If they didn't have the money to do it, and you were told that you wouldn't be paid for it, why would you expect to be paid for it?
It's difficult to convince managers to invest in software that might one day exist. They might invest your time but if they're not confident about your skills, they might fear that the project might take longer than expected and/or never get finished. Saying "We'll pay you if/when it's done" is also problematic (then there needs to time invested to crafting specifications about when it'll be done, there might be conflicts about that, budgeting money for investment that might or might not occur is a bitch, etc.). If you can show them a product and say "Here's a product that does X, if you're willing to pay Y, we'll start using this tomorrow" you remove the risk completely and it's much easier costs/benefits analysis.
That said... I think that the OP is in a situation where he has no chance but to give his boss the product. If he says "Okay, I knew you don't have money to pay me but I still made this piece of software... Just to tell you that I'm not going to give it to you!" it won't exactly improve his status within the organization. So either he'll tell nobody about it or he'll end up giving the software to his employer for whatever price he might or might not be able to negotiate for it. If the employer really can't pay him with money, I think this would be a good chance to negotiate some non-monetary benefits. Think it would benefit both you and the company if you could allocate one day a week to any work-related project of your choice (Google-style)? It's a good time to make the case when you hand over that piece of software. Want an extra week or two vacation next year? I bet that's doable if the product really is as good as the OP claims. Want the office with the nicest view? It could finally be yours...
I guess it depends on your world view: I could see someone making an argument that even if some patents aren't good for the society, individuals should be given the right to control what they've created (and conversely, someone could argue that patents shouldn't exist even if they are good for the society). From the point of view of the society, patents only make sense if they are a method of increasing the pool of public knowledge and should only be allowed in such cases. By that logic, you couldn't patent anything that can be deducted by examining the end product but you could patent the unique methods you used to manufacture it, for example. (Which would actually be going to the roots of the system!) You couldn't patent user interface components of operating system but if you were only able to create them because of some extremely clever engineering/optimization trick, you might be able to patent that.
One could argue that allowing entities to patent things that could be deduced from the end product would encourage them to invest more in R&D and that would have positive net impact. That, however, is purely a question of costs and benefits analysis (Cost being potential to patent technology that would have became available even without patents, benefit being potential for technology that wouldn't have became available without patents). I remember seeing quite a few discussions related to patents but I can't recall anyone having made the math for what would be the optimal patent duration, etc. [where the technology could be deduced from the end product] for technological advancement. I doubt it's 20, but I also doubt it's 0.
The history of patents dates back to 15th century Venice. Venice had a lucrative glass-blowing industry and major artisans had different kinds of trade secrets that related to the craft. Each artisan vigorously guarded their own trade secrets and often took those to the grave with them, so the technology didn't progress. So, they came up with a system: Artisan could claim their method of glass-blowing as patently original, have no longer the need to keep the method secret and would not take the method to the grave with them. Everyone won.
In those days, patents weren't for "Glass-blowing". That's a concept. They were for "A very specific method of glass-blowing, that the artisan had researched themselves (or learned from their master) and would otherwise have to keep secret". That much still applies to the modern patents (abominations such as "1-click shopping" being an exception). The patent isn't "The concept of using fuel cells as batteries". It is "Using specific type of fuel cells for laptop power in a specific and non-obvious way". It doesn't matter that someone else has used fuel cells for batteries before.
(FWIW: I think that there is still need for a system like that, so I also support software patents in cases where the patented idea is non-obvious enough that it probably wouldn't have became "public knowledge" in the next 20 years without the patent. This could well apply to specific encryption algorithms and stuff like that.)
The truly funny part is Web 2.0 is back to classic Client/Server programming, utilizing an HTML engine as the client. I believe that existed since the 60s with dumb terminals, but certainly no later than the early 80s with the current modern thick client/server model (think X11 and the like)
It seems like you're talking about HTML5 (Creating websites with application-like user experience with combinations of the latest HTML, CSS and JS features) though you refer to it as Web 2.0.
Web 2.0 has nothing to do with user interface (though certain UI elements, such as types of glossy buttons, are often referred to as "Web 2.0 style" because they got popular in blogs, etc.). Web 2.0 refers to the change in how people view the internet and how the content is produced. Web 2.0 refers to the change from passive users (who just visit corporation.com to look up information) to active users (who produce the content themselves. e.g., blogs, youtube, Slashdot community, etc.).
I know there are too many buzzwords these days, but these are the ones that everyone should know. Web 2.0 has been pretty well established for years and I think that it well describes very important change in how we view the web. HTML5 is more of a buzzword (as it doesn't actually refer to any new technology, it seems like a newer version of "DHTML") but it's quite widely used and the meaning is pretty consistent, too.:)
But if the security image is a photo with 2 people and a dog, against a white wall it's pretty likely that I can guess where the taps are, so I only have to guess the order.
