I think you're limiting your "People who say X" groups a little too thinly. The Guardian is a liberal newspaper that makes a point of being liberal in its pick of agendas rather than in being partisan in its use of facts. As a result, the Guardian will say (ourside of opinion pieces) "Here's another package of stuff about what the NSA is doing that we got from Snowden" rather than "HERO SNOWDEN UNMASKS TEH EVIL NSA!!"
As for the Post, it's crippled by the US media obsession with believing that objectivity = reporting both sides equally ("Views on shape of the world differ" as the old joke goes.) It cannot make any claims about Snowden's heroism or even play up the degree to which Snowden has risked his future livelihood because there are people opposed to what he's done.
That doesn't mean, however, that there aren't large numbers of people running around saying he's a hero.
On a seperate note, I notice this is the 500,000th article about Snowden on Slashdot's front page posted in the last hour alone: is it time that we put up a Kickstarter to create a file for 3D printers to produce our own Snowdens? We could use bitcoins to fund the entire thing..
This "iPod" is a pocketable player for MP3s you say? What a clever and original idea! *slyly references Nomad in the title*
You're kinda missing the wood for the trees here. There were plenty of Android tablets before the Kindle Fire. I believe there were even a few liquid paper eBook readers before the regular Kindle. And even if we ignore the fact that Amazon actually made popular versions of what were obscure geek toys, in truth there's no reason why Amazon has to be "original", it just has to be successful.
All of which said, I don't believe the story for a couple of reasons:
1. Amazon wouldn't limit it to being a games console.
2. Amazon wouldn't charge $300 for it either. If a rumor about a new Apple iWidget makes the rounds, and the rumored price is $500, chances are it'll be $600. If a rumor about a new Amazon KindleWidget makes the rounds, and the rumored price is $300, chances are it'll be $200.
FWIW DECT does not use 2.4GHz. US and European frequencies vary, but the US version is right in the middle (literally) of the PCS frequencies, and the European version is close but not exactly the same.
The last four digits of your credit card are printed on pretty much every receipt, shown on every order confirmation page, every "My account saved credit cards" screen, and are usually shown in addition to an expiration date. That's information that's never been considered confidential - quite the opposite indeed. It's pretty much public information.
GoDaddy was insane to consider it valid authentication information. You might just as well treat someone's name as their password.
I guess it depends on whose rules you're following. On a legal level, no, it's not misbehaving.
On the other hand, when you (or rather the company you've taken over) declares that, henceforth, Solaris shall be thought of as an open source operating system, and promotes the fact it's open source, and nearly a decade later you're finding legal loopholes the company you took over left in place, that you're using in order to sue people who treat it as one, then you're not exactly playing the rules you (or Sun) declared you were playing by.
as their assets and paychecks are denominated in DOLLARS as opposed to HOLDINGS
Our paychecks generally rise with or close to Inflation. Our assets comprise of holdings, like houses, cars, etc, and debts, which are denominated in dollars. We benefit when our debts reduce in value.
Very, very, few people have significant numbers of actual dollars just lying around, uninvested. So you're about 100% wrong.
The lenders aren't going to withdraw, and there's this little concept called "interest" you appear to be ignoring that serves multiple functions, including handling defaults and encouraging investment.
But in any case, anyone who proposes a particular currency's purpose is to get away from fractional reserve banking doesn't know what FRB is or why it exists. In particular, it serves the opposite function of what you think. Because the alternative to FRB is not 100% backed loans, it's near 0%.
FRB exists because of accounting. If I create a loan for you of $100, I have an agreement that means you'll pay me $100 plus interest, and you have access to $100 that you didn't have before. If I'm a bank, there might even be no money changing hands initially.
That agreement that I hold is worth something. That is to say, I can sell it to someone. Usually it's worth something along the lines of $(1-RISK) * (100 + interest payments). So by loaning you $100, I'm not out $100, in fact, I may be worth more than I was before I made you the loan, even though you haven't paid it yet.
You can fight this and say it's not fair, and it's double counting, and all kinds of things, but it's true, objectively true. You made a loan agreement with me, and people are willing to buy that agreement, so the agreement is worth more to me than the cash was, so my net worth immediately increased, rather than decreased, when I lended you cash. There's no getting around that. No system of accounting, economics, or mathematics, will prevent that loan document from being worth money.
The only problem is that sometimes there are bank runs, so we force banks, whose main business is making loans, to have a lot of cash on hand to cover for the fact that most of their value is tied up in IOUs from their debtors. That's called a reserve. And it's a fraction of the reserve needed.
