"piece of crap that nobody would ever want to buy anyway"
I'm totally with you. It's like shirts without pocket protectors. Pocket protectors are a brilliant, sensible idea that adds utility to an otherwise poorly designed garment. What kind of sheeple would buy ones without them?
Another perspective would be that some people like getting laid. Pocket protectors are sold to nerds for whom every last bit of utility is vastly more important than appearance or likelihood of meeting a woman outside of an MMO and regular shirts are sold to the rest of the populace who are really quite happy without them as they're not carrying pens around in their shirt pockets anyway.
I propose an empirical test:
1) Get a new iPhone when it comes out. Count the number of people who say, "Oooh, is that the new iPhone? What do you think of its design? Can I hold it? Wow, it really does feel thinner/lighter/whatever."
2) Get a new Android phone. Count the number of people who say, "Oooh, is that the new Evo X2? Does it have the 1.2 or the 1.2.1 antenna? Have they released a firmware hack yet? Screenshotting is so elegant once I hacked mine, installed a custom app, uninstalled that one and installed one that works on my model."
Did group 1 or group 2 get more respondents? Would you actually want to sleep with any of group 2? OK, scratch that, this is Slashdot and we're all happy to date to our level. But imagine you're part of the rest of the population.
I'm being facetious, of course - though, for much of the population, what'll get them laid really is a big consideration. That's why we live in a world with expensive clothes and expensive cars.
In my own case, the criteria was simple: My wife already hates me for giving her four different interfaces she has to learn to use just to watch the damn TV, all because I thought Netflix and Hulu plus YouTube would be a good cable replacement then wanted to try a 360 in one room and a PS3 in another. Giving her a phone that just works, that she can call me and say, "How do I do X"? and it'll be a couple of clicks away, not a, "Well, you need to root it first, then go to this obscure site, download this package, now if you install it correctly, you'll get to do the feature in a way that's totally inconsistent to how everything else you're used to on the phone works." is a huge thing.
Apple made a decision to go with "it just works." That simplifies and dumbs down what you can do but, for a HUGE number of people, that's vastly more important than wringing every last option out after hours of painful tweaking. To most people, it's a phone with some extra cool features. They'd really like their phone to just work, not need a constant uphill struggle to learn it and then relearn it when next year's model comes out and the carriers dick with everything.
By nerd criteria, Android is vastly superior. By many other people's criteria, the iPhone is superior. The trick is understanding the criteria people judge by and recognizing that just because other people's value systems are not the same as yours, that doesn't make them wrong for using criteria that're different to your own.
The lightest option for carrying around in a mobile environment is speech recognition. Your vocal chords travel around with you anyway. If you decide you need a headset, they're lighter than pretty much any mouse, trackpad or trackball. Best of all, your voice puts absolutely zero strain on your carpal tunnel.
Of course, it sucks for things like coding but if risking your carpal tunnels means getting to never use computers, limited access is still infinity times better than no access.
That addresses the lightest possible options for mobile use. Honestly though, if you're suffering enough from your carpal tunnels that you can't use computers/can only use them in restricted form and you really can't get by with your voice... Man up and carry a slightly bigger bag and the weight of a trackball. In the scheme of things, a slightly bulkier bag and the extra few ounces of a trackball or whatever bulky ergonomic solution works best for you is way less than the suffering bad carpal tunnels will give you.
While you're at it: Who really uses laptops in that many places anyway? Buy a dock, a really good ergonomic pointing device and a really good ergonomic keyboard (I've been impressed with the SafeType keyboards though they suck for cursor/numpad/key combination access) for each major location you use it (home office, work). Sure, that'll run you several hundred bucks per location but it costs way less than surgery, time off from work or losing your career. That protects you for 90% of the time most of us ever use our laptops. The other 10%? Do you really need to use it in Starbucks (if you're a MacBook Pro owner, I take it all back, you bought the thing to look "creative" and Starbucks is critical for that)? Do you really need to use your laptop in meetings (buy a dictaphone if your wrists matter that much and transcribe in a healthier environment later)?
The point of all of the above is that with a few small compromises, there's no reason laptop use needs to be any worse than desktop use. And those small compromises? They're a lot smaller than the pain of carpal tunnels, lost income and surgery.
The terrorists have actually recruited exactly the same number of liberal arts students as engineers. But it's only been nine years and the liberal arts students haven't got out of bed yet. They totally intend to attack something and have some really great ideas that'll totally change the neo facist world order but, well, Oprah was on. Plus, do you know how hard it is to hide explosives on your crotch when you're wearing your little sister's skinny jeans!
I'm assuming there's some legal definition for "expectation" that, in traditional legal form, has no bearing on what the word means to normal humans?
Otherwise, it would seem there are two pretty easy outs:
1) Anyone who uses file sharing networks sends their ISP a letter saying, "I expect you to maintain my privacy." Short of the ISP writing back to them and saying, "no," they now have an established expectation.
