The thing is, until we know *who* did the hacking it's hard to fault Sony for anything other than their failure to disclose, and even that is tough since they don't seem to quite know what's going on.
No matter how good you are at security, it's always possible someone can compromise your data (see the RSA hack for example). Within an organization there are always people you trust, no matter how much that is 'trust but verify' it's simply impossible to secure everything. People can be bribed, the best security experts in the world can make mistakes, the best security practices can still have holes. Even if you patch every known vulnerability to whatever you're doing, those vulnerabilities and patches are separated by more than 0 time, which is a window of opportunity for an attack. If you have a great security feature, say an RSA token, and the token is hacked, you're kind of boned. In sony's case maybe the relied too much on the console itself to not be hacked, (though you would think something that compromises the 77 million accounts is bigger than just hacked consoles), maybe they let too many people have access to the encrypted files (Bradly Manning only for PS3 accounts?), maybe someone worked very hard to try and extort money from Sony after it found a hole. Hell, maybe the chinese are just trying to screw with them.
Until we know what happened, it's hard to fault Sony here. On the other hand, they're probably not going to be inclined to talk if they were the ones that screwed it up. I'm not sure how long I want to give them to find out, but our era of "I demand the correct information right this second" is not always realistic.
ya how exactly is "the best place to put speed traps" NOT being used to improve traffic safety? The whole damn point is to get people to drive safely and punish people who don't.
I grant you speed traps can be used as a 'revenue generation mechanism' too, (both for insurance companies and for the ticket issuers), but traffic safety and speed enforcement go hand in hand. The best place for revenue generation is where people are speeding the most, which is, on a personally correctable basis the most dangerous places. Speeding is, I would think, one of the most common dangerous driving things we all do (though texting or talking on a cellphone is probably up there, you don't really set up a trap for that which would be any different than a speed trap). Sure there are roads themselves which are unsafe, but that's not a police problem.
http://www.independentmail.com/news/2010/feb/07/dangerous-driving-habits-can-increase-risk-fatal-c/ has a great one line tidbit:
"As in the rest of the nation, most vehicle fatalities in South Carolina and Georgia are attributed to one or more of those three factors: speeding, drunken driving or not wearing a seat belt.
Drivers distracted while using cell phones or text messaging, eating or fidgeting with on-board electronic devices also are a growing concern, according to U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood."
Speed traps can catch: cell phones, texting, not wearing a seat belt and speeding, and drunk driving. Though randomly driving around will probably net better distracted drivers, and targeted placement of checks will catch drunk drivers better. You still want to stop the maximum number of speeders (and people not wearing seat belts.. seriously, who in this day and age doesn't wear a seat belt?), which will be the same place that would ensure maximum revenue generation.
from the sounds of it they don't have a high level explanation to give. There may be cultural things about not explaining how exactly you fucked up that go with it too, but given that we're seeing this quite a bit later than the initial breach it seems like they may still be figuring out just how bad things are.
It depends to some degree how much. Admittedly I'm in ontario canada, not the US so the situations are a bit different. Around here an engineering degree is about 8k/year in tuition + fees, everything else about 7k, except law, medicine, veterinary and certain business programmes (ivey) because they have their own rules. So while yes, a comp sci student, physics student and english lit major pay the same they aren't that much cheaper than engineering. Engineering students do on average more credit hours than everyone else (everyone else would do 5 courses at a time, engineers 6 because the 6th course is their professional training) which justifies the added costs supposedly.
But the thing is, the vast majority of students are on student loans. I'm just guessing that the engineers will be better able to pay off their 84k in debt compared to everyone elses 80, with the possible exception of comp sci. But the net difference isn't that much. (Note I'm assuming 12k/year living expenses + tuition x4 years. Lots of students get by on less living at home, donations from parents, scholarships, and summer employment, I'm just looking at total cost assuming you don't live at home, I'm a grad student and paid so I can supposedly break even about 20k a year, and my tuition is about 7k). Engineers also get swanky co-ops that most other people don't, that pay starting salaries of 20 bucks an hour for 16 months during their programme too, at least where I am.
Now if you're a foreign student you're paying in the 20-22k range for tuition alone since it isn't subsidized. Sure the engineers pay a bit more than everyone else, but again, one extra course. And, if you intend to go home when you're done I see no reason to subsidize your training here.
You don't want to make useful fields so easy to get into that they fill up with incompetent people. Overall I think that hurts both the profession and the people who are pushed through but are incompetent. And it wastes a lot of money. Training engineers is expensive, trying to train 4000 people when only 1000 will make it wastes 3000 peoples time, and wastes 3/4ths of your money paying instructors. Anyone who can do well in a field should be able to afford to get in, but you should have to put enough thought into it that you really think this is worth doing. Or else you end up with thousands of psychology grads for dozens of psychologist jobs.
except that you already do. It's a matter of how much.
I'm in ontario (canada). The actual cost of tuition, about 20k/year, which is what we charge foreign students. Domestic students. 6-7k. The US will have different numbers but in effect it's the same thing. Educating competent people ultimately is good for everyone, because you're actually investing in the future, growing the tax base, and growing the economy, and not everyone competent, even from one child families could afford full tuition rates + living expenses to go to an appropriate school. Appropriate as in one that offers a degree programme you're interested in (I don't know about the US but there are 17 universities in ontario, only about half offer engineering, and comp sci as full degrees, only a couple offer certain native studies etc. Most of them offer business, but aren't very good at it).