We can, if you like, force the "fraction" to be 100%, but that's not going to work. Banks will be unable to lend to anyone at anything other than absurdly high interest rates, so instead we'll go to less regulated sources of loans like the bond market. I'll close my bank and instead buy a $100 bond from you that pays interest, and maybe I'll sell that bond to someone else. And if that looks exactly like the situation we just had, well, that's because it is, except that there's no reserve any more.
I guess you could also outlaw bonds. And then I guess loans altogether. And then money;-)
Cheaper because you don't have to pay money transfer fees
Cobblers. This keeps coming up and it's completely untrue. To transfer money from one person to another, the money needs to be in a currency that both parties accept. Typically (as in, always) this is whatever currency taxes are paid in, food is bought with, a bank accepts for mortgage costs and/or a landlord accepts for rent payment, utilities accept for service payments, and transportation infrastructure providers (be they energy, vehicle, or whole shebang) accepts for products and services rendered. It is also the currency wages are paid in.
As there is no country in the world as yet where Bitcoins are paid out or accepted by all or even most of these entities, the sending entity MUST convert your cash into Bitcoins to initiate a transfer, and the receiving entity MUST convert the Bitcoins back into cash at the end of the transfer. Both transactions result in a fee. The fee is lower than that charged for some transactions, but higher than charged for other types of transactions, when compared to a straight single currency cash transfer. (And don't even get me started on the uncertainty involved where you have no way of knowing whether youi'll even be able to convert the received # Bitcoins into the same number of $ORIGINAL_CURRENCY as sent.)
The same points can be made about transaction times and other supposed advantages of Real currency->Bitcoin->Real currency type transfers.
For real people, in the real world, engaged in legitimate transactions, Bitcoins are a terrible way to conduct business.
Samsung hasn't been "patent trolling", it's been asking Apple to pay for its FRAND patents, and Apple's been refusing because it doesn't like the terms.
The EU's response has been dubious at best.
{{prose|date=February 2013}} The '''smartphone wars''' or '''smartphone patents licensing and litigation''' is an ongoing business battle by [[smartphone]] manufacturers including [[Sony]], [[Google]], [[Apple Inc.]], [[Samsung]], [[Microsoft]], [[Nokia]], [[Motorola]], and [[HTC]], among others, in [[Patent infringement|patent litigation]]. The conflict is part of the [[Technology patent wars|wider "patent wars"]] between multinational technology and software corporations.
To secure and increase their [[market share]], companies granted a [[patent]] can sue to prevent competitors from using the methods the patent covers. Since 2010 the number of lawsuits, counter-suits, and trade complaints based on patents and [[Industrial design right|designs]] in the market for smartphones, and devices based on [[Mobile operating system|smartphone OSes]] such as [[Android (operating system)|Android]] and [[iOS]], has increased significantly.
==Timeline== Initial suits, countersuits, rulings, licence agreements, and other major events in ''italics'':<ref>{{cite web |author=Florian Mueller |url=http://www.scribd.com/doc/44759893/Apple-vs-Android-10-12-02 |title=Apple vs Android 10.12.02 |accessdate=September 8, 2011}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |author=Florian Mueller |url=http://www.scribd.com/doc/52195210/NokiaVsApple-11-03-31-100 |title=NokiaVsApple_11.03.31.100 |accessdate=September 8, 2011}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |author=Florian Mueller |url=http://www.scribd.com/doc/52754079/Microsoft-vs-Motorola-11-04-09 |title=Microsoft vs Motorola 11.04.09 |accessdate=September 8, 2011}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |author=Florian Mueller |url=http://www.scribd.com/doc/59474521/AppleVsSamsung-11-07-05 |title=AppleVsSamsung_11.07.05 |accessdate=September 8, 2011}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |author=Florian Mueller |url=http://www.scribd.com/doc/61387056/AppleVsHTCandS3-11-07-29 |title=AppleVsHTCandS3_11.07.29 |accessdate=September 8, 2011}}</ref>
===2009=== The pattern of suing and countersuing really began in 2009 as the smartphone market grew more rapidly. * 2009, Oct 22: ''Nokia sues Apple over 10 patents.''<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/10/22/nokia_sues_apple_over_iphones_use_of_patented_wireless_standards.html |title=Nokia sues Apple over iPhone's use of patented wireless standards |publisher=Appleinsider.com |date=October 22, 2009 |accessdate=January 5, 2012}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/29/nokia-vs-apple-the-in-depth-analysis/ |title=Nokia vs. Apple: the in-depth analysis |publisher=Engadget.com |date= |accessdate=January 5, 2012}}</ref> * 2009, Dec 11: ''Apple countersues Nokia over 13 patents.''<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/11/apple-countersues-nokia-for-infringing-13-patents/ |title=Apple countersues Nokia for infringing 13 patents |publisher=Engadget.com |date= |accessdate=January 5, 2012}}</ref> * 2009, Dec 29: Nokia files a second lawsuit<ref>{{cite web|last=Foresman |first=Chris |url=http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/nokia-adds-additional-lawsuit-in-patent-catfight-with-apple.ars |title=Nokia adds additional lawsuit in patent catfight with Apple |publisher=Arstechnica.com |date=January 4, 2010 |accessdate=January 5, 2012}}</ref> and a [[United States International Trade Commission|U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC)]] complaint against Apple over 7 more patents.<ref>{{cite web|last=Foresman |first=Chris |url=http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/12/nokia-hurls-new-salvo-in-spat-with-apple-complains-to-itc.ars |title=Nokia hurls new salvo in spat with Apple, complains to ITC |publisher=Arstechnica.com |date=December 29, 2009 |accessdate=January 5, 2012}}</ref>
The article says the FBI seized the Tormail thingie as part of an investigation into the company that was hosting it - which they were investigating because the company in question was providing hosting services to child pornographers.