2) ISPs who don't want to carry the costs of media industry fishing trips put in their sales blurb, "We maintain your privacy." Now users of those ISPs have an expectation of privacy.
In normal English, either case would establish an expectation amongst users for their privacy to be maintained. That courts may have [illogically] ruled users of general ISPs somehow don't have that expectation but that doesn't matter as ISPs/users would have now established and clarified a superceding expectation.
Of course, like I said, legal definitions rarely match common sense or actual English.;)
"For example, graphics chips are doubling in capacity every six months. That translates into a thousandfold increase in capacity over a five-year period — the average shelf life of most game platforms."
I'm pretty sure Gordon E. Moore might disagree with that claim.
Granted, "capacity" is a nebulous term:
They're sure as hell not doubling ram (the most obvious "capacity" part) that fast (4GB is the absolute maximum on dual GPU cards) and that would imply 1GB was the maximum a year ago, 256MB two years ago and anyone with a 3 year old gaming PC would be chugging along on 64MB of ram.
They're not doubling in clock speed (substitute MB for MHz for a rough equivalent to the above).
Single chips are running ~1600 stream processors. That'd be 400 a year ago? 100 two years ago? 25 three years ago?
Clearly my ~$200 8800GT that still works just fine for most games was delivered from the future by a flying Delorean.
The 1,000x/generation is marketing hype by console manufacturers who're trying to sell you on how superawesome their new system is. With certain code optimizations, performing certain tasks, certain aspects of the rendering pipeline may be 1,000 times faster but I'm pretty sure a PS3 or XBox 360 would weep at running GTA:San Andreas at 15,360p (32x in each direction of the PS2/XBox's 480p).
Reality is, we're seeing something closer to Moore's law.
Though that would make a less sensational article, "SHOCK HORROR: Programmers today need to advance to stay relevant at exactly the same pace as every other programmer for the last 30 years."
"Pakistani-based militants used mobile and satellite phones..."
Were they Pakistani? Or Pakistan-based?
Just like a person can be English or England-based but there's no such thing as English-based person, there's no such thing as a Pakistani-based person.
Grammar nazi? Perhaps. But it's kind of unfortunate when we can't even get regional cultural terms right before setting ourselves up as experts and discussing the nuances of what's morally right or wrong for that region.
Employment is a somewhat dynamic equilibrium but still an equilibrium nonetheless. All of the factors for an against ultimately balance out (albeit taking a few years to do so every time there's a boom or bust). Those factors tend to include: pay, working hours, working conditions, perceived sense of enjoyment, desire to be in the field, qualifications needed to get there, and many more.
Every year, millions of kids enter the workforce. Hundreds of thousands of them think gaming is just the coolest thing ever. If they get in via QA/Customer Service, they don't even need a degree to get there. On the positive side: They get to be in a field [they think] they love and they get to work in it with f-all experience or training. Even the coders get in on the back of a basic degree or a successful game mod.
Funnily enough, with a massive supply and only a finite demand for these employees... employers have discovered they can ask for longer hours and pay less for them than they would in fields where hardly anyone wants to do it and they need years of specialized training.
Not exactly rocket science.
I was in the industry for five years. I got sick of the crazy hours and too many people with a maturity level way south of their customers so I left. I'd imagine it took them a second or two to replace me because that crazy supply of people who want to be in the field, no matter what, continues unabated.
The difference between the people complaining/writing rants and myself is that I recognized what the reality was and stopped whining about it being unfair. Of course I wasn't going to get the conditions people in much less desirable jobs have - because I was trading them for getting to do the desirable thing that a million other people would make the same trade to get to do. Sure, after a few years, most people in the field realize the trade off isn't actually worth it and move on - but, like me, they get some great memories, they get to know they lived their dream for a while... and a million new kids get to take their places and do the same... for the few years it takes them to burn out too.
A lot of the guys I used to know now work sane hours for way better salaries in places where they have to wear a tie, not have nerf fights in the office and never release anything a tenth as much fun as a videogame. They don't bitch about that either as they recognize that, too, is a trade off they chose, with a balance point set by millions of other people choosing where their values lie.
In short: You don't have to work in the games industry, or programming, or any other industry. Stop bitching about what you don't get compared to someone else, somewhere else, when they're making other tradeoffs you don't have to. Instead, figure out what's more rewarding to your values than it is for most other people, skewing the equilibrium in your favor, and then reap the benefits of being there.
Every housing lock I control, I swap over to run off the same Kwikset smart key.
With them, I can re-key to any other Kwikset key I like in a few seconds. If my wife or I lose a key, if we decide a friend who was trusted with a spare isn't so trustworthy now, we can rekey each lock in a few seconds and be good to go again rather than having to replace the whole damn lock. Plus, as I've re-keyed all the locks, the new key continues working in every door rather than being yet another variant.