Sadly, one of the great challenges for the future is how governments and pension plans around the world are going to pay benefits and services for more and more retirees, with less and less workers, while at the same time clean up the environmental mess caused by more and more people. This is going to become especially apparent if governments have to bail out pension plans which can't keep paying benefits they are contractually obliged to pay. Saying, in effect 'your parents were dumb enough to have 10 kids so you should only earn minimum wage' will significantly trap them in poverty, poorly utilize talent and ultimately be bad for everyone, including you, because your taxes and pension contributions will go up, and the services go down.
we don't know how any of their data was stored, or accessed. That's sort of the problem; Sony isn't talking, which is leading to wild speculation, including yours.
maybe by buying them from nortel some shareholders or bond holders will recoup more 'losses' tax free? Who knows, MS may be envisioning a scenario where the IPv4 networks float around for certain legacy devices long after the rest of us are doing everything IPv6.
Or maybe they just figured having them trapped in limbo doing nothing was definitely bad, and doing something with them was worth 7 million dollars compared to them floating around bankruptcy court for another 3 years, and if they're wrong, it's only 7 million bucks, which on MS's scale is nothing.
sure they would. They're paid by the chinese government to come here and be trained, and are obliged to go home. Unlike the persians (we have a lot of those specifically where I am), indians and arabs, who are, in general, trying to get the hell away from wherever they were. The chinese guys go home, or else. Not all of them of course. But if they got tens of thousands of dollars from the government to come here there are certain strings attached. For a foreigner to get a masters they need to have about 50K canadian before we even let them in (that's for 2 years). PhD (4 years) can oddly be less, because if we guarantee them funding and scholarships and so on so they can more or less survive the Phd with maybe 10 or 20k CDN in the bank. If we can't guarantee them funding, and I don't have time in/. post to justify explaining one particular schools archaic rules on who qualifies for various sources of funding, they'd need about 200k cash in the bank, before they get here.
Besides, why would the chinese guys want to stay here anymore? We can fill our scientist ranks with perfect english speakers from other places, and there are good opportunities back home, they pay a lot less in china, but more than enough to live comfortably. As I say, the ones that are here have their own little expat community, they aren't even trying to become part of society here. They're paying for an education, we give it to them, collect our money and they go home. Seems like a good business deal.
We run foreign student education as a for profit exchange business. That's not a bad thing. That doesn't mean there are enough science jobs here either, but we could easily send half of our students back to their home countries and not hurt ourselves. Imagine if GM exported 50% of all the cars they made to China and India, people would be thrilled. Education isn't much different, except that there isn't a market for a chunk of the graduates we do keep.
What does america have to do with it? This was in new zealand.
Also, the police were called due to reports of truckloads of groceries being removed. So while some people were honest, it appears the dishonest capitalized quickly.
From the article it appears it took less than an hour between someone realizing the store was unlocked an unattended to trying to run off with a pile of free food.
well that and all the chinese scientists we train in the west go home now. And depending on where you are, that can easily be 30-40% of your grad student body.
Where I am we're about 80-85% foreign (out of about 120 grad students in comp sci). Of those, about half are from the PRC, but some are from the ROC too, and I cannot, as a casual observer, tell the difference. Nor do most of the students from the PRC talk to me, since there are enough of them they cluster together.
What we don't have great numbers on is how many people dropped apple for android (or how much more there is to come). I suspect apple is close to peaking with its apple base, there's only so many people who can/will afford apple, and critically techies and developer types are all moving to android. That gives a huge edge to 'the next big thing' software wise not being on Apple.
I'd be very interested to see stats on how much money people are willing to toss away when they switch phones. Not on the phone itself, that is, in many cases a subsidized part of their carrier agreement, and no matter what you have to spend some money on a new phone. I mean how much money on apps are you willing to toss to go somewhere else. If you've spent 1000 bucks on stuff locked into itunes it's pretty hard to pack up and go android, and have to re-buy. On the other hand if you've spent 10 dollars it's not a big deal. Somewhere in between is a psychological loyalty point. Then there's ease of migrating all your data and all that stuff, which is a barrier as well.
So will the chance to get a decent phone from anyone else who doesn't want to exert draconian control on my phone. 3 years ago the iPhone 3g was pretty much the only smartphone worth having in most of the world. Not so much anymore. Now it's a matter of how locked in people are to their itunes account and apps or if they're willing to abandon ship and re-buy.
Except that ubuntu LTS's, for example, are only supported for 5 years. So his point is perfectly valid. If you don't want to migrate to a new version of ubuntu, you're still screwed. Which isn't really any different than relying on MS or anyone else.
MS has released three service packs for XP, each of which had support for 5 years, which is why we're approaching the end here, the last SP was I think 2008.
One can legitimately argue the merits of a free upgrade path or not. But if either the free, or paid upgrade paths don't suit your needs you're pretty much equally screwed.
Much of the article complains about MS intentionally not releasing upgrades for various windows features in older versions (insofar as media player and IE deserve to be called features). I think it just makes the press when they do that. But how much software would really support ubuntu 6.04 LTS (which is still supported until june I believe)? The point of the new software is that it does something new, whether that 'new' is good or bad is another matter entirely, but it's not like we're on Ubuntu 6.04 revision 38960, we've moved onto 10.1, which presumably has features that aren't in 6.04. MS chooses to charge the user for those features, Ubuntu relies on 'professional support' or ubuntu branded goods, for revenue, and might break even this year. Apparently they are close to their 30 million dollar a year break even point. Without ultra rich guy and some speculative investors willing to take a personal hit for us free-loaders ubuntu wouldn't be here today. I guess that's commendable, share the wealth sort of thing, but there's a lot to be said in charging people for the product they actually use, so that you can be sure you can afford to make more of them.
that doesn't make the article any less insightful. The first 4 paragraphs are not practical joke funny, they're irony and sarcasm. The last paragraph is the only traditional 'joke' part of the story, but the rest of it is definitely insightful, as the article itself clearly recognizes. There are lots of comedy shows that use comedy to be insightful about the political process after all.
Ironically the anti-ICBM stance from 6 years ago might have been wrong. Though obviously the success and failure of anti-missile systems is probably classified to varying degrees, it's hard to know if the stance against anti-missile systems was based on wildly out of date (and therefore useless) data, or just overzealous evangelizing, or if it actually is right, and all this money the US, Russia, Chicom and israel are spending on it is being wasted.