In that case... don't choose an photo of 2 people and a dog.
What you're saying is "This system has very poor security, if they choose the pictures poorly and each picture has very few probable combinations". Pretty obvious answer is: Don't choose such pictures. I'd guess that before they choose a picture for this purpose, they do some testing on what kind of patterns people use and discard the pictures where there is too little distribution. Of course, users may always use the most obvious pattern and they might be able to choose a picture themselves and use too simple picture... but users can also choose very stupid passwords.
Summarizing republicans as "against big government" is a bit misleading. It's more of a "Against big government, except where it pleases us, our sponsors or enforces our belief system".
By "belief system", do you mean the Constitution? Because being "against big government" in the extreme is called Anarchy -- you have to be for something for it to be called government. Most libertarians I know (Republicans aside, since they're obviously less small government than Libs) are pretty "core functionality only", even believing religion/abortion/all-that-bullshit has no place in government either.
By belief system I mean "Christianity". If one claims to be for small government, I think one should also be for secularization of church and state but I don't see republicans demanding anything like that. Very recently senate republicans demanded a vote just to "reaffirm" the USA motto is "In god we trust". Obviously that action was purely symbolic but that kind of actions symbolize neither small government or efficiency. Even the most libertarian republicans (I'm looking at you, Ron Paul) support banning abortion.
When a party wants the federal state to enforce its religious views on the rest of the population, even though that certainly isn't a part of the constitution, it doesn't take ideological stance for freedom and small government. Republicans happen to oppose Social Security programs but the fact that it would make the government smaller is the side product, not the other way around.
If you are talking about some set of liberalists that doesn't include the mainstream republicans or people such as Ron Paul, this comment doesn't apply to them. Then again, neither did my previous one.
Summarizing republicans as "against big government" is a bit misleading. It's more of a "Against big government, except where it pleases us, our sponsors or enforces our belief system". Or would you honestly say that republicans oppose farming subsidies or military spending? Or support limiting the federal government's ability to spy on its people? Or demand more secularization of the federal government?I think that republicans ideologically being against big government is a myth and instead they are for it or against it depending on what benefits them in each individual case. (And I want to be very clear here: I don't consider that approach to be a bad one. I just think it shouldn't be combined to "small government" rhetoric.)
That said, I actually think that Newt is the best one republicans have to offer at the moment. He's not one of the craziest ones* and he has a lot more consistency than many other candidates. I do disagree with him in most issues but I think he's relatively respectable when it comes to acting as a politician.
I never attended high-school (I went to vocational school and then started my engineering studies) so I never got to study those interesting-sounding subjects like psychology and philosophy. Now that all the most famous universities have been putting their introductory courses online, I've watched quite a few of them.
When I was watching Introduction to Psychology (Prof. Paul Bloom, Yale, extremely interesting and entertaining way to spend some 20-odd hours) I thought "Hell, I could actually do more than watch these lectures. I think I'll actually buy the book and read the recommended chapters!".
The course book costed something like 150+ dollars, which I thought was astounding but that actually wasn't the showstopper for me (I have a job and am quite prone to buying stuff on a whim in my sleep-deprivation induced mania). What made me pissed off was that they (=every store I could find by googling the book) didn't sell an electronic version of the book. What made me more pissed was that they clearly had electronic version: If I were to buy the physical book, I would get the PDF on CD with the book. There simply was no way of buying just the PDF (I would have been willing to accept DRM, to pay the full price, whatever... I just didn't want to wait a week, spend a phonecall arguing with customs officers, pay another 30 bucks for shipping, another 30 bucks of import taxes, etc. as is usually the case when I order stuff online).
In the end, I was annoyed that the stores selling the book could have made my life easier but had chosen not to, so I didn't buy the book. However, open courses like these cause large amounts of people like me to consider buying books that we never would have otherwise bought. If the industry can implement minor reforms to approach us a bit, I'm sure there's a lot of potential for more profit.
Why should I not trust Amazon? If I were in the book printing business, I'd probably feel the need to thoroughly analyze the claims but let's face it: The best seller lists are pretty useless for us consumers. I'll buy e-books for myself and give hardbacks as presents this year, no matter whether Amazon reports e-book share to be 10% or 50%. I don't need to worry about what impression Amazon is trying to create so I can just enjoy the interesting pieces of statistics.
I'm not saying that the accuracy of statistics doesn't matter (though I might be saying "it doesn't matter much") but I think that in a case like this, we can just discuss the statistics and what they might or might not imply without caring about hidden motivations of the company behind them.
I have been surrounded by the riot cops more than once and I really doubt you could pull that off.
If you are in the middle of a crowd, hold a reflective surface and the cops target you with a weapon like this, all you're doing is reflect the light at your fellow demonstrators. Sure, some might reach the cops but much more will be directed at the demonstrators who are closer to you and perhaps just turning their faces towards you (as they try to look away from the cops with the light). Even if the cops aren't protected against this, you're doing them more good than harm.