They're not perfect but then most household locks aren't - they're simply good enough to deter most people.
one for the outer door, two for the inner, three more for my girlfriends place, one for the office... and the roof
At the very least, that's one key in place of your three plus the roof. Depending on how close your girlfriend and you are, it could be one for all seven. If you were very lazy and happy with security through obscurity with your co-workers, you could key all six of your home/girlfriend's locks off your work key. That'd be eight keys condensed in to one.
That one plus the bike/car/motorcycle keys is only four and now pretty easy to carry. If your car is your daily ride and the bike/motorcycle are occasional toy rides, you can likely swap them off to a second keyring for just those occasions. At that point, a building and a car key on a keyring, even with your swiss army knife, isn't going to be that bulky at all.
Discussing this one in the office, the esteemed Kevin Thompson said,
"It could be good for the netbook market when all of those people buy an iPad and realize they can't do [expletive] go and buy a netbook to replace it."
Apple's training users to appreciate a convenience size... yet almost completely failing to provide for content production as well as content consumption.
The quoted Morgan Stanley figures say 44% are buying an iPad instead of. That's 56% who aren't, who wouldn't be buying anything else. Many users will stay with Apple... but how many users have Apple converted to the size of ultra portables yet let down enough on content production that they'll move back in to, and enlarge, the general netbook market?
MobileMe has the ability to check the GPS location of your lost phone, remotely. It is hard to imagine that, if this wasn't a controlled leak, Apple's legendary witch hunters wouldn't have been all over the guy who found it long before he could sell it to Gizmodo.
For the rest of us, getting charged $100/year so you can get what the Latitude app - that Apple just happened to reject - does for free is abusive enough that we don't all pay it. For an Apple employee who likely gets it free anyway, on a test unit, given their legendary zeal for protecting against leaks? It's pretty much inconceivable that they didn't have MobileMe running. If they had MobileMe running and it was a genuine loss not a marketing ploy, it's pretty much inconceivable that their witch hunters didn't turn up. Everything screams of a staged loss.
Well, you know, there are still a couple of people around that play musical instruments (you know, those expensive things you don't have to plug in)
The best ones still require you to. And they go up to eleven!
Mind you, I'm yet to see a laptop with a class-A set of tubes, either. And no, steampunk fans, gluing some non functioning brasswork and a couple of tubes doesn't make anything other than an ugly mess.
Actually, you type "fertilizer + bomb" in to google.
It still gives you 106,000 results, completely invalidating his original point about how weeding out farmers gives you a usefully small search set.
Any terrorist with half a brain is going to use euphemisms, switched words, code, etc. About all you're going to reliably turn up is a list of every school boy in America, every news agency that's ever posted a story on a bomber using fertilizer and a crackpot on a compound in Arkansas who's only a danger to himself anyway.
'If you search for fertilizers on Google... it's going to come back with 6.5 million pages. Enjoy,' he said. 'If you want to search for non-farmers who are discussing fertilizer... it's not even searchable.'
Sure it is. 6,499,996 of those 6.5m are non farmers discussing fertilizer. With mega farms taking over farming, there are only, what, four actual farmers in America. </joke>
Even if we assume there are huge numbers of farmers on the internets, discussing fertilizer all day... He's implying 6.5m is too large a set to go through but the non farmer set is small enough to manually browse through. Really? So there aren't millions of home owners with gardens in America? There aren't tens of thousands of HOAs handling their own landscaping? There aren't armies of landscapers? And that's before you get in to the 106,000 results Google gives you for "fertilizer + bomb". Even if you weed out every last farmer, every landscaper, every HOA, every home owner... you still have over 100,000 entries to go through of people simply discussing fertilizer and bombs. To turn his own words back on him, "Enjoy."
Not that I, in any way, think it's right we've ended up in this situation, nor that the conclusion is right. For the sake of providing an alternative perspective, however...
"And where does this attitude towards minors come from?"
Under the legal age of consent, minors are considered a group that require additional guidance: greater praise to encourage positive actions, protecting from greater long term consequences of negative actions, more immediate short term consequences for those actions.
Under that system, it's generally considered a parent's responsibility to discipline.
Unfortunately, the common belief is that a hell of a lot of parents don't bother. They've got other things to do, are absent, would rather be the kids' friends, had kids whilst kids themselves and never learned the lessons they need to teach, a whole slew of reasons.
The common belief holds that they tend to dump pretty much the entire responsibility for parenting on a school system that has to deal with the consequences of that lack of parenting every day.
Given they've had both the responsibility and consequences dumped on them, for the entirety of raising a child, time and again... and they know the parents often won't back them when it becomes the parents' responsibility in situations that overlap... how surprising is it that issues keep coming up where they overreach what would ever be acceptable in a world where every parent acted like a parent?
