 100% accurate. A hand-counting system isn't that accurate, but it can still be trusted as long as there aren't barriers from people being involved in the process to make sure it's being done reliably. What's important is that there's a reliable way to accurately re-count the votes to discover if there's a discrepancy, then deal with that discrepancy (if any) appropriately, without having to be concerned about the integrity of the voting records being compromised in the mean time.
A well designed hand counting system does this, because it's designed in a way that everyone can see and understand what's happening, and such that any stakeholder can assign trusted representatives to observe the process.
This definitely doesn't exclude electronic voting systems, however, but an electronic system should be used primarily to augment the counting process rather than being a final authority. The only plausible reason for an electronic system is to speed up the counting process because the media wants to be able to have it all nicely timed to announce the results on prime time TV.
Storing the votes electronically with no paper records is very bad, and doing this with closed systems that can't be examined is very bad. For either of these cases, most people don't have the qualifications to even understand the concept of how this works, let alone feel comfortable with trusting it. It's also difficult to audit, except for people who are very specifically skilled, and requiring that everyone trust a very small proportion of people is just bad.
If it's really necessary to use electronic counting methods to keep the media and the public happy, though, it's completely possible to do. All that's needed is a system where:
Voters record their votes in a machine
The machine prints the vote on a slip and displays it to a voter, but doesn't let the voter access it
The voter physically manipulates a lever such that the slip falls into either an Accept or a Reject box.
If the vote was rejected, the machine lets the voter chose a different option and repeats the process. Otherwise the paper vote is deposited, and electronic record is recorded, and the voter can leave.
This way there's an electronic record and a paper record of the vote, meaning it's possible to have a speedy recount (even if it's by scanning a digital record on the paper slip), or a hand recount if there's any doubt. The fact that everyone can plainly see how the hand ballots were generated and deposited in the box makes it just as trustworthy as a more basic hand ballot. The only possibility of a discrepancy is if the machine recorded the electronic record inconsistently from the paper record, in which case the printed paper record in a hand recount should be authoritative, because that's the vote that the voter examined and confirmed was what they meant. Any significant doubt should result in a hand recount.
Radiohead made far more money distributing it this way than they ever did with a record label.
This is most likely true, but a lot of the reason Radiohead's making a lot of money is because they were heavily promoted by a record label in the past, lots of people know about them, Radiohead got massive amounts of free media exposure by doing what they did, and people are flocking to them because of it. Radiohead makes music that a lot of people like, but many other bands make similarly good music without anything like the same amount of exposure, and would make a lot less if they did the same thing than if they were able to get signed by a label and have massive amounts of money poured into promoting them.
Not that I support the music publishing cartel or the way it works, and I also don't think it would be unlikely for a band that hadn't been promoted by record companies to have a similar success. I just haven't personally seen it yet on the same scale as what Radiohead's managed.
Actually from a consumer perspective I don't care even if we don't see this happen for smaller independent bands very often. What matters for me is that the availability of quality music improves over time, that it costs more reasonable amounts, and that the money I pay goes directly to the artists to the extent that good artists can reasonably continue to produce more good music, rather than to publishing agents in the middle who take 95% and use it on marketing to try and convince me to buy more of their crappy music range.
If someone sends me a threatening letter, I should be able to make the threat public in order to get help for myself. That's just common sense.
I don't think it's particularly fair either. Copyright, at least in the US (of which I'm not a citizen) was constitutionally designed with the intent of promoting the progress of Science and Useful Arts. I don't see any benefit to any kind of science or "useful art" that's gained out of letting lawyers prevent people from re-publishing their threat letters. The only arguable benefit I can think of is if lawyers could somehow claim that other lawyers might plagiarise their templates for their own CAD letters. As far as I'm concerned, if it's legal meta information, it should unconditionally be public domain, because it's important that information about legal actions taking place can be made public for everyone to see.
