Indeed. I think most of the tech community has a love / hate relationship with MS; however, I also believe that Windows 8 is exceeding the previous known levels of hate for a product not yet released. Though I do not know Bill Gates, I imagine that he left very clear 'instructions' with Ballmer not to screw with the crown jewels - Windows / Office. Also, not to piss off their developer base.
This has been an ongoing problem with Ballmer. He hasn't earned the tech community's trust, because he hasn't proven that he thinks independently / analytically, like most programmers, and his predecessor. Techs are lead, not ruled; and he appears to be making that fatal error. What more, vision requires creating / dominating markets that don't even exist yet, and which no Wall St. analyst predicted. Appearing as an also-ran in the tablet market is not instilling confidence in a lot of developers.
Hmm. I believe the median salary for programmers in San Francisco was $150k last I checked...I will have to look into it.
You have to keep in mind, however, that I did specify 'the better paid' programmers, and that the sheer number of millionaire / billionaire programmers out there will skew the average. It might actually be easier to find someone being paid a few million than $300K...
"To me, the things you imagine seem naive fantasies." -> And I imagine that had you lived a few centuries ago, you would have said the same of the Founding Fathers.
Why live the life of a sycophant, sucking up to the powers that enslave you and your families? Do you love your fetters that much? The gods hate slavery as much as the enslaved; name one family involved in this peculiar institution who hasn't paid triple for its misbegotten actions.
Residents of New York City who wish to obtain a pistol license must apply through the New York Police Department License Bureau at One Police Plaza in lower Manhattan.[14] The choice of licenses are: Unrestricted Concealed Carry License (for personal self defense, generally considered off-limits to an average citizen), Restricted Business Carry License, Restricted Target License and Restricted Premises-only License.[14] NYC Unrestricted Concealed Carry Licenses are valid throughout the rest of the state. Security Guards and business people who regularly carry valuables may be issued a Restricted Business Carry License which is valid only while conducting the business specifically as it was described, in great detail, on the application for the license. NYC target or premises-only licenses are the licenses issued to average citizens who cannot show a need for self defense greater than any another average citizen. They are clearly marked: RESTRICTED - NOT FOR CARRY and require the licensee to obtain special permission from the NYPD License Bureau to leave the city with the handgun. Most licenses issued in New York City are for on-premises possession only, for self-defense within the home or business. Transporting the handgun (via a locked-box) to and from a target range must be done according to a strictly limited schedule pre-approved by the NYPD Licensing Bureau. NYC target licenses allow carrying to and from the range within a "locked-box" at any time at the discretion of the licensee, but prohibit the possession of the licensed handgun in a loaded condition within the home, thereby prohibiting use for self-defense within the home or business. Applicants for, and holders of, a NYC target license must be members of an NYPD License Bureau-approved target range within NYC at the time of application for the license. Traveling through New York City with a license issued from another jurisdiction within New York State must be done carefully (locked box, in vehicle's trunk, no unnecessary stops).[6][7][14]
"The government is entirely composed of perfect beings that would only use the backdoor against actual criminals." -> Thank you.
I find it odd that people can interact with government officials day and day out for years, and forget that they're human beings. No human being should be invested with the kinds of powers they're after.
Why not use a smartphone? Get a Mini-HDMI to HDMI cable, as well as a bluetooth mouse and keyboard. Use the built-in wifi connector, and use a 'Remote Desktop' client to connect to a machine with more power.
Sure, it limits your options to hotels with LCD screens and WiFi Hotspots, but that shouldn't be too much of a burden.
Indeed. That was the first red flag that caught my eye -> "ex-Navy Seal would be nice if I were expecting the offices to be physically attacked, but I don't know how well they'd hold up against various intelligence people questioning their 'loyalty' to their own..."
Indeed. It's like none of them get the idea that paranoid users are paranoid, and keeping out 99.99% of all various intruders, but letting in the 0.01% via a mandated backdoor is the same, mentally speaking, as letting in 100% of all various intruders. Having a backdoor means the solution is inherently insecure, and requires trusting someone which, let's be honest, you don't know. ("Dude, it's totally cool. Your files are totally secure, except that because of a recent law, we have to create a master key that unlocks all the files, at once, and yes, if this key were ever compromised / stolen for any reason, all of our users would have their proverbial asses hanging out the window onto oncoming traffic, but yeah, come on, what are the chances that'd ever happen? Why wouldn't you want to use an almost-secure solution?").
