If they're running at a loss, then the artists are definitely getting paid too much.
Or listeners are paying too little. Or the CEO of ${MUSIC_STREAMING_SERVICE} is overpaid.
And no, if my paycheck for the last couple of weeks work were to be spread out over the remainder of my employer's lifetime as a few dollars a month, I wouldn't consider it a "good deal". People have to eat now.
The article has nothing to do with Card's homophobia. It wasn't even triggered by one of his anti-gay rants. The article came out about the time Card was demanding the press be punished for reporting truthfully on abuses by the American government during the War on Terror.
And, FWIW, your attack on the article doesn't even make sense, it certainly doesn't suggest you read it. The author isn't attacking Card for making Ender Hitler, he's merely referencing what happened when someone else made that claim.
The author's suggestion is that Card probably never wrote the first two Enders Games novels. He draws this conclusion based upon Card's response to the claim that Ender is Hitler - namely that Card didn't appear to know what was in his own novel, denying the novel contained elements even given references, and the massive quality change that occured between the second and third novels - as well as the substantial delay in publication.
Is that a reasonable conclusion? I don't know, it sounds to me more like Card has difficulty coping with criticism, and the third novel could easily be bad because he's, ultimately, a hack who got lucky with his first. But it certainly isn't a conclusion drawn by someone trying to explain why Card's homophobic, or more generally, a fascist.
The fact he has a range of books available at 0.01c he can freely buy suggests there is a market, even if it's hard to understand.
That is the problem with the Kindle. It's great at the whole convenience thing, but the fact you have to buy everything new, and the fact publishers are reluctant to even look at the (paper) market and say "Well, there are a lot of people who hold out and buy $15 books for $1 once they can get them used, so let's make our older books available at that kind of discount" makes using a Kindle to read everything a fairly expensive proposition.
The South attacked the United States, not vice-versa. And while it's true Lincoln could kinda sorta have surrendered, it would have been at the cost of making a larger war inevitable in the medium term between a desperate, bankrupt, slave-based economy and a comparatively modern industrialized nation.
I don't think any realistic assessment of the civil war, outside of revisionist "States rights! Not about slavery! Lincoln just wanted power! The South were the good guys they just had this itty bitty slave problem that made them look bad!" crap, leads to a positive outcome if the South ends up nominally independent, especially given the impetus for the split in the first place was the refusal of the North to enforce fugitive slave laws.
Nobody checks people's posting history. I've been called shills for companies I've lambasted in the past and a hater of companies I've expressed a liking for too often to think for a second anyone looks at my nick and goes "Hmm, I don't know this guy, let's check his history"
And yeah, Slashdot could do with one. I've gotten to the point personally that I actually hold off making jokes, because nine times out of ten, I get modded Troll for them, get serious replies, and I even frequently get replies that start "I realize I'm replying to a troll here but...".
Slashdot makes Germany look like the world's biggest comedy club.
The whole thing's ridiculous anyway. A $foreign government is spying on $us? Heavens forfend! That never happens! Why the entire point of intelligence agencies is to sit in closed rooms and update facebook posts or comment on Slashdot articles all day, not to spy on people!
Well if all we're interested in is making the compiler happy, perhaps a different route would be to use FORTH/PostScript style RPN? This way the language syntax doesn't get in the way. And programmers can play the old FORTH "Try to make their code read like English" game which almost never works but once in a blue-moon kinda sorta does...
It isn't a lot of money by itself but it plays into a theme, which may or may not be right. If State Dept is loose with this kind of spending, what else are they wasting money on? Or was this genuinely a one off and generally the State Dept is frugal, but somehow this one fell through the cracks?
In any case, whatever the facts, I need to finish the email I've been working on offering my SEO services to Whitehouse.gov...