This turns out to be a stroke of luck for the FBI, as it means for all subsequent investigations, if something comes up that involves a Tormail email address, they don't need a cooperative ISP to provide them with the contents of the associated mailbox.
And, uh, that's about it. You're not presumed guilty, it's just you made the mistake of using something that the FBI now have complete access to, kinda like if you walked through a street in a crime ridden neighborhood, and the local police had decided to clamp down on crime there by covering the entire area in cops, you'd be "under surveilance" even though the police don't think you've done anything and should probably hope they don't mistake you for someone else or something like that.
This is sooooooooo true. Only the other day, I logged in to AdWords, and there at the top of the screen was a big box that said "Find out the life history of anyone on the Internet by entering their email address, reddit, or Slashdot ID in this box".
So I looked for a random number. There was a flyer for a local car dealership advertising a Corolla for $9,751.38, so I entered that, and clicked Submit. There was a brief request asking me to give my consent to a charge of 25c on my Google Wallet, and I thought "What the hell, why not?" and gave it.
There, in front of me, was all the information about "975138" I asked for. It was one of those "Be careful what you wish for, you might get it" things. Slashdot had pulled up the details of some Slashdotter with the nick "Jaktar".
Everything was there.
His phone numbers. His credit record. I could see he'd spent over $300 in the last month on "Gold pony cookies" for the popular free-to-play Facebook game "Pony club". He had a recurring membership on several websites, including the Alabama Post Gazette, Netflix, and something called "Hot Manponies Dot Com".
Even better was that all of this was hyperlinked to similarly relevant information. I clicked on a credit card billing line marked "KATZ PSYCHIATRIC SERV COPAY", and immediately received a list of future and prior appointments with a therapist. The prior appointments were also hyperlinked, and a quick click revealed a Google Voice style transcription of the appointment in question (not that interesting, 20 minutes of it was marked "(extended sobbing, 2 mins)" alternating with "(hysterical laughing, 60 seconds)".
Finally, there was information to help people like me, who just want to advertise and tailor our ads to people like "Jaktar". Google had analyzed the person's history, and recommended various keywords I could use in my ads to appeal to people like him. "Star Wars", "Leia", "PHP", "Free to play", and "Ponies" came up.
This type of information is gold, quite frankly. Advertisers like me are always interested in targetting specific people at great expense, rather than trying to appeal to broad swathes of the population, so Google collecting this data and selling it to us is exactly what we need.
If merely comparing someone to someone bad was libelous, Godwin's law would have to be restated as "Back when the Internet existed, as each online discussion ended in a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler, resulting in the infamous libel suits that brought down that brave experiment in free speech and porn."
Look at it this way: it's OK to say "Joe Bloggs is just like Hitler". What's less OK is to say "I have compelling proof that Joe Bloggs is organizing a program of mass exterminations for jewish people, and is trying to manipulate events so that Germany can safely invade Poland, and he's also advocating the creation of a Federal freeway system."
I think that's a reasonable balance actually, as it allows hyperbole as long as it remains hyperbole, not actual false accusations.
When you leave your parent's basement, you'll probably find yourself doing a few things to get a job, including higher education, relocating, and investing more than you'd otherwise want and need to in housing, transportation equipment, etc.
If you're under the impression employees took no risks, and have little to pay back, during the process of looking for work, then you're dumber than a Republican.
It's also worth noting that you're failing completely to address any issues here, including explaining why the risks associated with selling an unknown quantity of movie views at cinemas, followed by an unknown number of DVDs, streaming views, video on demand, etc, followed by some unknown to-be-negotiated TV rights, is somehow less than the risks associated with a GUARANTEED FIXED INCOME.