Not everyone using these services is a spy, thief, hacker, cracker, mentally ill, or otherwise questionable person trying to hide something. Sometimes they're just people who like the idea of living quiet lives, and would like a secure / protected e-mail service to actually live up to its name. But there are some eccentric people in positions of power which don't like that idea -> they can't sleep at night until they know for sure that there isn't a bogeyman living under your bed!
Indeed. Of course, it's a 'Release Preview', so perhaps they will pull a rabbit out of a hat by release time, and give us a better reason to upgrade to Windows 8 than because they stopped certifying drivers for Windows 7.
My guess is that the developers are being starved for good / passionate ideas, so they're scraping the bottom of the barrel. You know how things are when you read the same sentence over and over again, until it loses its meaning? And then you keep reading it, and playing around with the words in your mouth, stressing syllables and thinking about alternate meanings for the various words? That's what they're doing here. They haven't bridged the gap from the current paradigm to a superior evolution, so they are going back and reinventing things, trying to see if they missed anything. Lacking a leader with a strong vision in this area, they naturally tune into anyone who looks like they have the remotest idea of something slightly better. As such, they've been taking their cues from Apple, which despite not being the same company, appears to be the most dominant or 'alpha male' in the UI paradigm area.
I think it's kind of strange, but then, perhaps schools are really pushing creative lobotomies these days. Conforming with the group / hierarchy is more important than dreaming of something better that will probably have you treated like an outsider. It's not an adventure with lots of fun / rewards / learning something new, it's a job. That sort of thing.
Nonsense. They didn't do it properly in one direction (it got better, but still needs some work), and now they are doing it completely wrong in a different direction.
Instead of leveraging the GPU to do all sorts of 3D window stuff, they just used it for offloading some work from the CPU. Flip3D is their sole innovation there, and I despise it -> it's harder to use than alt+tab, slower, and it looks horrible. It could have been fricking awesome, but no, they butter-boobed it. Now they're throwing it all away; they're giving up their greatest advantage over invasions from other OSs in the desktop / laptop market, and chasing the lowest common denominator.
Even John Carmack is getting pissed over the state of 3D today, and is taking things into his own hands. Can't wait for Apple to announce that they've gone full 3D (not just compositing) for their next OS X release, just so I can see the look on Ballmer's face when he realizes he handed them the desktop market (with all his chasing of the tablet market, and an inability to appreciate what he already had, all because he wanted to be an 'also-ran').
Haha, no. If what I understand about the current mentality of MS is correct, Windows 9 will suffer from 'The Wesley.' The UI designers, who desperately love their Metro interface, will remain unconvinced that it sucks balls, and instead will opt to make it more annoying and omnipresent in Windows 9.
Wat? What the hell kind of GPU are you running that you could even remotely consider this an issue? My own machine runs games comfortably, while a second screen plays movies.
*facepalms* They're stripping away functionality, and you consider that an improvement? If you hate transparency so much in Windows 7, you can just untick the checkbox that enables it.
Removing it, on the other hand, is a sign that the code base behind this thing is in dangerous territory.
And I, on the other hand, have been getting back into the groove of running Slackware, as I consider the pain, suffering, and insanity of running that thing to be less than what I see with Windows 8.
I'll probably just continue to run Windows 7 with the addition of cross-builds on Slack, just in case things continue down their current path.
Wonderous. Then we can have a face off with their data mining engine against mine. If I win, then they will henceforth refer to me as 'the Buddha's Nipples,' and be forced to run OS/2 Warp on all of their machines, minus the various patches / service packs that were released after its shipping date. They also have to shutdown the drone / mech programs, and must spend agency resources filing frivolous lawsuits against themselves, in which the charges are violations of various enshrined freedoms.
If they win, I'll publicly acknowledge that they have someone in their employ that is much more intelligent than I give them credit, and stop taking pot-shots at them for making a mockery of the civil rights that they're supposed to be protecting. This part is open to some negotiation, but must be agreed upon mutually (duress free), and will be enforced by the impartial observers.