Thus, the only way to pull this off would be to have large reflective surfaces between the crowd and the cops. I'm not sure if this can be pulled off at all: It's easy to create reflective surfaces quickly (metal foil, etc.) but often the cops are too close for you to hold any significant sizes of reflective surfaces between you and them. Besides, it is easy enough to spot such surfaces and target the weapon somewhere else. I guess that you could technically have a disciplined enough crowd to spread something reflective on top of them (like shields in a phanlax formation)... but really, I can't see that happening in any real-world scenario.
Corporations exist to make money. Therefore, they'll make money however they can. This is entirely allowed by our patent system and isn't evil at all.
You could argue that people don't have any duties towards other people or the society and each should just try to gain as much money as legally possible. You could even argue that if everyone tries to do that, things end up better for all of us. I would disagree but I could at least understand both the ethical and economic principles behind those claims.
Corporations, however, aren't something that "just exist". They're tool that we, as the society, came up with and gave certain exclusive rights to. To be more exact, corporations are tools through which we grant certain people (CEO, Shareholders, etc.) certain rights that they wouldn't otherwise have (e.g., when the company earns money, it can direct it to shareholders but when it can't pay back its debts, we don't hold shareholders personally responsible).
You can say "You don't whitelist rights! Government/Society/etc. don't GIVE rights" but in the case of corporations, society really has created some rights that don't have any ethical reason to exist. They've been created because we believe that if we create them and give them to people who use them responsibly, society becomes a better place and everyone wins. That being the case, we have all the right to say "You either accept BOTH the rights and duties (=some social responsibility) of this corporation-thingy or we don't give you either of them" and thus expect some social responsibility from corporations.
Wages are high but the cost of electricity is relatively low. I have no idea how big expense that is compared to wages but I'd guess that it amounts to something?
In any case... Let me be the first Finnish person here to say: Thank you. Fiskers is hiring also software developers over here and I've considered applying. If I will and if I'll get the job, I'll try to remember where my paycheck is coming from.:)
There are a lot of traits that could - whether that'd be accurate or not - be called "very american". They include patriotism, appreciation of freedom, love towards free market economics, etc... However, I can't figure out what in the phrase you quoted is "very american". You could say something like "we appreciate freedom and it's an expression of that to buy stuff, take it apart and (try to) make it better" but I think that's a bit far fetched and you could make up just as good explanation for any other culture.
I'm a bit tired of people claiming that an activity is very american just because the person is from USA and likes it. I know that some people will react with "Oh come on. Why do you care?" but us geeks tend to be quite sensitive to minor issues in things we care about. It shouldn't be odd that when someone essentially says that "[being the engineering type of a person] is very american", I cringe.
It's not just the "just a toy" claim. The phrases before that are even more telling
My boss upgraded to Lion, and I used it for about two minutes before deciding to stick with Snow Leopard for the foreseeable future
Even if the "two minutes" is an exaggeration... Practically any UI change, for example, feels difficult at first, even if it ends up being a lot better once you've gotten used to it. (It took me a month to stop hating the ribbon UI of MS Office even though I now consider it mostly positive thing) Deciding "I won't try this" about an OS in a matter of minutes is just silly.
Essentially, you consider yourselves to be concerned citizens who have seen the crime, etc. around and patrol the streets. Fine. Where I live, we have some superheroes like that. Some far right activists have noticed increased amount of crimes in areas with a lot of immigrants so they patrol - in groups - the streets of these areas, looking for immigrants that act somehow suspiciously in their opinion... And that's scary as hell. I'm sure that they - just like you - think that they're doing something good for the society and that world needs more people like them.
Now, how do I tell "the superheroes" and "the far right citizen patrols" apart from each other? I can't. From my point of view, there is no other indicator between "superheroes" and "a phenomenon I fear more that petty crime" than your word that you only do what is REALLY good while the other guys just THINK they do what is really good. Even more... even if what you say is true, I'd be willing to bet that increase in the positive kind of vigilantes also leads (through more media coverage, cultural attitude shifts, etc.) to the increase in the negative kind.
This is nothing personal: It might be that the total effect of everything YOU have done and will ever do ends up being positive. Let's hope for that. But "super heroes" aka. vigilantes who patrol the streets and act based on their definition of good and righteous... it's just something that we as a society don't need and shouldn't accept.
I'm sorry but that's just factually untrue. The word "Try" has two implications: A motivation to see something happen and action to make that reality. If there's only motivation but no action, "tries" is misleading because better word would be "wants", "wishes", etc. If there's only action but no motivation, better word would be "causes".
