The defining feature of both extreme fascism and extreme socialism is that they're authoritarian, and from that perspective they look the same.
That might be an appropriate observation if we're talking about the similarities between Hitler and Stalin, but it has no relevance to modern-day Europe. By normal standards, the social democracies of Northern Europe are about the least "authoritarian" countries in the world. They have free speech, free elections, strong middle classes, and far fewer people in prison than the US.
They have their own problems they don't want to face, like the fact that their continent is falling apart as their socialist and fascist policies have destroyed their economy such that nothing is left but the facade, and that is starting to break apart.
This is nonsensical demagoguery. There are no "fascist" countries in Europe today with the possible exception of Hungary under Fidesz. And the most "socialist" nations in the European Union tend to be the ones that are doing best. Sweden, Denmark, Finland, all are doing fine. Even Iceland recovered quite nicely after its bank crisis of a few years back. It's not the cradle of social democracy that is suffering from the current debt crunch; it's Greece, which never should even have been admitted to the EU in the first place. And Greece isn't really that socialist. They have a bunch of overpaid public employees, which is not the same thing.
Would you pay a buck or two extra for fast access â" or vote for someone who thinks you should?
If I thought that I (and others) would actually get the access in exchange for paying the tax, then yes. But the experience with existing "universal service" fees in the United States has not been encouraging. It's basically just an excuse for the existing cable and telephone companies to pocket more money.
More generally, this is one of several reasons why Americans are far more averse to taxes than Europeans. The Europeans have more competent governments on average (I'm talking about Scandinavia, Germany, France, etc., not outliers such as Greece) and ordinary Europeans see more return on their tax money than ordinary Americans do. In the US, most federal tax dollars go to senior-oriented programs (Medicare, Social Security) which are great, but don't directly help working families, and to the military, which is absurdly over-bloated, spending about as much as the rest of the world put together. Most of this is corporate welfare, going to politically connected defense contractors. The state governments are even more corrupt and inept than the Feds. Localities are a mixed bag, but in general it seems that people are more willing to support property taxes for tangible goods like schools, libraries, and better roads.
Wow. You're saying that once people are no longer young they can't change or learn. Almost makes me want to die.
Of course older people can change and learn, but it's somewhat more difficult than for the young. (Even young adults have a harder time learning than children, who soak up knowledge like sponges.) Perhaps an even larger factor is that older people are more likely to have entrenched positions that allow them to refuse to update their knowledge. Young adults have to keep up or risk being left out. The example given in the original article is a case in point: once someone becomes a tenured professor, they can pretty much do whatever they want without repercussions. If they don't want to learn how to use computers, then they just don't, and all they risk is a few nasty words from colleagues at most.
The problem I always had with the NES is despite the "Nintendo seal of quality" the amount of shitty shovelware they let into the channel was just insane. For every decent game you probably had a dozen truly crap games, not even counting all the movie license crap they let loose upon their system like a chili fart on a bus. Friday The 13th or Total Recall anyone?
All consoles had (and have) a lot of "shitty shovelware", but the ratio of good games to bad games on the NES was higher than on most other systems. Nintendo limited each third-party licensee to a certain number of games released per year, so this meant that a lot of the worst Famicom games never made it to America. (Of course, quite a few good games didn't, either.)
And not all licensed titles for the NES were bad. The NES version of Batman, for instance, was a very good platformer. DuckTales was a well-designed game, too.
If your transaction system is sufficiently insecure that your only solution to fraud and money laundering is to block transactions over a certain size, you fail. We're all dying to move away from that ridiculous idea that visa/mc/banks are currently using, because it is fundamentally broken.
The brokenness is legal, not technical. The US government wants to know the details of every transaction over $10,000, and it's actually against the law for banks to offer privacy and anonymity to their customers on such transactions. This is what got e-gold shut down.
Only a united front can beat back the MAFIAA. Winston Churchill's statement on appeasement seems apropos here: "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile – hoping it will eat him last".
He spent five years writing and endless stream of perscriptions for painkillers and sedatives/anti-anxiety meds.
