Exactly; it's not like we have the luxury of fossils existing of every single species to have ever existed. Fossils only form under certain conditions; usually animals decompose when they die, and eventually there's nothing left. Rarely, something different happens, and we're left with a fossil: for instance, an asteroid strikes, or a volcano erupts, or the animal gets stuck in some tar pits. These occurrences are abnormal, so there's no telling how many species we're missing out on because none of their members happened to get caught in a fossil-forming event.
If there's nothing that can be done to change it, then how come the first Gilded Age ended?
It ended because people finally forced it to end. A better question is, how long did it take to end? The answer is: many decades. That's what we can expect, best-case.
The worse thing that people can do is start believing that the new Gilded Age is anything but a bunch of political imposed shit. That makes you like a Medieval serf who just accepted that the lord's privileges were the way things are, and how could they ever be any different?
They couldn't be different because if the serfs rose up, the aristocracy (who were also the military elites) would put on their armor, get on their horse, round up their other knight-buddies, and hack them all to bits. And again, how long did it take for things to change? Many centuries.
Face it, social change is glacially slow. People don't see bad things happening and then force their leaders to change things for the better in a couple of years. How long was it between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Enlightenment? There was no way for medieval serfs to bring that about any quicker.
But what I meant about the power supply is that we should dump the bulky, wasteful AT style that provides 3 different voltages (and so is really 3 power supplies in 1), and have one brick that provides 24V DC (or 19V or 12V, don't know what would be best) on 2 or more output cords. Plug one cord into the PC, plug the others into monitors.
Can't be done. Now you have to put separate power supplies inside the PCs and monitors to convert that power into the different voltages needed by different components. You can't power a PC with a single voltage. Some parts need 5V, some need 12V, some need 3.3V, some need 1.8V, etc. Motherboards already have DC-DC power supplies on them for supplying power to the CPU from a 12V rail coming from the power supply; they've been doing this since the P4. Hard drives need both 12V and 5V.
USB keyboards can also serve as USB hubs. Plug your mouse in there, or plug it directly into the computer. It's not like these devices can saturate the capacity of a USB port and must have exclusive use of one.
That's fine as long as you're OK with USB2 speeds. Don't expect to get USB3 speeds in your keyboard.
Speaking of USB, it has become a defacto standard for DC power. 5V may be a little low, but consumer electronics has been running with it.
Only if they use about 5W or less in total power. Monitors use far more power than that (about 25W for a typical 21" LCD). You can't run that on 5V without having high losses in the cable, and you'll still need DC-DC conversion in the monitor. The whole thing doesn't make sense at all.
HDMI with power, why not? Works for USB.
Because monitors use a lot more power than any USB plug can provide, and HDMI speeds are higher than USB. That much power running through a cable next to high-speed signals will cause signal problems, requiring heavy shielding, and increasing cable cost greatly.
Sounds good in theory, but in practice I don't see how that'd work in the PC space. Enterprises aren't going to pay Apple prices for desktop machines, and Apple hasn't done much in that segment anyway; they're good at making things for and marketing them to consumers, but not business; they've never done very well there. The real innovation that could be done with PCs is all in software, and that's mainly up to Microsoft since everyone has voluntary limited themselves to using MS software in business. A new software competitor can't usurp them because all the businesses are locked into the MS ecosystem (Exchange etc.), and anything really innovative would break the way things work with MS-ware. There's nothing new to innovate with hardware; no one's going to pay tons of money for a fancy new-style PC case when they can get something from HP or Lenovo dirt cheap (in the quantities of thousands or tens of thousands that businesses order PCs in).
Not true. Pirating usually requires some mechanism for sharing among pirates, and these days that usually means BitTorrent or other P2P networks. It's pretty trivial to snoop on BitTorrent and see how many people are sharing a particular file; in fact this is exactly what media companies do when either suing people for infringement or complaining to the government about piracy.