I'm not saying it's right. As is always joked, there are tougher requirements on having a beer or driving a car than there are on becoming a parent. It's not acceptable that many parents do a terrible job of raising their kids. It's not acceptable that responsibility and consequences are dumped on the school system. It's not acceptable that some parents acting so poorly leads to some teachers generalizing for all parents and overreaching in all cases. It's not acceptable that we value education as poorly as we do, have class sizes as large as we do, and create a situation where teachers don't have time to genuinely assess each case.
It's wrong in every way. But the only way you stand any chance of fixing something is to understand the whole broken system and everything that needs fixing... rather than just finger pointing at one symptom at the end of the chain and declaring that it is wrong. Sadly, as a society, we much prefer that fingerpointing and scapegoating to actually facing tough truths. So, I imagine these teachers will get sued, we'll all feel very righteous, then wonder why it's continued to get worse next year.
"As a customer, you have the power to influence vendors to provide more secure products by letting them know that security is important to you,"
And, as a consumer, you have the power to influence vendors to provide better employment and buying practices by letting them know that they are important to you.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of America continues to shop at Walmart whilst every competitor goes out of business.
"Does it get the job done? Now what's the cheapest I can get it for?" is most people's primary motivation.
Sellers, who listen to them saying, "I want security!" and deliver that, at the expense of greater cost, are then left wondering why the competitor who did just enough to avoid standing out on security but otherwise kept their product slightly cheaper is selling many times more copies.
So, yes, people can influence sellers with their actions. The problem is, it needs to be their actions, not their words. Even worse, they're already successfully doing just that - unfortunately, their actions are screaming something quite different to any words about, "Security is truly important to me."
The good news is the EMP will magically avoid trashing people's smart phones. It'll leave the computers, digital cameras, etc. in perfect working order. Best of all, it absolutely will not kill the person with a pacemaker.
And they will never, ever, miss, doing all that damage to another motorist, knocking out the street lights the car was passing through and causing other accidents or hitting a building and fragging the poor bystanding company's network.
From listening to everyone complain, the grass is always greener elsewhere.
Simple truth is, all of them seem to do some things better and some things worse than others. It's more about figuring out which things you actually care about and which ones you don't. Then find the provider that does what you care about and fails at the things you don't care about anyway.
50-100m deaths, when the global population was a quarter of what it is now, is hardly anything.
You're quite right, "a small percentage of people that might have died" - 5% is, indeed, a small percentage. That'd only be a quarter of a billion deaths these days.
The orders were put in at a time when no one knew whether it going to stay relatively harmless or mutate to something as potent as the 1918-1920 version of the same virus. Even then, it took them well over six months to create enough to just cover the high risk groups. They could've waited, to be sure... But, had we not got lucky and it had mutated, that'd have been a fun six to nine months of knowing we needed a vaccine but had wasted our chance to get started. Given the choice, I'd rather err on the side of caution than save a few dollars.
If she's facing three years in jail for filming three minutes of Twilight, what is the movie's director of photography facing? Surely all ninety minutes of it, plus being the original creator of that, merits far more?
49,000 lost contributors in three months sounds like a lot.
Out of 3,000,000 active contributors, that's a little less than 2%.
Even that would assume 0 new contributors signed up during the three month period. Conveniently, that number was skipped. If 49,001 contributors signed up, while 49,000 left, the shocking figure of 49,000 leaving is actually a net gain.
Given the site's been around since 2001 (let's call it 25 three month periods), gaining 3m contributors implies an average of 120,000 have joined in each three month period. Even if it's slowed, my guess is it's still enough that the actual drop off, if even a drop off, is well below 1%.
"After years of panicked lawsuits against TiVo and DVR technology in general, the NYTimes is reporting on yet another lesson for content providers to learn and then immediately forget"
"According to Nielsen, 46 percent of viewers 18 to 49 years old for all four networks taken together are watching the commercials during playback, up slightly from last year"
"some shows having increases of more than 20 percent when DVR ratings are added"
So, the ad value drops by 54%... But up to 20% more viewers are added... Giving, at best, 55.2% of your former ad viewership.
Yes, 55.2% of your old value is SO much better than the former 100%.
Drawing the conclusion that content providers were wrong to freak out about DVRs is farcical. Their product is still worth at least 45% less to advertisers. Yes, 45% less is better than 54% less, that 20% bump from DVRs hooking more viewers is nice and all... But, seriously, it's like saying "Hey, we burned down half your home but, good news, we totally discovered a small basement you didn't know about in the charred wreckage. Aren't you grateful we torched your home?!"
Slashdot Mirror
No one likes a COICA blocker.
"piece of crap that nobody would ever want to buy anyway"
I'm totally with you. It's like shirts without pocket protectors. Pocket protectors are a brilliant, sensible idea that adds utility to an otherwise poorly designed garment. What kind of sheeple would buy ones without them?
Another perspective would be that some people like getting laid. Pocket protectors are sold to nerds for whom every last bit of utility is vastly more important than appearance or likelihood of meeting a woman outside of an MMO and regular shirts are sold to the rest of the populace who are really quite happy without them as they're not carrying pens around in their shirt pockets anyway.