You know else prefers standard monthly payments? Pretty much everyone, like the OP said. Not just employees, but corporations too. In many cases, the overwhelming cost of the underlying commodities makes it impossible to do so - for example, oil and groceries (although look at Warehouse stores for an example of companies that do, actually, attempt to make their income fixed by providing a hybrid cost structure.) But others, where no underlying commodity is an issue, and the entire cost structure comprises of "We're going to make a major investment and then try to get users to pay it back" ask you to pay by the month.
Cable TV? By the month. Cell phone? By the month. Internet? By the month. Cable TV premium channel (HBO, etc - hmmm, maybe a particularly relevent example?) - by the month.
One of the most ambigious words out there is "freedom." We can usually focus on some areas of broad agreement, but for the most part it's a word used more for its positive overtones than its accuracy.
The Southern States, zealously supporting slavery, described themselves on the side of freedom. John Wilkes Booth wrote about glowingly. Why? Because the Feds letting the power holders in the South own slaves was, clearly, not interfering with their freedom to do so.
I'm using the South as an great example, but there's an even better one, except the conversation would degenerate from here if I used it. Let's just say "You know who also said he was fighting for freedom?"
I'm inclined to avoid using the word these days. In the mean time, using the term objectively, I think Stallman is probably on a better track than the BSD people. The BSD people would be better if it weren't for the existance of copyright. That changes everything, Stallman understands that, I don't think the BSD people do.
Should be easy enough. Find the base discrete unit that measures time (eg the smallest step in time you can make), and the base discrete unit of distance. If the speed of light, measured by those units, is 4,294,967,296, then you're living in a simulation.
FFS
Slow Down Cowboy!
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Yeah, I'm struggling to see the cause of the hysteria in the summary, especially as Google doesn't have a stranglehold on mobile, and Google supports the only major mobile smartphone platform open enough to allow multiple app stores to co-exist.
Oh wait, I know the cause of the hysteria: Facebook. Specifically, the money FB has been paying to their shills to post anti-Google nonsense lately.
The funny part is that Google is genuinely easy to criticize, but these idiots insist on focussing on stuff that's obviously bunk. Google in bed with the NSA? Sure - as I am, after all, networks I use have probably been hacked by the NSA too. Google controlling mobile? WTF? And OMG THEY RUN A BUS IN SAN FRANCISCO!!! This cannot be allowed otherwise MORE PEOPLE WILL WANT TO LIVE IN SAN FRANCISCO!
Meanwhile they have a terrible search engine that gets worse by the minute - even Bing, a third rate clone, has now surpassed it in usefulness, and their attempts to push Google+ have broken numerous services, some of which because they've intentionally withdrawn them.
But, sure, ignore the actual problems with Google and focus on the made-up complaints instead. That makes total sense.
I do too. That said I can see a situation where it'd be useful to have something that's easy to prepare lying around for those days you just don't have the time and energy to prepare something reasonable and carrying round needs-to-be-kept-frozen needs-a-microwave food isn't an option.
I'm not sure this is a fair answer to the question: it's a little like someone saying "It's 2014: What new stuff should I learn to be a better accountant?" and the answer coming back "Have you tried calculus? IT'S AWESOME!!"
The right answer, alas, is not something that tickles your fancy, but something you're likely to hate - like the latest tax code.
What about the original question? Well, they're saying "New technologies" but it's not clear if they mean "New to me" or "New as in 3D printed guns". I'm guessing the latter, this is Slashdot after all.
The answer to the latter interpretation is, of course, "Who the f--- knows?" It's pretty close to impossible to determine what's a fad technology and what's not. I think node.js shows some potential, but it's the only thing I can think off the top of my head it's worth familiarizing yourself with - and technically, it's not new new, it's just up and coming.
The answer to the former is... well, something that's going to depress virtually everyone on Slashdot.
Python? Fuck no. Nobody uses it. Let me clarify that for pedants: yes, you can mention a handful of projects that use it, and many, many, many, GNU/Linux wizards use it to write quick automation scripts for various tasks, but that's not a reason to learn it.
What do you need to learn that's a back-end language? Well, there are three:
PHP.
VB.NET.
Java.
At least two, possibly three, of those will send most self respecting programmers gibbering in a corner. However:
- PHP is the language of LAMP. Yes, P originally meant "Perl", but PHP took over a long time ago. Download a few popular open source projects of scale and popularity equal to or greater than Wordpress (itself a common example), and you'll see what I mean - large numbers, possibly most, of the projects you download will be written in this bullshit, awful, language.
