The idea that a large company like that would embark on a huge project like StreetView without thoroughly auditing the code they planned on using boggles the mind. Either they didn't carefully audit the code before deploying it in their massive global project or they did and knowingly collected this data. I'm not sure which of those options makes Google look worse.
A lot of the big charities these days seem to be focused on "awareness" rather than "finding a cure". This basically sounds like giving money to these people so they can run more ads to get more money. At what point do we decide people are "aware" enough and start actually trying to cure these diseases? I don't care how many people are aware of breast cancer, I care how fast it takes to come up with a cure for breast cancer.
The big offenders I've seen are breast cancer awareness and autism awareness. Why do we need to give money to make people more aware of these conditions? Everyone is already as aware as they need to be! Stop spending money on awareness and start spending it on research!
Of course, once a charity reaches a certain size, its primary goal becomes self-preservation, and finding a cure for these things would threaten that goal.
And none of the stories you mention matter even a little bit to the vast majority of the 6.7 billion people on this planet, and yet we still talk about them ad nauseum.
Yes it can work, for very small values of "work". It may be a legitimate route for independent games that need a gimmick like this to generate lots of press and get people to try their games. Of course, if your business model is dependent on getting lots of press, you pretty much have to be one of the first ones to do it, since the 27th company to do this isn't going to generate nearly as much press as the first one, and therefore likely won't have nearly this kind of success.
Basically, it's a way for small companies that would barely make beer money any other way to make a decent living (at least for the short term). It has not, however, disproved the more traditional model for selling games, which is still vastly more profitable. This is 5 games which combined managed to make $1 million. For a megacorp like EA, or any of the big-budget game publishing companies, $1 million is a rounding error.
This is "zero tolerance" done the wrong way. If we're going to go zero tolerance, we need to go all the way. Upon discovery of the illicit candy, she should have been summarily executed on the spot.
Seriously though, a week detention for candy? How about starting with a polite note home to the parents explaining the policy? All a detention will do is set up an adversarial relationship where the parents will fight the school on everything they try to do from now on.
Don't be silly, he was clearly talking about Kagan's computer.
Unless...maybe this is a subtle way of saying Kagan is a robot! Is Obama poised to nominate the first female robot Supreme Court Justice? This could indeed be a historic moment! Not only that, it would finally balance the court in terms of robot justices. Finally the liberal side of the court will have its own robot justice to balance out Clarence Thomas.
Sorry, but this is the Politics section. The only reason the politics section exists is to generate page hits by getting people into a huge partisan flamewar while generating ad revenue for Slashdot. It was started in 2004 as a transparent attempt to profit from the increasingly politicized populace that loves to argue endlessly over this crap online. Given the number of comments these articles tend to get, I'd say it's paid off handsomely for Slashdot's corporate overlords. It is no more "news for nerds" than the Idle section is.
That's a little outdated. In today's world everyone is equally loud, and the media has no apparent interest in looking for who is the most factually correct so they'll assume anyone willing to talk to them is credible. Therefore, you have both sides presented as being equally correct and both sides being given plenty of opportunity to state their claims, even when one of them is clearly, objectively, nuts or at least does not have the facts on their side. So, instead of the squeaky wheel getting the grease, all of the wheels are squeaky.
In this environment, the one who wins is the one who can keep talking the longest. Nobody pays any attention to anyone else's arguments, and no one is even remotely interested in seeing anyone else's perspective, and thus nobody's mind is ever changed. All we get is two sides shouting past each other continuously until one side gets tired of the whole thing and gives up, or at least turns down their own volume. Whoever is left standing, regardless of whether their position is correct, or even makes sense, is the "winner".
So, while the one who can talk the loudest at the end is the one who wins, that one is only the loudest because everyone else has given up and stopped shouting. If both sides feel strongly enough about the issue, they'll both keep shouting forever, and nobody wins. Those issues become wedge issues, and elections often turn on them even though neither side ever has any intention of actually doing anything about them (guns, abortion, etc.)
This is why I made the distinction between "ideally" and "realistically". Ideally, the IT department would have the sack to refuse and the administration would have the brains to listen. Realistically, at least an email thread explaining IT's opposition to the move before they did it would at least tell us they knew it was wrong and tried to stop it.