For example: I try to get in shape (I've got motivation and take action). To get in shape I intend to jog. Jogging causes my shoes to wear off. Is it accurate to say "I'm trying to wear off my shoes"? No. That's misleading as it simply isn't how the word is used and it makes no sense at all to use it like that. "I try to do X" implies that I've achieved success when I've reached X. I haven't achieved any success when my shoes have worn off so I'm clearly not trying to do that. I'm not trying to do all [unwanted side effects of things I'm trying to do].
I find it quite ironic that a person who references Orwell in their sig. manages such wordplay to twist words to suit a political agenda.
Look, we're in a debt crisis and cuts must be made, everyone agrees about that. What we don't agree about is what to cut: Some people say "Cut a lot of military spending", others "Cut a lot of social security" and still others "Both of those are more important than planetary exploration". If I were to support significant cuts to social security, it wouldn't be appropriate to ask "Is F69631 trying to end welfare?" as that certainly wouldn't be my motivation. It might be appropriate to ask "Does F69631 consider social security to be less important than our continued presence in [sandy country]" but even that would be questionable as the situation obviously isn't "either-or". It would be appropriate to ask "Does F69631 believe that it's better idea to cut that amount of money from social security than to cut only some of that amount there and cut the rest from [another program]?"...
I'd bet a month's wage that Obama administration has nothing against planetary exploration. It's always easier to create provocative straw-man arguments than it is to actually engage in a civilized discussion in which everyone acknowledges the facts (=the fact that in a democracy we need to make compromises and other people might have different values and opinions than you do). We need some sort of rally to restore sanity or something...
Where I live, all the tickets are electronic. Sure, you can buy single tickets from the driver but they cost more, aren't eligible for student discounts, etc... So everyone has a personal, electronic ticket to which you can either buy a period of time (e.g., a month) or value (e.g., 30 euros). When you get into the bus, you bring the ticket close to a device attached to the wall. If you have a period of time, it just beeps to inform the driver that he can get let you in and if you have value, you need to press some of the buttons to indicate how far you'll go (after which some of the value is reduced from your card, the device beeps, etc.).
The big brother doesn't need cameras to know about practically every distance longer than walking distance that I've traveled during the last few years. This includes the times I've taken a taxi as I use credit cards to pay for those.
It's well-known that due to the "one process per tab" design of Chrome, opening a new tab reserves a fixed amount of memory. So it's quite clear that if you open 40 tabs in several browsers and do nothing else, Chrome is likely to use the most memory (though I can't imagine how they got it to use about a gig of memory. When I open new tabs, they each reserve something like 3 megs...). However, if you look at the "Memory Management" chart, you see that FireFox is pretty bad at freeing the reserved memory, even after a significant amount of time has went by... When 39 of the open tabs were closed, FireFox used several times as much memory as Chrome. Even after they waited 5 minutes, FF used nearly twice as much as Chrome.
When I surf, I frequently open and close tabs and the browser is on for several hours at the time. What matters is whether the browser can free the memory it no longer needs or does it keep hogging more and more. In that aspect, FF fared pretty badly...
Microsoft's Security Essentials used to be pretty lightweight but it's hitting middle age weight gain. At least it's not intrusive and doesn't nag you to pay up since it's free.
Could you refer me to some source about that weight gain? I'm interested as I've ended up using/recommending MSE nearly exclusively when it comes to Windwos AV-applications. It's always felt relatively efficient and non-intrusive so I've never paid much attention to how much resources it actually uses... so if that's changing/about to change, I might need to re-evaluate this.
For a moment, I thought that you had created a greasemonkey script that detected incorrect ways to spell the name and replaced them with a correct one.
When I go to an event like ASSEMBLY I join the appropriate IRC channel of about 500 people. Not only do I not know most of them, I don't know who is dating who, who is friends of who, which of them have similar interests with each other, how active certain people are in interacting with each other, etc. before I explicitly get to know them and find out things like this manually... And this is all OK, as IRC isn't a social network.
I can't easily monitor my social circle (friends, family, co-workers, etc.) through IRC: Even ignoring that most of the people I know aren't on IRC, IRC is built around channels, not around social relationships. Not all of the people I frequently interact with are on the same channel (indeed, I would need to be on all the channels they're on)! I would need to analyze the backlogs of 30 different channels to piece together the data about the people I'm interested in, etc. which simply isn't practical (or possible).
Like all communication mediums, IRC can be used to build and maintain social relationships. However, it obviously isn't designed for the type of stuff that social networks are designed for. It's mind boggling how someone could not see this difference.:)
Birds getting drunk on fermented berries is common all around the world and that's one of the options they're considering. However, TFA says that it might not be the case here: The effects can last days even after the bird is brought in for treatment, which really shouldn't happen seeing how amazingly fast metabolism parrots have. Also, the fact that these have so dramatically increased in the last ten years suggests that there might be more to it.
That said... It's really suspicious that they can't figure out whether the birds are actually drunk or not.