Having said this, I'm still not sure it's necessary to re-publish a letter verbatim to get the message across that a lawyer has threatened you and accurately stating what the threat is. Having copyright on something doesn't preclude rights of others such as fair use, and such rights would let one publish the essence of whatever the threat is anyway, including relevant quotes from the original material.
It's one thing if you have angry customers over something you have control over. It's another thing entirely if your customers are angry at you AND there isn't a single solitary thing you can do. That said, I hope that they are more careful in the future...
But this is why you're supposed to be careful to avoid screwing things up this seriously. I appreciate that you're trying to take some kind of sympathetic angle here but I don't see the relevance.
There were a variety of things that a company with 2.6 million customers could have done beforehand which would have minimised the impact of something like this happening. The least of these would have been to have had a system for regular reliable backups. Another obvious thing that would have helped (going by what was said in the article) would be to have a more robust procedure for deleting accounts, such as disabling them for a while first so the process can be reversed.
I sympathise a lot with the people on the end of the phones who probably had little control over this. But as a company, it fully deserves to have angry customers, and probably less customers in the future.
Whenever I do have to go into the office, I'm surrounded by distractions
I appreciate that you've already stated there are people who do better in an office setting, but I still find it interesting that so many of comments I've read on Slashdot are strongly in favour of telecommuting.
I quite enjoy going to work. It's a 40 minute walk (which is an excuse to go for a reasonable walk a couple of times a day), and being at work puts me in the frame of mind for doing work-related things. Having people around who are also doing work really helps to motivate me. If I'm at home, I usually find it very hard to concentrate on work topics because I'm surrounded by non-work things, and sometimes people who want my attention for non-work things. Home tends to be where I like to relax more, and that's usually the frame of mind I'm in when I'm there.
We do have people who like to telecommute, particularly if they live a long way out of town or have kids or whatever, but I don't think I'd do well to be one of them.
Removing DRM from music essentially makes it more valuable (which is why iTunes decided to charge more for it than music with DRM) and will improve profits of music without DRM.
Incidentally the whole iTunes-double-charging thing is absurd. It shouldn't be necessary for a consumer to pay extra to get rights that they're legally supposed to have anyway.
Consumer rights provided that are provided for by copyright law are legal rights, not luxuries that are allowed to be charged for. If it's so easy for consumers to assert these rights with DRM content then the DRM-free content shouldn't be in demand for any legal use, in which case Apple is openly assisting copyright infringement, which amounts to breaking the law.
Presumably Apple is not trying to assist people with copyright infringement, which basically means that Apple is forcing people to pay extra money to for the ability to assert their legal rights. Surely this is also illegal, isn't it?
No, the intended audience is going to be those folks who may lack the IT knowledge but still control the purse strings (CEO, COO, CFO, et al). They don't know any better so it's going to be easy to fill their heads with FUD and have them take it as gospel.
This is a report to justify a decision already made -- it's not a report to investigate fairly and without bias. Besides the occasional ignorant manager you've already mentioned, I think the more important target for this report will also be staff in organisations where office politics are commonplace. This is exactly the kind of report that's useful in cases where managers and/or IT staff have already made up their minds to stay with Windows/Office for a shallow reason that suits themselves without having considered the organisation, and simply need to find documentation to justify it to whoever queries them, and are in a position to be able to hide or talk down any reports that debunk or claim the opposite.
Perhaps it's because they're already trained in these products and aren't keen to learn new ones, maybe they'd lose their jobs if the company moved away from Microsoft, or perhaps they just like being flown to Microsoft training events and given shiny toys and free alcohol every year. Whatever the reason, there are a lot of people who like using Microsoft because it's Microsoft, and are happy to use whatever flaky means are necessary to justify it. The same is often true for OSS or just about any other technology, to be fair.
As for the "expensive" ones, if they movies they appear in bring in large sums of money, the creative people involved in making it deserve significant portion of that.
