You'd need to build a web of trust, whereby you indicate whose ratings you trust and to what degree. Second-order and higher ratings (made by people who are trusted by the people *you* trust, and so forth) would also contribute to the rating you saw for a given site.
The flaw with anything that depends on a web of trust is bootstrapping. How to build a big enough userbase of people who trust each other in real life?
Actually, it changes Google's mission statement to, "To index the world's information and serve portions of it up to you depending on your culture, locale and in some cases, restrictions imposed by local government."
Google doesn't care about the color of your skin, they care about the language you speak and the laws governing your usage of the Internet. In both cases, they care about these things because it lets them continue to deliver pertinent information. If they run afoul of Chinese government's censorship policies, China will cut off access to their servers plain and simple.
While we're on the subject, let's all take a moment to remind ourselves that race is a cultural construct rather than a biological fact. Consider, for instance, that black natives of the West Indies and black natives of Australia share NO common ancestry going back 100,000 years, yet they are both labeled as being of the "black" race.
Of course, that doesn't keep people from discriminating based on race... it just makes the foolishness and stupidity of their prejudice all the more poignant.
If anyone were out there trying to imply that Firefox has 150,000,000 users *because* of their 150 million downloads, then I might be inclined to agree with you.
(In fact, it's totally within reason that Firefox *does* have that many users -- since most web analytics firms place FF at about 11% market share, and there're in excess of a billion people using the Web on the planet. But I'm not going to make that claim since I haven't done my research.)
So, what does the figure "150 million" represent? Simply and honestly put, this is the number of times someone has gone out of his way to install Firefox because he was unhappy with his built-in browser (MSIE or Safari).
Yes, some of these downloads were existing Firefox fanatics who were reinstalling their OS. Yes, some of these people never installed after downloading. But there are sources of error in the other direction, too: download caches, Firefox-on-CD, corporate deployments and secondary download sources all put a dent in Firefox's download rates.
Of course, nothing is that simple. No neo-con thinks of himself as evil. I'm sure the majority of them genuinely want to do good for our country and our citizens, and a somewhat smaller proportion of them want to do good for the rest of the world.
It's just that they're controlling and arrogant. They think they know what's best for every other American, every other human out there. They want to impose legislation that will ensure we behave "properly" (according to their own code of moral conduct). The neo-con's point of view does not leave room for self-doubt, for moral relativism, for the right of other people to do things the wrong way.
What's worse, a lot of the conservatives I've met are the selfish type. They want what's good for America, but they want it in a way that benefits them personally. The prevailing opinion seems to be that a position of power comes with perks and privileges and the ability to "pull strings."
Sorry if my previous post gave the impression that I'm a Republican apologist. I'm an independent who generally votes Democrat for pragmatic reasons (lesser of two evils).
Picketing someone else's convention is a far cry from introducing a bill on the House or Senate floor! I wasn't aware of that particular instance of misconduct on the part of Democrats, but if they did what you say, then I agree that their acts were illegal.
Do you have a link, so I can learn about the incident you mentioned?
Since the Chinese DNS system will be using Chinese characters for (new) TLDs, I don't think there'll ever be a naming conflict with existing domain names. So this solution is eminently workable, and I don't see why it's the end of the interoperable Internet.
Of course, any "real" Chinese company will need to register BOTH foo.com and foo.(dot-com-character).cn -- just as today, businesses feel compelled to register foo.com, foo.org, foo.net, foo.biz, foo.ws, and so forth. But really, adding a few new TLDs won't harm much.
While we're on the subject -- if you bother to read blackboxvoting's analysis of the voting machine logs, you will see that while there is no "smoking gun" evidence of fraud, there is ample evidence of misconfigured, misused and badly maintained voting machines. Power was cycled in the middle of the election. Times and dates were not set. Poll workers failed to follow the procedure for closing the polls and tallying results locally. And this happened throughout the *entire county* of Palm Beach.
