Anything good in America was imported along with immigrants.
That's a somewhat unreasonable complaint. Apart from a tiny percentage of Native Americans they are all descendants of immigrants. What choice did they have but import what they knew tasted good? It belongs to them just as much as it belongs to their compatriots who did not emigrate. In any case regardless who invented it: there is no shortage of excellent food in the US.
It's entirely fair to blame them for what they did to beer though. There were plenty of German immigrants who knew how to brew it, if they hadn't destroyed their businesses via the prohibition, they wouldn't have to drink Bud Lite today.
British food may be terrible, but their cakes rock. They know how to bake - well unless it comes to bread, not sure what happened there... British-Indian food is good, too - don't know what you are complaining about there. I'd say your average Indian restaurant is miles ahead of an average Chinese or Thai restaurant. (Now if you get the food *in* China, or *in* Thailand - that's a different matter.)
They really didn't have to gamble everything on a single platform. Other smartphone vendors manage to support multiple platforms - if HTC and Samsung can make Windows Phones alongside their Android offerings, why couldn't Nokia do that?
Don't forget: even if Windows were to become successful as a mobile platform - they would still have to share the success of that platform with HTC and Samsung and everybody else who currently makes or in the future wants to make a Windows phone. Unlike Nokia, MS has not tied itself to just one partner, and neither have the other smartphone vendors. Only Nokia is dependent on a single platform which they don't control
Apart from that: many companies would prefer to hear complaints rather than customers just no longer buying their stuff. Because if you know what your customers dislike you can do something to fix it. Not all companies operate like that, but quite a few do.
Well then make sure you are not going to give him any money. If you feel you just *have* to watch it, then at least pirate it. In this case that's the only moral thing to do (apart from not watching it at all). If you do end up giving him money, well then you deserve what you get.
Pointing out facts seems to be a perfectly reasonable way to influence the law. Preventing it to be bend out of shape by fantasies is also influencing it. Just in a reasonable way.
If we want to live in a society which respects the rule of law, then the law also protects assholes, and taking that protection away from them takes it away from everybody.
Sorry, correct title is "15 Million Merits" - here is a clip which demonstrates how the system would work. (To give some context - he doesn't want to watch how the girl he loves works as a porn star, but he doesn't have sufficient funds to skip the show...)
How such a system could look like has been presented in Charlie Brookers "Black Mirror - 15 Million Credits". I think that ought to count as prior art. I'm still in favor of the patent though - having ideas like that patented at least makes them more expensive to implement.
But when someone makes a threat based on certain characteristics of a person, such as race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, they are disgracing the very foundation of this country,
Fine, but that country's foundation is regularly disgraced, and that disgracing is part of mainstream culture. Even more fundamental: allowing that disgracing is part of the foundation as well.
What you are saying is "discrimination is wrong, but if you do it, you shouldn't be treated any worse for having done so."
I think - and probably GP, too - that a man beating someone up is wrong. If the victim is chosen because the drunk attacker looks for someone to beat up, or because he belongs to another race - the attacker should face punishment. The motivation for the attack is hatred in both cases - random hatred on the first guy, racial hatred on the second guy. Justice is served by giving them both the same punishment.
You stop short of giving your belief any teeth, any hope of implementation.
I disagree with that, too. Discrimination is fought by punishing the attack. The guy getting beaten up because of his skin color receives protection - by the attacker receiving equal treatment under the law. That hasn't always been the case, historically - making sure it is now, *is* fighting discrimination. So is arguing and convincing others that discrimination is wrong. Dropping one ideal - Justice - in favor of another one - Equality - is counter productive. There is no way a slightly higher punishment would deter a racist who is determined to commit a crime which already which would already receive a high punishment.
It's an attempt to shortcut convincing people that their ideas are wrong, by legislating random sanctions. It's transparent it's unconvincing and it's unjust - and because of that it's fodder for racist demagogues. It's hard to make their job easier than that: by actually handing them an argument that is true.
A man who hits someone at a bar because he's wearing a skirt is far, far more likely to do it again.
If that's actually the case: repeat offenders usually get harsher punishments. Justice is served by actually punishing the person who re-offends, not by punishing the person who has statistically a higher chance to re-offend.
Depends. Let's assume the article is right about the 40 hour week. So the union enforces that, productivity actually rises and the advantage from outsourcing decreases.
Of course, business decisions aren't always made in a rational manner. Otherwise the disadvantages of China (supplier lock-in, copying of your products) and India (very high employee turnover - you are constantly training new peope for other companies) would be more realistically evaluated.
Ok, so you don't vote for evil. Scenario: candidate A is incompetent and anti-democratic, candidate B is corrupt and incompetent. You don't vote and others like you don't vote because both candidates are evil: result candidate A is coming in. He abolishes free press, puts severe restrictions on free speech. Four years later candidate C (competent, democratic and not corrupt) wants to run against A - he doesn't have even have a chance anymore because A controls the press and has systematically silenced all opponents.