The rules, which will be agreed upon mutually by both parties before they are ratified (duress free and all that jazz), will include, but are not limited to: 1.) this is a challenge based off of merit, and will be judged as such by impartial observers, 2.) as this is a challenge of merit, there is to be no funny business with one party cracking another party's machines (or social engineering, etc.) to lift the code base, nor the planting of trojans, worms, or virii, etc. (remotely dialing into another party's code repository, and purposefully altering their code to mess with their results is expressly forbidden), 3.) there is no be no black-listing, grey-listing, or any kind of listing, or the equivalent thereof (again, an impartial observer will ensure this is respected, with dire consequences to the party which transgresses this rule) neither during, nor following the challenge (none of this double jeopardy style stuff, where if I somehow manage to trump them, they decide to add me to the no-fly list to get back at me, nor black vans / monitoring of communications, etc.), 4.) the majority of the code used by either party must be written by said party (no outsourcing major components), 5.) all laws which prohibit or interfere with this challenge (reverse-engineering, encryption / decryption, etc.) and their penalties are hereby suspended (I prefer not to be slapped with a reverse-engineering lawsuit should the challenge require some reverse-engineering). There are not to be so much as a rumor that one party is acting in revenge, or to subvert the other party through legal trickey, during this challenge.
The target will be mutually agreed upon, and will be chosen both for its difficulty and novel-ness (to ensure that it's something new, and hasn't been attempted before, as well as to ensure that it does constitute a challenge worthy of spending some time on it). Licensing of either party's code following the challenge is not compulsory, nor is revealing any details of its inner workings (none of this "Hey, your data miner works better than ours, so give it to us (we pay or may not pay you for it), or people with guns / badges will escort you to Gitmo until you feel compelled, by your 'selfless nature' as well as your time spent at the Atlantic's version of the Hanoi Hilton, to cough it up). Multiple submissions are allowed, and the submissions will be in the form of an XML document. Only the impartial observer will know the correct answer / solution to the target, and will signal if / when the challenge has started / ended, as well as who the winner is. If the challenge results in a draw, a new, more difficult target will be chosen. If neither party succeeds in the challenge, a new target may be mutually agreed upon. If more than three challenges result in either draws, or no winners, the future challenges may be suspended by either party.
Once again, I must stress that there is to be no funny business. No background checks, no harassing a party's coworkers / associates / family, no psychological warfare / profiling, freezing of bank accounts, prank phone calls, wiretapping, etc. The actual names of those involved, on the behal
Indeed. No one is cheering the fall of Nokia. Most of us wish they could get their sh*t together, and go back to making excellent, nearly indestructible phones.
Do you really think the US military would fire on its own people, within its own country's borders? If so little as 500,000 people rose up with arms to depose the US government, I'd doubt the military would become involved. Remember, this is to depose a government which has violated (in this hypothetical scenario) it's own supreme set of laws, which the military swears to uphold before it considers any orders from its leaders, be it Generals / Admirals or Commanders-in Chief. Like it or not, someone in that 500,000 will be a blood relation to those in the military; and as hard-edged as a General / Admiral might be, they have a soft spot for firing on their own sons / daughters / wives / cousins / nephews / nieces / uncles / aunts; giving an order to attack those people, or to defend with lethal force, would destroy them. General William would have to explain at the next family gathering why he ordered the deaths of his brother's kids while providing support for those who violated the laws he swore to uphold when he joined the service. He be vilified, and his family would cut themselves off from him. Chances are he'd end up taking his own life.
"The only recourse you have is the same as any country, persuade the military to turn against the government, or recruit a foreign military to join your side and train and equip your troops (which is how the American war of Independence was won)." -> Or, as in the American Revolution, you just wait until those in power fire on a large crowd of unarmed civilians, then fan the flames of hatred. One of our founding fathers did that with the Boston Massacre. Which is a major point here -> it won't be the military that fires on the civilians, it will be the police, using military weapons and training. How do I know this? Because the number of recorded incidents of police misconduct is on the rise. There was an incident about a week ago, in which a police officer struck a Justice; it happened in New York, I believe...here we are. A Queens Supreme Court Justice, Thomas Raffaele. Let me restate, that's a Supreme Court Justice being assaulted by a police officer. Why? Because the police officers involved were torturing a suspect while purposefully riling up a crowd; the Justice in question wasn't wearing his judge's robes, but a t-shirt and jeans, and he looked like a soft target that the officer could intimidate in his ill-fated attempt to demonstrate his authority to the crowd. He thought the target was the weakest looking person there, and apparently had no clue that he was assaulting a judge! Go on, defend his actions. I want to hear how this judge, who is described as an easy-going guy, deserved an officer charging him, and attempting to crush his wind pipe. Tell me how these kinds of people are safeguarding our liberties, and how we don't need a powerful check against these kinds of behaviors! Or are you going to say that this was a one time incident? You know what, you're probably right. It will probably never be repeated again, as judges everywhere will begin wearing their robes while out of the courtroom, just to ensure that the police know not to attack them. It will be cold comfort for those of us who do not own a set of black robes, but what can we do when we're so weak? Beg the police not to assault and batter suspects already in their custody? Take out a newspaper ad asking them to be kinder? Perhaps some more sensitivity training? LMFAO.