I sincerely believe that Floridians are no more stupid or smart than anyone else in the country. If this kind of human error is happening on a massive scale in every county in Florida that uses electronic machines, then chances are it's happening EVERYWHERE.
Regardless who you vote for, don't you want your elections to be conducted by well-trained poll workers who know what they're doing?
There's a difference between trying to change the law in order to favor yourself, and committing outright fraud.
While both of these acts are shameful and reprehensible, one of them is legal (attempting to change the law) and one of them is illegal (breaking the law).
Let's consider our beloved president, George W. Bush. The man lies to the American public all the time. Part of his job as president is to lie. This was also a part of Clinton's job, and Bush 1's job, and every president before him. The executive branch needs to lie to some segment of the American public in order to have any hope of advancing its agenda.
Do I like the fact that the president is lying to us (about Iraq and numerous other issues)? Of course not! But I accept that he is perfectly within his rights to lie.
However, if the president were to lie UNDER OATH, that would be perjury, which is an impeachable offense. That, in my mind, would be unacceptable Presidential conduct.
Most liberals feel that Bush is an idiot, but that the other components of his political machine are quite intelligent. Some liberals feel that Bush too is intelligent, but either is hampered in public speaking by his mild dyslexia, or portrays himself as a nincompoop purposefully so that people will underestimate him. A very small (but vocal) of "liberals" buy into the idea that the Republican party are morons. Morons don't come to be in control of all branches of government.
The difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth, is that the truth is supported by ample evidence. If the Florida elections officials had nothing to hide, why did a group of concerned citizens need to SUE THEM in order to get access to data that should be available to everyone?
Black Box Voting has presented evidence of election fraud. As a rational individual, you have the choice of (a) showing that their evidence is flawed, or (b) shutting up.
Name-calling and whining are NOT traditional American values. The emotion-driven, irrational whiners in BOTH parties make me sick. People who vote with their hearts and think with their stomachs will run this nation into the ground.
IIRC aerogel has a rigid structure, but it isn't divided into cells or pockets of air. Rather, it consists mostly of empty space (or air), with some structural elements in between.
I would guess that NASA put the aerogel in a chamber and slowly lowered the pressure to near-vacuum, in order to evacuate the air from the aerogel without damaging its structural integrity. Then they packaged it, and come showtime, exposed it to empty space.
We should avoid using the term "reverse racism" to refer to people discriminating against non-minorities! No matter the skin colors involved, racism is still racism plain and simple!
Racism is always unproductive and injurious, no matter who is being racist against whom!
The only true "reverse racism" is acceptance and equal treatment of your fellow human regardless of his skin color, ethnic background or manner of speech.
Yup! And I say that's exactly as it should be. Humans derive meaning from sensory input by detecting patterns. The fact that a discernable pattern exists, implies that the input has lower entropy than it could have.
Start with maximum entropy -- pure randomness. Carve away at the randomness until a pattern emerges, and this is what we describe as "information." This process is the same whether you're ordering the molecules in a blob of clay to form a sculpture, or ordering an inky fluid by applying it to a sheet of paper in strokes that form letters, words and sentences.
So, entropy -- disorder, unpredictability -- is the natural state of things. As time passes, systems emerge that reduce entropy in the information-theoretic sense, even as they increase entropy in the thermodynamic sense.
A quasar that rotates at such-and-such speed emitting regular pulses of RF is one such system. A human composing a symphony is another such system. They are both engaged in the process of turning random information into useful information.
Of course I'm just waxing poetical, playing the favorite game of armchair philosophers everywhere by taking words from the rigorously scientific discipline of information theory and using them inappropriately to form half-baked philosophical notions about the world. But it sure beats doing my homework.
In general, the more compressible a given blob of data is, the less information is actually contained in it.
Let's take the absurd example of 100,000,000 petabytes of 'X' characters. That's a lot of data! But, since it can be represented by a single 'X' character plus a 64-bit repetition count, it's very easily compressible. There's not much information contained in that data.