Me and my girlfriend have a 175 GB cap with a 50 Mbps connection and we regularly butt heads with the cap. We each use 80-90 GB/month. Though I tend to use more. I've used about 40 GB in 10 days. Pre -download of portal 2. Redownload of Empire total war, those combined put me to 26 GB and it took me about 2 hours. Somewhere in there I bought Magika, I can't remember how big it was though. I still haven't actually accomplished anything useful with my internet and I'm pushing mid 30's of GB, and I still have 20 days left in the month, and that's just me. Then I have any code I'm working on, or more to the point the art assets that go with it, movies, music etc. We're in canada so while netflix is here, it's simply not an option. Though she (my GF) uses a number of sketchy video downloading sites to watch TV and movies 'on demand' that eats up a lot too. I expect to hit a couple of GB for a world of warcraft patch as well.
One of my co-workers (who is sort of half my boss) has his wife and two mostly grown kids at home. He's similar to me in terms of use, movies, games that sort of thing. So are his kids. He's easily pushing 350, 400 a month.
For me the biggest culprits are old (say 1-3 years old) games, that are on sale on the various online retailers. They're still the same size as todays games more or less, but for 5 bucks I can buy a lot more of them than at say, 50 also a year after release all the patches are done which mean games that might be kinda broken on release are actually pretty decent. Either way there's a lot there.
Because it's illegal for them to sell to the US. One is a company that was going to manufacture in italy ( Hospira), the other (Dream Pharma) is a british wholesaler, in both cases supplying drugs for lethal injection is almost certainly illegal. The british made it illegal in november, and in italy it already was. Again, one random company is in no position to argue with their own government (or the government where they intend to do the work). If the law is clear (which, not being being in the british or italian chemicals business I'm not 100% sure on), and says 'no exporting materials that would be used in activities that would be illegal here' then the only option is for the people of the those countries to change the law, or, depending on your perspective I suppose, demand the company comply with the law. I believe they would, in theory, be allowed to export sodium thiopental, or other drugs to hospitals, but they cannot guarantee they won't be resold, and if they can't guarantee that, they can't sell it.
Sort of by your logic and the AC's logic they very nearly were charged for supplying security sensitive material to an oppressive regime.
The thing is, when do india or the emirates or saudi cross over from a legitimate demand for access to that information, into oppressive regime category? Remember not all legal systems are based on english common law, or the notion of warrants as we're used to them in CAN/US/UK/AUS/NZ. That doesn't make them any less robust (in fact there's no particular reason they can't be more robust or fair, the systems are after all very different). Even the US lets it's spy agencies install black rooms in telecom offices to spy on traffic, even though RIM is canadian, we (we canadians that is) can't limit RIM to sell only in places that let all their traffic pass through canada (or pass through securely or whatever) since someone else would enter the business phone business and wipe them out. You comply with the laws of the country where you do business, or you don't do business. That means you have to trade-off reasonable protections for your customers against the legal requirements of the government, at some point you may simply refuse to even try (say north korea), or even Chicom where you could expect any secrets would be stolen by the state. Ultimately any government can change and go crazy, there's only so much you can reasonably do to protect your customers before. For all of the complaining about the power of corporations, governments still write the rules, even if corporations try and help them along.
Notice that MS did a pretty decent job with binary translation from the xbox to the xbox2, and that was much lower priority (in fact it was primarily written by one guy afaik, he gives talks fairly regularly). Damned if I can remember his name at the moment. But that's not all that relevant. Enough money might produce a half decent solution for windows. Also, all that code that's in windows they've had to figure out how to move to ARM, and windows is (for better or worse) a lot more than just a process scheduler and minimalist front end and API.
It's also not clear what they're targeting windows on ARM for. Desktops? Tablets? Phones? Are they going to a unified OS for all of the above? Pretty much every piece of software has requirements, if the goal is a limited subset of those markets they might do fine killing off compatibility with a lot of apps as long as it will do web browsing, office and a few other things, especially new programs compiled for whatever new market they're working on. I wouldn't be surprised if you could boil down 85 or 90% of non gaming computer use to a dozen application suites or so (office, web browsing, pdf reading, some sort of music app, e-mail, and video watching). Most of those apps are updated on a fairly regular basis so recompiling for ARM might not be a big deal, and unless you're going for a full on desktop replacement at full speed you might be able to manage. Computers are sufficiently more powerful in hardware than most applications require that even relatively inefficient implements might manage.
They could just implement a federal sales tax on everything. Right now the issue is that no one wants to pay taxes (who does), so they shop around for the best states to minimize their tax exposure.
That's all fine and good, that's why provinces/(what you would organize as the States) get to set their own taxes. But they need money, the federal government needs money. So however they do it, expect to have to pay taxes. Part of the responsibility of parliament/congress is to eliminate legal tax dodges (it is the responsibility of justice and the treasury/revenue agencies to eliminate illegal tax dodges).
Although us Federal tax revenues are at or near a century low, (~15% of GDP down from normally about 20%), and you're running about a 10% of GDP deficit, so no new taxes, but just the economy recovering might eliminate the need for some tax increasing measures.
Any classification system, whether its writing, movies or games is inherently limiting. There have been constant attempts, even by big companies to blend genres. The 'action -rpg' which has more or less replaced the pure RPG of years ago. All of the first person shooter technology folding into action/rpg games. Then there's the whole notions of strategy, grand strategy and so on. Even older games like X-com blended economics, tactical games and a strategic overview (sort of a crappy RTS) with city building. Star wars galaxies glues space shooter onto whatever you want to call the ground combat side of things. Those are more combined genres, it is both A and B just in different places. But something like dawn of war is half RPG half RTS at the same time (Warcraft III did this as well, and to a lesser extent WC2).