No he's not. He's saying that if you have a ratings system where 5 means "Good", 4 means "Not good but could have been worse", and 1-3 means "Fire this guy", then people's default vote will be 5, and it'll be impossible to determine who's actually a good driver, and who just does the minimum.
eBay is a good example of this idea in practice. By rights, the right item arriving as described during the advertised delivery period should be rated a "Neutral" transaction, and an average eBayer should have mostly "Neutral" ratings. But because of... well, I don't know why, but somehow we got to the point that "Neutral" means bad, and so the score of an eBayer is completely useless - you genuinely can't tell the people who go the extra mile from the people who do just enough to avoid getting fired. (And interestingly their attempt to introduce more fine grained seller ratings fails for the same reason.)
Again though that's not what's being talked about here. In this context VPN providers means an ISP you connect to over the Internet, not a private network, virtual or otherwise.
VPN protocols are mainstream and widely used by business people, but not VPN providers (using the term in the article headline) - that is, an ISP that instead of being accessed by its customers over phone lines, DSL links, or cables, is instead accessed by customers via a VPN protocol over the Internet.
Business people use VPNs to access their office networks. You don't need a VPN provider to do that. Business people generally wouldn't have much of a use for VPN providers - the only use I can think of off the top of my head is for testing connectivity, which is something your business's technical team might do, and which is an application where such a service constitutes massive over-engineering.
Otherwise... VPN providers are generally useful when you have to disguise your IP address for some reason. I guess they're also possibly useful (I've never used one so I don't know how well this would work) if you need an additional IP address, for running a server or something similar. The latter is obviously legitimate. The former may or may not be, but the immediate reasons for hiding your real IP address that come to mind are not legal.
If the tool you're using isn't an exact fit for the application you need it to do - though only because of speed, but it does it anyway, you should use another tool even though...
1. You're not familiar with it
2. It's not your area of expertise
3. The lack of suitability means you're wasting whole minutes a day. However, you'll need to hire a programmer or else take a course likely lasting months to get the skills needed to use the alternative tool.
4. Your tool, the one that was designed to be easy for someone in your profession to make use of, does, ultimately, do the job you need it to do.
No.
No, no, no, no and again no. You're a developer. Good for you. Good for me too. But our jobs are not to make patronising unrealistic suggestions to smart people who don't have our particular skillset. Our job is to make it easier for other people to do their jobs. Telling them to hire programmers or run off and learn our skills isn't "making it easier".
If the only thing wrong with the way they're doing is that their computer runs slow when doing it, the solutions we should be presenting are the easiest. Upgrades and better underlying office suite code. Good for the LibreOffice people that that is what they're doing.
Good for you, but what do you plan to do if, say, you contract an expensive form of cancer? The probability is pretty low that you're part of that group that can casually drop a half million or more on a treatment regime.
As a group, you're in with a bunch of people who will contract cancer and never be able to pay for it (not because you're religious but because you're human and you're choosing not to be able to pay for it), as well as other less expensive things that the victim will be unable to pay for. Hence you pay a tax to offset the problems caused by membership of your group.
There's no area where "bureaucrats make decisions regarding our family's healthcare" is true tomorrow that wasn't true in 2007. The difference is that in some areas decisions that were made by insurance companies are now made by publicly accountable government employees. Moreover, if this is a "Death Panels" reference, the so-called panels determine policy issues, not individual cases. Whether an insurance company pays for grandma's hip operation is still a decision made by an Insurance Company bureaucrat, albeit one that you can now sue over if it contradicts the general policies set by the government.
Obamacare is a stupid, barely effective, way of providing universal healthcare that's, in practice, an unnecessary bailout for the health insurance industry, but let's keep the criticisms factual, OK?
You can pay slightly higher taxes, as an alternative to getting health insurance. This will offset the burden you (as a group) place on the rest of us when you need urgent, critical, healthcare, and are unable to pay for it, declaring bankrupcy or something similar instead to avoid paying.
You certainly don't need to leave the US, and while the tax penalty can get quite high (there's a middle range indeed where it's more than the cost of subsidized insurance) it's certainly not so extreme as to not be an option.