I'd be really interested to see if it worked out this way. Many popular actors (perhaps not all) aren't demonstrably better at acting than a vast number of other actors who aren't popular. They bring in lots of money because people recognise them, and are more likely to see a movie because they can see that actor. Sometimes people might watch a movie because of the director, but almost nobody who I know would go to see a movie because of the screenplay writer, or the audio mixing guys. Would the creative people behind some brilliant CGI really end up being treated any differently?
Personally I don't think they would. There are plenty of occasions where the people behind the scenes, responsible for all the creativity, have simply been pulled out and replaced... and people have kept watching because the front of the show has stayed the same. The Simpsons is a great example. Early episodes are very different from later episodes, and the differences coincide a lot with the changes in writers and directors. Most people who I've spoken to like one or the other, but they rarely like both. The change was gradual enough, though, to keep the show around and popular long enough for the viewer base to change without its popularity falling over.
I was just thinking the same thing... once the stockpile is depleted and helium goes (some price way higher than it currently costs) some refiner will look at one of their waste product pipes labeled "Helium" and well... they'll get really happy and call a company about a cryopump and some storage tanks... shortage solved...
And what backs up this argument is that it's exactly what happens in the oil market. Every few years the media gets hold of someone's declaration that the world's oil reserves will be depleted within X years, which is completely true for as long as the current technology is being used to extract the oil from the easiest places. There's a lot of oil that's known about underground and a lot of places that haven't been well searched, but it's not cost-effective to search for and extract it. As soon as oil becomes more scarce and the price goes up, it becomes more cost effective for oil companies to improve their drilling abilities and start drilling in new places... and the crisis is averted for another 15-20 years (yet again).
There are other reasons why it may not be a good idea to use too much oil, but running out of it isn't the most serious issue. I don't know a lot about helium sources but if it's true that there's a lot known about in other places, I don't see why this would be different.
I don't live in the US, but my possibly skewed understanding is that the administrations of quite a few school districts have signed agreements with companies (like Microsoft) which state that they're not allowed to do things such as purchase other Operating Systems and competing applications in their schools, unless they forfeit the right to massive discounts and the like from those companies.
Can someone a bit closer to the issue maybe comment on whether this will have much of an effect on getting OLPC laptops distributed around schools in the USA? Or is this part of the reason why Microsoft seems so keen to get Windows working on that hardware?
The original version of SimCity was developed by Maxis on the C64, and ported to various platforms, including the Macintosh. Maxis licensed the Macintosh SimCity source code to DUX software, to port to Unix.
DUX Software contracted me (Don Hopkins) to port SimCity to Unix, and I developed "SimCity HyperLook Edition", while working at the Turing Institute on HyperLook with Arthur van Hoff. The user interface was written in PostScript, which ran on the NeWS window system on Sun workstations, and it supported multiple zoomable views, pie menus, annotating and printing maps, and many user interface improvements.
After Sun canceled NeWS, DUX Software contracted me to rewrite the HyperLook user interface in TCL/Tk for X11, and I developed a multi-player networked user interface using the X11 protocol. The TCL/Tk version of SimCity has been ported to various Unix and non-Unix platforms, including SunOS, Solaris, Irix, HP/UX, OSF/1, Quarterdeck Desqview/X, NDC X Terminals, Warp, and Linux. The contract to sell SimCity for Unix expired after ten years, so the TCL/Tk version was no longer commercially available.
OLPC SimCity is based on the TCL/Tk version of SimCity. SimCity is a trademark of Electronic Arts. Don Hopkins adapted SimCity to the OLPC, thanks to the support of John Gilmore. OLPC SimCity will be shipped with the OLPC, and it has been run through EA's quality assurance process and reviewed for integrity. EA reserves the right to review and approve any version of the game distributed under the name SimCity.
So it looks as if it's some kind of mutated version of SimCity Classic which dates back to the C64 version.