None of these classifications in gaming are particularly firm. One could also envision different (presumably better) classification systems. But changing how you define games comes with a huge consumer cost. I think you see more genre innovation in the casual space because 95% of them can fail. If you do that with call of duty, you take a big risk. Consumers have come to expect a particular type of experience, that's why they bought your product, don't mislead them into something else. And creating new IP is both hard and risky.
I would argue mathematical analysis is the only way to to provide insight about the world. Everything else is philosophy. If you can replace any philosophical theory with scientifically verifiable one, which is by definition based on math, you have obsoleted the philosophical theory with a better one. If you can't replace a philosophical theory (for example one related to politics or law and justice) with science then you are still better with a mathematical analysis of the problem which may be economic in nature rather than scientific.
Anyone can do logical reasoning and philosophical theories. Backing them up with mathematical analysis is what differentiate applyable, good theories from from the bad ones.
It's not the logic of solving problems you should be teaching. Anyone can do that, easily, with or without math. We call them arts grads. It's the quantitative analysis that's important. Ok so you aren't using the quadratic formula in your love life. It's the wrong tool. A statistical analysis of activities engaged in, money invested, the probability of loss due to breakup etc. are all very legitimate mathematical tools in to assess the risk/rewards involved in any relationship. Moreover you need to be confident in the validity of the tools you use to solve a problem. Take something simple, like choosing the specific shade of blue in the google logo, or the background on your corporate letterhead. Now, you can use a 'logical' approach, and feel good about appropriate contrast or the 'tone' the colour conveys. Or you can use survey people (how many is significant?), quantize the various options (how do you quantize them?), and view it as an optimization problem to pick the the optimal colour for the problem you are solving. The latter is the correct (if somewhat expensive) way to choose, the former is what you have arts majors for. If you are a 5 person company, the arts major approach is all fine and good. If you are nokia, google or IBM you damn well better have some actual analysis behind your choice of what font to use, what colour to use etc. because even subtle variations effect perception of your brand, and when you're a company worth 10's of billions of dollars, fractional percent shifts in the value of your brand equate to millions of dollars.
Most of what we learned in math, that seemed basically useless to everyone who wasn't going to be an engineer or a physicist (I was originally a physicist), ended up 15 years later hitting me in the head as a game developer. Quantitatively defining fun, defining the world all of those things are both mathy, and require a lot formal proofs of either correctness or at least derivations of whatever it is you're trying to solve. Computers simulate the world through math, and mathematical approximation, so by extension any field which requires computer models necessarily relies on math to build those tools accurately. The better you are at math, the better the models will be. If you want them to be fast, have good cache hit ratios, minimize memory use, etc. then you can come to a computer scientist. I note that I'm really a developer, not a designer. The designers come up with all these ideas on what would be fun, and I have to find a way to analytically assess them. Is this UI placement better or worse than that one? Is this area too hard or too easy? Solving those problems regularly requires derivations and proofs, and the developers have to come up with them themselves (they aren't just in a book somewhere I can look up), well ok, some tools are in books. But most of them are situational at best.
Do I use the quadratic formula? Not so much at the moment. Do I use its proof and derivation on a regular basis, absolutely. I'm working with a hex grid pathfinding algorithm, and I work with some curvalinear coordinate systems (not all of which are your standard spherical or cylindrical) to attach visual effects to various things. Not far off from where I thought I'd be 15 years ago (hex grids were all the rage in the 90's wargaming scene).
Applying numbers to real problems, either for simulator or for actual analysis, whether its' physical simulation or finance or the like, developing and understanding what your toolkit is, how to use it, and where it will fail is the point of teaching math. If your goal is a 'logical approach to problem solving' you're either on a course for people who won't ever be capable of using math to solve problems, or you're doing it wrong. How do you quantize it, how do you analyse it, how do you prove that your answer is optimal, or if it is intractably hard to optimize it, how efficient is it, and what approximations did you take to get here?
Actually I said it's not that sony is blameless. Perhaps the double negative was confusing. They shouldn't have included the other OS option. It was doomed to failure. They did, and they should be stuck with it, but putting it in in the first place was colossally stupid.
from the sounds of it you're multiboxing. not botting. Those are two different things. Multiboxing is running multiple copies of the game at once, and using tools to manage each of those windows at once. Botting is using a computer program to automate play with you not there (typically for plat/gold farming). As you say, the latter is nearly universally frowned upon. Multiboxing is another matter entirely.
hacking and supporting PS3 linux are not the same thing. Sony should still officially support linux - even if that is expensive and hard. I'm sympathetic that a failed attempt to save customers money (and make them money) is going to end up costing them a pile of cash, but that's beside the point. Allowing hacking, which gives unfettered access to the memory of the system and into the inner workings of their PSN and running game memory is a whole other ball game. Even hacking to restore PS3 functionality is vigilanty justice at best, with all of the consequences that brings.
Nor do I think piracy is a major issue, even from this hack. it is a potential vague future threat. But in the immediate present the goal is to cut off cheating (and some of the serious security problems that come with unfettered access to the PSN via a PS3 homebrew).
Honestly I think that's the weakness of the cell. A graphing calculator you can understand all the parts. I spent nearly a year and a half on cell development, which was summarily tossed when we got GPU computing and CUDA. Even with official documentation written by a bunch of PhD's at sony it was quite a challenge to re-envision problems into the cell way. And then the GPU computing way comes along, which is very similar, but substantially better. And unless you're a game developer (which I sort of am now) trying to do anything on the Cell would be like trying to rewrite flash in Ada for the fun of it.
My assertion of homebrew being worthless is less philosophical and more practical. By the time you've managed anything useful on a jailbroken ps3, and, importantly, anything you couldn't do vastly better other places it will be long dead.