I don't see what the problem is. The information is comprised of basic GPS, microphone audio, and phone radio data that's very obviously being collected purely for debugging and diagnostic reasons. From the article*:
The phone collects the information, storing it in a file called "/media/.NSAquiredData" until it can be transmitted to the Motorola server at bmailvctms.gomoto.com, and comprises of the following:
* Number of dropped calls in the last 24 hours.
* Location data, sampled at 5am, 11am, and 6pm
* Location type of above (eg residential, business)
* If the location at 5am != 6pm, and 5am and 6pm are both residential locations, and 11am is a business, then:
- Whether 6pm is associated with a phone number that is frequently called but not marked "HOME", "FAMILY", or "WIFE"
- Whether a random, five minute, audio sample taken between 6pm and 6.30pm matches patterns marked "KISS", "WORD_LOVE", or "WHIP"
- Whether that audio sample contains both male and female voices, and whether, upon analysing a similar sample taken at 9.30pm, one voice matches but another voice does not.
* The date and time and location of any dropped calls
* The temperature of the phone at the time the calls were dropped
* The status of the humidity sensors at the time of any dropped calls
To the people responding "But other browsers support extensions! You're an idiot!", yes, technically you're right, but I'm referring to the specific type of extension that would allow something like NoScript/YesScript to be viable, and I'm talking about mainstream browsers (no, Konqueror is not mainstream.)
Yes, I'm technically wrong, but in terms of the point I was trying to make, not in any way that matters.
It's not perfect but Multifox provides the ability to use seperate environments within Firefox. As an alternative you can manually create launchers for Firefox with the -P flag.
There's nothing stopping you from sticking with Firefox 22. While later versions will have more support for more modern standards, if you're not going to run Javascript then it's not going to matter a whole lot what the new standards are.
In the meantime, understand too that while Firefox 23+ may not provide a UI to disable JS across the browser, it is still a low-level setting for now in about:config, and Firefox continues to be the only browser that supports extensions - meaning that options like YesScript, NoScript, and to a lesser extent Ad-block+ will always be available to provide the functionality you're after.
Oh FFS people! Just because it's a newspaper doesn't mean it's not a troll. Newspapers were trolling long, long, long, before the Internet was invented.
The scary stuff isn't articles like this one, it's what they write when they're being serious.
Slashdot Mirror
Or listeners are paying too little. Or the CEO of ${MUSIC_STREAMING_SERVICE} is overpaid.
And no, if my paycheck for the last couple of weeks work were to be spread out over the remainder of my employer's lifetime as a few dollars a month, I wouldn't consider it a "good deal". People have to eat now.
You left Android over an abstract concept? Seems a little extreme!
I can understand someone leaving Android because of something that's a part-consequence of fragmentation, but not of fragmentation itself.
What the hell are you talking about?
The article has nothing to do with Card's homophobia. It wasn't even triggered by one of his anti-gay rants. The article came out about the time Card was demanding the press be punished for reporting truthfully on abuses by the American government during the War on Terror.
And, FWIW, your attack on the article doesn't even make sense, it certainly doesn't suggest you read it. The author isn't attacking Card for making Ender Hitler, he's merely referencing what happened when someone else made that claim.
The author's suggestion is that Card probably never wrote the first two Enders Games novels. He draws this conclusion based upon Card's response to the claim that Ender is Hitler - namely that Card didn't appear to know what was in his own novel, denying the novel contained elements even given references, and the massive quality change that occured between the second and third novels - as well as the substantial delay in publication.
Is that a reasonable conclusion? I don't know, it sounds to me more like Card has difficulty coping with criticism, and the third novel could easily be bad because he's, ultimately, a hack who got lucky with his first. But it certainly isn't a conclusion drawn by someone trying to explain why Card's homophobic, or more generally, a fascist.
The fact he has a range of books available at 0.01c he can freely buy suggests there is a market, even if it's hard to understand.
That is the problem with the Kindle. It's great at the whole convenience thing, but the fact you have to buy everything new, and the fact publishers are reluctant to even look at the (paper) market and say "Well, there are a lot of people who hold out and buy $15 books for $1 once they can get them used, so let's make our older books available at that kind of discount" makes using a Kindle to read everything a fairly expensive proposition.