When you get on BT and see millions of IP addresses sharing a copy of your product, then you know that people apparently do want your product, but just don't want to pay for it. However, if you get on BT and your product isn't on there at all, or no one's bothered seeding it for a year, then you know that no one wants that POS.
This isn't like 1986, when piracy meant giving people copies of stuff on floppy disk. Back in those days, you were mostly correct: piracy happened entirely in the dark. Not any more.
The problem with unions is they tend to result in horrifically unproductive and overpaid employees. My coworkers were just talking about their previous building where the janitors were unionized and refused to clean piles of dead cockroaches because that somehow wasn't their job, the water fountains had Legionaire's Disease, and the janitors drove high-end Mercedes because they got paid so much. I remember another story about an automotive assembly line where a manager noticed trucks going by missing a critical part on the assembly line, so he went to the employee who was supposed to install it and found out he ran out of parts, so he just stopped. The manager tried to go get more parts to supply him but the employee threatened to file a union grievance since that's not supposed to be the manager's job. Unionization just seems to result in people being turned into mindless automatons, incapable of doing anything at all outside their narrowly-defined job description, and makes the company completely uncompetitive. They worked back in the 50s when there was no such thing as foreign competition, but if you try it now, the companies will just go under as everyone buys from Chinese competitors instead.
I rather think people are finding the classic desktop PC simply too bulky, noisy, and possibly power hungry. Peek inside a case, and you see a large volume of unused and wasted space.
This is an unfortunate byproduct of high modularity. You could make things better integrated, but only with custom parts which can't be exchanged with other machines so easily. Unfortunately, the PC industry has never been very good at standardization, and the last thing they did well was the ATX standard. After that, they tried the BTX standard and that flopped.
Cabling is another mess. Can't some of these cables be consolidated?
Probably not. A lot of cables now are high-speed serial interface cables and can't just be merged with other cables. They're also going different places. The hard drive has two cables going to it, one from the motherboard (data), and the other from the power supply (power). How are you going to consolidate those? Run power through the motherboard?
At the least merge the mouse and keyboard cables, like on MacIntoshes?
Great, now instead of being able to use any keyboard and mouse you want, you're stuck with the ones that came with your computer? Who wants that? If you're talking about just putting a USB port on the keyboard for the mouse to plug into, that does make sense and a lot of keyboards already do that.
Power the display and computer from the same power supply, instead of having separate power supplies for PC and monitor?
The Coleco Adam did something like this: they put the power supply in the printer. So you couldn't run the computer without the printer. The thing bombed.
Also, what happens when you plug a second (or third, or fourth) monitor in? Your power supply wasn't designed for that. What if you replace the monitor with a larger monitor? Again, it won't work. Finally, it's unlikely you'd be able to make them share a cable this way without screwing up the HDMI signal.
The tower configuration saves on footprint, but that little innovation is over 20 years old. Where are the mini ATX, Nano-ITX and smaller size PCs?
Finally, you make a suggestion that makes some real sense. However, they do have these: go look at Dell's and HP's and Lenovo's "SFF" (small form factor) desktop machines. They're not that small, however, but they are an improvement on the standard ATX minitower. But then they have the problem I mentioned above: lack of standardization. They use standard optical and hard drives of course, but the motherboards and power supplies are nonstandard, so if you have a problem you can forget about swapping it out. They work well in large corporate settings because the company will buy tons of the same model (or same model line), so the IT department will have spare parts on hand for repairs, but for individuals they're not so great unless you like paying $400 for a replacement power supply.
Or, why haven't they moved more aggresively into tablets?
Because Samsung beat them to it, and because there's no real profit there unless you control the whole software ecosystem like Apple does (and MS tries to do, but fails).
Fuck getting used to it. You should deal with the reality of it, but "getting used to it" means thinking of it as something that's reasonable. That's bull. A few decades ago this was not the norm. Large successful companies didn't do it. IBM started a "no layoffs" policy during the Great Depression and IIRC they did okay afterwards. This "we are all temporary employees" has nothing to do with any essential new business requirements, and everything to do with politics and a shift back towards the Gilded Age.