Here's some more of the article, for those who are too lazy to click the link:
The judge said that two police officers had a shirtless suspect on the ground, handcuffed, and one of them was ramming his knee into the suspect's back. A crowd was watching, but no one interfered with the police, Raffaele said.
"The officer with his knee on the back of the suspect kept raising himself up and then pounding his knee back into the guy's back," Raffaele said. "The guy on the ground was saying, 'I beg you, stop. I beg you.' And th
Ah, Kaggle. That website / company is of personal interest to myself these days. If only their rewards were higher (with the exception of the Heritage Health Prize, which seems to be setting an example to the others; it could be higher, of course, but the fact that it's over a million has the obvious result of drawing in hideous numbers of teams; as such, they will probably get what they're actually looking for, which will save their company billions).
It's the other competitions that are...kind of weak with the prize money. And what they want is arguably more difficult to create than the Heritage Health Prize.
Now, if we could only get more companies to participate, and find a way to mitigate what I think might be slightly excessive taxation on those prizes...which is one of my darker fears: finding a solution, and having 40% of the money walk away. A million is a lot of money, true, but accounting for inflation and purchasing power, after taxes...it works out to two year's worth of salary for some of the better paid programmers out there. As I said, it's interesting, and tempting, but I'd look to sweeten the deal even further.
What would be really funny is if the NSA started posting challenges, with large rewards, for various algorithms.
Slashdot Mirror
Except in this case, you need to make sure those bricks are coming from that house. Forged IP addresses and what not.
Thank you. That was the first problem I noticed with their revenge-oriented approach.
Indeed. I think most of the tech community has a love / hate relationship with MS; however, I also believe that Windows 8 is exceeding the previous known levels of hate for a product not yet released. Though I do not know Bill Gates, I imagine that he left very clear 'instructions' with Ballmer not to screw with the crown jewels - Windows / Office. Also, not to piss off their developer base.
This has been an ongoing problem with Ballmer. He hasn't earned the tech community's trust, because he hasn't proven that he thinks independently / analytically, like most programmers, and his predecessor. Techs are lead, not ruled; and he appears to be making that fatal error. What more, vision requires creating / dominating markets that don't even exist yet, and which no Wall St. analyst predicted. Appearing as an also-ran in the tablet market is not instilling confidence in a lot of developers.
Hmm. I believe the median salary for programmers in San Francisco was $150k last I checked...I will have to look into it.
You have to keep in mind, however, that I did specify 'the better paid' programmers, and that the sheer number of millionaire / billionaire programmers out there will skew the average. It might actually be easier to find someone being paid a few million than $300K...
"To me, the things you imagine seem naive fantasies." -> And I imagine that had you lived a few centuries ago, you would have said the same of the Founding Fathers.
Why live the life of a sycophant, sucking up to the powers that enslave you and your families? Do you love your fetters that much? The gods hate slavery as much as the enslaved; name one family involved in this peculiar institution who hasn't paid triple for its misbegotten actions.
New York City:
Residents of New York City who wish to obtain a pistol license must apply through the New York Police Department License Bureau at One Police Plaza in lower Manhattan.[14] The choice of licenses are: Unrestricted Concealed Carry License (for personal self defense, generally considered off-limits to an average citizen), Restricted Business Carry License, Restricted Target License and Restricted Premises-only License.[14]
NYC Unrestricted Concealed Carry Licenses are valid throughout the rest of the state. Security Guards and business people who regularly carry valuables may be issued a Restricted Business Carry License which is valid only while conducting the business specifically as it was described, in great detail, on the application for the license. NYC target or premises-only licenses are the licenses issued to average citizens who cannot show a need for self defense greater than any another average citizen. They are clearly marked: RESTRICTED - NOT FOR CARRY and require the licensee to obtain special permission from the NYPD License Bureau to leave the city with the handgun. Most licenses issued in New York City are for on-premises possession only, for self-defense within the home or business. Transporting the handgun (via a locked-box) to and from a target range must be done according to a strictly limited schedule pre-approved by the NYPD Licensing Bureau. NYC target licenses allow carrying to and from the range within a "locked-box" at any time at the discretion of the licensee, but prohibit the possession of the licensed handgun in a loaded condition within the home, thereby prohibiting use for self-defense within the home or business. Applicants for, and holders of, a NYC target license must be members of an NYPD License Bureau-approved target range within NYC at the time of application for the license. Traveling through New York City with a license issued from another jurisdiction within New York State must be done carefully (locked box, in vehicle's trunk, no unnecessary stops).[6][7][14]
Come again?