The South attacked the United States, not vice-versa. And while it's true Lincoln could kinda sorta have surrendered, it would have been at the cost of making a larger war inevitable in the medium term between a desperate, bankrupt, slave-based economy and a comparatively modern industrialized nation.
I don't think any realistic assessment of the civil war, outside of revisionist "States rights! Not about slavery! Lincoln just wanted power! The South were the good guys they just had this itty bitty slave problem that made them look bad!" crap, leads to a positive outcome if the South ends up nominally independent, especially given the impetus for the split in the first place was the refusal of the North to enforce fugitive slave laws.
Nobody checks people's posting history. I've been called shills for companies I've lambasted in the past and a hater of companies I've expressed a liking for too often to think for a second anyone looks at my nick and goes "Hmm, I don't know this guy, let's check his history"
And yeah, Slashdot could do with one. I've gotten to the point personally that I actually hold off making jokes, because nine times out of ten, I get modded Troll for them, get serious replies, and I even frequently get replies that start "I realize I'm replying to a troll here but...".
Slashdot makes Germany look like the world's biggest comedy club.
You're right, Star Wars (or ANH episode 4, whatever, shuttup George) does lose its charm after the 56th or 57th time you watch it.
The whole thing's ridiculous anyway. A $foreign government is spying on $us? Heavens forfend! That never happens! Why the entire point of intelligence agencies is to sit in closed rooms and update facebook posts or comment on Slashdot articles all day, not to spy on people!
Well if all we're interested in is making the compiler happy, perhaps a different route would be to use FORTH/PostScript style RPN? This way the language syntax doesn't get in the way. And programmers can play the old FORTH "Try to make their code read like English" game which almost never works but once in a blue-moon kinda sorta does...
"Wait, did someone suggest Apple should switch to Android? That's a great idea for a new article!" - John Dvorak Cringley.
It isn't a lot of money by itself but it plays into a theme, which may or may not be right. If State Dept is loose with this kind of spending, what else are they wasting money on? Or was this genuinely a one off and generally the State Dept is frugal, but somehow this one fell through the cracks?
In any case, whatever the facts, I need to finish the email I've been working on offering my SEO services to Whitehouse.gov...
No he's not. He's saying that if you have a ratings system where 5 means "Good", 4 means "Not good but could have been worse", and 1-3 means "Fire this guy", then people's default vote will be 5, and it'll be impossible to determine who's actually a good driver, and who just does the minimum.
eBay is a good example of this idea in practice. By rights, the right item arriving as described during the advertised delivery period should be rated a "Neutral" transaction, and an average eBayer should have mostly "Neutral" ratings. But because of... well, I don't know why, but somehow we got to the point that "Neutral" means bad, and so the score of an eBayer is completely useless - you genuinely can't tell the people who go the extra mile from the people who do just enough to avoid getting fired. (And interestingly their attempt to introduce more fine grained seller ratings fails for the same reason.)
Again though that's not what's being talked about here. In this context VPN providers means an ISP you connect to over the Internet, not a private network, virtual or otherwise.
VPN protocols are mainstream and widely used by business people, but not VPN providers (using the term in the article headline) - that is, an ISP that instead of being accessed by its customers over phone lines, DSL links, or cables, is instead accessed by customers via a VPN protocol over the Internet.
Business people use VPNs to access their office networks. You don't need a VPN provider to do that. Business people generally wouldn't have much of a use for VPN providers - the only use I can think of off the top of my head is for testing connectivity, which is something your business's technical team might do, and which is an application where such a service constitutes massive over-engineering.
Otherwise... VPN providers are generally useful when you have to disguise your IP address for some reason. I guess they're also possibly useful (I've never used one so I don't know how well this would work) if you need an additional IP address, for running a server or something similar. The latter is obviously legitimate. The former may or may not be, but the immediate reasons for hiding your real IP address that come to mind are not legal.