We're living in the present, not the past. Why would you not want to "get used to" the way things are? It'll help you deal with modern realities better than sitting on your ass, pining for the "good old days" which are long gone and are not coming back, no matter how much you might wish them to.
Yes, we're moving back to the Gilded Age, whether you like it or not. There's absolutely nothing that can be done to change that. You might as well get used to it.
Well the business laptop product line seems to have totally gone down the shitter. I have a 2008-era Dell Latitude E6400 for my personal laptop and it's excellent: metal case, sleek, all-black businesslike design, excellent 1440x900 screen (14" model), extremely easy to open and repair or replace components (single screw on back metal panel, and the keyboard is the best I've used on a laptop, even better than the many Thinkpads I've had. It's a great laptop. The E6410/6510 that replaced it was also great, just a small update to move from the Core2Duo series CPUs to the Corei5/i7 CPUs). Then they replaced those with the E6420/6520 and then E6430/6530 models, and they're shit. I have a E6420 for my work-issued laptop. It's butt-ugly (rounded corners, silver-and-gray color scheme, and ugly orange border around the keyboard), the keyboard has a worse layout than before, and worst of all the screen is total shit: they changed it to a 1366x768 wide-screen panel. The older model has far more vertical resolution, and the panel overall has more area. The new model has a noticably smaller screen, but the laptop itself is bigger, and the screen has a much larger bezel around it.
The PC market isn't going down the tubes. It just has reached a point where it isn't growing,
To American corporations, it's the same thing. If you're not constantly expanding at a high rate, then you're "dying". There's no such thing as being stable.
Anyway, the solution to realizing that you've given someone else the keys to your kingdom and free access to all business negotiations and trade secrets isn't to "stop worrying about it", which is exactly my point.
What other solution is there? Now that most Fortune 500 companies have outsourced their IT services, what the heck is the point of worrying about other entities having access to this information?
Relying on a "cloud" company for all of your IT services is negligent and short-sighted. Having another company supply infrastructure or manage individual services isn't as bad.
I don't see how it's any different. It's not just individual non-critical services that major corporations are outsourcing, it's their entire IT infrastructure. They no longer have IT departments as such; those are outsourced to other companies.
Letting Google, or any third party, be privy to all of your company's internal affairs is quite a precarious position to voluntarily put yourself in.
Yes, but tons of companies do it all the time by using "cloud" services. You can't single out Google for this; if your company uses any cloud services at all, then it's making the same mistake. This also applies to the many, many large corporations who outsource their IT services. It's all-or-nothing: either never use any 3rd-party cloud services at all, and do all your IT in-house, or stop worrying about it. You can't outsource your IT support services to Dell and then complain about Google having access to your company's data. Google is no better or worse than any other 3rd-party company (except Facebook).
The main problem with privacy on social networks, as far as I can tell, is presenting different information to different people. You might like to use your social network account to say something to a bunch of family members (perhaps talking about a reunion, or problems with a deadbeat sibling, etc.) which you don't want your employer or other acquaintances to see. Or you might like to share political things with your close friends which of course you don't want your employer or the whole world to see. So you might not care too much that Google the company sees this stuff and shows you ads based on it, but you don't want some prospective employer browsing your profile and seeing all your dirty laundry and political views or whatever.
The big problem with Facebook is that they simply don't seem to have any concept of this. They think everything should be out in the open for everyone in the world to see; it's apparent by the way they've behaved. They've only put in privacy protections because of intense user demand, and even then they usually don't work very well and frequently don't work at all, the settings change on you randomly, etc. It's plainly obvious they really don't want you keeping secrets from your employer or anyone else in the world, and they have an agenda of eliminating all privacy entirely. Google, OTOH, for all their faults, does seem to understand this, which is why they have "circles" on Google+, to keep things separate, which is why Linus can make kernel-related posts to the world at large, while sharing family photos with his close friends and family members without everyone else seeing that stuff. That's something you just can't do with Facebook. Google does have its problems (like trying to force everyone into G+, pushing everyone to use real names on YouTube, totally screwing up the UI in Gmail, etc.), but I've never heard of them screwing up privacy protections the way Facebook has.