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The thing is, until we know *who* did the hacking it's hard to fault Sony for anything other than their failure to disclose, and even that is tough since they don't seem to quite know what's going on.
No matter how good you are at security, it's always possible someone can compromise your data (see the RSA hack for example). Within an organization there are always people you trust, no matter how much that is 'trust but verify' it's simply impossible to secure everything. People can be bribed, the best security experts in the world can make mistakes, the best security practices can still have holes. Even if you patch every known vulnerability to whatever you're doing, those vulnerabilities and patches are separated by more than 0 time, which is a window of opportunity for an attack. If you have a great security feature, say an RSA token, and the token is hacked, you're kind of boned. In sony's case maybe the relied too much on the console itself to not be hacked, (though you would think something that compromises the 77 million accounts is bigger than just hacked consoles), maybe they let too many people have access to the encrypted files (Bradly Manning only for PS3 accounts?), maybe someone worked very hard to try and extort money from Sony after it found a hole. Hell, maybe the chinese are just trying to screw with them.
Until we know what happened, it's hard to fault Sony here. On the other hand, they're probably not going to be inclined to talk if they were the ones that screwed it up. I'm not sure how long I want to give them to find out, but our era of "I demand the correct information right this second" is not always realistic.
ya how exactly is "the best place to put speed traps" NOT being used to improve traffic safety? The whole damn point is to get people to drive safely and punish people who don't.
I grant you speed traps can be used as a 'revenue generation mechanism' too, (both for insurance companies and for the ticket issuers), but traffic safety and speed enforcement go hand in hand. The best place for revenue generation is where people are speeding the most, which is, on a personally correctable basis the most dangerous places. Speeding is, I would think, one of the most common dangerous driving things we all do (though texting or talking on a cellphone is probably up there, you don't really set up a trap for that which would be any different than a speed trap). Sure there are roads themselves which are unsafe, but that's not a police problem.
http://www.independentmail.com/news/2010/feb/07/dangerous-driving-habits-can-increase-risk-fatal-c/ has a great one line tidbit:
"As in the rest of the nation, most vehicle fatalities in South Carolina and Georgia are attributed to one or more of those three factors: speeding, drunken driving or not wearing a seat belt.
Drivers distracted while using cell phones or text messaging, eating or fidgeting with on-board electronic devices also are a growing concern, according to U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood."
Speed traps can catch: cell phones, texting, not wearing a seat belt and speeding, and drunk driving. Though randomly driving around will probably net better distracted drivers, and targeted placement of checks will catch drunk drivers better. You still want to stop the maximum number of speeders (and people not wearing seat belts.. seriously, who in this day and age doesn't wear a seat belt?), which will be the same place that would ensure maximum revenue generation.
from the sounds of it they don't have a high level explanation to give. There may be cultural things about not explaining how exactly you fucked up that go with it too, but given that we're seeing this quite a bit later than the initial breach it seems like they may still be figuring out just how bad things are.
It depends to some degree how much. Admittedly I'm in ontario canada, not the US so the situations are a bit different. Around here an engineering degree is about 8k/year in tuition + fees, everything else about 7k, except law, medicine, veterinary and certain business programmes (ivey) because they have their own rules. So while yes, a comp sci student, physics student and english lit major pay the same they aren't that much cheaper than engineering. Engineering students do on average more credit hours than everyone else (everyone else would do 5 courses at a time, engineers 6 because the 6th course is their professional training) which justifies the added costs supposedly.
But the thing is, the vast majority of students are on student loans. I'm just guessing that the engineers will be better able to pay off their 84k in debt compared to everyone elses 80, with the possible exception of comp sci. But the net difference isn't that much. (Note I'm assuming 12k/year living expenses + tuition x4 years. Lots of students get by on less living at home, donations from parents, scholarships, and summer employment, I'm just looking at total cost assuming you don't live at home, I'm a grad student and paid so I can supposedly break even about 20k a year, and my tuition is about 7k). Engineers also get swanky co-ops that most other people don't, that pay starting salaries of 20 bucks an hour for 16 months during their programme too, at least where I am.
Now if you're a foreign student you're paying in the 20-22k range for tuition alone since it isn't subsidized. Sure the engineers pay a bit more than everyone else, but again, one extra course. And, if you intend to go home when you're done I see no reason to subsidize your training here.
You don't want to make useful fields so easy to get into that they fill up with incompetent people. Overall I think that hurts both the profession and the people who are pushed through but are incompetent. And it wastes a lot of money. Training engineers is expensive, trying to train 4000 people when only 1000 will make it wastes 3000 peoples time, and wastes 3/4ths of your money paying instructors. Anyone who can do well in a field should be able to afford to get in, but you should have to put enough thought into it that you really think this is worth doing. Or else you end up with thousands of psychology grads for dozens of psychologist jobs.
except that you already do. It's a matter of how much.
I'm in ontario (canada). The actual cost of tuition, about 20k/year, which is what we charge foreign students. Domestic students. 6-7k. The US will have different numbers but in effect it's the same thing. Educating competent people ultimately is good for everyone, because you're actually investing in the future, growing the tax base, and growing the economy, and not everyone competent, even from one child families could afford full tuition rates + living expenses to go to an appropriate school. Appropriate as in one that offers a degree programme you're interested in (I don't know about the US but there are 17 universities in ontario, only about half offer engineering, and comp sci as full degrees, only a couple offer certain native studies etc. Most of them offer business, but aren't very good at it).
Sadly, one of the great challenges for the future is how governments and pension plans around the world are going to pay benefits and services for more and more retirees, with less and less workers, while at the same time clean up the environmental mess caused by more and more people. This is going to become especially apparent if governments have to bail out pension plans which can't keep paying benefits they are contractually obliged to pay. Saying, in effect 'your parents were dumb enough to have 10 kids so you should only earn minimum wage' will significantly trap them in poverty, poorly utilize talent and ultimately be bad for everyone, including you, because your taxes and pension contributions will go up, and the services go down.
we don't know how any of their data was stored, or accessed. That's sort of the problem; Sony isn't talking, which is leading to wild speculation, including yours.