Slashdot Mirror
If they didn't have the money to do it, and you were told that you wouldn't be paid for it, why would you expect to be paid for it?
It's difficult to convince managers to invest in software that might one day exist. They might invest your time but if they're not confident about your skills, they might fear that the project might take longer than expected and/or never get finished. Saying "We'll pay you if/when it's done" is also problematic (then there needs to time invested to crafting specifications about when it'll be done, there might be conflicts about that, budgeting money for investment that might or might not occur is a bitch, etc.). If you can show them a product and say "Here's a product that does X, if you're willing to pay Y, we'll start using this tomorrow" you remove the risk completely and it's much easier costs/benefits analysis.
That said... I think that the OP is in a situation where he has no chance but to give his boss the product. If he says "Okay, I knew you don't have money to pay me but I still made this piece of software... Just to tell you that I'm not going to give it to you!" it won't exactly improve his status within the organization. So either he'll tell nobody about it or he'll end up giving the software to his employer for whatever price he might or might not be able to negotiate for it. If the employer really can't pay him with money, I think this would be a good chance to negotiate some non-monetary benefits. Think it would benefit both you and the company if you could allocate one day a week to any work-related project of your choice (Google-style)? It's a good time to make the case when you hand over that piece of software. Want an extra week or two vacation next year? I bet that's doable if the product really is as good as the OP claims. Want the office with the nicest view? It could finally be yours...
I guess it depends on your world view: I could see someone making an argument that even if some patents aren't good for the society, individuals should be given the right to control what they've created (and conversely, someone could argue that patents shouldn't exist even if they are good for the society). From the point of view of the society, patents only make sense if they are a method of increasing the pool of public knowledge and should only be allowed in such cases. By that logic, you couldn't patent anything that can be deducted by examining the end product but you could patent the unique methods you used to manufacture it, for example. (Which would actually be going to the roots of the system!) You couldn't patent user interface components of operating system but if you were only able to create them because of some extremely clever engineering/optimization trick, you might be able to patent that.
One could argue that allowing entities to patent things that could be deduced from the end product would encourage them to invest more in R&D and that would have positive net impact. That, however, is purely a question of costs and benefits analysis (Cost being potential to patent technology that would have became available even without patents, benefit being potential for technology that wouldn't have became available without patents). I remember seeing quite a few discussions related to patents but I can't recall anyone having made the math for what would be the optimal patent duration, etc. [where the technology could be deduced from the end product] for technological advancement. I doubt it's 20, but I also doubt it's 0.
The history of patents dates back to 15th century Venice. Venice had a lucrative glass-blowing industry and major artisans had different kinds of trade secrets that related to the craft. Each artisan vigorously guarded their own trade secrets and often took those to the grave with them, so the technology didn't progress. So, they came up with a system: Artisan could claim their method of glass-blowing as patently original, have no longer the need to keep the method secret and would not take the method to the grave with them. Everyone won.
In those days, patents weren't for "Glass-blowing". That's a concept. They were for "A very specific method of glass-blowing, that the artisan had researched themselves (or learned from their master) and would otherwise have to keep secret". That much still applies to the modern patents (abominations such as "1-click shopping" being an exception). The patent isn't "The concept of using fuel cells as batteries". It is "Using specific type of fuel cells for laptop power in a specific and non-obvious way". It doesn't matter that someone else has used fuel cells for batteries before.
(FWIW: I think that there is still need for a system like that, so I also support software patents in cases where the patented idea is non-obvious enough that it probably wouldn't have became "public knowledge" in the next 20 years without the patent. This could well apply to specific encryption algorithms and stuff like that.)
The truly funny part is Web 2.0 is back to classic Client/Server programming, utilizing an HTML engine as the client. I believe that existed since the 60s with dumb terminals, but certainly no later than the early 80s with the current modern thick client/server model (think X11 and the like)
It seems like you're talking about HTML5 (Creating websites with application-like user experience with combinations of the latest HTML, CSS and JS features) though you refer to it as Web 2.0.
Web 2.0 has nothing to do with user interface (though certain UI elements, such as types of glossy buttons, are often referred to as "Web 2.0 style" because they got popular in blogs, etc.). Web 2.0 refers to the change in how people view the internet and how the content is produced. Web 2.0 refers to the change from passive users (who just visit corporation.com to look up information) to active users (who produce the content themselves. e.g., blogs, youtube, Slashdot community, etc.).
I know there are too many buzzwords these days, but these are the ones that everyone should know. Web 2.0 has been pretty well established for years and I think that it well describes very important change in how we view the web. HTML5 is more of a buzzword (as it doesn't actually refer to any new technology, it seems like a newer version of "DHTML") but it's quite widely used and the meaning is pretty consistent, too. :)
But if the security image is a photo with 2 people and a dog, against a white wall it's pretty likely that I can guess where the taps are, so I only have to guess the order.
In that case... don't choose an photo of 2 people and a dog.