Unless the IT department personnel have copies of email threads which include them vehemently opposing this policy, I have little sympathy for them. This sort of spying is highly unethical, and an IT department should, ideally, refuse to honor the request. Realistically, I can see people who depend on that job doing it, but I would expect them to do whatever they could to dissuade the school district from doing it first, and maybe anonymously whistleblowing to the local newspaper second. If all they can show is that they were "just following orders", that's not enough to absolve them.
An internal cloud is one that your own IT department manages, which is why I went into all the technical detail on that one. It's the opposite of outsourcing, whereas an Amazon-style cloud is basically another way of saying "IT outsourcing".
You seem to present a false dichotomy between endless pessimism (the naysayers) and boundless optimism (investing in whatever the naysayers say won't work). I prefer a more pragmatic approach.
The simple fact is that "cloud computing," as defined by those people selling space on clouds to external clients, is nothing more than a logical evolution of "software as a service". It is, at its core, technology outsourcing. While the term "cloud" connotes an amorphous blob through which data can move freely, the actual mechanics of a cloud are unimportant to the end user. I could be running a "cloud", by this definition, on a big server farm with virtual servers migrating between hardware devices as needed, totally transparent to the user. Or, I could be putting each client on his own dedicated piece of hardware and not including virtualization at all. Either one of these could be called a "cloud" as far as the client is concerned. The whole point of an external cloud is the client doesn't know or care what the underlying technology is or how it works.
The more interesting definition of cloud, to me, is the internal cloud. By this definition, the cloud is explicitly a collection of servers that host multiple virtual machines, which can be moved essentially at will (and even automatically with no input from the operator) as individual virtual machines require more or fewer resources. This type of cloud has also commonly been called a "grid", although grid is another one of those terms with several not-very-well-understood meanings. In this kind of cloud, you optimize the use of compute power while (in theory) reducing administrative overhead. Of course, this depends on a lot of technology that's fairly new and requires a great deal of automation and excellent management software in order to actually make administration easier, and most implementations so far tend to increase, rather than decrease, administration costs. Even so, this type of solution can save a lot of money in terms of hardware, space, and power required to support the IT needs of a business.
I've been deeply involved in developing and implementing internal clouds for a couple of years now, and the technology really does hold a lot of promise. I'm not sold at all on the external Amazon-style clouds as the future of computing, but the "blob of virtual machines" internal cloud seems to hold a lot of promise, especially in larger data center environments.
Ha Ha. Your browser sucks. All it did to me was freeze my browser for 30 seconds while I feverishly pounded on the close tab key. Two seizures and a puddle of vomit later, the window closed and the browser stayed up. Thank you, Firefox!
That's one hell of a slippery slope you're sliding down there. In any case, as far as who pressured ICANN to reject the domain and why, you're just flat-out wrong:
After the second.xxx proposal was approved in 2005, the Family Research Council (FRC) mobilized its forces in an all-out crusade. Claiming that the creation of a.xxx TLD would allow pornographers to "expand their evil empires on the Internet," the FRC urged its supporters to express opposition to the proposal. The Department of Commerce alone received nearly 6,000 letters expressing concern on the subject. The Department of Commerce eventually requested that ICANN spend more time considering the implications of the proposal before reaching a conclusion.
Of course it wouldn't stop them from using their existing domains. Basically it would mean ICANN gets to collect a bunch of money for more domain registrations from existing clients while not actually changing anything of any consequence. Given that, the question is why the hell won't they approve it? The only possible explanation I can come up with is that anything that smacks of salaciousness must be rejected so as to avoid offending the very loud and very influential Puritanical set.
Because kneejerk Puritans would go crazy because it would look like someone was actually condoning porn, or at least recognizing its right to exist. We can't have that sort of thing, especially not in America where we practice our bizarre fetishes behind closed doors while condemning anyone who shares them. The only acceptable methods of sexual gratification are intercourse for the purpose of bearing children and the occasional leaked celebrity sex tape.
If this doesn't work, their next option is to wall off the Gulf of Mexico, drain the water, and let the entire thing fill with oil like a gigantic bathtub. Then, we'll get a bunch of old hippies together, throw in a giant effigy, light the whole thing on fire, and have the best Burning Man festival ever!