At least the update with the official statement from sony has some content. Not technical content particularly, but at least content.
maybe by buying them from nortel some shareholders or bond holders will recoup more 'losses' tax free? Who knows, MS may be envisioning a scenario where the IPv4 networks float around for certain legacy devices long after the rest of us are doing everything IPv6.
Or maybe they just figured having them trapped in limbo doing nothing was definitely bad, and doing something with them was worth 7 million dollars compared to them floating around bankruptcy court for another 3 years, and if they're wrong, it's only 7 million bucks, which on MS's scale is nothing.
sure they would. They're paid by the chinese government to come here and be trained, and are obliged to go home. Unlike the persians (we have a lot of those specifically where I am), indians and arabs, who are, in general, trying to get the hell away from wherever they were. The chinese guys go home, or else. Not all of them of course. But if they got tens of thousands of dollars from the government to come here there are certain strings attached. For a foreigner to get a masters they need to have about 50K canadian before we even let them in (that's for 2 years). PhD (4 years) can oddly be less, because if we guarantee them funding and scholarships and so on so they can more or less survive the Phd with maybe 10 or 20k CDN in the bank. If we can't guarantee them funding, and I don't have time in /. post to justify explaining one particular schools archaic rules on who qualifies for various sources of funding, they'd need about 200k cash in the bank, before they get here.
Besides, why would the chinese guys want to stay here anymore? We can fill our scientist ranks with perfect english speakers from other places, and there are good opportunities back home, they pay a lot less in china, but more than enough to live comfortably. As I say, the ones that are here have their own little expat community, they aren't even trying to become part of society here. They're paying for an education, we give it to them, collect our money and they go home. Seems like a good business deal.
We run foreign student education as a for profit exchange business. That's not a bad thing. That doesn't mean there are enough science jobs here either, but we could easily send half of our students back to their home countries and not hurt ourselves. Imagine if GM exported 50% of all the cars they made to China and India, people would be thrilled. Education isn't much different, except that there isn't a market for a chunk of the graduates we do keep.
What does america have to do with it? This was in new zealand.
Also, the police were called due to reports of truckloads of groceries being removed. So while some people were honest, it appears the dishonest capitalized quickly.
From the article it appears it took less than an hour between someone realizing the store was unlocked an unattended to trying to run off with a pile of free food.
well that and all the chinese scientists we train in the west go home now. And depending on where you are, that can easily be 30-40% of your grad student body.
Where I am we're about 80-85% foreign (out of about 120 grad students in comp sci). Of those, about half are from the PRC, but some are from the ROC too, and I cannot, as a casual observer, tell the difference. Nor do most of the students from the PRC talk to me, since there are enough of them they cluster together.
What we don't have great numbers on is how many people dropped apple for android (or how much more there is to come). I suspect apple is close to peaking with its apple base, there's only so many people who can/will afford apple, and critically techies and developer types are all moving to android. That gives a huge edge to 'the next big thing' software wise not being on Apple.
I'd be very interested to see stats on how much money people are willing to toss away when they switch phones. Not on the phone itself, that is, in many cases a subsidized part of their carrier agreement, and no matter what you have to spend some money on a new phone. I mean how much money on apps are you willing to toss to go somewhere else. If you've spent 1000 bucks on stuff locked into itunes it's pretty hard to pack up and go android, and have to re-buy. On the other hand if you've spent 10 dollars it's not a big deal. Somewhere in between is a psychological loyalty point. Then there's ease of migrating all your data and all that stuff, which is a barrier as well.
So will the chance to get a decent phone from anyone else who doesn't want to exert draconian control on my phone. 3 years ago the iPhone 3g was pretty much the only smartphone worth having in most of the world. Not so much anymore. Now it's a matter of how locked in people are to their itunes account and apps or if they're willing to abandon ship and re-buy.
Except that ubuntu LTS's, for example, are only supported for 5 years. So his point is perfectly valid. If you don't want to migrate to a new version of ubuntu, you're still screwed. Which isn't really any different than relying on MS or anyone else.
MS has released three service packs for XP, each of which had support for 5 years, which is why we're approaching the end here, the last SP was I think 2008.
One can legitimately argue the merits of a free upgrade path or not. But if either the free, or paid upgrade paths don't suit your needs you're pretty much equally screwed.
Much of the article complains about MS intentionally not releasing upgrades for various windows features in older versions (insofar as media player and IE deserve to be called features). I think it just makes the press when they do that. But how much software would really support ubuntu 6.04 LTS (which is still supported until june I believe)? The point of the new software is that it does something new, whether that 'new' is good or bad is another matter entirely, but it's not like we're on Ubuntu 6.04 revision 38960, we've moved onto 10.1, which presumably has features that aren't in 6.04. MS chooses to charge the user for those features, Ubuntu relies on 'professional support' or ubuntu branded goods, for revenue, and might break even this year. Apparently they are close to their 30 million dollar a year break even point. Without ultra rich guy and some speculative investors willing to take a personal hit for us free-loaders ubuntu wouldn't be here today. I guess that's commendable, share the wealth sort of thing, but there's a lot to be said in charging people for the product they actually use, so that you can be sure you can afford to make more of them.
that doesn't make the article any less insightful. The first 4 paragraphs are not practical joke funny, they're irony and sarcasm. The last paragraph is the only traditional 'joke' part of the story, but the rest of it is definitely insightful, as the article itself clearly recognizes. There are lots of comedy shows that use comedy to be insightful about the political process after all.
Ironically the anti-ICBM stance from 6 years ago might have been wrong. Though obviously the success and failure of anti-missile systems is probably classified to varying degrees, it's hard to know if the stance against anti-missile systems was based on wildly out of date (and therefore useless) data, or just overzealous evangelizing, or if it actually is right, and all this money the US, Russia, Chicom and israel are spending on it is being wasted.