"The government is entirely composed of perfect beings that would only use the backdoor against actual criminals." -> Thank you.
I find it odd that people can interact with government officials day and day out for years, and forget that they're human beings. No human being should be invested with the kinds of powers they're after.
Why not use a smartphone? Get a Mini-HDMI to HDMI cable, as well as a bluetooth mouse and keyboard. Use the built-in wifi connector, and use a 'Remote Desktop' client to connect to a machine with more power.
Sure, it limits your options to hotels with LCD screens and WiFi Hotspots, but that shouldn't be too much of a burden.
Indeed. That was the first red flag that caught my eye -> "ex-Navy Seal would be nice if I were expecting the offices to be physically attacked, but I don't know how well they'd hold up against various intelligence people questioning their 'loyalty' to their own..."
Indeed. It's like none of them get the idea that paranoid users are paranoid, and keeping out 99.99% of all various intruders, but letting in the 0.01% via a mandated backdoor is the same, mentally speaking, as letting in 100% of all various intruders. Having a backdoor means the solution is inherently insecure, and requires trusting someone which, let's be honest, you don't know. ("Dude, it's totally cool. Your files are totally secure, except that because of a recent law, we have to create a master key that unlocks all the files, at once, and yes, if this key were ever compromised / stolen for any reason, all of our users would have their proverbial asses hanging out the window onto oncoming traffic, but yeah, come on, what are the chances that'd ever happen? Why wouldn't you want to use an almost-secure solution?").
Not everyone using these services is a spy, thief, hacker, cracker, mentally ill, or otherwise questionable person trying to hide something. Sometimes they're just people who like the idea of living quiet lives, and would like a secure / protected e-mail service to actually live up to its name. But there are some eccentric people in positions of power which don't like that idea -> they can't sleep at night until they know for sure that there isn't a bogeyman living under your bed!
Indeed. Of course, it's a 'Release Preview', so perhaps they will pull a rabbit out of a hat by release time, and give us a better reason to upgrade to Windows 8 than because they stopped certifying drivers for Windows 7.
My guess is that the developers are being starved for good / passionate ideas, so they're scraping the bottom of the barrel. You know how things are when you read the same sentence over and over again, until it loses its meaning? And then you keep reading it, and playing around with the words in your mouth, stressing syllables and thinking about alternate meanings for the various words? That's what they're doing here. They haven't bridged the gap from the current paradigm to a superior evolution, so they are going back and reinventing things, trying to see if they missed anything. Lacking a leader with a strong vision in this area, they naturally tune into anyone who looks like they have the remotest idea of something slightly better. As such, they've been taking their cues from Apple, which despite not being the same company, appears to be the most dominant or 'alpha male' in the UI paradigm area.
I think it's kind of strange, but then, perhaps schools are really pushing creative lobotomies these days. Conforming with the group / hierarchy is more important than dreaming of something better that will probably have you treated like an outsider. It's not an adventure with lots of fun / rewards / learning something new, it's a job. That sort of thing.
Nonsense. They didn't do it properly in one direction (it got better, but still needs some work), and now they are doing it completely wrong in a different direction.
Instead of leveraging the GPU to do all sorts of 3D window stuff, they just used it for offloading some work from the CPU. Flip3D is their sole innovation there, and I despise it -> it's harder to use than alt+tab, slower, and it looks horrible. It could have been fricking awesome, but no, they butter-boobed it. Now they're throwing it all away; they're giving up their greatest advantage over invasions from other OSs in the desktop / laptop market, and chasing the lowest common denominator.