What you're saying is "This system has very poor security, if they choose the pictures poorly and each picture has very few probable combinations". Pretty obvious answer is: Don't choose such pictures. I'd guess that before they choose a picture for this purpose, they do some testing on what kind of patterns people use and discard the pictures where there is too little distribution. Of course, users may always use the most obvious pattern and they might be able to choose a picture themselves and use too simple picture... but users can also choose very stupid passwords.
By "belief system", do you mean the Constitution? Because being "against big government" in the extreme is called Anarchy -- you have to be for something for it to be called government. Most libertarians I know (Republicans aside, since they're obviously less small government than Libs) are pretty "core functionality only", even believing religion/abortion/all-that-bullshit has no place in government either.
By belief system I mean "Christianity". If one claims to be for small government, I think one should also be for secularization of church and state but I don't see republicans demanding anything like that. Very recently senate republicans demanded a vote just to "reaffirm" the USA motto is "In god we trust". Obviously that action was purely symbolic but that kind of actions symbolize neither small government or efficiency. Even the most libertarian republicans (I'm looking at you, Ron Paul) support banning abortion.
When a party wants the federal state to enforce its religious views on the rest of the population, even though that certainly isn't a part of the constitution, it doesn't take ideological stance for freedom and small government. Republicans happen to oppose Social Security programs but the fact that it would make the government smaller is the side product, not the other way around.
If you are talking about some set of liberalists that doesn't include the mainstream republicans or people such as Ron Paul, this comment doesn't apply to them. Then again, neither did my previous one.
Summarizing republicans as "against big government" is a bit misleading. It's more of a "Against big government, except where it pleases us, our sponsors or enforces our belief system". Or would you honestly say that republicans oppose farming subsidies or military spending? Or support limiting the federal government's ability to spy on its people? Or demand more secularization of the federal government?I think that republicans ideologically being against big government is a myth and instead they are for it or against it depending on what benefits them in each individual case. (And I want to be very clear here: I don't consider that approach to be a bad one. I just think it shouldn't be combined to "small government" rhetoric.)
That said, I actually think that Newt is the best one republicans have to offer at the moment. He's not one of the craziest ones* and he has a lot more consistency than many other candidates. I do disagree with him in most issues but I think he's relatively respectable when it comes to acting as a politician.
I never attended high-school (I went to vocational school and then started my engineering studies) so I never got to study those interesting-sounding subjects like psychology and philosophy. Now that all the most famous universities have been putting their introductory courses online, I've watched quite a few of them.
When I was watching Introduction to Psychology (Prof. Paul Bloom, Yale, extremely interesting and entertaining way to spend some 20-odd hours) I thought "Hell, I could actually do more than watch these lectures. I think I'll actually buy the book and read the recommended chapters!".
The course book costed something like 150+ dollars, which I thought was astounding but that actually wasn't the showstopper for me (I have a job and am quite prone to buying stuff on a whim in my sleep-deprivation induced mania). What made me pissed off was that they (=every store I could find by googling the book) didn't sell an electronic version of the book. What made me more pissed was that they clearly had electronic version: If I were to buy the physical book, I would get the PDF on CD with the book. There simply was no way of buying just the PDF (I would have been willing to accept DRM, to pay the full price, whatever... I just didn't want to wait a week, spend a phonecall arguing with customs officers, pay another 30 bucks for shipping, another 30 bucks of import taxes, etc. as is usually the case when I order stuff online).
In the end, I was annoyed that the stores selling the book could have made my life easier but had chosen not to, so I didn't buy the book. However, open courses like these cause large amounts of people like me to consider buying books that we never would have otherwise bought. If the industry can implement minor reforms to approach us a bit, I'm sure there's a lot of potential for more profit.
Why should I not trust Amazon? If I were in the book printing business, I'd probably feel the need to thoroughly analyze the claims but let's face it: The best seller lists are pretty useless for us consumers. I'll buy e-books for myself and give hardbacks as presents this year, no matter whether Amazon reports e-book share to be 10% or 50%. I don't need to worry about what impression Amazon is trying to create so I can just enjoy the interesting pieces of statistics.
I'm not saying that the accuracy of statistics doesn't matter (though I might be saying "it doesn't matter much") but I think that in a case like this, we can just discuss the statistics and what they might or might not imply without caring about hidden motivations of the company behind them.
I have been surrounded by the riot cops more than once and I really doubt you could pull that off.
If you are in the middle of a crowd, hold a reflective surface and the cops target you with a weapon like this, all you're doing is reflect the light at your fellow demonstrators. Sure, some might reach the cops but much more will be directed at the demonstrators who are closer to you and perhaps just turning their faces towards you (as they try to look away from the cops with the light). Even if the cops aren't protected against this, you're doing them more good than harm.