- VB.NET is one of the two major enterprise core platforms. It really is. Why? Well, back in the 1990s, lots of corporations brought in armies of code monkeys to write their core business applications in the easiest languages available, which meant they were left with a large body of business logic written in VB. As businesses moved to the web, they found the easiest migration path was VB.NET, it meant they could use much of their existing code and simply drop it into a web environment. As a result, most.NET applications are written in VB.NET, and large numbers of enterprises are dependent upon it.
- Java - the other end of the Enterprise coin. Any corporation who didn't migrate to VB.NET for their data/web backends migrated to Java instead, because of the big Java push in the late 1990s and because Sun put together some moderately good (for the time) web frameworks in the early 2000s.
And that's it.
You can start to cry now.
Python? Nice, but up there with shell scripting as something that's good to have, but you won't actually ever have a boss ask you "We have major problem and we're going to need someone with Python skills to fix it."
Front end development: HTML5 and jQuery. Worth knowing a little Flash too, because you may have to maintain something in Flash or even write something new in Flash if your employer doesn't want people downloading their multimedia files. That's about it.
This is the truthful answer. It's up to you to decide now: does this make you want to give up being a programmer? Because if it does, you can always become an accountant! Here's a copy of the 2014 Tax code to get you started...
I look forward to Google and Bing announcing they're replacing robots.txt with a policy of ignoring all websites whose domain names end in "-donotindex" before the TLD...
Seriously, forcing people who want privacy to rename their networks is is a horrible idea and whoever came up with this idea needs a good smackdown.
In the context of X11, what, exactly, is a "native widget"?
OFFS:
Slow Down Cowboy!
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No, they were being careful. The FSF couldn't bless a project that wasn't free software, period. There were just too many dangers involved. They didn't bless Java until Java was finally released under the GPL, and it's not as if the FSF had any reason to be particularly antagonistic towards Sun, a major and early contributor to free software.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're limiting your "People who say X" groups a little too thinly. The Guardian is a liberal newspaper that makes a point of being liberal in its pick of agendas rather than in being partisan in its use of facts. As a result, the Guardian will say (ourside of opinion pieces) "Here's another package of stuff about what the NSA is doing that we got from Snowden" rather than "HERO SNOWDEN UNMASKS TEH EVIL NSA!!"
As for the Post, it's crippled by the US media obsession with believing that objectivity = reporting both sides equally ("Views on shape of the world differ" as the old joke goes.) It cannot make any claims about Snowden's heroism or even play up the degree to which Snowden has risked his future livelihood because there are people opposed to what he's done.
That doesn't mean, however, that there aren't large numbers of people running around saying he's a hero.
On a seperate note, I notice this is the 500,000th article about Snowden on Slashdot's front page posted in the last hour alone: is it time that we put up a Kickstarter to create a file for 3D printers to produce our own Snowdens? We could use bitcoins to fund the entire thing..
This "iPod" is a pocketable player for MP3s you say? What a clever and original idea! *slyly references Nomad in the title*
You're kinda missing the wood for the trees here. There were plenty of Android tablets before the Kindle Fire. I believe there were even a few liquid paper eBook readers before the regular Kindle. And even if we ignore the fact that Amazon actually made popular versions of what were obscure geek toys, in truth there's no reason why Amazon has to be "original", it just has to be successful.
All of which said, I don't believe the story for a couple of reasons:
1. Amazon wouldn't limit it to being a games console.
2. Amazon wouldn't charge $300 for it either. If a rumor about a new Apple iWidget makes the rounds, and the rumored price is $500, chances are it'll be $600. If a rumor about a new Amazon KindleWidget makes the rounds, and the rumored price is $300, chances are it'll be $200.
FWIW DECT does not use 2.4GHz. US and European frequencies vary, but the US version is right in the middle (literally) of the PCS frequencies, and the European version is close but not exactly the same.
Why Paypal?
The last four digits of your credit card are printed on pretty much every receipt, shown on every order confirmation page, every "My account saved credit cards" screen, and are usually shown in addition to an expiration date. That's information that's never been considered confidential - quite the opposite indeed. It's pretty much public information.
GoDaddy was insane to consider it valid authentication information. You might just as well treat someone's name as their password.
You know, both Hitler and Eisenhower advocated and built Federal interstate highway systems so they're the same person too.
I guess it depends on whose rules you're following. On a legal level, no, it's not misbehaving.
On the other hand, when you (or rather the company you've taken over) declares that, henceforth, Solaris shall be thought of as an open source operating system, and promotes the fact it's open source, and nearly a decade later you're finding legal loopholes the company you took over left in place, that you're using in order to sue people who treat it as one, then you're not exactly playing the rules you (or Sun) declared you were playing by.