Even John Carmack is getting pissed over the state of 3D today, and is taking things into his own hands. Can't wait for Apple to announce that they've gone full 3D (not just compositing) for their next OS X release, just so I can see the look on Ballmer's face when he realizes he handed them the desktop market (with all his chasing of the tablet market, and an inability to appreciate what he already had, all because he wanted to be an 'also-ran').
Haha, no. If what I understand about the current mentality of MS is correct, Windows 9 will suffer from 'The Wesley.' The UI designers, who desperately love their Metro interface, will remain unconvinced that it sucks balls, and instead will opt to make it more annoying and omnipresent in Windows 9.
Wat? What the hell kind of GPU are you running that you could even remotely consider this an issue? My own machine runs games comfortably, while a second screen plays movies.
None of the people in the GUI camp promote the ribbon interface. It's usually spoken of with fear, fear that it might infect other software.
*facepalms* They're stripping away functionality, and you consider that an improvement? If you hate transparency so much in Windows 7, you can just untick the checkbox that enables it.
Removing it, on the other hand, is a sign that the code base behind this thing is in dangerous territory.
And I, on the other hand, have been getting back into the groove of running Slackware, as I consider the pain, suffering, and insanity of running that thing to be less than what I see with Windows 8.
I'll probably just continue to run Windows 7 with the addition of cross-builds on Slack, just in case things continue down their current path.
Wonderous. Then we can have a face off with their data mining engine against mine. If I win, then they will henceforth refer to me as 'the Buddha's Nipples,' and be forced to run OS/2 Warp on all of their machines, minus the various patches / service packs that were released after its shipping date. They also have to shutdown the drone / mech programs, and must spend agency resources filing frivolous lawsuits against themselves, in which the charges are violations of various enshrined freedoms.
If they win, I'll publicly acknowledge that they have someone in their employ that is much more intelligent than I give them credit, and stop taking pot-shots at them for making a mockery of the civil rights that they're supposed to be protecting. This part is open to some negotiation, but must be agreed upon mutually (duress free), and will be enforced by the impartial observers.
The rules, which will be agreed upon mutually by both parties before they are ratified (duress free and all that jazz), will include, but are not limited to: 1.) this is a challenge based off of merit, and will be judged as such by impartial observers, 2.) as this is a challenge of merit, there is to be no funny business with one party cracking another party's machines (or social engineering, etc.) to lift the code base, nor the planting of trojans, worms, or virii, etc. (remotely dialing into another party's code repository, and purposefully altering their code to mess with their results is expressly forbidden), 3.) there is no be no black-listing, grey-listing, or any kind of listing, or the equivalent thereof (again, an impartial observer will ensure this is respected, with dire consequences to the party which transgresses this rule) neither during, nor following the challenge (none of this double jeopardy style stuff, where if I somehow manage to trump them, they decide to add me to the no-fly list to get back at me, nor black vans / monitoring of communications, etc.), 4.) the majority of the code used by either party must be written by said party (no outsourcing major components), 5.) all laws which prohibit or interfere with this challenge (reverse-engineering, encryption / decryption, etc.) and their penalties are hereby suspended (I prefer not to be slapped with a reverse-engineering lawsuit should the challenge require some reverse-engineering). There are not to be so much as a rumor that one party is acting in revenge, or to subvert the other party through legal trickey, during this challenge.
The target will be mutually agreed upon, and will be chosen both for its difficulty and novel-ness (to ensure that it's something new, and hasn't been attempted before, as well as to ensure that it does constitute a challenge worthy of spending some time on it). Licensing of either party's code following the challenge is not compulsory, nor is revealing any details of its inner workings (none of this "Hey, your data miner works better than ours, so give it to us (we pay or may not pay you for it), or people with guns / badges will escort you to Gitmo until you feel compelled, by your 'selfless nature' as well as your time spent at the Atlantic's version of the Hanoi Hilton, to cough it up). Multiple submissions are allowed, and the submissions will be in the form of an XML document. Only the impartial observer will know the correct answer / solution to the target, and will signal if / when the challenge has started / ended, as well as who the winner is. If the challenge results in a draw, a new, more difficult target will be chosen. If neither party succeeds in the challenge, a new target may be mutually agreed upon. If more than three challenges result in either draws, or no winners, the future challenges may be suspended by either party.