Why is it so obvious that it isn't being done to fight spam? Virtually all of the newsgroups out there, outside of the moderated ones, have been completely overrun with spam. There is no really effective spam-control device for Usenet other than moderated groups, and it's virtually impossible to maintain a good conversational flow in a moderated forum.
Usenet was great in its time, but its fatal flaw turned out to be an inability to keep out spam. We fought it for years, but the fact is the spammers have won, and it's time to move on to technologies that are better able to control it, like web forums. Yes, Usenet was much nicer back in the old days before the Internet exploded, but a lot of things online were nicer then. NNTP was developed for a world where common courtesy and community policing were sufficient to correct bad behavior, but those days are gone now as the overall population of the 'net has increased exponentially and the technology of spammers has improved so that a few of them can easily drown out the many who are willing to abide by basic netiquette rules.
The world changed. You can either adapt to it or sit back and complain about how things were so much better then, and how kids have no respect for people's lawns anymore. Web forums may have a long way to go before they can match the feature set on Usenet 15 years ago, but they beat the hell out of today's Usenet in terms of signal to noise ratio, and for many of us that's the more important thing.
Sure, but in the case of an artist his 10% may have been absolutely vital to the game's success. Certainly development takes up a huge amount of time and effort, but developers in general tend to be really crappy artists. The two skillsets (and mindsets) are very different from each other, and both are critical to a successful game. The art is what people see first, and if the game looks amateurish or poorly rendered, many people will simply not buy it or put it down almost immediately and tell all their friends what a piece of crap it is. On the other hand, if no one can play your game for more than 10 minutes without encountering a serious issue with the code, the game will be sunk just as bad.
Artists are important for modern games. So are developers. "Idea guys", not so much.
There are plenty of theories regarding the Maya collapse, but European invasion isn't one of them. The collapse happened well before the Europeans showed up.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea that a large company like that would embark on a huge project like StreetView without thoroughly auditing the code they planned on using boggles the mind. Either they didn't carefully audit the code before deploying it in their massive global project or they did and knowingly collected this data. I'm not sure which of those options makes Google look worse.
A lot of the big charities these days seem to be focused on "awareness" rather than "finding a cure". This basically sounds like giving money to these people so they can run more ads to get more money. At what point do we decide people are "aware" enough and start actually trying to cure these diseases? I don't care how many people are aware of breast cancer, I care how fast it takes to come up with a cure for breast cancer.
The big offenders I've seen are breast cancer awareness and autism awareness. Why do we need to give money to make people more aware of these conditions? Everyone is already as aware as they need to be! Stop spending money on awareness and start spending it on research!
Of course, once a charity reaches a certain size, its primary goal becomes self-preservation, and finding a cure for these things would threaten that goal.
And none of the stories you mention matter even a little bit to the vast majority of the 6.7 billion people on this planet, and yet we still talk about them ad nauseum.
Don't be absurd. Other than DVD rentals and Internet usage increasing, this won't affect anything.
Ball Lightening Caused by Magnetic Hallucinations
It's clearly a bogus theory. In my experience, ball lightening is usually caused by filling it up with helium.
Yes it can work, for very small values of "work". It may be a legitimate route for independent games that need a gimmick like this to generate lots of press and get people to try their games. Of course, if your business model is dependent on getting lots of press, you pretty much have to be one of the first ones to do it, since the 27th company to do this isn't going to generate nearly as much press as the first one, and therefore likely won't have nearly this kind of success.
Basically, it's a way for small companies that would barely make beer money any other way to make a decent living (at least for the short term). It has not, however, disproved the more traditional model for selling games, which is still vastly more profitable. This is 5 games which combined managed to make $1 million. For a megacorp like EA, or any of the big-budget game publishing companies, $1 million is a rounding error.
Use EMACS
But I already have an OS, why would I want to install another one just to edit text?
This is "zero tolerance" done the wrong way. If we're going to go zero tolerance, we need to go all the way. Upon discovery of the illicit candy, she should have been summarily executed on the spot.
Seriously though, a week detention for candy? How about starting with a polite note home to the parents explaining the policy? All a detention will do is set up an adversarial relationship where the parents will fight the school on everything they try to do from now on.