Our paychecks generally rise with or close to Inflation. Our assets comprise of holdings, like houses, cars, etc, and debts, which are denominated in dollars. We benefit when our debts reduce in value.
Very, very, few people have significant numbers of actual dollars just lying around, uninvested. So you're about 100% wrong.
The lenders aren't going to withdraw, and there's this little concept called "interest" you appear to be ignoring that serves multiple functions, including handling defaults and encouraging investment.
But in any case, anyone who proposes a particular currency's purpose is to get away from fractional reserve banking doesn't know what FRB is or why it exists. In particular, it serves the opposite function of what you think. Because the alternative to FRB is not 100% backed loans, it's near 0%.
FRB exists because of accounting. If I create a loan for you of $100, I have an agreement that means you'll pay me $100 plus interest, and you have access to $100 that you didn't have before. If I'm a bank, there might even be no money changing hands initially.
That agreement that I hold is worth something. That is to say, I can sell it to someone. Usually it's worth something along the lines of $(1-RISK) * (100 + interest payments). So by loaning you $100, I'm not out $100, in fact, I may be worth more than I was before I made you the loan, even though you haven't paid it yet.
You can fight this and say it's not fair, and it's double counting, and all kinds of things, but it's true, objectively true. You made a loan agreement with me, and people are willing to buy that agreement, so the agreement is worth more to me than the cash was, so my net worth immediately increased, rather than decreased, when I lended you cash. There's no getting around that. No system of accounting, economics, or mathematics, will prevent that loan document from being worth money.
The only problem is that sometimes there are bank runs, so we force banks, whose main business is making loans, to have a lot of cash on hand to cover for the fact that most of their value is tied up in IOUs from their debtors. That's called a reserve. And it's a fraction of the reserve needed.
We can, if you like, force the "fraction" to be 100%, but that's not going to work. Banks will be unable to lend to anyone at anything other than absurdly high interest rates, so instead we'll go to less regulated sources of loans like the bond market. I'll close my bank and instead buy a $100 bond from you that pays interest, and maybe I'll sell that bond to someone else. And if that looks exactly like the situation we just had, well, that's because it is, except that there's no reserve any more.
I guess you could also outlaw bonds. And then I guess loans altogether. And then money ;-)
Cobblers. This keeps coming up and it's completely untrue. To transfer money from one person to another, the money needs to be in a currency that both parties accept. Typically (as in, always) this is whatever currency taxes are paid in, food is bought with, a bank accepts for mortgage costs and/or a landlord accepts for rent payment, utilities accept for service payments, and transportation infrastructure providers (be they energy, vehicle, or whole shebang) accepts for products and services rendered. It is also the currency wages are paid in.
As there is no country in the world as yet where Bitcoins are paid out or accepted by all or even most of these entities, the sending entity MUST convert your cash into Bitcoins to initiate a transfer, and the receiving entity MUST convert the Bitcoins back into cash at the end of the transfer. Both transactions result in a fee. The fee is lower than that charged for some transactions, but higher than charged for other types of transactions, when compared to a straight single currency cash transfer. (And don't even get me started on the uncertainty involved where you have no way of knowing whether youi'll even be able to convert the received # Bitcoins into the same number of $ORIGINAL_CURRENCY as sent.)
The same points can be made about transaction times and other supposed advantages of Real currency->Bitcoin->Real currency type transfers.
For real people, in the real world, engaged in legitimate transactions, Bitcoins are a terrible way to conduct business.
OK, issue resolved. Those living in the United States of America shall henceforth be known as Usish.
Samsung hasn't been "patent trolling", it's been asking Apple to pay for its FRAND patents, and Apple's been refusing because it doesn't like the terms.
The EU's response has been dubious at best.
Absolutely. No more than six months in prison, tops. And they should agree to waive most of the fine.
No, that's not exactly what the article says.
The article says the FBI seized the Tormail thingie as part of an investigation into the company that was hosting it - which they were investigating because the company in question was providing hosting services to child pornographers.
This turns out to be a stroke of luck for the FBI, as it means for all subsequent investigations, if something comes up that involves a Tormail email address, they don't need a cooperative ISP to provide them with the contents of the associated mailbox.
And, uh, that's about it. You're not presumed guilty, it's just you made the mistake of using something that the FBI now have complete access to, kinda like if you walked through a street in a crime ridden neighborhood, and the local police had decided to clamp down on crime there by covering the entire area in cops, you'd be "under surveilance" even though the police don't think you've done anything and should probably hope they don't mistake you for someone else or something like that.
This is sooooooooo true. Only the other day, I logged in to AdWords, and there at the top of the screen was a big box that said "Find out the life history of anyone on the Internet by entering their email address, reddit, or Slashdot ID in this box".