So, we can conclude that Google is offering to let us store non-information data, i.e. low-entropy information. It's a good thing, too! I've been looking for a place to store my collection of null bytes. (I ran out of space on my bookshelf last year.)
Actually, no. I simply wanted a provocative subject line that would make people read the post, and that's the best I could think of on short notice.:) The subject line hasn't got dilly to do with the comment.
...for charging people $35/hr to fix elementary problems. Until I read about places like Geek Squad who send you a cookie-cutter tech with only limited troubleshooting skills, yet charge $150/hr or more!
Nowawadays my guilt is gone. I can't vouch for other people, but _I_ know _I'm_ a good tech. I don't need to know much about your software or hardware to be of use. 15 years of experience with PCs and good critical thinking skills give me everything I need to solve my customers' problems in less time than the "pros," and usually with better results. Even with my 1 hour minimum, I'm still saving Grandma 300% over what one of these places would charge her, and I'm doing a better job than them to boot.
Realize that you have an immense body of context and experience, which lets you think of replacing an optical drive or repairing a broken Office install as "simple." By the same token, the master mechanic can put your car on a lift in his garage and declare that your engine swap will be a piece of cake -- he's done it dozens of times before! But to you, the engine swap is an almost insurmountable task.
Your skill, and hence your labor, has a high market value. Even at $50/hr, you're selling your labor at a discount! You should be proud of yourself for offering a superior service at a very competitive price.
Cell phones work by handing off your phone call between cells as you, the humble cellular customer, travel across the surface of the Earth.
Occasionally, when the network of cells is congested, or when some technical difficulty prevents your call from being handed off fast enough, your call will get dropped.
As you might expect, the faster you move, the more often your call is handed off. And the more often your call is handed off, the greater the chances of your call getting dropped. Cell phone companies try and compensate for this phenomenon by providing plenty of capacity along the routes of major freeways. Nonetheless, I've noticed that my calls get dropped more often when I'm moving than when I'm stationary.
Now then... if my calls get dropped when I'm doing 80mph in a car, imagine how often my calls will get dropped when I'm doing 500mph in a 747! Especially given that the cells I'm talking to could be 4 or 5 miles straight below me! Even if my phone can maintain 2-way communication with cells, it will need to transmit at full power simply to cover that distance (and punch through the tons of metal that surround me in the aircraft.) At that signal strength, the cell phone very well could interfere with the aircraft's RF instruments.
Cell phone communication simply won't be reliable or safe enough without the use of cells onboard the airplane. Of course, this means that the airline has full control over your communications link to the world. Your cell phone will become just another way to access the fantastically expensive onboard phone service that most airline carriers have provided since the mid 1980s.
I'm relieved that this is the case. The only thing preventing the cabin of a jumbo jet from turning into social hour at the mall food court, is the exhorbitant $1-per-minute surcharge the airline levies on you for the privilege of making calls while in the air!
I guess chipset, CPU type, CPU speed, RAM type, amount of RAM, hard drive size, battery life, video chipset, onboard networking peripherals, screen resolution and and screen size are not hardware specifications, then?
Because -- for a given amount of money, I can buy a laptop with a faster CPU, larger hard drive, better video chipset and better screen resolution than any tablet PC.
The shape of a computer (its form factor) is not very significant. It hardly counts as a hardware specification. About the only difference between a tablet PC and a run-of-the-mill laptop is that the tablet PC has extra engineering work put into it to make everything fit into such a small space.
Have you seen Tablet PC prices? They're through the roof! I can buy a traditional laptop for $1400, but buying something with the SAME EXACT HARDWARE SPECIFICATIONS as a slate-form tablet costs me $2000!
Hardware manufacturers still stubbornly insist on imposing a stiff premium for the sexy new technology, which just MIGHT be one reason it hasn't seen a higher adoption rate.