Don't be silly, he was clearly talking about Kagan's computer.
Unless...maybe this is a subtle way of saying Kagan is a robot! Is Obama poised to nominate the first female robot Supreme Court Justice? This could indeed be a historic moment! Not only that, it would finally balance the court in terms of robot justices. Finally the liberal side of the court will have its own robot justice to balance out Clarence Thomas.
Sorry, but this is the Politics section. The only reason the politics section exists is to generate page hits by getting people into a huge partisan flamewar while generating ad revenue for Slashdot. It was started in 2004 as a transparent attempt to profit from the increasingly politicized populace that loves to argue endlessly over this crap online. Given the number of comments these articles tend to get, I'd say it's paid off handsomely for Slashdot's corporate overlords. It is no more "news for nerds" than the Idle section is.
That's a little outdated. In today's world everyone is equally loud, and the media has no apparent interest in looking for who is the most factually correct so they'll assume anyone willing to talk to them is credible. Therefore, you have both sides presented as being equally correct and both sides being given plenty of opportunity to state their claims, even when one of them is clearly, objectively, nuts or at least does not have the facts on their side. So, instead of the squeaky wheel getting the grease, all of the wheels are squeaky.
In this environment, the one who wins is the one who can keep talking the longest. Nobody pays any attention to anyone else's arguments, and no one is even remotely interested in seeing anyone else's perspective, and thus nobody's mind is ever changed. All we get is two sides shouting past each other continuously until one side gets tired of the whole thing and gives up, or at least turns down their own volume. Whoever is left standing, regardless of whether their position is correct, or even makes sense, is the "winner".
So, while the one who can talk the loudest at the end is the one who wins, that one is only the loudest because everyone else has given up and stopped shouting. If both sides feel strongly enough about the issue, they'll both keep shouting forever, and nobody wins. Those issues become wedge issues, and elections often turn on them even though neither side ever has any intention of actually doing anything about them (guns, abortion, etc.)
The Year of Linux on the Desktop(tm) is just around the corner!
That Onion article is absurd. Clarence Thomas ruling differently than Antonin Scalia? As if that would ever happen...
This is why I made the distinction between "ideally" and "realistically". Ideally, the IT department would have the sack to refuse and the administration would have the brains to listen. Realistically, at least an email thread explaining IT's opposition to the move before they did it would at least tell us they knew it was wrong and tried to stop it.
Unless the IT department personnel have copies of email threads which include them vehemently opposing this policy, I have little sympathy for them. This sort of spying is highly unethical, and an IT department should, ideally, refuse to honor the request. Realistically, I can see people who depend on that job doing it, but I would expect them to do whatever they could to dissuade the school district from doing it first, and maybe anonymously whistleblowing to the local newspaper second. If all they can show is that they were "just following orders", that's not enough to absolve them.
An internal cloud is one that your own IT department manages, which is why I went into all the technical detail on that one. It's the opposite of outsourcing, whereas an Amazon-style cloud is basically another way of saying "IT outsourcing".
You seem to present a false dichotomy between endless pessimism (the naysayers) and boundless optimism (investing in whatever the naysayers say won't work). I prefer a more pragmatic approach.
The simple fact is that "cloud computing," as defined by those people selling space on clouds to external clients, is nothing more than a logical evolution of "software as a service". It is, at its core, technology outsourcing. While the term "cloud" connotes an amorphous blob through which data can move freely, the actual mechanics of a cloud are unimportant to the end user. I could be running a "cloud", by this definition, on a big server farm with virtual servers migrating between hardware devices as needed, totally transparent to the user. Or, I could be putting each client on his own dedicated piece of hardware and not including virtualization at all. Either one of these could be called a "cloud" as far as the client is concerned. The whole point of an external cloud is the client doesn't know or care what the underlying technology is or how it works.
The more interesting definition of cloud, to me, is the internal cloud. By this definition, the cloud is explicitly a collection of servers that host multiple virtual machines, which can be moved essentially at will (and even automatically with no input from the operator) as individual virtual machines require more or fewer resources. This type of cloud has also commonly been called a "grid", although grid is another one of those terms with several not-very-well-understood meanings. In this kind of cloud, you optimize the use of compute power while (in theory) reducing administrative overhead. Of course, this depends on a lot of technology that's fairly new and requires a great deal of automation and excellent management software in order to actually make administration easier, and most implementations so far tend to increase, rather than decrease, administration costs. Even so, this type of solution can save a lot of money in terms of hardware, space, and power required to support the IT needs of a business.