He's a doctor. He's legally entitled to do that if there is a legitimate medical reason. And in borderline cases, he's entitled to the benefit of the doubt.
Re:Was just a way to remove employee equity?
on
Trouble At OnLive
·
· Score: 1
It seems to me that the key factor here will be whether this was a true arm's-length transaction or not. Were the OnLive assets sold at a fair market price because the company in its existing form just wasn't profitable? In that case, the equity probably was worthless, and it was reasonable to try to salvage something from the wreckage. Or were the assets sold at a knock-down price to a company controlled by the existing management, or people closely associated with management? If that's the case, then the courts would probably rule that it was a sham transaction entered into for fraudulent purposes, and the employees should be able to get compensation for their lost stock options. How much money Steve Perlman walks away with will be a big clue in determining which is which. Is he taking the same equity hit as his employees, or is he pulling in lots of cash? If the latter, it definitely looks fishy.
Re:that is why we need unions in TECH
on
Trouble At OnLive
·
· Score: 1
In the case of a startup with stock options, the employees ARE investors.
Setting up Google Chrome as the default PDF reader is more secure, and it's one less program to update. To do so in Windows 7 just right click on a PDF file, click "open with", click "choose default program", click Browse, and Browse to the following file:
C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\Chrome.exe
I had considered doing something like this, but I'm not at all sure I want Google to have full information on my reading habits. (I already have Chrome installed for Facebook only, since it can be assumed that anything done on Facebook has no privacy to begin with, and this stops Facebook from tracking me on my normal browser.)
Adobe Reader is freeware.
Why would Adobe want their "customers" (who pay nothing for the software) to constantly upgrade to new versions?
Adobe Reader is a marketing tool used to sell upgrades to Acrobat. They want to be able to ship new features in new versions of Acrobat, and to do this, they consider it helpful to be able to ensure buyers that "everyone" will be able to use their new whiz-bang documents/forms/whatever.
That's just bad coding and there is no excuse. It doesn't help that the demo code snip-its from twitter et al are blocking javascript garbage, but any webdesigner or programmer worth their salt should be able to rewrite it into async non-blocking code in no time flat.
Twitter et al. should be providing decent code in the first place. They know a lot of people are going to be using the code as-is. Remember, a lot of web designers are not JavaScript experts. Dealing with synchronization is an intermediate to advanced level feature. You can't assume anyone who is writing any web page knows how to do it. And if it's so easy, why doesn't the demo code do it anyway?
Well, you're paying for snob appeal, mostly. And yes, if you need a high-res screen, then you'll partly be paying for that. But were most people buying those products now previously screaming out for such high-res? Nope.
I've seen quite a few complaints on Slashdot that monitor resolutions and/or DPIs are actually lower than they were a few years ago, and that it's very difficult and/or expensive to get anything above 1080p. Many of these complaints predate the release of the Retina MacBook Pro. See, for example, this article, which was published after Apple introduced the iPhone 4, but before the iPad 3 and Retina MacBook Pro. Or how about this article, in which Microsoft complains about the very same thing. So, yes, people were "screaming out for such high-res".
One thing is very clear from what we know of this case: Judge Lucy Koh lacks appropriate judicial temperament. A judge isn't supposed to be hassling and berating the lawyers on both sides like this. Furthermore, she seems to be jumping on any possible pretext to exclude as much evidence as possible from both sides. This is unusual, especially in a civil case. Frankly, I think she just doesn't want to hear the case at all, and wishes the parties would come to a settlement. In other words, she'd rather not do her job. Maybe we should grant that wish, and impeach her for violating the Article III requirement of "good behavior".
Just think how much more smug you are when you're running free software on over-priced hardware
I would be very interested to know where I can get a laptop with a 2880x1800 display panel for cheaper than Apple is charging. I am not aware of any others. It's a judgment call whether this is worth the money, as it is definitely a premium-priced product, but you are paying for actual hardware specs, not just snob appeal.
Why in the world would you even try to do it? What is the goal of this endeavour?