Now, look at Apple's recent behavior vis a vis pricing. Their prices have been going ever down; I can now buy a bottom-of-the-line eMac for about the same price as a workaday desktop PC.
I predict that Apple's lowered prices will intersect with Tablet PC manufacturers' artificially high margins, with the net result that the tablet Mac will be in the same ballpark, value-wise, as a Tablet PC.
Disclosure: I do not, nor have I ever, owned a Mac.
Your project manager, or build engineer, or whoever is responsible for ensuring that a new build is "legitimate," should have sole possession of the private key used to sign the finished project.
In case of disaster (project manager disappears), you should escrow the private key using a secret-splitting scheme such that 51% or more of your developers can recover it.
Wait... so this guy nulled out your balance on the original Chase card, then sent you a new one with zero balance? And you're complaining why, exactly?
Perhaps you mean that he transferred the balance to the new Chase card which he gave you, both without your permission (and going against his earlier claim that you couldn't transfer balance from another Chase card). In that case, I can understand why you might be flustered.
Not trying to discredit your story or ruin your point... just curious.
Because SFL has a much greater population density that Moose Country?
Because the folks in Moose Country aren't any worse off by the introduction of the scheme (they still have to huddle in the dark), but the folks in SFL get another hour of daylight after work to go and live their lives, as well as saving money on energy costs?
That'd work pretty well, as long as you chose one person's computer to act as the judge, or tiebreaker, or whatever you want to call it.. basically, one client has the last word on what happened when in the game. He sends updates to all the others about his idea of the game's state, and the others reconcile their views with his as best they can.
It wouldn't necessarily be pretty -- witness the frustration of so many SOCOM players -- but it'd be a good first attempt at true multiplayer GTA. I personally would be willing to tolerate any number of miniature errors and inconsistencies in exchange for the chance to play that game online!
Slashdot Mirror
You'd need to build a web of trust, whereby you indicate whose ratings you trust and to what degree. Second-order and higher ratings (made by people who are trusted by the people *you* trust, and so forth) would also contribute to the rating you saw for a given site.
The flaw with anything that depends on a web of trust is bootstrapping. How to build a big enough userbase of people who trust each other in real life?
Actually, it changes Google's mission statement to, "To index the world's information and serve portions of it up to you depending on your culture, locale and in some cases, restrictions imposed by local government."
... it just makes the foolishness and stupidity of their prejudice all the more poignant.
Google doesn't care about the color of your skin, they care about the language you speak and the laws governing your usage of the Internet. In both cases, they care about these things because it lets them continue to deliver pertinent information. If they run afoul of Chinese government's censorship policies, China will cut off access to their servers plain and simple.
While we're on the subject, let's all take a moment to remind ourselves that race is a cultural construct rather than a biological fact. Consider, for instance, that black natives of the West Indies and black natives of Australia share NO common ancestry going back 100,000 years, yet they are both labeled as being of the "black" race.
Of course, that doesn't keep people from discriminating based on race
If anyone were out there trying to imply that Firefox has 150,000,000 users *because* of their 150 million downloads, then I might be inclined to agree with you.
(In fact, it's totally within reason that Firefox *does* have that many users -- since most web analytics firms place FF at about 11% market share, and there're in excess of a billion people using the Web on the planet. But I'm not going to make that claim since I haven't done my research.)
So, what does the figure "150 million" represent? Simply and honestly put, this is the number of times someone has gone out of his way to install Firefox because he was unhappy with his built-in browser (MSIE or Safari).
Yes, some of these downloads were existing Firefox fanatics who were reinstalling their OS. Yes, some of these people never installed after downloading. But there are sources of error in the other direction, too: download caches, Firefox-on-CD, corporate deployments and secondary download sources all put a dent in Firefox's download rates.
So, take this number for what it is and be happy!
That's where you're wrong, pally. They're evil.