..All of which means that Hayden Christensen was the perfect choice for the role of Vader and played it perfectly. My mind is blown:o.
I never saw the 3rd prequel, only the first two, but I refuse to pass judgment on Hayden as an actor for his role in those movies, because it was plainly obvious that those movies sucked because of Lucas. It doesn't matter how great an actor is; even Marlon Brando would have looked like a fool with Lucas directing him. An actor is only as good as the director, and Lucas is so horrible, and his scripts and dialog so horrible, that no amount of talent could turn those scripts into quality movies.
I've never seen Hayden in anything else, so I have no idea if he's a good actor or not.
As best as I can tell, he got a good paycheck for a while, got a successful project to put on his resume, and probably now has a manager who he can use for a reference in the future. Also, he may have been a contractor (he said "I have been in this specific situation", and TFS refers to an employee who is a contractor); when you're a contractor, things are different. You don't really care much about your long-term "success" in the company, since you're just there for a paycheck during your 6-month or 12-month tenure there. Unless you're using the gig as a temp-to-perm, you're really only there to make money and to build some experience before moving on. If that's what this guy's attitude was, then his experience could be counted as a "success".
To date we have only Google's word that the only thing they will do with your Plus data is serve you ads.
But intelligent people realize this is a hollow promise, one that can be violated by Google themselves, or any random hacker that manages to penetrate Google's security, or any random NSA agent that wants to gen up a letter.
And how is this different than any other company? It's not. If you're worried about these things, you shouldn't be using any online products/services from any corporation at all. In fact, if you're worried about random hackers, you either shouldn't be putting any of your data online at all, anywhere, or if you think you're so great at security, you should only be using systems that you've set up yourself and manage yourself.
But in the meantime, I trust regular old email (encrypted where necessary)
Regular old email can't be used to publish a blog to anyone in the world who cares to read it. You could use a blogging service, but then that could be hacked by some random hacker. Or, you could get an account with a hosting service and set up your own Wordpress site, but there again some random hacker could hack it, so that won't work for you either.
- Audio recording: good in theory, scary in use. Having a web browser listing to your audio could cause ease dropping software.
Yeah, so? If you want to write an application which records or manipulates audio, then this is a pretty important requirement. It just goes to show that this notion that all modern applications should be written in HTML5 is wrong. There's a lot of things you might want to do on your computer which just don't lend themselves to HTML5/Javascript/PHP/Java.
In the UK, no. It'll be dirt cheap, and probably free for the patients since the government takes care of that kind of thing.
In the USA, no. Your $2000/month figure is too low. Probably more like $10-20,000 per month. And it probably won't be covered by insurance, so we'll have a bunch of parents trying to do it themselves, to disastrous effect.
However I could see a lot of parents trying this, to a disastrous effect, because it could be the kid who has extremely small tolerance, will get too much and hurt themselves. or increasing the dosage goes too fast for the child.
I can see this happening a lot in America. After all, any parents who want to do this will be faced with a $100,000 medical bill for this service, probably denied by insurance, so they'll resort to doing it themselves since it sounds so simple.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly; it's not like we have the luxury of fossils existing of every single species to have ever existed. Fossils only form under certain conditions; usually animals decompose when they die, and eventually there's nothing left. Rarely, something different happens, and we're left with a fossil: for instance, an asteroid strikes, or a volcano erupts, or the animal gets stuck in some tar pits. These occurrences are abnormal, so there's no telling how many species we're missing out on because none of their members happened to get caught in a fossil-forming event.