That's basically what happened to Russia with Putin. Good strategy for the US, is it?
I'll just copy this from his Wikipedia page: He has described contraception as "a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be," and said in 2003 that he favors having laws against polygamy, adultery, sodomy, and other actions "antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family".
So basically yes: if you vote for Santorum you'll get a much worse supreme court.
If you don't vote for the lesser evil you'll get the bigger evil, though. (You want a Santorum supreme court?) And if you can't even be bothered to vote, you sure as hell won't fight back.
Yahoo will not destroy Facebook. They wouldn't do that even if their patents would be found to be valid - instead they would extort some money from Facebook. They may not be the sharpest knifes in the drawer, but they aren't completely stupid either - destroying Facebook doesn't generate income. Chances are this wouldn't affect the users in the least. What does a Facebook user care where the advertising money is paid to, and who owns how many shares in the company?
I also wouldn't affect Yahoo much, because they'd still be a company which doesn't earn money and has no vision of the future. It would just delay the inevitable for a bit.
Japan has a huge coast line, it's an ideal location for wind parks. Germany is investing heavily into that, but that means (among other things) to build HVDC transmission lines to reach the coast. Japan doesn't even need to do that. For reference, here is a report from the Royal Corps of Engineering about the costs of various power sources: Costs_Report. Wind is actually quite affordable despite the standby costs (taken into consideration by the report). Electric cars and demand shaping (e.g. with smart metering) could help bringing that down further.
Extreme circumstances are normal in the pacific ring of fire, and just like Germany, Japan has no place to store the spent nuclear fuel. Neither country can afford to lose a chunk of land like the region around Fukushima - they are densely populated and the land is highly developed and valuable.
That doesn't mean that nuclear power doesn't make sense anywhere, but Japan is the wrong place for it.
There is something which I hope could be added to Android. Basically a modification to the screen lock which works in conjunction with a Bluetooth device - as soon as the phone is out of reach of the device the screen lock would kick in - you could use any Bluetooth device, e.g. a headset. There is code implementing this available for Ubuntu, it should be possible to port this to Android.
Going one step further it would be nice to have a dedicated piece of hardware which authenticates using cryptographic means - a little token which would clip on your key ring or could be kept in your pocket. To prevent someone from sniffing the Bluetooth communication. Also the relevant apps for NFC and other financial transactions could be enhanced so that they would need to get a key from that token.
An additional interesting feature would be to issue an alarm as soon as the communication to the token (or headset or whatever) was broken. So if you forget your phone it would alert you automatically, and if someone tries to steal it and runs away with it, the sound would draw attention to the person holding it.
I played around with app inventor - it's fun and let's you create an app quickly. Then you hit a wall though - you can't copy and paste similar structures, you can't have multiple apps screens, the sound objects have severe limitations etc. There are quite a few bugs as well.
In principle it would be a good tool to teach someone programming, but in it's current form it will become a source of frustration sooner or later because you will not be able to progress beyond a certain point. Maybe MIT will develop it into something better - perhaps add a way to export to Java, too. Right now I would recommend going the Eclipse route, though.
Well I don't know how that guy's tools worked, I was assuming T's setup would automatically change to another set of authentication data as soon as U was trying to connect. That's based on nothing but the description of coaxthief "if you have the time let the program run over night to sniff out as many macs as it can but this is not required" - but why bother gathering a large number of MACs if you don't want to use that in order to avoid collisions? Otherwise, each time U would try to connect T would have to manually switch to new authentication data.
I did a quick check for an old version of the site. At $99 you would expect to get something that works reasonably smooth, even if you are just stealing internet access.
Well, from the description it appears the guy was selling modified cable modems to sniff data on the coax line and enabling the user to change MAC addresses etc. This would seem to indicate that the device would operate with several configuration sets - maybe switching those on the fly depending whether they were already in use. This way the users' modems would be able to replicate the access data of other users.
That could be prevented by using encryption for exchanging login data, but it's pretty hard to detect: You can't easily tell the difference between unauthorized access of user B with user A's login data, and user A who just happens to use the internet a lot. Also you wouldn't notice a few users doing that in one particular segment, the guys customers could be distributed all over the US:
Actually, the bookmark syncing between your desktop(s) and mobile devices is a great browser feature. Firefox navigation on Android is way superior to the stock browser, too. The only thing currently missing is Flash - it was scheduled to happen in Q1 this year. If they manage to do that, I'll use Firefox exclusively on my Android phone.
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Anything good in America was imported along with immigrants.
That's a somewhat unreasonable complaint. Apart from a tiny percentage of Native Americans they are all descendants of immigrants. What choice did they have but import what they knew tasted good? It belongs to them just as much as it belongs to their compatriots who did not emigrate. In any case regardless who invented it: there is no shortage of excellent food in the US.