Of course, nothing is that simple. No neo-con thinks of himself as evil. I'm sure the majority of them genuinely want to do good for our country and our citizens, and a somewhat smaller proportion of them want to do good for the rest of the world.
It's just that they're controlling and arrogant. They think they know what's best for every other American, every other human out there. They want to impose legislation that will ensure we behave "properly" (according to their own code of moral conduct). The neo-con's point of view does not leave room for self-doubt, for moral relativism, for the right of other people to do things the wrong way.
What's worse, a lot of the conservatives I've met are the selfish type. They want what's good for America, but they want it in a way that benefits them personally. The prevailing opinion seems to be that a position of power comes with perks and privileges and the ability to "pull strings."
Sorry if my previous post gave the impression that I'm a Republican apologist. I'm an independent who generally votes Democrat for pragmatic reasons (lesser of two evils).
Picketing someone else's convention is a far cry from introducing a bill on the House or Senate floor! I wasn't aware of that particular instance of misconduct on the part of Democrats, but if they did what you say, then I agree that their acts were illegal.
Do you have a link, so I can learn about the incident you mentioned?
Since the Chinese DNS system will be using Chinese characters for (new) TLDs, I don't think there'll ever be a naming conflict with existing domain names. So this solution is eminently workable, and I don't see why it's the end of the interoperable Internet.
Of course, any "real" Chinese company will need to register BOTH foo.com and foo.(dot-com-character).cn -- just as today, businesses feel compelled to register foo.com, foo.org, foo.net, foo.biz, foo.ws, and so forth. But really, adding a few new TLDs won't harm much.
While we're on the subject -- if you bother to read blackboxvoting's analysis of the voting machine logs, you will see that while there is no "smoking gun" evidence of fraud, there is ample evidence of misconfigured, misused and badly maintained voting machines. Power was cycled in the middle of the election. Times and dates were not set. Poll workers failed to follow the procedure for closing the polls and tallying results locally. And this happened throughout the *entire county* of Palm Beach.
I sincerely believe that Floridians are no more stupid or smart than anyone else in the country. If this kind of human error is happening on a massive scale in every county in Florida that uses electronic machines, then chances are it's happening EVERYWHERE.
Regardless who you vote for, don't you want your elections to be conducted by well-trained poll workers who know what they're doing?
There's a difference between trying to change the law in order to favor yourself, and committing outright fraud.
While both of these acts are shameful and reprehensible, one of them is legal (attempting to change the law) and one of them is illegal (breaking the law).
Let's consider our beloved president, George W. Bush. The man lies to the American public all the time. Part of his job as president is to lie. This was also a part of Clinton's job, and Bush 1's job, and every president before him. The executive branch needs to lie to some segment of the American public in order to have any hope of advancing its agenda.
Do I like the fact that the president is lying to us (about Iraq and numerous other issues)? Of course not! But I accept that he is perfectly within his rights to lie.
However, if the president were to lie UNDER OATH, that would be perjury, which is an impeachable offense. That, in my mind, would be unacceptable Presidential conduct.
Most liberals feel that Bush is an idiot, but that the other components of his political machine are quite intelligent. Some liberals feel that Bush too is intelligent, but either is hampered in public speaking by his mild dyslexia, or portrays himself as a nincompoop purposefully so that people will underestimate him. A very small (but vocal) of "liberals" buy into the idea that the Republican party are morons. Morons don't come to be in control of all branches of government.
The difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth, is that the truth is supported by ample evidence. If the Florida elections officials had nothing to hide, why did a group of concerned citizens need to SUE THEM in order to get access to data that should be available to everyone?
Black Box Voting has presented evidence of election fraud. As a rational individual, you have the choice of (a) showing that their evidence is flawed, or (b) shutting up.
Name-calling and whining are NOT traditional American values. The emotion-driven, irrational whiners in BOTH parties make me sick. People who vote with their hearts and think with their stomachs will run this nation into the ground.