So I looked for a random number. There was a flyer for a local car dealership advertising a Corolla for $9,751.38, so I entered that, and clicked Submit. There was a brief request asking me to give my consent to a charge of 25c on my Google Wallet, and I thought "What the hell, why not?" and gave it.
There, in front of me, was all the information about "975138" I asked for. It was one of those "Be careful what you wish for, you might get it" things. Slashdot had pulled up the details of some Slashdotter with the nick "Jaktar".
Everything was there.
His phone numbers. His credit record. I could see he'd spent over $300 in the last month on "Gold pony cookies" for the popular free-to-play Facebook game "Pony club". He had a recurring membership on several websites, including the Alabama Post Gazette, Netflix, and something called "Hot Manponies Dot Com".
Even better was that all of this was hyperlinked to similarly relevant information. I clicked on a credit card billing line marked "KATZ PSYCHIATRIC SERV COPAY", and immediately received a list of future and prior appointments with a therapist. The prior appointments were also hyperlinked, and a quick click revealed a Google Voice style transcription of the appointment in question (not that interesting, 20 minutes of it was marked "(extended sobbing, 2 mins)" alternating with "(hysterical laughing, 60 seconds)".
Finally, there was information to help people like me, who just want to advertise and tailor our ads to people like "Jaktar". Google had analyzed the person's history, and recommended various keywords I could use in my ads to appeal to people like him. "Star Wars", "Leia", "PHP", "Free to play", and "Ponies" came up.
This type of information is gold, quite frankly. Advertisers like me are always interested in targetting specific people at great expense, rather than trying to appeal to broad swathes of the population, so Google collecting this data and selling it to us is exactly what we need.
Thanks Google!
If merely comparing someone to someone bad was libelous, Godwin's law would have to be restated as "Back when the Internet existed, as each online discussion ended in a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler, resulting in the infamous libel suits that brought down that brave experiment in free speech and porn."
Look at it this way: it's OK to say "Joe Bloggs is just like Hitler". What's less OK is to say "I have compelling proof that Joe Bloggs is organizing a program of mass exterminations for jewish people, and is trying to manipulate events so that Germany can safely invade Poland, and he's also advocating the creation of a Federal freeway system."
I think that's a reasonable balance actually, as it allows hyperbole as long as it remains hyperbole, not actual false accusations.
I stand corrected.
When you leave your parent's basement, you'll probably find yourself doing a few things to get a job, including higher education, relocating, and investing more than you'd otherwise want and need to in housing, transportation equipment, etc.
If you're under the impression employees took no risks, and have little to pay back, during the process of looking for work, then you're dumber than a Republican.
It's also worth noting that you're failing completely to address any issues here, including explaining why the risks associated with selling an unknown quantity of movie views at cinemas, followed by an unknown number of DVDs, streaming views, video on demand, etc, followed by some unknown to-be-negotiated TV rights, is somehow less than the risks associated with a GUARANTEED FIXED INCOME.
You know else prefers standard monthly payments? Pretty much everyone, like the OP said. Not just employees, but corporations too. In many cases, the overwhelming cost of the underlying commodities makes it impossible to do so - for example, oil and groceries (although look at Warehouse stores for an example of companies that do, actually, attempt to make their income fixed by providing a hybrid cost structure.) But others, where no underlying commodity is an issue, and the entire cost structure comprises of "We're going to make a major investment and then try to get users to pay it back" ask you to pay by the month.
Cable TV? By the month. Cell phone? By the month. Internet? By the month. Cable TV premium channel (HBO, etc - hmmm, maybe a particularly relevent example?) - by the month.
The OP is completely right.
Understand.
One of the most ambigious words out there is "freedom." We can usually focus on some areas of broad agreement, but for the most part it's a word used more for its positive overtones than its accuracy.
The Southern States, zealously supporting slavery, described themselves on the side of freedom. John Wilkes Booth wrote about glowingly. Why? Because the Feds letting the power holders in the South own slaves was, clearly, not interfering with their freedom to do so.
I'm using the South as an great example, but there's an even better one, except the conversation would degenerate from here if I used it. Let's just say "You know who also said he was fighting for freedom?"
I'm inclined to avoid using the word these days. In the mean time, using the term objectively, I think Stallman is probably on a better track than the BSD people. The BSD people would be better if it weren't for the existance of copyright. That changes everything, Stallman understands that, I don't think the BSD people do.
Should be easy enough. Find the base discrete unit that measures time (eg the smallest step in time you can make), and the base discrete unit of distance. If the speed of light, measured by those units, is 4,294,967,296, then you're living in a simulation.