I propose an empirical test:
1) Get a new iPhone when it comes out. Count the number of people who say, "Oooh, is that the new iPhone? What do you think of its design? Can I hold it? Wow, it really does feel thinner/lighter/whatever."
2) Get a new Android phone. Count the number of people who say, "Oooh, is that the new Evo X2? Does it have the 1.2 or the 1.2.1 antenna? Have they released a firmware hack yet? Screenshotting is so elegant once I hacked mine, installed a custom app, uninstalled that one and installed one that works on my model."
Did group 1 or group 2 get more respondents? Would you actually want to sleep with any of group 2? OK, scratch that, this is Slashdot and we're all happy to date to our level. But imagine you're part of the rest of the population.
I'm being facetious, of course - though, for much of the population, what'll get them laid really is a big consideration. That's why we live in a world with expensive clothes and expensive cars.
In my own case, the criteria was simple: My wife already hates me for giving her four different interfaces she has to learn to use just to watch the damn TV, all because I thought Netflix and Hulu plus YouTube would be a good cable replacement then wanted to try a 360 in one room and a PS3 in another. Giving her a phone that just works, that she can call me and say, "How do I do X"? and it'll be a couple of clicks away, not a, "Well, you need to root it first, then go to this obscure site, download this package, now if you install it correctly, you'll get to do the feature in a way that's totally inconsistent to how everything else you're used to on the phone works." is a huge thing.
Apple made a decision to go with "it just works." That simplifies and dumbs down what you can do but, for a HUGE number of people, that's vastly more important than wringing every last option out after hours of painful tweaking. To most people, it's a phone with some extra cool features. They'd really like their phone to just work, not need a constant uphill struggle to learn it and then relearn it when next year's model comes out and the carriers dick with everything.
By nerd criteria, Android is vastly superior. By many other people's criteria, the iPhone is superior. The trick is understanding the criteria people judge by and recognizing that just because other people's value systems are not the same as yours, that doesn't make them wrong for using criteria that're different to your own.
The lightest option for carrying around in a mobile environment is speech recognition. Your vocal chords travel around with you anyway. If you decide you need a headset, they're lighter than pretty much any mouse, trackpad or trackball. Best of all, your voice puts absolutely zero strain on your carpal tunnel.
Of course, it sucks for things like coding but if risking your carpal tunnels means getting to never use computers, limited access is still infinity times better than no access.
That addresses the lightest possible options for mobile use. Honestly though, if you're suffering enough from your carpal tunnels that you can't use computers/can only use them in restricted form and you really can't get by with your voice... Man up and carry a slightly bigger bag and the weight of a trackball. In the scheme of things, a slightly bulkier bag and the extra few ounces of a trackball or whatever bulky ergonomic solution works best for you is way less than the suffering bad carpal tunnels will give you.
While you're at it: Who really uses laptops in that many places anyway? Buy a dock, a really good ergonomic pointing device and a really good ergonomic keyboard (I've been impressed with the SafeType keyboards though they suck for cursor/numpad/key combination access) for each major location you use it (home office, work). Sure, that'll run you several hundred bucks per location but it costs way less than surgery, time off from work or losing your career. That protects you for 90% of the time most of us ever use our laptops. The other 10%? Do you really need to use it in Starbucks (if you're a MacBook Pro owner, I take it all back, you bought the thing to look "creative" and Starbucks is critical for that)? Do you really need to use your laptop in meetings (buy a dictaphone if your wrists matter that much and transcribe in a healthier environment later)?
The point of all of the above is that with a few small compromises, there's no reason laptop use needs to be any worse than desktop use. And those small compromises? They're a lot smaller than the pain of carpal tunnels, lost income and surgery.
The terrorists have actually recruited exactly the same number of liberal arts students as engineers. But it's only been nine years and the liberal arts students haven't got out of bed yet. They totally intend to attack something and have some really great ideas that'll totally change the neo facist world order but, well, Oprah was on. Plus, do you know how hard it is to hide explosives on your crotch when you're wearing your little sister's skinny jeans!
I'm assuming there's some legal definition for "expectation" that, in traditional legal form, has no bearing on what the word means to normal humans?
Otherwise, it would seem there are two pretty easy outs:
1) Anyone who uses file sharing networks sends their ISP a letter saying, "I expect you to maintain my privacy." Short of the ISP writing back to them and saying, "no," they now have an established expectation.
2) ISPs who don't want to carry the costs of media industry fishing trips put in their sales blurb, "We maintain your privacy." Now users of those ISPs have an expectation of privacy.
In normal English, either case would establish an expectation amongst users for their privacy to be maintained. That courts may have [illogically] ruled users of general ISPs somehow don't have that expectation but that doesn't matter as ISPs/users would have now established and clarified a superceding expectation.