Once again, I must stress that there is to be no funny business. No background checks, no harassing a party's coworkers / associates / family, no psychological warfare / profiling, freezing of bank accounts, prank phone calls, wiretapping, etc. The actual names of those involved, on the behal
Indeed. No one is cheering the fall of Nokia. Most of us wish they could get their sh*t together, and go back to making excellent, nearly indestructible phones.
And "I" is the most constructive word in the English language.
So, what you're saying is that we need another George Washington and his band of merry men.
Looks like someone has had a little too much to think!
Do you really think the US military would fire on its own people, within its own country's borders? If so little as 500,000 people rose up with arms to depose the US government, I'd doubt the military would become involved. Remember, this is to depose a government which has violated (in this hypothetical scenario) it's own supreme set of laws, which the military swears to uphold before it considers any orders from its leaders, be it Generals / Admirals or Commanders-in Chief. Like it or not, someone in that 500,000 will be a blood relation to those in the military; and as hard-edged as a General / Admiral might be, they have a soft spot for firing on their own sons / daughters / wives / cousins / nephews / nieces / uncles / aunts; giving an order to attack those people, or to defend with lethal force, would destroy them. General William would have to explain at the next family gathering why he ordered the deaths of his brother's kids while providing support for those who violated the laws he swore to uphold when he joined the service. He be vilified, and his family would cut themselves off from him. Chances are he'd end up taking his own life.
"The only recourse you have is the same as any country, persuade the military to turn against the government, or recruit a foreign military to join your side and train and equip your troops (which is how the American war of Independence was won)." -> Or, as in the American Revolution, you just wait until those in power fire on a large crowd of unarmed civilians, then fan the flames of hatred. One of our founding fathers did that with the Boston Massacre. Which is a major point here -> it won't be the military that fires on the civilians, it will be the police, using military weapons and training. How do I know this? Because the number of recorded incidents of police misconduct is on the rise. There was an incident about a week ago, in which a police officer struck a Justice; it happened in New York, I believe...here we are. A Queens Supreme Court Justice, Thomas Raffaele. Let me restate, that's a Supreme Court Justice being assaulted by a police officer. Why? Because the police officers involved were torturing a suspect while purposefully riling up a crowd; the Justice in question wasn't wearing his judge's robes, but a t-shirt and jeans, and he looked like a soft target that the officer could intimidate in his ill-fated attempt to demonstrate his authority to the crowd. He thought the target was the weakest looking person there, and apparently had no clue that he was assaulting a judge! Go on, defend his actions. I want to hear how this judge, who is described as an easy-going guy, deserved an officer charging him, and attempting to crush his wind pipe. Tell me how these kinds of people are safeguarding our liberties, and how we don't need a powerful check against these kinds of behaviors! Or are you going to say that this was a one time incident? You know what, you're probably right. It will probably never be repeated again, as judges everywhere will begin wearing their robes while out of the courtroom, just to ensure that the police know not to attack them. It will be cold comfort for those of us who do not own a set of black robes, but what can we do when we're so weak? Beg the police not to assault and batter suspects already in their custody? Take out a newspaper ad asking them to be kinder? Perhaps some more sensitivity training? LMFAO.
Here's some more of the article, for those who are too lazy to click the link:
The judge said that two police officers had a shirtless suspect on the ground, handcuffed, and one of them was ramming his knee into the suspect's back. A crowd was watching, but no one interfered with the police, Raffaele said.
"The officer with his knee on the back of the suspect kept raising himself up and then pounding his knee back into the guy's back," Raffaele said. "The guy on the ground was saying, 'I beg you, stop. I beg you.' And th
Ah, Kaggle. That website / company is of personal interest to myself these days. If only their rewards were higher (with the exception of the Heritage Health Prize, which seems to be setting an example to the others; it could be higher, of course, but the fact that it's over a million has the obvious result of drawing in hideous numbers of teams; as such, they will probably get what they're actually looking for, which will save their company billions).
It's the other competitions that are...kind of weak with the prize money. And what they want is arguably more difficult to create than the Heritage Health Prize.
Now, if we could only get more companies to participate, and find a way to mitigate what I think might be slightly excessive taxation on those prizes...which is one of my darker fears: finding a solution, and having 40% of the money walk away. A million is a lot of money, true, but accounting for inflation and purchasing power, after taxes...it works out to two year's worth of salary for some of the better paid programmers out there. As I said, it's interesting, and tempting, but I'd look to sweeten the deal even further.
What would be really funny is if the NSA started posting challenges, with large rewards, for various algorithms.