Me and my girlfriend have a 175 GB cap with a 50 Mbps connection and we regularly butt heads with the cap. We each use 80-90 GB/month. Though I tend to use more. I've used about 40 GB in 10 days. Pre -download of portal 2. Redownload of Empire total war, those combined put me to 26 GB and it took me about 2 hours. Somewhere in there I bought Magika, I can't remember how big it was though. I still haven't actually accomplished anything useful with my internet and I'm pushing mid 30's of GB, and I still have 20 days left in the month, and that's just me. Then I have any code I'm working on, or more to the point the art assets that go with it, movies, music etc. We're in canada so while netflix is here, it's simply not an option. Though she (my GF) uses a number of sketchy video downloading sites to watch TV and movies 'on demand' that eats up a lot too. I expect to hit a couple of GB for a world of warcraft patch as well.
One of my co-workers (who is sort of half my boss) has his wife and two mostly grown kids at home. He's similar to me in terms of use, movies, games that sort of thing. So are his kids. He's easily pushing 350, 400 a month.
For me the biggest culprits are old (say 1-3 years old) games, that are on sale on the various online retailers. They're still the same size as todays games more or less, but for 5 bucks I can buy a lot more of them than at say, 50 also a year after release all the patches are done which mean games that might be kinda broken on release are actually pretty decent. Either way there's a lot there.
Because it's illegal for them to sell to the US. One is a company that was going to manufacture in italy ( Hospira), the other (Dream Pharma) is a british wholesaler, in both cases supplying drugs for lethal injection is almost certainly illegal. The british made it illegal in november, and in italy it already was. Again, one random company is in no position to argue with their own government (or the government where they intend to do the work). If the law is clear (which, not being being in the british or italian chemicals business I'm not 100% sure on), and says 'no exporting materials that would be used in activities that would be illegal here' then the only option is for the people of the those countries to change the law, or, depending on your perspective I suppose, demand the company comply with the law. I believe they would, in theory, be allowed to export sodium thiopental, or other drugs to hospitals, but they cannot guarantee they won't be resold, and if they can't guarantee that, they can't sell it.
Sort of by your logic and the AC's logic they very nearly were charged for supplying security sensitive material to an oppressive regime.
The thing is, when do india or the emirates or saudi cross over from a legitimate demand for access to that information, into oppressive regime category? Remember not all legal systems are based on english common law, or the notion of warrants as we're used to them in CAN/US/UK/AUS/NZ. That doesn't make them any less robust (in fact there's no particular reason they can't be more robust or fair, the systems are after all very different). Even the US lets it's spy agencies install black rooms in telecom offices to spy on traffic, even though RIM is canadian, we (we canadians that is) can't limit RIM to sell only in places that let all their traffic pass through canada (or pass through securely or whatever) since someone else would enter the business phone business and wipe them out. You comply with the laws of the country where you do business, or you don't do business. That means you have to trade-off reasonable protections for your customers against the legal requirements of the government, at some point you may simply refuse to even try (say north korea), or even Chicom where you could expect any secrets would be stolen by the state. Ultimately any government can change and go crazy, there's only so much you can reasonably do to protect your customers before. For all of the complaining about the power of corporations, governments still write the rules, even if corporations try and help them along.
Notice that MS did a pretty decent job with binary translation from the xbox to the xbox2, and that was much lower priority (in fact it was primarily written by one guy afaik, he gives talks fairly regularly). Damned if I can remember his name at the moment. But that's not all that relevant. Enough money might produce a half decent solution for windows. Also, all that code that's in windows they've had to figure out how to move to ARM, and windows is (for better or worse) a lot more than just a process scheduler and minimalist front end and API.
It's also not clear what they're targeting windows on ARM for. Desktops? Tablets? Phones? Are they going to a unified OS for all of the above? Pretty much every piece of software has requirements, if the goal is a limited subset of those markets they might do fine killing off compatibility with a lot of apps as long as it will do web browsing, office and a few other things, especially new programs compiled for whatever new market they're working on. I wouldn't be surprised if you could boil down 85 or 90% of non gaming computer use to a dozen application suites or so (office, web browsing, pdf reading, some sort of music app, e-mail, and video watching). Most of those apps are updated on a fairly regular basis so recompiling for ARM might not be a big deal, and unless you're going for a full on desktop replacement at full speed you might be able to manage. Computers are sufficiently more powerful in hardware than most applications require that even relatively inefficient implements might manage.
They could just implement a federal sales tax on everything. Right now the issue is that no one wants to pay taxes (who does), so they shop around for the best states to minimize their tax exposure.
That's all fine and good, that's why provinces/(what you would organize as the States) get to set their own taxes. But they need money, the federal government needs money. So however they do it, expect to have to pay taxes. Part of the responsibility of parliament/congress is to eliminate legal tax dodges (it is the responsibility of justice and the treasury/revenue agencies to eliminate illegal tax dodges).
Although us Federal tax revenues are at or near a century low, (~15% of GDP down from normally about 20%), and you're running about a 10% of GDP deficit, so no new taxes, but just the economy recovering might eliminate the need for some tax increasing measures.
Any classification system, whether its writing, movies or games is inherently limiting. There have been constant attempts, even by big companies to blend genres. The 'action -rpg' which has more or less replaced the pure RPG of years ago. All of the first person shooter technology folding into action/rpg games. Then there's the whole notions of strategy, grand strategy and so on. Even older games like X-com blended economics, tactical games and a strategic overview (sort of a crappy RTS) with city building. Star wars galaxies glues space shooter onto whatever you want to call the ground combat side of things. Those are more combined genres, it is both A and B just in different places. But something like dawn of war is half RPG half RTS at the same time (Warcraft III did this as well, and to a lesser extent WC2).