Of course, like I said, legal definitions rarely match common sense or actual English. ;)
"For example, graphics chips are doubling in capacity every six months. That translates into a thousandfold increase in capacity over a five-year period — the average shelf life of most game platforms."
I'm pretty sure Gordon E. Moore might disagree with that claim.
Granted, "capacity" is a nebulous term:
They're sure as hell not doubling ram (the most obvious "capacity" part) that fast (4GB is the absolute maximum on dual GPU cards) and that would imply 1GB was the maximum a year ago, 256MB two years ago and anyone with a 3 year old gaming PC would be chugging along on 64MB of ram.
They're not doubling in clock speed (substitute MB for MHz for a rough equivalent to the above).
Single chips are running ~1600 stream processors. That'd be 400 a year ago? 100 two years ago? 25 three years ago?
Clearly my ~$200 8800GT that still works just fine for most games was delivered from the future by a flying Delorean.
The 1,000x/generation is marketing hype by console manufacturers who're trying to sell you on how superawesome their new system is. With certain code optimizations, performing certain tasks, certain aspects of the rendering pipeline may be 1,000 times faster but I'm pretty sure a PS3 or XBox 360 would weep at running GTA:San Andreas at 15,360p (32x in each direction of the PS2/XBox's 480p).
Reality is, we're seeing something closer to Moore's law.
Though that would make a less sensational article, "SHOCK HORROR: Programmers today need to advance to stay relevant at exactly the same pace as every other programmer for the last 30 years."
"Pakistani-based militants used mobile and satellite phones..."
Were they Pakistani? Or Pakistan-based?
Just like a person can be English or England-based but there's no such thing as English-based person, there's no such thing as a Pakistani-based person.
Grammar nazi? Perhaps. But it's kind of unfortunate when we can't even get regional cultural terms right before setting ourselves up as experts and discussing the nuances of what's morally right or wrong for that region.
Employment is a somewhat dynamic equilibrium but still an equilibrium nonetheless. All of the factors for an against ultimately balance out (albeit taking a few years to do so every time there's a boom or bust). Those factors tend to include: pay, working hours, working conditions, perceived sense of enjoyment, desire to be in the field, qualifications needed to get there, and many more.
Every year, millions of kids enter the workforce. Hundreds of thousands of them think gaming is just the coolest thing ever. If they get in via QA/Customer Service, they don't even need a degree to get there. On the positive side: They get to be in a field [they think] they love and they get to work in it with f-all experience or training. Even the coders get in on the back of a basic degree or a successful game mod.
Funnily enough, with a massive supply and only a finite demand for these employees... employers have discovered they can ask for longer hours and pay less for them than they would in fields where hardly anyone wants to do it and they need years of specialized training.
Not exactly rocket science.
I was in the industry for five years. I got sick of the crazy hours and too many people with a maturity level way south of their customers so I left. I'd imagine it took them a second or two to replace me because that crazy supply of people who want to be in the field, no matter what, continues unabated.
The difference between the people complaining/writing rants and myself is that I recognized what the reality was and stopped whining about it being unfair. Of course I wasn't going to get the conditions people in much less desirable jobs have - because I was trading them for getting to do the desirable thing that a million other people would make the same trade to get to do. Sure, after a few years, most people in the field realize the trade off isn't actually worth it and move on - but, like me, they get some great memories, they get to know they lived their dream for a while... and a million new kids get to take their places and do the same... for the few years it takes them to burn out too.
A lot of the guys I used to know now work sane hours for way better salaries in places where they have to wear a tie, not have nerf fights in the office and never release anything a tenth as much fun as a videogame. They don't bitch about that either as they recognize that, too, is a trade off they chose, with a balance point set by millions of other people choosing where their values lie.
In short: You don't have to work in the games industry, or programming, or any other industry. Stop bitching about what you don't get compared to someone else, somewhere else, when they're making other tradeoffs you don't have to. Instead, figure out what's more rewarding to your values than it is for most other people, skewing the equilibrium in your favor, and then reap the benefits of being there.
Given your skill sets, Drupal may be a good match.
They've got a huge amount going on for v7. With something of that size, you can find whatever niche is most interesting to you.
Would you rather find something it ought to do but doesn't yet and build a module?
Are you more interested in design and want to add themes that let people do things they can't already?
Do you want to help something existing? They could use help ensuring v5 and v6 modules are ported to v7?
Are you a good leader? Your local drupal user group could likely use someone to run code sprints to do the above.
Are you detail oriented? Even non coders can get involved with the QA for code sprints and the like.
Are you good at explaining things? Contribute documentation or tutorials.
As you can see, the project's big enough, pretty much anything tech you're interested in, you can get involved with.
I guess the cops understand exactly who pays their salaries.
Given the tax dodges large tech firms pull... You probably pay far more towards their salaries than Apple does.
Every housing lock I control, I swap over to run off the same Kwikset smart key.