If the tool you're using isn't an exact fit for the application you need it to do - though only because of speed, but it does it anyway, you should use another tool even though...
1. You're not familiar with it
2. It's not your area of expertise
3. The lack of suitability means you're wasting whole minutes a day. However, you'll need to hire a programmer or else take a course likely lasting months to get the skills needed to use the alternative tool.
4. Your tool, the one that was designed to be easy for someone in your profession to make use of, does, ultimately, do the job you need it to do.
No.
No, no, no, no and again no. You're a developer. Good for you. Good for me too. But our jobs are not to make patronising unrealistic suggestions to smart people who don't have our particular skillset. Our job is to make it easier for other people to do their jobs. Telling them to hire programmers or run off and learn our skills isn't "making it easier".
If the only thing wrong with the way they're doing is that their computer runs slow when doing it, the solutions we should be presenting are the easiest. Upgrades and better underlying office suite code. Good for the LibreOffice people that that is what they're doing.
Riiiight, because the notion the US would be spying on other countries was big news and a major scandal.
Do you really think MI6 and GCHQ aren't monitoring the US?
Good for you, but what do you plan to do if, say, you contract an expensive form of cancer? The probability is pretty low that you're part of that group that can casually drop a half million or more on a treatment regime.
As a group, you're in with a bunch of people who will contract cancer and never be able to pay for it (not because you're religious but because you're human and you're choosing not to be able to pay for it), as well as other less expensive things that the victim will be unable to pay for. Hence you pay a tax to offset the problems caused by membership of your group.
There's no area where "bureaucrats make decisions regarding our family's healthcare" is true tomorrow that wasn't true in 2007. The difference is that in some areas decisions that were made by insurance companies are now made by publicly accountable government employees. Moreover, if this is a "Death Panels" reference, the so-called panels determine policy issues, not individual cases. Whether an insurance company pays for grandma's hip operation is still a decision made by an Insurance Company bureaucrat, albeit one that you can now sue over if it contradicts the general policies set by the government.
Obamacare is a stupid, barely effective, way of providing universal healthcare that's, in practice, an unnecessary bailout for the health insurance industry, but let's keep the criticisms factual, OK?
You can pay slightly higher taxes, as an alternative to getting health insurance. This will offset the burden you (as a group) place on the rest of us when you need urgent, critical, healthcare, and are unable to pay for it, declaring bankrupcy or something similar instead to avoid paying.
You certainly don't need to leave the US, and while the tax penalty can get quite high (there's a middle range indeed where it's more than the cost of subsidized insurance) it's certainly not so extreme as to not be an option.
I don't see what the problem is. The information is comprised of basic GPS, microphone audio, and phone radio data that's very obviously being collected purely for debugging and diagnostic reasons. From the article*:
Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
* No, not that article, the other one.
To the people responding "But other browsers support extensions! You're an idiot!", yes, technically you're right, but I'm referring to the specific type of extension that would allow something like NoScript/YesScript to be viable, and I'm talking about mainstream browsers (no, Konqueror is not mainstream.)
Yes, I'm technically wrong, but in terms of the point I was trying to make, not in any way that matters.
It's not perfect but Multifox provides the ability to use seperate environments within Firefox. As an alternative you can manually create launchers for Firefox with the -P flag.
There's nothing stopping you from sticking with Firefox 22. While later versions will have more support for more modern standards, if you're not going to run Javascript then it's not going to matter a whole lot what the new standards are.
In the meantime, understand too that while Firefox 23+ may not provide a UI to disable JS across the browser, it is still a low-level setting for now in about:config, and Firefox continues to be the only browser that supports extensions - meaning that options like YesScript, NoScript, and to a lesser extent Ad-block+ will always be available to provide the functionality you're after.
Well I'm kinda guessing here, but I suspect he doesn't want to go to prison.
Oh FFS people! Just because it's a newspaper doesn't mean it's not a troll. Newspapers were trolling long, long, long, before the Internet was invented.
The scary stuff isn't articles like this one, it's what they write when they're being serious.