None of these classifications in gaming are particularly firm. One could also envision different (presumably better) classification systems. But changing how you define games comes with a huge consumer cost. I think you see more genre innovation in the casual space because 95% of them can fail. If you do that with call of duty, you take a big risk. Consumers have come to expect a particular type of experience, that's why they bought your product, don't mislead them into something else. And creating new IP is both hard and risky.
I would argue mathematical analysis is the only way to to provide insight about the world. Everything else is philosophy. If you can replace any philosophical theory with scientifically verifiable one, which is by definition based on math, you have obsoleted the philosophical theory with a better one. If you can't replace a philosophical theory (for example one related to politics or law and justice) with science then you are still better with a mathematical analysis of the problem which may be economic in nature rather than scientific.
Anyone can do logical reasoning and philosophical theories. Backing them up with mathematical analysis is what differentiate applyable, good theories from from the bad ones.
It's not the logic of solving problems you should be teaching. Anyone can do that, easily, with or without math. We call them arts grads. It's the quantitative analysis that's important. Ok so you aren't using the quadratic formula in your love life. It's the wrong tool. A statistical analysis of activities engaged in, money invested, the probability of loss due to breakup etc. are all very legitimate mathematical tools in to assess the risk/rewards involved in any relationship. Moreover you need to be confident in the validity of the tools you use to solve a problem. Take something simple, like choosing the specific shade of blue in the google logo, or the background on your corporate letterhead. Now, you can use a 'logical' approach, and feel good about appropriate contrast or the 'tone' the colour conveys. Or you can use survey people (how many is significant?), quantize the various options (how do you quantize them?), and view it as an optimization problem to pick the the optimal colour for the problem you are solving. The latter is the correct (if somewhat expensive) way to choose, the former is what you have arts majors for. If you are a 5 person company, the arts major approach is all fine and good. If you are nokia, google or IBM you damn well better have some actual analysis behind your choice of what font to use, what colour to use etc. because even subtle variations effect perception of your brand, and when you're a company worth 10's of billions of dollars, fractional percent shifts in the value of your brand equate to millions of dollars.
Most of what we learned in math, that seemed basically useless to everyone who wasn't going to be an engineer or a physicist (I was originally a physicist), ended up 15 years later hitting me in the head as a game developer. Quantitatively defining fun, defining the world all of those things are both mathy, and require a lot formal proofs of either correctness or at least derivations of whatever it is you're trying to solve. Computers simulate the world through math, and mathematical approximation, so by extension any field which requires computer models necessarily relies on math to build those tools accurately. The better you are at math, the better the models will be. If you want them to be fast, have good cache hit ratios, minimize memory use, etc. then you can come to a computer scientist. I note that I'm really a developer, not a designer. The designers come up with all these ideas on what would be fun, and I have to find a way to analytically assess them. Is this UI placement better or worse than that one? Is this area too hard or too easy? Solving those problems regularly requires derivations and proofs, and the developers have to come up with them themselves (they aren't just in a book somewhere I can look up), well ok, some tools are in books. But most of them are situational at best.
Do I use the quadratic formula? Not so much at the moment. Do I use its proof and derivation on a regular basis, absolutely. I'm working with a hex grid pathfinding algorithm, and I work with some curvalinear coordinate systems (not all of which are your standard spherical or cylindrical) to attach visual effects to various things. Not far off from where I thought I'd be 15 years ago (hex grids were all the rage in the 90's wargaming scene).
Applying numbers to real problems, either for simulator or for actual analysis, whether its' physical simulation or finance or the like, developing and understanding what your toolkit is, how to use it, and where it will fail is the point of teaching math. If your goal is a 'logical approach to problem solving' you're either on a course for people who won't ever be capable of using math to solve problems, or you're doing it wrong. How do you quantize it, how do you analyse it, how do you prove that your answer is optimal, or if it is intractably hard to optimize it, how efficient is it, and what approximations did you take to get here?
Actually I said it's not that sony is blameless. Perhaps the double negative was confusing. They shouldn't have included the other OS option. It was doomed to failure. They did, and they should be stuck with it, but putting it in in the first place was colossally stupid.
from the sounds of it you're multiboxing. not botting. Those are two different things. Multiboxing is running multiple copies of the game at once, and using tools to manage each of those windows at once. Botting is using a computer program to automate play with you not there (typically for plat/gold farming). As you say, the latter is nearly universally frowned upon. Multiboxing is another matter entirely.
hacking and supporting PS3 linux are not the same thing. Sony should still officially support linux - even if that is expensive and hard. I'm sympathetic that a failed attempt to save customers money (and make them money) is going to end up costing them a pile of cash, but that's beside the point. Allowing hacking, which gives unfettered access to the memory of the system and into the inner workings of their PSN and running game memory is a whole other ball game. Even hacking to restore PS3 functionality is vigilanty justice at best, with all of the consequences that brings.
yes. and they patch fairly regularly to fix it.
Nor do I think piracy is a major issue, even from this hack. it is a potential vague future threat. But in the immediate present the goal is to cut off cheating (and some of the serious security problems that come with unfettered access to the PSN via a PS3 homebrew).
Honestly I think that's the weakness of the cell. A graphing calculator you can understand all the parts. I spent nearly a year and a half on cell development, which was summarily tossed when we got GPU computing and CUDA. Even with official documentation written by a bunch of PhD's at sony it was quite a challenge to re-envision problems into the cell way. And then the GPU computing way comes along, which is very similar, but substantially better. And unless you're a game developer (which I sort of am now) trying to do anything on the Cell would be like trying to rewrite flash in Ada for the fun of it.
My assertion of homebrew being worthless is less philosophical and more practical. By the time you've managed anything useful on a jailbroken ps3, and, importantly, anything you couldn't do vastly better other places it will be long dead.