If there's nothing that can be done to change it, then how come the first Gilded Age ended?
It ended because people finally forced it to end. A better question is, how long did it take to end? The answer is: many decades. That's what we can expect, best-case.
The worse thing that people can do is start believing that the new Gilded Age is anything but a bunch of political imposed shit. That makes you like a Medieval serf who just accepted that the lord's privileges were the way things are, and how could they ever be any different?
They couldn't be different because if the serfs rose up, the aristocracy (who were also the military elites) would put on their armor, get on their horse, round up their other knight-buddies, and hack them all to bits. And again, how long did it take for things to change? Many centuries.
Face it, social change is glacially slow. People don't see bad things happening and then force their leaders to change things for the better in a couple of years. How long was it between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Enlightenment? There was no way for medieval serfs to bring that about any quicker.
But what I meant about the power supply is that we should dump the bulky, wasteful AT style that provides 3 different voltages (and so is really 3 power supplies in 1), and have one brick that provides 24V DC (or 19V or 12V, don't know what would be best) on 2 or more output cords. Plug one cord into the PC, plug the others into monitors.
Can't be done. Now you have to put separate power supplies inside the PCs and monitors to convert that power into the different voltages needed by different components. You can't power a PC with a single voltage. Some parts need 5V, some need 12V, some need 3.3V, some need 1.8V, etc. Motherboards already have DC-DC power supplies on them for supplying power to the CPU from a 12V rail coming from the power supply; they've been doing this since the P4. Hard drives need both 12V and 5V.
USB keyboards can also serve as USB hubs. Plug your mouse in there, or plug it directly into the computer. It's not like these devices can saturate the capacity of a USB port and must have exclusive use of one.
That's fine as long as you're OK with USB2 speeds. Don't expect to get USB3 speeds in your keyboard.
Speaking of USB, it has become a defacto standard for DC power. 5V may be a little low, but consumer electronics has been running with it.
Only if they use about 5W or less in total power. Monitors use far more power than that (about 25W for a typical 21" LCD). You can't run that on 5V without having high losses in the cable, and you'll still need DC-DC conversion in the monitor. The whole thing doesn't make sense at all.
HDMI with power, why not? Works for USB.
Because monitors use a lot more power than any USB plug can provide, and HDMI speeds are higher than USB. That much power running through a cable next to high-speed signals will cause signal problems, requiring heavy shielding, and increasing cable cost greatly.
Sounds good in theory, but in practice I don't see how that'd work in the PC space. Enterprises aren't going to pay Apple prices for desktop machines, and Apple hasn't done much in that segment anyway; they're good at making things for and marketing them to consumers, but not business; they've never done very well there. The real innovation that could be done with PCs is all in software, and that's mainly up to Microsoft since everyone has voluntary limited themselves to using MS software in business. A new software competitor can't usurp them because all the businesses are locked into the MS ecosystem (Exchange etc.), and anything really innovative would break the way things work with MS-ware. There's nothing new to innovate with hardware; no one's going to pay tons of money for a fancy new-style PC case when they can get something from HP or Lenovo dirt cheap (in the quantities of thousands or tens of thousands that businesses order PCs in).
Not true. Pirating usually requires some mechanism for sharing among pirates, and these days that usually means BitTorrent or other P2P networks. It's pretty trivial to snoop on BitTorrent and see how many people are sharing a particular file; in fact this is exactly what media companies do when either suing people for infringement or complaining to the government about piracy.
When you get on BT and see millions of IP addresses sharing a copy of your product, then you know that people apparently do want your product, but just don't want to pay for it. However, if you get on BT and your product isn't on there at all, or no one's bothered seeding it for a year, then you know that no one wants that POS.
This isn't like 1986, when piracy meant giving people copies of stuff on floppy disk. Back in those days, you were mostly correct: piracy happened entirely in the dark. Not any more.