In the long term, Micropolis can be recast from C to C++ classes, so it's possible to define clean interfaces between software modules, and make multiple instances of the simulator that don't interfere with each other, as well as easily interfacing it to Python using the SWIG interface generator. That should be done in a language-neutral way, so you could plug the simulator engine into many different languages and programming systems. Then more work needs to be done to open it up, and make it re-vectorable (plug-ins, events, callbacks, hooks, aspect oriented programming, etc), so you can replace and extend the various modules with the host language(s), eventually re-implementing most if not all of SimCity in another language.
Why is it that facility operators, be it trains, power plants, oil refineries, or anything have pathetic security, and when something does happen, they blame it totally on the perp who likely never had to confront even a single lock, much less a guard?
Perhaps you've grown up in a culture of fearing your neighbours, but not everyone does. Perhaps in Lodz, it's a waste of time, money and energy to assume that the local population is conspiring to bring the system down? Are you going to lock up the operator of a random shopping mall because they didn't strip all weapons from shoppers prior to someone going on a shooting rampage? Personally I haven't grown up in a culture of fear, I prefer to trust people in general, and I've found that strategy to be mutually beneficial.
This is a local metropolitan tram system. Any damage that can be caused by manipulating switches on the tracks can already be caused in many other ways (such as leaving rocks on the tracks). People don't usually do it. If they do for some retarded reason, the damage tends to be limited. And I would blame him totally -- he's old enough to know that derailing trams is a bad thing to do.
If this kept happening over and over again, I'd maybe expect the authorities of Lodz to do something about the security of the system. Otherwise there are probably much better things on which they could be spending their time and effort.
Well on my train set, the switches were designed so that trains coming in from either branch would enter the switch in such a way that they'd push the bar in the switch as they came through. I've driven real trams where switches were designed in exactly this way, which seems to make a lot of sense. The only complication is that after the vehicle has passed through, the switch is left pointing into the branch that the vehicle just came from. (A common way of designing them would be to put a spring in the switch, to make sure it'd always direct traffic down the same line, but let traffic come back the other way from either line.
I don't know how the Polish switches worked -- the automatic ones that I'm used to could be controlled by the tram driver through moderating the amount of power being drawn from the overhead at a specific position shortly before reaching the switch. So as a driver, you'd be prepared to either accelerate or drift at that exact location. My guess is that the Polish switches were controlled by remote signals so the driver could use some kind of dedicated control in the tram that'd simply send the signal ahead to a receiver. If the kid's remote happened to send a signal to change the switch when the tram was half-way over it, it'd be easy to get a situation where the back section went in a different direction from the front section. This would explain the derailments quite nicely, as well as the emergency stops (for those drivers who realised quickly enough that something was wrong).
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I don't see how you could claim this if it hasn't been properly tested. After all, why should people be particularly interested in people blowing each other up on the other side of the world, or in campaigns for politicians who might one day be running the country, even though virtually nothing will be likely to change in how they run the country? The fact is that the media concentrates on showing that kind of thing. It's there to watch.
A story about galaxies eating galaxies isn't exactly the climatic potential of scientific news reporting anyway. The main reason we see stories about galaxies at all is because they look shiny on TV and the topic will conveniently fill a gap with an entertaining distraction between other things that are spouted out by a media that's seriously broken.
There are plenty of science-related topics that are directly relevant to society and people who live in it, and which it might actually be beneficial for the media to report on. It might be that people wouldn't be interested in science unless it has flashy lights and lasts no longer than 2 minutes, but we really don't know because it's more cost-efficient to make talk shows that provoke people with noisy hosts and misinformation, or pseudo gameshows about social wierdos being trapped on artificial islands for months at a time and being psychologically manipulated into hating each other in front of cameras.
The Olympics claim to represent a lot of things, but so does any typical political candidate (just as an anecdotal comparison). The IOC will claim anything that's convenient about the Olympics because it's nothing more than empty marketing designed to generate billions of dollars for corrupt officials and corporations. The claims of the games aren't backed up by actions or by strong and powerful statements, and it hasn't been for a long time. Bidding for the games is dominated by corruption and back-door dealings, and the games themselves became a brag-fest and a political tool a long time ago.