Because the Retina MacBook Pro is a damn good laptop? I can't think of any other laptop that provides an equivalent display quality. And apart from the display, it's just generally well-built all around, both aesthetically and functionally. So if someone is really into Linux on the desktop, I can see why they'd want to try it on one of these systems. I can't stand MacOS X but if I had an unlimited budget, I'd seriously consider getting a Retina MacBook Pro and putting Windows 7 on it.
Is there any reason to believe that the problem is any worse at Coursera than at meatspace universities? When I was at NGCSU, there was apparently enough of an issue with plagiarism that more than one professor spent a whole class period on discussing the issue, and a centralized system (Turnitin.com) was used to detect the most blatant forms of cheating.
Sounds like an interesting premise for a novel. Stereotypical gamer geek raids and loots another group in his MMORPG, and is surprised by the size of the haul. Then he finds out he's pissed off some very bad people in the real world...
But it's exactly like having twenty police officers on every single street corner hand writing voluminous logs of every plate they see, along with the current date and time.
Since that could be done without warrant, this is obviously perfectly fine, and not even worth thinking about.
This kind of legal thinking (and I know you were probably being sarcastic here, but this is actually the established US case law) goes to show that lawyers can sometimes be just as autistic as computer nerds. A big enough difference in degree becomes a degree in kind. Yes, you don't have an "expectation of privacy" in public places, but it's one thing to say that when it applies to something that happens to be overheard or seen by someone nearby, and quite another to say that it's OK to turn all public property into one giant surveillance zone.
From a technical POV, it's surprising just how much the Slashdot site sucks, given that it's written by and for geeks. Not only does it not work very well on mobile, but it also doesn't support Unicode. As a result, copying and pasting quotes will often result in garbage being inserted where there should be dashes, smart quotes, or other special characters. Come on, it's 2012; there's absolutely no excuse for this.
Slashdot Mirror
again, wtf does the FCC have to do with the internet?
Is this a joke? They're the Federal Communications Commission. Are you contending that the Internet isn't a form of interstate communication?
The defining feature of both extreme fascism and extreme socialism is that they're authoritarian, and from that perspective they look the same.
That might be an appropriate observation if we're talking about the similarities between Hitler and Stalin, but it has no relevance to modern-day Europe. By normal standards, the social democracies of Northern Europe are about the least "authoritarian" countries in the world. They have free speech, free elections, strong middle classes, and far fewer people in prison than the US.
They have their own problems they don't want to face, like the fact that their continent is falling apart as their socialist and fascist policies have destroyed their economy such that nothing is left but the facade, and that is starting to break apart.
This is nonsensical demagoguery. There are no "fascist" countries in Europe today with the possible exception of Hungary under Fidesz. And the most "socialist" nations in the European Union tend to be the ones that are doing best. Sweden, Denmark, Finland, all are doing fine. Even Iceland recovered quite nicely after its bank crisis of a few years back. It's not the cradle of social democracy that is suffering from the current debt crunch; it's Greece, which never should even have been admitted to the EU in the first place. And Greece isn't really that socialist. They have a bunch of overpaid public employees, which is not the same thing.
Would you pay a buck or two extra for fast access â" or vote for someone who thinks you should?
If I thought that I (and others) would actually get the access in exchange for paying the tax, then yes. But the experience with existing "universal service" fees in the United States has not been encouraging. It's basically just an excuse for the existing cable and telephone companies to pocket more money.
More generally, this is one of several reasons why Americans are far more averse to taxes than Europeans. The Europeans have more competent governments on average (I'm talking about Scandinavia, Germany, France, etc., not outliers such as Greece) and ordinary Europeans see more return on their tax money than ordinary Americans do. In the US, most federal tax dollars go to senior-oriented programs (Medicare, Social Security) which are great, but don't directly help working families, and to the military, which is absurdly over-bloated, spending about as much as the rest of the world put together. Most of this is corporate welfare, going to politically connected defense contractors. The state governments are even more corrupt and inept than the Feds. Localities are a mixed bag, but in general it seems that people are more willing to support property taxes for tangible goods like schools, libraries, and better roads.