Thus, the only way to pull this off would be to have large reflective surfaces between the crowd and the cops. I'm not sure if this can be pulled off at all: It's easy to create reflective surfaces quickly (metal foil, etc.) but often the cops are too close for you to hold any significant sizes of reflective surfaces between you and them. Besides, it is easy enough to spot such surfaces and target the weapon somewhere else. I guess that you could technically have a disciplined enough crowd to spread something reflective on top of them (like shields in a phanlax formation)... but really, I can't see that happening in any real-world scenario.
Corporations exist to make money. Therefore, they'll make money however they can. This is entirely allowed by our patent system and isn't evil at all.
You could argue that people don't have any duties towards other people or the society and each should just try to gain as much money as legally possible. You could even argue that if everyone tries to do that, things end up better for all of us. I would disagree but I could at least understand both the ethical and economic principles behind those claims.
Corporations, however, aren't something that "just exist". They're tool that we, as the society, came up with and gave certain exclusive rights to. To be more exact, corporations are tools through which we grant certain people (CEO, Shareholders, etc.) certain rights that they wouldn't otherwise have (e.g., when the company earns money, it can direct it to shareholders but when it can't pay back its debts, we don't hold shareholders personally responsible).
You can say "You don't whitelist rights! Government/Society/etc. don't GIVE rights" but in the case of corporations, society really has created some rights that don't have any ethical reason to exist. They've been created because we believe that if we create them and give them to people who use them responsibly, society becomes a better place and everyone wins. That being the case, we have all the right to say "You either accept BOTH the rights and duties (=some social responsibility) of this corporation-thingy or we don't give you either of them" and thus expect some social responsibility from corporations.
IIRC it wasn't clear whether the year was actually 1984 or whether that was just one of the lies that the ministry had created.
Wages are high but the cost of electricity is relatively low. I have no idea how big expense that is compared to wages but I'd guess that it amounts to something?
In any case... Let me be the first Finnish person here to say: Thank you. Fiskers is hiring also software developers over here and I've considered applying. If I will and if I'll get the job, I'll try to remember where my paycheck is coming from. :)
There are a lot of traits that could - whether that'd be accurate or not - be called "very american". They include patriotism, appreciation of freedom, love towards free market economics, etc... However, I can't figure out what in the phrase you quoted is "very american". You could say something like "we appreciate freedom and it's an expression of that to buy stuff, take it apart and (try to) make it better" but I think that's a bit far fetched and you could make up just as good explanation for any other culture.
I'm a bit tired of people claiming that an activity is very american just because the person is from USA and likes it. I know that some people will react with "Oh come on. Why do you care?" but us geeks tend to be quite sensitive to minor issues in things we care about. It shouldn't be odd that when someone essentially says that "[being the engineering type of a person] is very american", I cringe.
It's not just the "just a toy" claim. The phrases before that are even more telling
My boss upgraded to Lion, and I used it for about two minutes before deciding to stick with Snow Leopard for the foreseeable future
Even if the "two minutes" is an exaggeration... Practically any UI change, for example, feels difficult at first, even if it ends up being a lot better once you've gotten used to it. (It took me a month to stop hating the ribbon UI of MS Office even though I now consider it mostly positive thing) Deciding "I won't try this" about an OS in a matter of minutes is just silly.
...most people don't have friends... ...Do not mix nerds like you and me who read /. with the actual general population.
Are you certain that you didn't mix up the two yourself?
Essentially, you consider yourselves to be concerned citizens who have seen the crime, etc. around and patrol the streets. Fine. Where I live, we have some superheroes like that. Some far right activists have noticed increased amount of crimes in areas with a lot of immigrants so they patrol - in groups - the streets of these areas, looking for immigrants that act somehow suspiciously in their opinion... And that's scary as hell. I'm sure that they - just like you - think that they're doing something good for the society and that world needs more people like them.
Now, how do I tell "the superheroes" and "the far right citizen patrols" apart from each other? I can't. From my point of view, there is no other indicator between "superheroes" and "a phenomenon I fear more that petty crime" than your word that you only do what is REALLY good while the other guys just THINK they do what is really good. Even more... even if what you say is true, I'd be willing to bet that increase in the positive kind of vigilantes also leads (through more media coverage, cultural attitude shifts, etc.) to the increase in the negative kind.
This is nothing personal: It might be that the total effect of everything YOU have done and will ever do ends up being positive. Let's hope for that. But "super heroes" aka. vigilantes who patrol the streets and act based on their definition of good and righteous... it's just something that we as a society don't need and shouldn't accept.
I'm sorry but that's just factually untrue. The word "Try" has two implications: A motivation to see something happen and action to make that reality. If there's only motivation but no action, "tries" is misleading because better word would be "wants", "wishes", etc. If there's only action but no motivation, better word would be "causes".