Yeah, I'm struggling to see the cause of the hysteria in the summary, especially as Google doesn't have a stranglehold on mobile, and Google supports the only major mobile smartphone platform open enough to allow multiple app stores to co-exist.
Oh wait, I know the cause of the hysteria: Facebook. Specifically, the money FB has been paying to their shills to post anti-Google nonsense lately.
The funny part is that Google is genuinely easy to criticize, but these idiots insist on focussing on stuff that's obviously bunk. Google in bed with the NSA? Sure - as I am, after all, networks I use have probably been hacked by the NSA too. Google controlling mobile? WTF? And OMG THEY RUN A BUS IN SAN FRANCISCO!!! This cannot be allowed otherwise MORE PEOPLE WILL WANT TO LIVE IN SAN FRANCISCO!
Meanwhile they have a terrible search engine that gets worse by the minute - even Bing, a third rate clone, has now surpassed it in usefulness, and their attempts to push Google+ have broken numerous services, some of which because they've intentionally withdrawn them.
But, sure, ignore the actual problems with Google and focus on the made-up complaints instead. That makes total sense.
I do too. That said I can see a situation where it'd be useful to have something that's easy to prepare lying around for those days you just don't have the time and energy to prepare something reasonable and carrying round needs-to-be-kept-frozen needs-a-microwave food isn't an option.
I'm not sure this is a fair answer to the question: it's a little like someone saying "It's 2014: What new stuff should I learn to be a better accountant?" and the answer coming back "Have you tried calculus? IT'S AWESOME!!"
The right answer, alas, is not something that tickles your fancy, but something you're likely to hate - like the latest tax code.
What about the original question? Well, they're saying "New technologies" but it's not clear if they mean "New to me" or "New as in 3D printed guns". I'm guessing the latter, this is Slashdot after all.
The answer to the latter interpretation is, of course, "Who the f--- knows?" It's pretty close to impossible to determine what's a fad technology and what's not. I think node.js shows some potential, but it's the only thing I can think off the top of my head it's worth familiarizing yourself with - and technically, it's not new new, it's just up and coming.
The answer to the former is... well, something that's going to depress virtually everyone on Slashdot.
Python? Fuck no. Nobody uses it. Let me clarify that for pedants: yes, you can mention a handful of projects that use it, and many, many, many, GNU/Linux wizards use it to write quick automation scripts for various tasks, but that's not a reason to learn it.
What do you need to learn that's a back-end language? Well, there are three:
PHP.
VB.NET.
Java.
At least two, possibly three, of those will send most self respecting programmers gibbering in a corner. However:
- PHP is the language of LAMP. Yes, P originally meant "Perl", but PHP took over a long time ago. Download a few popular open source projects of scale and popularity equal to or greater than Wordpress (itself a common example), and you'll see what I mean - large numbers, possibly most, of the projects you download will be written in this bullshit, awful, language.
- VB.NET is one of the two major enterprise core platforms. It really is. Why? Well, back in the 1990s, lots of corporations brought in armies of code monkeys to write their core business applications in the easiest languages available, which meant they were left with a large body of business logic written in VB. As businesses moved to the web, they found the easiest migration path was VB.NET, it meant they could use much of their existing code and simply drop it into a web environment. As a result, most .NET applications are written in VB.NET, and large numbers of enterprises are dependent upon it.
- Java - the other end of the Enterprise coin. Any corporation who didn't migrate to VB.NET for their data/web backends migrated to Java instead, because of the big Java push in the late 1990s and because Sun put together some moderately good (for the time) web frameworks in the early 2000s.
And that's it.
You can start to cry now.
Python? Nice, but up there with shell scripting as something that's good to have, but you won't actually ever have a boss ask you "We have major problem and we're going to need someone with Python skills to fix it."
Front end development: HTML5 and jQuery. Worth knowing a little Flash too, because you may have to maintain something in Flash or even write something new in Flash if your employer doesn't want people downloading their multimedia files. That's about it.
This is the truthful answer. It's up to you to decide now: does this make you want to give up being a programmer? Because if it does, you can always become an accountant! Here's a copy of the 2014 Tax code to get you started...
What. The. Fuck?
I look forward to Google and Bing announcing they're replacing robots.txt with a policy of ignoring all websites whose domain names end in "-donotindex" before the TLD...
Seriously, forcing people who want privacy to rename their networks is is a horrible idea and whoever came up with this idea needs a good smackdown.
No, they were being careful. The FSF couldn't bless a project that wasn't free software, period. There were just too many dangers involved. They didn't bless Java until Java was finally released under the GPL, and it's not as if the FSF had any reason to be particularly antagonistic towards Sun, a major and early contributor to free software.