With them, I can re-key to any other Kwikset key I like in a few seconds. If my wife or I lose a key, if we decide a friend who was trusted with a spare isn't so trustworthy now, we can rekey each lock in a few seconds and be good to go again rather than having to replace the whole damn lock. Plus, as I've re-keyed all the locks, the new key continues working in every door rather than being yet another variant.
They're not perfect but then most household locks aren't - they're simply good enough to deter most people.
one for the outer door, two for the inner, three more for my girlfriends place, one for the office ... and the roof
At the very least, that's one key in place of your three plus the roof. Depending on how close your girlfriend and you are, it could be one for all seven. If you were very lazy and happy with security through obscurity with your co-workers, you could key all six of your home/girlfriend's locks off your work key. That'd be eight keys condensed in to one.
That one plus the bike/car/motorcycle keys is only four and now pretty easy to carry. If your car is your daily ride and the bike/motorcycle are occasional toy rides, you can likely swap them off to a second keyring for just those occasions. At that point, a building and a car key on a keyring, even with your swiss army knife, isn't going to be that bulky at all.
Discussing this one in the office, the esteemed Kevin Thompson said,
"It could be good for the netbook market when all of those people buy an iPad and realize they can't do [expletive] go and buy a netbook to replace it."
Apple's training users to appreciate a convenience size... yet almost completely failing to provide for content production as well as content consumption.
The quoted Morgan Stanley figures say 44% are buying an iPad instead of. That's 56% who aren't, who wouldn't be buying anything else. Many users will stay with Apple... but how many users have Apple converted to the size of ultra portables yet let down enough on content production that they'll move back in to, and enlarge, the general netbook market?
MobileMe has the ability to check the GPS location of your lost phone, remotely. It is hard to imagine that, if this wasn't a controlled leak, Apple's legendary witch hunters wouldn't have been all over the guy who found it long before he could sell it to Gizmodo.
For the rest of us, getting charged $100/year so you can get what the Latitude app - that Apple just happened to reject - does for free is abusive enough that we don't all pay it. For an Apple employee who likely gets it free anyway, on a test unit, given their legendary zeal for protecting against leaks? It's pretty much inconceivable that they didn't have MobileMe running. If they had MobileMe running and it was a genuine loss not a marketing ploy, it's pretty much inconceivable that their witch hunters didn't turn up. Everything screams of a staged loss.
Well, you know, there are still a couple of people around that play musical instruments (you know, those expensive things you don't have to plug in)
The best ones still require you to. And they go up to eleven!
Mind you, I'm yet to see a laptop with a class-A set of tubes, either. And no, steampunk fans, gluing some non functioning brasswork and a couple of tubes doesn't make anything other than an ugly mess.
Actually, you type "fertilizer + bomb" in to google.
It still gives you 106,000 results, completely invalidating his original point about how weeding out farmers gives you a usefully small search set.
Any terrorist with half a brain is going to use euphemisms, switched words, code, etc. About all you're going to reliably turn up is a list of every school boy in America, every news agency that's ever posted a story on a bomber using fertilizer and a crackpot on a compound in Arkansas who's only a danger to himself anyway.
'If you search for fertilizers on Google ... it's going to come back with 6.5 million pages. Enjoy,' he said. 'If you want to search for non-farmers who are discussing fertilizer ... it's not even searchable.'
Sure it is. 6,499,996 of those 6.5m are non farmers discussing fertilizer. With mega farms taking over farming, there are only, what, four actual farmers in America. </joke>
Even if we assume there are huge numbers of farmers on the internets, discussing fertilizer all day... He's implying 6.5m is too large a set to go through but the non farmer set is small enough to manually browse through. Really? So there aren't millions of home owners with gardens in America? There aren't tens of thousands of HOAs handling their own landscaping? There aren't armies of landscapers? And that's before you get in to the 106,000 results Google gives you for "fertilizer + bomb". Even if you weed out every last farmer, every landscaper, every HOA, every home owner... you still have over 100,000 entries to go through of people simply discussing fertilizer and bombs. To turn his own words back on him, "Enjoy."
Not that I, in any way, think it's right we've ended up in this situation, nor that the conclusion is right. For the sake of providing an alternative perspective, however...
"And where does this attitude towards minors come from?"
Under the legal age of consent, minors are considered a group that require additional guidance: greater praise to encourage positive actions, protecting from greater long term consequences of negative actions, more immediate short term consequences for those actions.
Under that system, it's generally considered a parent's responsibility to discipline.
Unfortunately, the common belief is that a hell of a lot of parents don't bother. They've got other things to do, are absent, would rather be the kids' friends, had kids whilst kids themselves and never learned the lessons they need to teach, a whole slew of reasons.
The common belief holds that they tend to dump pretty much the entire responsibility for parenting on a school system that has to deal with the consequences of that lack of parenting every day.