It's sad that the Olympic Games is given so much credibility and attention, but there's the modern media for you.
Yes but back when they actually did this, if you're thinking of the early '90s and before, they weren't doing it because they were being generous. Microsoft let people install their software on several PCs because they genuinely agreed that if someone's purchased a licence for software, they should be able to use it wherever they like. The catch on that statement was that Microsoft still didn't allow the same licence to be used in two places at the same time. (So if you had Word on your home PC, the kids couldn't legally use it while you were using it at work.) This was the standard way of selling software, and everyone did it. Before they dominated the market, Microsoft followed the trend.
This was never generosity, it was fairness. Microsoft sold the licence to use the software, not the licence to use it on a specific PC. Somewhere along the way, at about the same time that Microsoft started to dominate and control the trends, this all changed to become far more draconian. Now with DRM involved, it's gotten ridiculous to the extent that if Microsoft's software thinks it's been installed on multiple PCs, it'll cripple itself, even though there's a reasonable chance that it's wrong. (I've recently crippled Vista on 3 systems already by installing drivers for various USB crypto devices which caused it to think the hardware had changed on the next reboot.)
All of this means that people have to pay for several copies of identical Microsoft software several times, even though they'll only ever be using one of those copies at any time.
My dad's Dell PC was sold to him with a firewire card several years ago for some reason. I'm not sure why, but it makes me wonder if there are a lot of other Dell desktop PCs out there with them. I pulled it out last night (only coincidentally) because he wasn't using it and I needed a spare PCI slot to give him a wireless adapter.
Which coalition governments have you studied? There are many different ways to design a structure that encourages coalition governments, and they cater to different needs.
Perhaps Ralph Nader doesn't think the Democrats would be any better or worse than the Republicans. If this is the case, why should he or his supporters care in the slightest what Democrat supporters and Republican haters think?
Besides, if Nader continues to draw votes from one particular side of a two-party system, it might actually motivate that side to realise that the system is quite screwed up, and push for changes to fix it.
I'm not a US citizen and it doesn't bother me a lot what happens except to the extent where the US stamps its foot over the rest of the world, but I find watching things from the outside quite interesting.
I think this will be more likely once the baby boomer population has moved on, and government is inherited by people who've spent more time growing up and living in an information-centric world rather than a paper one. Right now, especially in the UK I'd imagine, there is an over-representation of people in their 60's voting and running a lot of things in society. Many of them have probably learnt only what they needed to to get by as far as electronic media is concerned, and that's the basis they'll use for deciding if something is good or bad.
With respect, I think you're confusing copyright with USA copyright, the latter of which was originally defined in the US constitution as being for the purpose of encouraging progress (in so many words). In other countries it's not so defined. eg. The Statute of Anne, which originally defined copyright in Great Britian, also referred to the "moral rights" of authors and their families, and could be extended to a meaning that authors should have exclusive rights over their creations forever.
Well however abhorrent it might seem when you consider alleged working conditions and underhanded spying tactics from both governments, continuing business relations with a country like China makes sure that there are less incentives for those on either side to want to start attacking and killing the other. Cutting China off from the western world would probably result in another cold war sort of scenario, and I doubt the US (or anyone) wants that.
Why? An Operating System should let a user control their computer, and Vista doesn't even do that half the time if you consider all the places where Microsoft has decided that DRM and faulty counterfeit detection is more important than their users' freedom to actually be in control of their own property. I'd much rather the memory was reserved for applications which I could choose to have installed or removed at my own discretion.
The whole concept of Vista and its design goals is to give corporations control over how people do things, to force people to spend money unnecessarily, and to make people's legal rights meaningless. It's not an Operating System, or at best it's a horrible Operating System.
Absolutely. I could probably tolerate many of the shortcomings of Vista, but as far as I'm concerned, an Operating System should never ever intentionally cripple a user's access to their computer unless that's the intention of the user. As soon as the OS does that, it's no longer an Operating System.