I've been deeply involved in developing and implementing internal clouds for a couple of years now, and the technology really does hold a lot of promise. I'm not sold at all on the external Amazon-style clouds as the future of computing, but the "blob of virtual machines" internal cloud seems to hold a lot of promise, especially in larger data center environments.
Ha Ha. Your browser sucks. All it did to me was freeze my browser for 30 seconds while I feverishly pounded on the close tab key. Two seizures and a puddle of vomit later, the window closed and the browser stayed up. Thank you, Firefox!
After the second .xxx proposal was approved in 2005, the Family Research Council (FRC) mobilized its forces in an all-out crusade. Claiming that the creation of a .xxx TLD would allow pornographers to "expand their evil empires on the Internet," the FRC urged its supporters to express opposition to the proposal. The Department of Commerce alone received nearly 6,000 letters expressing concern on the subject. The Department of Commerce eventually requested that ICANN spend more time considering the implications of the proposal before reaching a conclusion.
(source)
While the porn industry also opposed it for other reasons, the ones that actually caused ICANN to reverse it were the Puritanical minority.
Of course it wouldn't stop them from using their existing domains. Basically it would mean ICANN gets to collect a bunch of money for more domain registrations from existing clients while not actually changing anything of any consequence. Given that, the question is why the hell won't they approve it? The only possible explanation I can come up with is that anything that smacks of salaciousness must be rejected so as to avoid offending the very loud and very influential Puritanical set.
Because kneejerk Puritans would go crazy because it would look like someone was actually condoning porn, or at least recognizing its right to exist. We can't have that sort of thing, especially not in America where we practice our bizarre fetishes behind closed doors while condemning anyone who shares them. The only acceptable methods of sexual gratification are intercourse for the purpose of bearing children and the occasional leaked celebrity sex tape.
If this doesn't work, their next option is to wall off the Gulf of Mexico, drain the water, and let the entire thing fill with oil like a gigantic bathtub. Then, we'll get a bunch of old hippies together, throw in a giant effigy, light the whole thing on fire, and have the best Burning Man festival ever!
Why is it so obvious that it isn't being done to fight spam? Virtually all of the newsgroups out there, outside of the moderated ones, have been completely overrun with spam. There is no really effective spam-control device for Usenet other than moderated groups, and it's virtually impossible to maintain a good conversational flow in a moderated forum.
Usenet was great in its time, but its fatal flaw turned out to be an inability to keep out spam. We fought it for years, but the fact is the spammers have won, and it's time to move on to technologies that are better able to control it, like web forums. Yes, Usenet was much nicer back in the old days before the Internet exploded, but a lot of things online were nicer then. NNTP was developed for a world where common courtesy and community policing were sufficient to correct bad behavior, but those days are gone now as the overall population of the 'net has increased exponentially and the technology of spammers has improved so that a few of them can easily drown out the many who are willing to abide by basic netiquette rules.
The world changed. You can either adapt to it or sit back and complain about how things were so much better then, and how kids have no respect for people's lawns anymore. Web forums may have a long way to go before they can match the feature set on Usenet 15 years ago, but they beat the hell out of today's Usenet in terms of signal to noise ratio, and for many of us that's the more important thing.
Sure, but in the case of an artist his 10% may have been absolutely vital to the game's success. Certainly development takes up a huge amount of time and effort, but developers in general tend to be really crappy artists. The two skillsets (and mindsets) are very different from each other, and both are critical to a successful game. The art is what people see first, and if the game looks amateurish or poorly rendered, many people will simply not buy it or put it down almost immediately and tell all their friends what a piece of crap it is. On the other hand, if no one can play your game for more than 10 minutes without encountering a serious issue with the code, the game will be sunk just as bad.
Artists are important for modern games. So are developers. "Idea guys", not so much.
There are plenty of theories regarding the Maya collapse, but European invasion isn't one of them. The collapse happened well before the Europeans showed up.