Given they've had both the responsibility and consequences dumped on them, for the entirety of raising a child, time and again... and they know the parents often won't back them when it becomes the parents' responsibility in situations that overlap... how surprising is it that issues keep coming up where they overreach what would ever be acceptable in a world where every parent acted like a parent?
I'm not saying it's right. As is always joked, there are tougher requirements on having a beer or driving a car than there are on becoming a parent. It's not acceptable that many parents do a terrible job of raising their kids. It's not acceptable that responsibility and consequences are dumped on the school system. It's not acceptable that some parents acting so poorly leads to some teachers generalizing for all parents and overreaching in all cases. It's not acceptable that we value education as poorly as we do, have class sizes as large as we do, and create a situation where teachers don't have time to genuinely assess each case.
It's wrong in every way. But the only way you stand any chance of fixing something is to understand the whole broken system and everything that needs fixing... rather than just finger pointing at one symptom at the end of the chain and declaring that it is wrong. Sadly, as a society, we much prefer that fingerpointing and scapegoating to actually facing tough truths. So, I imagine these teachers will get sued, we'll all feel very righteous, then wonder why it's continued to get worse next year.
"As a customer, you have the power to influence vendors to provide more secure products by letting them know that security is important to you,"
And, as a consumer, you have the power to influence vendors to provide better employment and buying practices by letting them know that they are important to you.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of America continues to shop at Walmart whilst every competitor goes out of business.
"Does it get the job done? Now what's the cheapest I can get it for?" is most people's primary motivation.
Sellers, who listen to them saying, "I want security!" and deliver that, at the expense of greater cost, are then left wondering why the competitor who did just enough to avoid standing out on security but otherwise kept their product slightly cheaper is selling many times more copies.
So, yes, people can influence sellers with their actions. The problem is, it needs to be their actions, not their words. Even worse, they're already successfully doing just that - unfortunately, their actions are screaming something quite different to any words about, "Security is truly important to me."
The good news is the EMP will magically avoid trashing people's smart phones. It'll leave the computers, digital cameras, etc. in perfect working order. Best of all, it absolutely will not kill the person with a pacemaker.
And they will never, ever, miss, doing all that damage to another motorist, knocking out the street lights the car was passing through and causing other accidents or hitting a building and fragging the poor bystanding company's network.
From listening to everyone complain, the grass is always greener elsewhere.
Simple truth is, all of them seem to do some things better and some things worse than others. It's more about figuring out which things you actually care about and which ones you don't. Then find the provider that does what you care about and fails at the things you don't care about anyway.
True. The previous H1N1 epidemic barely made a dent.
50-100m deaths, when the global population was a quarter of what it is now, is hardly anything.
You're quite right, "a small percentage of people that might have died" - 5% is, indeed, a small percentage. That'd only be a quarter of a billion deaths these days.
The orders were put in at a time when no one knew whether it going to stay relatively harmless or mutate to something as potent as the 1918-1920 version of the same virus. Even then, it took them well over six months to create enough to just cover the high risk groups. They could've waited, to be sure... But, had we not got lucky and it had mutated, that'd have been a fun six to nine months of knowing we needed a vaccine but had wasted our chance to get started. Given the choice, I'd rather err on the side of caution than save a few dollars.
You're a social media company that doesn't have the whole making contacts thing down?
And you'd like to ensure you get your full value?
If she's facing three years in jail for filming three minutes of Twilight, what is the movie's director of photography facing? Surely all ninety minutes of it, plus being the original creator of that, merits far more?
49,000 lost contributors in three months sounds like a lot.
Out of 3,000,000 active contributors, that's a little less than 2%.
Even that would assume 0 new contributors signed up during the three month period. Conveniently, that number was skipped. If 49,001 contributors signed up, while 49,000 left, the shocking figure of 49,000 leaving is actually a net gain.
Given the site's been around since 2001 (let's call it 25 three month periods), gaining 3m contributors implies an average of 120,000 have joined in each three month period. Even if it's slowed, my guess is it's still enough that the actual drop off, if even a drop off, is well below 1%.
Not exactly the death of a system.
"After years of panicked lawsuits against TiVo and DVR technology in general, the NYTimes is reporting on yet another lesson for content providers to learn and then immediately forget"
"According to Nielsen, 46 percent of viewers 18 to 49 years old for all four networks taken together are watching the commercials during playback, up slightly from last year"
"some shows having increases of more than 20 percent when DVR ratings are added"
So, the ad value drops by 54%... But up to 20% more viewers are added... Giving, at best, 55.2% of your former ad viewership.
Yes, 55.2% of your old value is SO much better than the former 100%.
Drawing the conclusion that content providers were wrong to freak out about DVRs is farcical. Their product is still worth at least 45% less to advertisers. Yes, 45% less is better than 54% less, that 20% bump from DVRs hooking more viewers is nice and all... But, seriously, it's like saying "Hey, we burned down half your home but, good news, we totally discovered a small basement you didn't know about in the charred wreckage. Aren't you grateful we torched your home?!"