IIRC aerogel has a rigid structure, but it isn't divided into cells or pockets of air. Rather, it consists mostly of empty space (or air), with some structural elements in between.
I would guess that NASA put the aerogel in a chamber and slowly lowered the pressure to near-vacuum, in order to evacuate the air from the aerogel without damaging its structural integrity. Then they packaged it, and come showtime, exposed it to empty space.
This is just a guess though.
We should avoid using the term "reverse racism" to refer to people discriminating against non-minorities! No matter the skin colors involved, racism is still racism plain and simple!
Racism is always unproductive and injurious, no matter who is being racist against whom!
The only true "reverse racism" is acceptance and equal treatment of your fellow human regardless of his skin color, ethnic background or manner of speech.
Yup! And I say that's exactly as it should be. Humans derive meaning from sensory input by detecting patterns. The fact that a discernable pattern exists, implies that the input has lower entropy than it could have.
Start with maximum entropy -- pure randomness. Carve away at the randomness until a pattern emerges, and this is what we describe as "information." This process is the same whether you're ordering the molecules in a blob of clay to form a sculpture, or ordering an inky fluid by applying it to a sheet of paper in strokes that form letters, words and sentences.
So, entropy -- disorder, unpredictability -- is the natural state of things. As time passes, systems emerge that reduce entropy in the information-theoretic sense, even as they increase entropy in the thermodynamic sense.
A quasar that rotates at such-and-such speed emitting regular pulses of RF is one such system. A human composing a symphony is another such system. They are both engaged in the process of turning random information into useful information.
Of course I'm just waxing poetical, playing the favorite game of armchair philosophers everywhere by taking words from the rigorously scientific discipline of information theory and using them inappropriately to form half-baked philosophical notions about the world. But it sure beats doing my homework.
In general, the more compressible a given blob of data is, the less information is actually contained in it.
Let's take the absurd example of 100,000,000 petabytes of 'X' characters. That's a lot of data! But, since it can be represented by a single 'X' character plus a 64-bit repetition count, it's very easily compressible. There's not much information contained in that data.
So, we can conclude that Google is offering to let us store non-information data, i.e. low-entropy information. It's a good thing, too! I've been looking for a place to store my collection of null bytes. (I ran out of space on my bookshelf last year.)
Next week on Slashdot: hardware stores supporting axe murderers by selling forestry tools!
Actually, no. I simply wanted a provocative subject line that would make people read the post, and that's the best I could think of on short notice. :) The subject line hasn't got dilly to do with the comment.
If Sony insists on delaying ths long, they're having serious trouble.
...for charging people $35/hr to fix elementary problems. Until I read about places like Geek Squad who send you a cookie-cutter tech with only limited troubleshooting skills, yet charge $150/hr or more!
Nowawadays my guilt is gone. I can't vouch for other people, but _I_ know _I'm_ a good tech. I don't need to know much about your software or hardware to be of use. 15 years of experience with PCs and good critical thinking skills give me everything I need to solve my customers' problems in less time than the "pros," and usually with better results. Even with my 1 hour minimum, I'm still saving Grandma 300% over what one of these places would charge her, and I'm doing a better job than them to boot.
Realize that you have an immense body of context and experience, which lets you think of replacing an optical drive or repairing a broken Office install as "simple." By the same token, the master mechanic can put your car on a lift in his garage and declare that your engine swap will be a piece of cake -- he's done it dozens of times before! But to you, the engine swap is an almost insurmountable task.
Your skill, and hence your labor, has a high market value. Even at $50/hr, you're selling your labor at a discount! You should be proud of yourself for offering a superior service at a very competitive price.
Cell phones work by handing off your phone call between cells as you, the humble cellular customer, travel across the surface of the Earth.
... if my calls get dropped when I'm doing 80mph in a car, imagine how often my calls will get dropped when I'm doing 500mph in a 747! Especially given that the cells I'm talking to could be 4 or 5 miles straight below me! Even if my phone can maintain 2-way communication with cells, it will need to transmit at full power simply to cover that distance (and punch through the tons of metal that surround me in the aircraft.) At that signal strength, the cell phone very well could interfere with the aircraft's RF instruments.