The problem with unions is they tend to result in horrifically unproductive and overpaid employees. My coworkers were just talking about their previous building where the janitors were unionized and refused to clean piles of dead cockroaches because that somehow wasn't their job, the water fountains had Legionaire's Disease, and the janitors drove high-end Mercedes because they got paid so much. I remember another story about an automotive assembly line where a manager noticed trucks going by missing a critical part on the assembly line, so he went to the employee who was supposed to install it and found out he ran out of parts, so he just stopped. The manager tried to go get more parts to supply him but the employee threatened to file a union grievance since that's not supposed to be the manager's job. Unionization just seems to result in people being turned into mindless automatons, incapable of doing anything at all outside their narrowly-defined job description, and makes the company completely uncompetitive. They worked back in the 50s when there was no such thing as foreign competition, but if you try it now, the companies will just go under as everyone buys from Chinese competitors instead.
I rather think people are finding the classic desktop PC simply too bulky, noisy, and possibly power hungry. Peek inside a case, and you see a large volume of unused and wasted space.
This is an unfortunate byproduct of high modularity. You could make things better integrated, but only with custom parts which can't be exchanged with other machines so easily. Unfortunately, the PC industry has never been very good at standardization, and the last thing they did well was the ATX standard. After that, they tried the BTX standard and that flopped.
Cabling is another mess. Can't some of these cables be consolidated?
Probably not. A lot of cables now are high-speed serial interface cables and can't just be merged with other cables. They're also going different places. The hard drive has two cables going to it, one from the motherboard (data), and the other from the power supply (power). How are you going to consolidate those? Run power through the motherboard?
At the least merge the mouse and keyboard cables, like on MacIntoshes?
Great, now instead of being able to use any keyboard and mouse you want, you're stuck with the ones that came with your computer? Who wants that? If you're talking about just putting a USB port on the keyboard for the mouse to plug into, that does make sense and a lot of keyboards already do that.
Power the display and computer from the same power supply, instead of having separate power supplies for PC and monitor?
The Coleco Adam did something like this: they put the power supply in the printer. So you couldn't run the computer without the printer. The thing bombed.
Also, what happens when you plug a second (or third, or fourth) monitor in? Your power supply wasn't designed for that. What if you replace the monitor with a larger monitor? Again, it won't work. Finally, it's unlikely you'd be able to make them share a cable this way without screwing up the HDMI signal.
The tower configuration saves on footprint, but that little innovation is over 20 years old. Where are the mini ATX, Nano-ITX and smaller size PCs?
Finally, you make a suggestion that makes some real sense. However, they do have these: go look at Dell's and HP's and Lenovo's "SFF" (small form factor) desktop machines. They're not that small, however, but they are an improvement on the standard ATX minitower. But then they have the problem I mentioned above: lack of standardization. They use standard optical and hard drives of course, but the motherboards and power supplies are nonstandard, so if you have a problem you can forget about swapping it out. They work well in large corporate settings because the company will buy tons of the same model (or same model line), so the IT department will have spare parts on hand for repairs, but for individuals they're not so great unless you like paying $400 for a replacement power supply.
Or, why haven't they moved more aggresively into tablets?
Because Samsung beat them to it, and because there's no real profit there unless you control the whole software ecosystem like Apple does (and MS tries to do, but fails).
Fuck getting used to it. You should deal with the reality of it, but "getting used to it" means thinking of it as something that's reasonable. That's bull. A few decades ago this was not the norm. Large successful companies didn't do it. IBM started a "no layoffs" policy during the Great Depression and IIRC they did okay afterwards. This "we are all temporary employees" has nothing to do with any essential new business requirements, and everything to do with politics and a shift back towards the Gilded Age.
We're living in the present, not the past. Why would you not want to "get used to" the way things are? It'll help you deal with modern realities better than sitting on your ass, pining for the "good old days" which are long gone and are not coming back, no matter how much you might wish them to.