It's entirely fair to blame them for what they did to beer though. There were plenty of German immigrants who knew how to brew it, if they hadn't destroyed their businesses via the prohibition, they wouldn't have to drink Bud Lite today.
British food may be terrible, but their cakes rock. They know how to bake - well unless it comes to bread, not sure what happened there... British-Indian food is good, too - don't know what you are complaining about there. I'd say your average Indian restaurant is miles ahead of an average Chinese or Thai restaurant. (Now if you get the food *in* China, or *in* Thailand - that's a different matter.)
They really didn't have to gamble everything on a single platform. Other smartphone vendors manage to support multiple platforms - if HTC and Samsung can make Windows Phones alongside their Android offerings, why couldn't Nokia do that?
Don't forget: even if Windows were to become successful as a mobile platform - they would still have to share the success of that platform with HTC and Samsung and everybody else who currently makes or in the future wants to make a Windows phone. Unlike Nokia, MS has not tied itself to just one partner, and neither have the other smartphone vendors. Only Nokia is dependent on a single platform which they don't control
Apart from that: many companies would prefer to hear complaints rather than customers just no longer buying their stuff. Because if you know what your customers dislike you can do something to fix it. Not all companies operate like that, but quite a few do.
Well then make sure you are not going to give him any money. If you feel you just *have* to watch it, then at least pirate it. In this case that's the only moral thing to do (apart from not watching it at all). If you do end up giving him money, well then you deserve what you get.
Isn't that problem solved by the bumblebee project?
Pointing out facts seems to be a perfectly reasonable way to influence the law. Preventing it to be bend out of shape by fantasies is also influencing it. Just in a reasonable way.
If we want to live in a society which respects the rule of law, then the law also protects assholes, and taking that protection away from them takes it away from everybody.
Sorry, correct title is "15 Million Merits" - here is a clip which demonstrates how the system would work. (To give some context - he doesn't want to watch how the girl he loves works as a porn star, but he doesn't have sufficient funds to skip the show...)
How such a system could look like has been presented in Charlie Brookers "Black Mirror - 15 Million Credits". I think that ought to count as prior art. I'm still in favor of the patent though - having ideas like that patented at least makes them more expensive to implement.
But when someone makes a threat based on certain characteristics of a person, such as race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, they are disgracing the very foundation of this country,
Fine, but that country's foundation is regularly disgraced, and that disgracing is part of mainstream culture. Even more fundamental: allowing that disgracing is part of the foundation as well.
What you are saying is "discrimination is wrong, but if you do it, you shouldn't be treated any worse for having done so."
I think - and probably GP, too - that a man beating someone up is wrong. If the victim is chosen because the drunk attacker looks for someone to beat up, or because he belongs to another race - the attacker should face punishment. The motivation for the attack is hatred in both cases - random hatred on the first guy, racial hatred on the second guy. Justice is served by giving them both the same punishment.
You stop short of giving your belief any teeth, any hope of implementation.
I disagree with that, too. Discrimination is fought by punishing the attack. The guy getting beaten up because of his skin color receives protection - by the attacker receiving equal treatment under the law. That hasn't always been the case, historically - making sure it is now, *is* fighting discrimination. So is arguing and convincing others that discrimination is wrong. Dropping one ideal - Justice - in favor of another one - Equality - is counter productive. There is no way a slightly higher punishment would deter a racist who is determined to commit a crime which already which would already receive a high punishment.
It's an attempt to shortcut convincing people that their ideas are wrong, by legislating random sanctions. It's transparent it's unconvincing and it's unjust - and because of that it's fodder for racist demagogues. It's hard to make their job easier than that: by actually handing them an argument that is true.
A man who hits someone at a bar because he's wearing a skirt is far, far more likely to do it again.
If that's actually the case: repeat offenders usually get harsher punishments. Justice is served by actually punishing the person who re-offends, not by punishing the person who has statistically a higher chance to re-offend.
Depends. Let's assume the article is right about the 40 hour week. So the union enforces that, productivity actually rises and the advantage from outsourcing decreases.
Of course, business decisions aren't always made in a rational manner. Otherwise the disadvantages of China (supplier lock-in, copying of your products) and India (very high employee turnover - you are constantly training new peope for other companies) would be more realistically evaluated.
Right. Example where that worked, please?
Ok, so you don't vote for evil. Scenario: candidate A is incompetent and anti-democratic, candidate B is corrupt and incompetent. You don't vote and others like you don't vote because both candidates are evil: result candidate A is coming in. He abolishes free press, puts severe restrictions on free speech. Four years later candidate C (competent, democratic and not corrupt) wants to run against A - he doesn't have even have a chance anymore because A controls the press and has systematically silenced all opponents.