Occasionally, when the network of cells is congested, or when some technical difficulty prevents your call from being handed off fast enough, your call will get dropped.
As you might expect, the faster you move, the more often your call is handed off. And the more often your call is handed off, the greater the chances of your call getting dropped. Cell phone companies try and compensate for this phenomenon by providing plenty of capacity along the routes of major freeways. Nonetheless, I've noticed that my calls get dropped more often when I'm moving than when I'm stationary.
Now then
Cell phone communication simply won't be reliable or safe enough without the use of cells onboard the airplane. Of course, this means that the airline has full control over your communications link to the world. Your cell phone will become just another way to access the fantastically expensive onboard phone service that most airline carriers have provided since the mid 1980s.
I'm relieved that this is the case. The only thing preventing the cabin of a jumbo jet from turning into social hour at the mall food court, is the exhorbitant $1-per-minute surcharge the airline levies on you for the privilege of making calls while in the air!
+1 Smartass, baby.
I guess chipset, CPU type, CPU speed, RAM type, amount of RAM, hard drive size, battery life, video chipset, onboard networking peripherals, screen resolution and and screen size are not hardware specifications, then?
Because -- for a given amount of money, I can buy a laptop with a faster CPU, larger hard drive, better video chipset and better screen resolution than any tablet PC.
The shape of a computer (its form factor) is not very significant. It hardly counts as a hardware specification. About the only difference between a tablet PC and a run-of-the-mill laptop is that the tablet PC has extra engineering work put into it to make everything fit into such a small space.
Have you seen Tablet PC prices? They're through the roof! I can buy a traditional laptop for $1400, but buying something with the SAME EXACT HARDWARE SPECIFICATIONS as a slate-form tablet costs me $2000!
Hardware manufacturers still stubbornly insist on imposing a stiff premium for the sexy new technology, which just MIGHT be one reason it hasn't seen a higher adoption rate.
Now, look at Apple's recent behavior vis a vis pricing. Their prices have been going ever down; I can now buy a bottom-of-the-line eMac for about the same price as a workaday desktop PC.
I predict that Apple's lowered prices will intersect with Tablet PC manufacturers' artificially high margins, with the net result that the tablet Mac will be in the same ballpark, value-wise, as a Tablet PC.
Disclosure: I do not, nor have I ever, owned a Mac.
Your project manager, or build engineer, or whoever is responsible for ensuring that a new build is "legitimate," should have sole possession of the private key used to sign the finished project.
In case of disaster (project manager disappears), you should escrow the private key using a secret-splitting scheme such that 51% or more of your developers can recover it.
Wait... so this guy nulled out your balance on the original Chase card, then sent you a new one with zero balance? And you're complaining why, exactly?
Perhaps you mean that he transferred the balance to the new Chase card which he gave you, both without your permission (and going against his earlier claim that you couldn't transfer balance from another Chase card). In that case, I can understand why you might be flustered.
Not trying to discredit your story or ruin your point... just curious.
Because SFL has a much greater population density that Moose Country?
Because the folks in Moose Country aren't any worse off by the introduction of the scheme (they still have to huddle in the dark), but the folks in SFL get another hour of daylight after work to go and live their lives, as well as saving money on energy costs?
That'd work pretty well, as long as you chose one person's computer to act as the judge, or tiebreaker, or whatever you want to call it .. basically, one client has the last word on what happened when in the game. He sends updates to all the others about his idea of the game's state, and the others reconcile their views with his as best they can.
It wouldn't necessarily be pretty -- witness the frustration of so many SOCOM players -- but it'd be a good first attempt at true multiplayer GTA. I personally would be willing to tolerate any number of miniature errors and inconsistencies in exchange for the chance to play that game online!