Yes, we're moving back to the Gilded Age, whether you like it or not. There's absolutely nothing that can be done to change that. You might as well get used to it.
Well the business laptop product line seems to have totally gone down the shitter. I have a 2008-era Dell Latitude E6400 for my personal laptop and it's excellent: metal case, sleek, all-black businesslike design, excellent 1440x900 screen (14" model), extremely easy to open and repair or replace components (single screw on back metal panel, and the keyboard is the best I've used on a laptop, even better than the many Thinkpads I've had. It's a great laptop. The E6410/6510 that replaced it was also great, just a small update to move from the Core2Duo series CPUs to the Corei5/i7 CPUs). Then they replaced those with the E6420/6520 and then E6430/6530 models, and they're shit. I have a E6420 for my work-issued laptop. It's butt-ugly (rounded corners, silver-and-gray color scheme, and ugly orange border around the keyboard), the keyboard has a worse layout than before, and worst of all the screen is total shit: they changed it to a 1366x768 wide-screen panel. The older model has far more vertical resolution, and the panel overall has more area. The new model has a noticably smaller screen, but the laptop itself is bigger, and the screen has a much larger bezel around it.
The PC market isn't going down the tubes. It just has reached a point where it isn't growing,
To American corporations, it's the same thing. If you're not constantly expanding at a high rate, then you're "dying". There's no such thing as being stable.
Hey USA, get with every other first world nation on earth (and a few second and third world ones) and get some universal healthcare for YOUR people.
There's a word in this sentence which does not belong.
I disagree; I think Ballmer should have been retained as CEO indefinitely.
If they really had to replace him, they should have picked whoever came up with the Microsoft Songsmith commercial.
Anyway, the solution to realizing that you've given someone else the keys to your kingdom and free access to all business negotiations and trade secrets isn't to "stop worrying about it", which is exactly my point.
What other solution is there? Now that most Fortune 500 companies have outsourced their IT services, what the heck is the point of worrying about other entities having access to this information?
Relying on a "cloud" company for all of your IT services is negligent and short-sighted. Having another company supply infrastructure or manage individual services isn't as bad.
I don't see how it's any different. It's not just individual non-critical services that major corporations are outsourcing, it's their entire IT infrastructure. They no longer have IT departments as such; those are outsourced to other companies.
Letting Google, or any third party, be privy to all of your company's internal affairs is quite a precarious position to voluntarily put yourself in.
Yes, but tons of companies do it all the time by using "cloud" services. You can't single out Google for this; if your company uses any cloud services at all, then it's making the same mistake. This also applies to the many, many large corporations who outsource their IT services. It's all-or-nothing: either never use any 3rd-party cloud services at all, and do all your IT in-house, or stop worrying about it. You can't outsource your IT support services to Dell and then complain about Google having access to your company's data. Google is no better or worse than any other 3rd-party company (except Facebook).
The main problem with privacy on social networks, as far as I can tell, is presenting different information to different people. You might like to use your social network account to say something to a bunch of family members (perhaps talking about a reunion, or problems with a deadbeat sibling, etc.) which you don't want your employer or other acquaintances to see. Or you might like to share political things with your close friends which of course you don't want your employer or the whole world to see. So you might not care too much that Google the company sees this stuff and shows you ads based on it, but you don't want some prospective employer browsing your profile and seeing all your dirty laundry and political views or whatever.
The big problem with Facebook is that they simply don't seem to have any concept of this. They think everything should be out in the open for everyone in the world to see; it's apparent by the way they've behaved. They've only put in privacy protections because of intense user demand, and even then they usually don't work very well and frequently don't work at all, the settings change on you randomly, etc. It's plainly obvious they really don't want you keeping secrets from your employer or anyone else in the world, and they have an agenda of eliminating all privacy entirely. Google, OTOH, for all their faults, does seem to understand this, which is why they have "circles" on Google+, to keep things separate, which is why Linus can make kernel-related posts to the world at large, while sharing family photos with his close friends and family members without everyone else seeing that stuff. That's something you just can't do with Facebook. Google does have its problems (like trying to force everyone into G+, pushing everyone to use real names on YouTube, totally screwing up the UI in Gmail, etc.), but I've never heard of them screwing up privacy protections the way Facebook has.