For example: I try to get in shape (I've got motivation and take action). To get in shape I intend to jog. Jogging causes my shoes to wear off. Is it accurate to say "I'm trying to wear off my shoes"? No. That's misleading as it simply isn't how the word is used and it makes no sense at all to use it like that. "I try to do X" implies that I've achieved success when I've reached X. I haven't achieved any success when my shoes have worn off so I'm clearly not trying to do that. I'm not trying to do all [unwanted side effects of things I'm trying to do].
I find it quite ironic that a person who references Orwell in their sig. manages such wordplay to twist words to suit a political agenda.
Look, we're in a debt crisis and cuts must be made, everyone agrees about that. What we don't agree about is what to cut: Some people say "Cut a lot of military spending", others "Cut a lot of social security" and still others "Both of those are more important than planetary exploration". If I were to support significant cuts to social security, it wouldn't be appropriate to ask "Is F69631 trying to end welfare?" as that certainly wouldn't be my motivation. It might be appropriate to ask "Does F69631 consider social security to be less important than our continued presence in [sandy country]" but even that would be questionable as the situation obviously isn't "either-or". It would be appropriate to ask "Does F69631 believe that it's better idea to cut that amount of money from social security than to cut only some of that amount there and cut the rest from [another program]?"...
I'd bet a month's wage that Obama administration has nothing against planetary exploration. It's always easier to create provocative straw-man arguments than it is to actually engage in a civilized discussion in which everyone acknowledges the facts (=the fact that in a democracy we need to make compromises and other people might have different values and opinions than you do). We need some sort of rally to restore sanity or something...
Where I live, all the tickets are electronic. Sure, you can buy single tickets from the driver but they cost more, aren't eligible for student discounts, etc... So everyone has a personal, electronic ticket to which you can either buy a period of time (e.g., a month) or value (e.g., 30 euros). When you get into the bus, you bring the ticket close to a device attached to the wall. If you have a period of time, it just beeps to inform the driver that he can get let you in and if you have value, you need to press some of the buttons to indicate how far you'll go (after which some of the value is reduced from your card, the device beeps, etc.).
The big brother doesn't need cameras to know about practically every distance longer than walking distance that I've traveled during the last few years. This includes the times I've taken a taxi as I use credit cards to pay for those.
It's well-known that due to the "one process per tab" design of Chrome, opening a new tab reserves a fixed amount of memory. So it's quite clear that if you open 40 tabs in several browsers and do nothing else, Chrome is likely to use the most memory (though I can't imagine how they got it to use about a gig of memory. When I open new tabs, they each reserve something like 3 megs...). However, if you look at the "Memory Management" chart, you see that FireFox is pretty bad at freeing the reserved memory, even after a significant amount of time has went by... When 39 of the open tabs were closed, FireFox used several times as much memory as Chrome. Even after they waited 5 minutes, FF used nearly twice as much as Chrome.
When I surf, I frequently open and close tabs and the browser is on for several hours at the time. What matters is whether the browser can free the memory it no longer needs or does it keep hogging more and more. In that aspect, FF fared pretty badly...
Microsoft's Security Essentials used to be pretty lightweight but it's hitting middle age weight gain. At least it's not intrusive and doesn't nag you to pay up since it's free.
Could you refer me to some source about that weight gain? I'm interested as I've ended up using/recommending MSE nearly exclusively when it comes to Windwos AV-applications. It's always felt relatively efficient and non-intrusive so I've never paid much attention to how much resources it actually uses... so if that's changing/about to change, I might need to re-evaluate this.
For a moment, I thought that you had created a greasemonkey script that detected incorrect ways to spell the name and replaced them with a correct one.
When I go to an event like ASSEMBLY I join the appropriate IRC channel of about 500 people. Not only do I not know most of them, I don't know who is dating who, who is friends of who, which of them have similar interests with each other, how active certain people are in interacting with each other, etc. before I explicitly get to know them and find out things like this manually... And this is all OK, as IRC isn't a social network.
I can't easily monitor my social circle (friends, family, co-workers, etc.) through IRC: Even ignoring that most of the people I know aren't on IRC, IRC is built around channels, not around social relationships. Not all of the people I frequently interact with are on the same channel (indeed, I would need to be on all the channels they're on)! I would need to analyze the backlogs of 30 different channels to piece together the data about the people I'm interested in, etc. which simply isn't practical (or possible).
Like all communication mediums, IRC can be used to build and maintain social relationships. However, it obviously isn't designed for the type of stuff that social networks are designed for. It's mind boggling how someone could not see this difference. :)
Birds getting drunk on fermented berries is common all around the world and that's one of the options they're considering. However, TFA says that it might not be the case here: The effects can last days even after the bird is brought in for treatment, which really shouldn't happen seeing how amazingly fast metabolism parrots have. Also, the fact that these have so dramatically increased in the last ten years suggests that there might be more to it.
That said... It's really suspicious that they can't figure out whether the birds are actually drunk or not.