We've been creating a new Vista Enterprise Desktop build at work and I've been trying to work with an experimental image of it, mostly because I have to update some of our internal software. The stupid thing locks up and claims to be counterfeit every time I try to install drivers for the various cryptography devices that we need. It's causing no end of frustration, because we don't want to have to re-activate it every time someone has to install new driver software and I'm now getting paranoid about installing anything just in case it chokes.
Microsoft has finally put its priority of controlling everyone and everything for their own commercial gain above my own right to control my PC, and that's why I'll never install Vista on my home computer unless they disable this DRM and "Genuine Advantage" crap, or at the very least fix it so that it never has false positives, which I personally don't think is possible. Admittedly this is easier for me because I haven't been running Windows at home since Windows 98, but Microsoft's crossed the line if they ever wanted me to come back. All of that putting up with the issues of not as easily being able to open proprietary Microsoft documents and videos and use cheaper proprietary hardware suddenly became well worth it, because at least I know my PC isn't going to randomly leap out at me one day and arbitrarily decide that I'm not worthy of using it for the things I need to do.
I don't think a well designed voting should necessarily have to be 100% accurate. A hand-counting system isn't that accurate, but it can still be trusted as long as there aren't barriers from people being involved in the process to make sure it's being done reliably. What's important is that there's a reliable way to accurately re-count the votes to discover if there's a discrepancy, then deal with that discrepancy (if any) appropriately, without having to be concerned about the integrity of the voting records being compromised in the mean time.
A well designed hand counting system does this, because it's designed in a way that everyone can see and understand what's happening, and such that any stakeholder can assign trusted representatives to observe the process.
This definitely doesn't exclude electronic voting systems, however, but an electronic system should be used primarily to augment the counting process rather than being a final authority. The only plausible reason for an electronic system is to speed up the counting process because the media wants to be able to have it all nicely timed to announce the results on prime time TV.
Storing the votes electronically with no paper records is very bad, and doing this with closed systems that can't be examined is very bad. For either of these cases, most people don't have the qualifications to even understand the concept of how this works, let alone feel comfortable with trusting it. It's also difficult to audit, except for people who are very specifically skilled, and requiring that everyone trust a very small proportion of people is just bad.
If it's really necessary to use electronic counting methods to keep the media and the public happy, though, it's completely possible to do. All that's needed is a system where:
This way there's an electronic record and a paper record of the vote, meaning it's possible to have a speedy recount (even if it's by scanning a digital record on the paper slip), or a hand recount if there's any doubt. The fact that everyone can plainly see how the hand ballots were generated and deposited in the box makes it just as trustworthy as a more basic hand ballot. The only possibility of a discrepancy is if the machine recorded the electronic record inconsistently from the paper record, in which case the printed paper record in a hand recount should be authoritative, because that's the vote that the voter examined and confirmed was what they meant. Any significant doubt should result in a hand recount.
This is most likely true, but a lot of the reason Radiohead's making a lot of money is because they were heavily promoted by a record label in the past, lots of people know about them, Radiohead got massive amounts of free media exposure by doing what they did, and people are flocking to them because of it. Radiohead makes music that a lot of people like, but many other bands make similarly good music without anything like the same amount of exposure, and would make a lot less if they did the same thing than if they were able to get signed by a label and have massive amounts of money poured into promoting them.
Not that I support the music publishing cartel or the way it works, and I also don't think it would be unlikely for a band that hadn't been promoted by record companies to have a similar success. I just haven't personally seen it yet on the same scale as what Radiohead's managed.
Actually from a consumer perspective I don't care even if we don't see this happen for smaller independent bands very often. What matters for me is that the availability of quality music improves over time, that it costs more reasonable amounts, and that the money I pay goes directly to the artists to the extent that good artists can reasonably continue to produce more good music, rather than to publishing agents in the middle who take 95% and use it on marketing to try and convince me to buy more of their crappy music range.