That's basically what happened to Russia with Putin. Good strategy for the US, is it?
I'll just copy this from his Wikipedia page: He has described contraception as "a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be," and said in 2003 that he favors having laws against polygamy, adultery, sodomy, and other actions "antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family".
So basically yes: if you vote for Santorum you'll get a much worse supreme court.
If you don't vote for the lesser evil you'll get the bigger evil, though. (You want a Santorum supreme court?) And if you can't even be bothered to vote, you sure as hell won't fight back.
Yahoo will not destroy Facebook. They wouldn't do that even if their patents would be found to be valid - instead they would extort some money from Facebook. They may not be the sharpest knifes in the drawer, but they aren't completely stupid either - destroying Facebook doesn't generate income. Chances are this wouldn't affect the users in the least. What does a Facebook user care where the advertising money is paid to, and who owns how many shares in the company?
I also wouldn't affect Yahoo much, because they'd still be a company which doesn't earn money and has no vision of the future. It would just delay the inevitable for a bit.
Japan has a huge coast line, it's an ideal location for wind parks. Germany is investing heavily into that, but that means (among other things) to build HVDC transmission lines to reach the coast. Japan doesn't even need to do that. For reference, here is a report from the Royal Corps of Engineering about the costs of various power sources: Costs_Report. Wind is actually quite affordable despite the standby costs (taken into consideration by the report). Electric cars and demand shaping (e.g. with smart metering) could help bringing that down further.
Extreme circumstances are normal in the pacific ring of fire, and just like Germany, Japan has no place to store the spent nuclear fuel. Neither country can afford to lose a chunk of land like the region around Fukushima - they are densely populated and the land is highly developed and valuable.
That doesn't mean that nuclear power doesn't make sense anywhere, but Japan is the wrong place for it.
There is something which I hope could be added to Android. Basically a modification to the screen lock which works in conjunction with a Bluetooth device - as soon as the phone is out of reach of the device the screen lock would kick in - you could use any Bluetooth device, e.g. a headset. There is code implementing this available for Ubuntu, it should be possible to port this to Android.
Going one step further it would be nice to have a dedicated piece of hardware which authenticates using cryptographic means - a little token which would clip on your key ring or could be kept in your pocket. To prevent someone from sniffing the Bluetooth communication. Also the relevant apps for NFC and other financial transactions could be enhanced so that they would need to get a key from that token.
An additional interesting feature would be to issue an alarm as soon as the communication to the token (or headset or whatever) was broken. So if you forget your phone it would alert you automatically, and if someone tries to steal it and runs away with it, the sound would draw attention to the person holding it.
There seems to have been some breakthrough regarding hydrogen tanks recently. BMW had stopped their development, but they've restarted it, too.
Sorry, I don't have a cite but I'm in automotive and got this through the grapevine. Could be because of this research.
I played around with app inventor - it's fun and let's you create an app quickly. Then you hit a wall though - you can't copy and paste similar structures, you can't have multiple apps screens, the sound objects have severe limitations etc. There are quite a few bugs as well.
In principle it would be a good tool to teach someone programming, but in it's current form it will become a source of frustration sooner or later because you will not be able to progress beyond a certain point. Maybe MIT will develop it into something better - perhaps add a way to export to Java, too. Right now I would recommend going the Eclipse route, though.
Well I don't know how that guy's tools worked, I was assuming T's setup would automatically change to another set of authentication data as soon as U was trying to connect. That's based on nothing but the description of coaxthief "if you have the time let the program run over night to sniff out as many macs as it can but this is not required" - but why bother gathering a large number of MACs if you don't want to use that in order to avoid collisions? Otherwise, each time U would try to connect T would have to manually switch to new authentication data.
I did a quick check for an old version of the site. At $99 you would expect to get something that works reasonably smooth, even if you are just stealing internet access.
Well, from the description it appears the guy was selling modified cable modems to sniff data on the coax line and enabling the user to change MAC addresses etc. This would seem to indicate that the device would operate with several configuration sets - maybe switching those on the fly depending whether they were already in use. This way the users' modems would be able to replicate the access data of other users.
That could be prevented by using encryption for exchanging login data, but it's pretty hard to detect: You can't easily tell the difference between unauthorized access of user B with user A's login data, and user A who just happens to use the internet a lot. Also you wouldn't notice a few users doing that in one particular segment, the guys customers could be distributed all over the US:
Purchasing is not a likely problem, laptops are cheap. He probably just doesn't want to carry it.
Actually, the bookmark syncing between your desktop(s) and mobile devices is a great browser feature. Firefox navigation on Android is way superior to the stock browser, too. The only thing currently missing is Flash - it was scheduled to happen in Q1 this year. If they manage to do that, I'll use Firefox exclusively on my Android phone.