That's a very good point. If you're posting stuff for the world to read, then why would you care about "privacy violations"?
No, it doesn't. The company doesn't get "credit" for some software project that's only used inside the company.
..All of which means that Hayden Christensen was the perfect choice for the role of Vader and played it perfectly. My mind is blown :o.
I never saw the 3rd prequel, only the first two, but I refuse to pass judgment on Hayden as an actor for his role in those movies, because it was plainly obvious that those movies sucked because of Lucas. It doesn't matter how great an actor is; even Marlon Brando would have looked like a fool with Lucas directing him. An actor is only as good as the director, and Lucas is so horrible, and his scripts and dialog so horrible, that no amount of talent could turn those scripts into quality movies.
I've never seen Hayden in anything else, so I have no idea if he's a good actor or not.
As best as I can tell, he got a good paycheck for a while, got a successful project to put on his resume, and probably now has a manager who he can use for a reference in the future. Also, he may have been a contractor (he said "I have been in this specific situation", and TFS refers to an employee who is a contractor); when you're a contractor, things are different. You don't really care much about your long-term "success" in the company, since you're just there for a paycheck during your 6-month or 12-month tenure there. Unless you're using the gig as a temp-to-perm, you're really only there to make money and to build some experience before moving on. If that's what this guy's attitude was, then his experience could be counted as a "success".
To date we have only Google's word that the only thing they will do with your Plus data is serve you ads.
But intelligent people realize this is a hollow promise, one that can be violated by Google themselves, or any random
hacker that manages to penetrate Google's security, or any random NSA agent that wants to gen up a letter.
And how is this different than any other company? It's not. If you're worried about these things, you shouldn't be using any online products/services from any corporation at all. In fact, if you're worried about random hackers, you either shouldn't be putting any of your data online at all, anywhere, or if you think you're so great at security, you should only be using systems that you've set up yourself and manage yourself.
But in the meantime, I trust regular old email (encrypted where necessary)
Regular old email can't be used to publish a blog to anyone in the world who cares to read it. You could use a blogging service, but then that could be hacked by some random hacker. Or, you could get an account with a hosting service and set up your own Wordpress site, but there again some random hacker could hack it, so that won't work for you either.
- Audio recording: good in theory, scary in use. Having a web browser listing to your audio could cause ease dropping software.
Yeah, so? If you want to write an application which records or manipulates audio, then this is a pretty important requirement. It just goes to show that this notion that all modern applications should be written in HTML5 is wrong. There's a lot of things you might want to do on your computer which just don't lend themselves to HTML5/Javascript/PHP/Java.
Audio and video recording are both pretty simple, as long as you don't mind using Flash to do it.
That's about as viable a solution as using ActiveX. Flash is nearly dead now anyway; in a few years it'll have completely disappeared.
In the UK, no. It'll be dirt cheap, and probably free for the patients since the government takes care of that kind of thing.
In the USA, no. Your $2000/month figure is too low. Probably more like $10-20,000 per month. And it probably won't be covered by insurance, so we'll have a bunch of parents trying to do it themselves, to disastrous effect.
However I could see a lot of parents trying this, to a disastrous effect, because it could be the kid who has extremely small tolerance, will get too much and hurt themselves. or increasing the dosage goes too fast for the child.
I can see this happening a lot in America. After all, any parents who want to do this will be faced with a $100,000 medical bill for this service, probably denied by insurance, so they'll resort to doing it themselves since it sounds so simple.
Sorry, no. It's definitely Win7, and IE's "About" dialog says it's IE8. Maybe Win7 Home or Pro are different; this is Win7 Enterprise.