I don't think it's particularly fair either. Copyright, at least in the US (of which I'm not a citizen) was constitutionally designed with the intent of promoting the progress of Science and Useful Arts. I don't see any benefit to any kind of science or "useful art" that's gained out of letting lawyers prevent people from re-publishing their threat letters. The only arguable benefit I can think of is if lawyers could somehow claim that other lawyers might plagiarise their templates for their own CAD letters. As far as I'm concerned, if it's legal meta information, it should unconditionally be public domain, because it's important that information about legal actions taking place can be made public for everyone to see.
Having said this, I'm still not sure it's necessary to re-publish a letter verbatim to get the message across that a lawyer has threatened you and accurately stating what the threat is. Having copyright on something doesn't preclude rights of others such as fair use, and such rights would let one publish the essence of whatever the threat is anyway, including relevant quotes from the original material.
But this is why you're supposed to be careful to avoid screwing things up this seriously. I appreciate that you're trying to take some kind of sympathetic angle here but I don't see the relevance.
There were a variety of things that a company with 2.6 million customers could have done beforehand which would have minimised the impact of something like this happening. The least of these would have been to have had a system for regular reliable backups. Another obvious thing that would have helped (going by what was said in the article) would be to have a more robust procedure for deleting accounts, such as disabling them for a while first so the process can be reversed.
I sympathise a lot with the people on the end of the phones who probably had little control over this. But as a company, it fully deserves to have angry customers, and probably less customers in the future.
I appreciate that you've already stated there are people who do better in an office setting, but I still find it interesting that so many of comments I've read on Slashdot are strongly in favour of telecommuting.
I quite enjoy going to work. It's a 40 minute walk (which is an excuse to go for a reasonable walk a couple of times a day), and being at work puts me in the frame of mind for doing work-related things. Having people around who are also doing work really helps to motivate me. If I'm at home, I usually find it very hard to concentrate on work topics because I'm surrounded by non-work things, and sometimes people who want my attention for non-work things. Home tends to be where I like to relax more, and that's usually the frame of mind I'm in when I'm there.
We do have people who like to telecommute, particularly if they live a long way out of town or have kids or whatever, but I don't think I'd do well to be one of them.
Incidentally the whole iTunes-double-charging thing is absurd. It shouldn't be necessary for a consumer to pay extra to get rights that they're legally supposed to have anyway.
Consumer rights provided that are provided for by copyright law are legal rights, not luxuries that are allowed to be charged for. If it's so easy for consumers to assert these rights with DRM content then the DRM-free content shouldn't be in demand for any legal use, in which case Apple is openly assisting copyright infringement, which amounts to breaking the law.
Presumably Apple is not trying to assist people with copyright infringement, which basically means that Apple is forcing people to pay extra money to for the ability to assert their legal rights. Surely this is also illegal, isn't it?
This is a report to justify a decision already made -- it's not a report to investigate fairly and without bias. Besides the occasional ignorant manager you've already mentioned, I think the more important target for this report will also be staff in organisations where office politics are commonplace. This is exactly the kind of report that's useful in cases where managers and/or IT staff have already made up their minds to stay with Windows/Office for a shallow reason that suits themselves without having considered the organisation, and simply need to find documentation to justify it to whoever queries them, and are in a position to be able to hide or talk down any reports that debunk or claim the opposite.
Perhaps it's because they're already trained in these products and aren't keen to learn new ones, maybe they'd lose their jobs if the company moved away from Microsoft, or perhaps they just like being flown to Microsoft training events and given shiny toys and free alcohol every year. Whatever the reason, there are a lot of people who like using Microsoft because it's Microsoft, and are happy to use whatever flaky means are necessary to justify it. The same is often true for OSS or just about any other technology, to be fair.
I'd be really interested to see if it worked out this way. Many popular actors (perhaps not all) aren't demonstrably better at acting than a vast number of other actors who aren't popular. They bring in lots of money because people recognise them, and are more likely to see a movie because they can see that actor. Sometimes people might watch a movie because of the director, but almost nobody who I know would go to see a movie because of the screenplay writer, or the audio mixing guys. Would the creative people behind some brilliant CGI really end up being treated any differently?