Wow. You're saying that once people are no longer young they can't change or learn. Almost makes me want to die.
Of course older people can change and learn, but it's somewhat more difficult than for the young. (Even young adults have a harder time learning than children, who soak up knowledge like sponges.) Perhaps an even larger factor is that older people are more likely to have entrenched positions that allow them to refuse to update their knowledge. Young adults have to keep up or risk being left out. The example given in the original article is a case in point: once someone becomes a tenured professor, they can pretty much do whatever they want without repercussions. If they don't want to learn how to use computers, then they just don't, and all they risk is a few nasty words from colleagues at most.
It is crazy. But you'll have a hard time convincing the Rand-intoxicated readership of Slashdot.
The problem I always had with the NES is despite the "Nintendo seal of quality" the amount of shitty shovelware they let into the channel was just insane. For every decent game you probably had a dozen truly crap games, not even counting all the movie license crap they let loose upon their system like a chili fart on a bus. Friday The 13th or Total Recall anyone?
All consoles had (and have) a lot of "shitty shovelware", but the ratio of good games to bad games on the NES was higher than on most other systems. Nintendo limited each third-party licensee to a certain number of games released per year, so this meant that a lot of the worst Famicom games never made it to America. (Of course, quite a few good games didn't, either.)
And not all licensed titles for the NES were bad. The NES version of Batman, for instance, was a very good platformer. DuckTales was a well-designed game, too.
Well, there's also the fact that Torx screws aren't really that obscure to begin with.
If your transaction system is sufficiently insecure that your only solution to fraud and money laundering is to block transactions over a certain size, you fail. We're all dying to move away from that ridiculous idea that visa/mc/banks are currently using, because it is fundamentally broken.
The brokenness is legal, not technical. The US government wants to know the details of every transaction over $10,000, and it's actually against the law for banks to offer privacy and anonymity to their customers on such transactions. This is what got e-gold shut down.
Only a united front can beat back the MAFIAA. Winston Churchill's statement on appeasement seems apropos here: "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile – hoping it will eat him last".
He spent five years writing and endless stream of perscriptions for painkillers and sedatives/anti-anxiety meds.
He's a doctor. He's legally entitled to do that if there is a legitimate medical reason. And in borderline cases, he's entitled to the benefit of the doubt.
It seems to me that the key factor here will be whether this was a true arm's-length transaction or not. Were the OnLive assets sold at a fair market price because the company in its existing form just wasn't profitable? In that case, the equity probably was worthless, and it was reasonable to try to salvage something from the wreckage. Or were the assets sold at a knock-down price to a company controlled by the existing management, or people closely associated with management? If that's the case, then the courts would probably rule that it was a sham transaction entered into for fraudulent purposes, and the employees should be able to get compensation for their lost stock options. How much money Steve Perlman walks away with will be a big clue in determining which is which. Is he taking the same equity hit as his employees, or is he pulling in lots of cash? If the latter, it definitely looks fishy.
In the case of a startup with stock options, the employees ARE investors.
Setting up Google Chrome as the default PDF reader is more secure, and it's one less program to update. To do so in Windows 7 just right click on a PDF file, click "open with", click "choose default program", click Browse, and Browse to the following file: C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\Chrome.exe
I had considered doing something like this, but I'm not at all sure I want Google to have full information on my reading habits. (I already have Chrome installed for Facebook only, since it can be assumed that anything done on Facebook has no privacy to begin with, and this stops Facebook from tracking me on my normal browser.)
What they need is a "Lean PDF" that is strictly limited to describing the page content, with no internal programmability.
This subset already exists, and is known as PDF/A.
Adobe Reader is freeware. Why would Adobe want their "customers" (who pay nothing for the software) to constantly upgrade to new versions?
Adobe Reader is a marketing tool used to sell upgrades to Acrobat. They want to be able to ship new features in new versions of Acrobat, and to do this, they consider it helpful to be able to ensure buyers that "everyone" will be able to use their new whiz-bang documents/forms/whatever.