Personally I don't think they would. There are plenty of occasions where the people behind the scenes, responsible for all the creativity, have simply been pulled out and replaced... and people have kept watching because the front of the show has stayed the same. The Simpsons is a great example. Early episodes are very different from later episodes, and the differences coincide a lot with the changes in writers and directors. Most people who I've spoken to like one or the other, but they rarely like both. The change was gradual enough, though, to keep the show around and popular long enough for the viewer base to change without its popularity falling over.
And what backs up this argument is that it's exactly what happens in the oil market. Every few years the media gets hold of someone's declaration that the world's oil reserves will be depleted within X years, which is completely true for as long as the current technology is being used to extract the oil from the easiest places. There's a lot of oil that's known about underground and a lot of places that haven't been well searched, but it's not cost-effective to search for and extract it. As soon as oil becomes more scarce and the price goes up, it becomes more cost effective for oil companies to improve their drilling abilities and start drilling in new places ... and the crisis is averted for another 15-20 years (yet again).
There are other reasons why it may not be a good idea to use too much oil, but running out of it isn't the most serious issue. I don't know a lot about helium sources but if it's true that there's a lot known about in other places, I don't see why this would be different.
I don't live in the US, but my possibly skewed understanding is that the administrations of quite a few school districts have signed agreements with companies (like Microsoft) which state that they're not allowed to do things such as purchase other Operating Systems and competing applications in their schools, unless they forfeit the right to massive discounts and the like from those companies.
Can someone a bit closer to the issue maybe comment on whether this will have much of an effect on getting OLPC laptops distributed around schools in the USA? Or is this part of the reason why Microsoft seems so keen to get Windows working on that hardware?
It actually states the history of where it's come from in one of the linked articles (emphasis added):
So it looks as if it's some kind of mutated version of SimCity Classic which dates back to the C64 version.
This is actually clearly explained in one of the linked articles:
Perhaps you've grown up in a culture of fearing your neighbours, but not everyone does. Perhaps in Lodz, it's a waste of time, money and energy to assume that the local population is conspiring to bring the system down? Are you going to lock up the operator of a random shopping mall because they didn't strip all weapons from shoppers prior to someone going on a shooting rampage? Personally I haven't grown up in a culture of fear, I prefer to trust people in general, and I've found that strategy to be mutually beneficial.
This is a local metropolitan tram system. Any damage that can be caused by manipulating switches on the tracks can already be caused in many other ways (such as leaving rocks on the tracks). People don't usually do it. If they do for some retarded reason, the damage tends to be limited. And I would blame him totally -- he's old enough to know that derailing trams is a bad thing to do.
If this kept happening over and over again, I'd maybe expect the authorities of Lodz to do something about the security of the system. Otherwise there are probably much better things on which they could be spending their time and effort.
Well on my train set, the switches were designed so that trains coming in from either branch would enter the switch in such a way that they'd push the bar in the switch as they came through. I've driven real trams where switches were designed in exactly this way, which seems to make a lot of sense. The only complication is that after the vehicle has passed through, the switch is left pointing into the branch that the vehicle just came from. (A common way of designing them would be to put a spring in the switch, to make sure it'd always direct traffic down the same line, but let traffic come back the other way from either line.
I don't know how the Polish switches worked -- the automatic ones that I'm used to could be controlled by the tram driver through moderating the amount of power being drawn from the overhead at a specific position shortly before reaching the switch. So as a driver, you'd be prepared to either accelerate or drift at that exact location. My guess is that the Polish switches were controlled by remote signals so the driver could use some kind of dedicated control in the tram that'd simply send the signal ahead to a receiver. If the kid's remote happened to send a signal to change the switch when the tram was half-way over it, it'd be easy to get a situation where the back section went in a different direction from the front section. This would explain the derailments quite nicely, as well as the emergency stops (for those drivers who realised quickly enough that something was wrong).