That's just bad coding and there is no excuse. It doesn't help that the demo code snip-its from twitter et al are blocking javascript garbage, but any webdesigner or programmer worth their salt should be able to rewrite it into async non-blocking code in no time flat.
Twitter et al. should be providing decent code in the first place. They know a lot of people are going to be using the code as-is. Remember, a lot of web designers are not JavaScript experts. Dealing with synchronization is an intermediate to advanced level feature. You can't assume anyone who is writing any web page knows how to do it. And if it's so easy, why doesn't the demo code do it anyway?
Well, you're paying for snob appeal, mostly. And yes, if you need a high-res screen, then you'll partly be paying for that. But were most people buying those products now previously screaming out for such high-res? Nope.
I've seen quite a few complaints on Slashdot that monitor resolutions and/or DPIs are actually lower than they were a few years ago, and that it's very difficult and/or expensive to get anything above 1080p. Many of these complaints predate the release of the Retina MacBook Pro. See, for example, this article, which was published after Apple introduced the iPhone 4, but before the iPad 3 and Retina MacBook Pro. Or how about this article, in which Microsoft complains about the very same thing. So, yes, people were "screaming out for such high-res".
One thing is very clear from what we know of this case: Judge Lucy Koh lacks appropriate judicial temperament. A judge isn't supposed to be hassling and berating the lawyers on both sides like this. Furthermore, she seems to be jumping on any possible pretext to exclude as much evidence as possible from both sides. This is unusual, especially in a civil case. Frankly, I think she just doesn't want to hear the case at all, and wishes the parties would come to a settlement. In other words, she'd rather not do her job. Maybe we should grant that wish, and impeach her for violating the Article III requirement of "good behavior".
Just think how much more smug you are when you're running free software on over-priced hardware
I would be very interested to know where I can get a laptop with a 2880x1800 display panel for cheaper than Apple is charging. I am not aware of any others. It's a judgment call whether this is worth the money, as it is definitely a premium-priced product, but you are paying for actual hardware specs, not just snob appeal.
Why in the world would you even try to do it? What is the goal of this endeavour?
Because the Retina MacBook Pro is a damn good laptop? I can't think of any other laptop that provides an equivalent display quality. And apart from the display, it's just generally well-built all around, both aesthetically and functionally. So if someone is really into Linux on the desktop, I can see why they'd want to try it on one of these systems. I can't stand MacOS X but if I had an unlimited budget, I'd seriously consider getting a Retina MacBook Pro and putting Windows 7 on it.
Is there any reason to believe that the problem is any worse at Coursera than at meatspace universities? When I was at NGCSU, there was apparently enough of an issue with plagiarism that more than one professor spent a whole class period on discussing the issue, and a centralized system (Turnitin.com) was used to detect the most blatant forms of cheating.
Sounds like an interesting premise for a novel. Stereotypical gamer geek raids and loots another group in his MMORPG, and is surprised by the size of the haul. Then he finds out he's pissed off some very bad people in the real world...
But it's exactly like having twenty police officers on every single street corner hand writing voluminous logs of every plate they see, along with the current date and time. Since that could be done without warrant, this is obviously perfectly fine, and not even worth thinking about.
This kind of legal thinking (and I know you were probably being sarcastic here, but this is actually the established US case law) goes to show that lawyers can sometimes be just as autistic as computer nerds. A big enough difference in degree becomes a degree in kind. Yes, you don't have an "expectation of privacy" in public places, but it's one thing to say that when it applies to something that happens to be overheard or seen by someone nearby, and quite another to say that it's OK to turn all public property into one giant surveillance zone.
From a technical POV, it's surprising just how much the Slashdot site sucks, given that it's written by and for geeks. Not only does it not work very well on mobile, but it also doesn't support Unicode. As a result, copying and pasting quotes will often result in garbage being inserted where there should be dashes, smart quotes, or other special characters. Come on, it's 2012; there's absolutely no excuse for this.