Actually, it is generally dictatorships that can give such guarantees. Modern democracies tend to have separate legislatures and judiciaries. Note Ecuador also has this separation but does not have the same extradition agreements with the U.S.
person of a diplomatic agent. Big difference. That's anyone the diplomatic staff says is under their protection
I think you have the wrong definition of person. My reading of this is as the 'physical body' of a diplomatic agent as per definition 2 on wiktionary.
Note that if article 29 did refer to 'associates' of actual diplomats then the Vienna Convention is strangely silent on the protections afforded to the actual diplomats themselves.
It's tricky as Assange has been given asylum for politcal reasons, not because Ecuador believes he is being unfairly persecuted for a criminal act. I can't imagine the UK embassy in China, for example, giving asylum to a random Chinese dissident, although they might for a UK citizen. They certainly wouldn't for a UK citizen apparently guilty of raping a Chinese citizen.
In this case Assange is not a citizen but has a weak prior relationship with Ecuador. Ecuador is certainly burning some political capital to do this. Perhaps they are somehow hoping to benefit from his celebrity.
It astonishes me every time I do an update on Windows just how long it takes to analyse which ones you need. Sure there's side-by-side DLL complexity and so on, but I try to imagine how I would program such a system and can't for the life of me figure out how it would take more than a few seconds once it has received a few K to a MB of info on new packages.
It's even worse considering how standardised an environment Windows is compared to Linux - a distro typically manages a lot more software and variations.
Windows 7 is definitely an improvement for installation simplicity though.
Moving the C compiler codebase to C++ allows C++ compiler to more easily advance.
This is unrelated. The job that a piece of software does is theoretically independent from the language. They are moving to C++ because they believe the language features better help them organise their codebase. You could write a C++ compiler in Java, Python, Lolcode - whichever language is best suited to parsing text, arranging it into expression trees, optimising those trees and writing out binary files. I don't think OpenCobol would benefit from being writting in Cobol rather than C!
* Generally the same performance as Windows 7, sometimes marginally faster
* Faster startup and shutdown
* Games and web browsing the same (IE10 no better than IE9)
* Multimedia slightly faster (x264 encoding/decoding)
I'm sure corporate group policy will take care of the faster startup and shutdown times:)
My theory is that most Americans are exposed almost exclusively to American entertainment, given the dominance of Hollywood in English-speaking entertainment. Other English-speaking countries have a combination of this and entertainment in their own language. Also, Americans tend to be culturally insular (in a non-perjorative sense), and why not, since it's a huge country capable of providing almost everything internally. Finally, unlike Europe, the geography provides little pressure to be bilingual (changing of late with Mexican interaction).
I think our ideas on how to behave toward others, manage a society and diplomacy are too different to get far here, but a couple of points;
Assange is leaking military secrets intended to kill US servicemen in a war authorized by our Congress
That's not a fair analysis of Wikileak's intentions. If it were they would have redacted nothing. Their intention is to reveal 'unethical' behaviour and embarass the U.S. government into behaving better.
Don't we have any goddamned spies anymore? We should have stuck a shiv [..] quiet and off the public radar.
Why off the public radar, unless you think the government knows best and the opinion of the people should be disregarded? This is the sort of behaviour Wikileaks attempts to reveal because most people disagree with it. Information furthers democracy.
Spying is a strange endeavour, borderline illegal, basically declaring war without declaring war. If the U.S. is allowed to send spies to assassinate people in other countries when it considers they are acting in a warlike way towards them, then shouldn't other countries be allowed to do the same on U.S. soil? You may argue that the U.S. is in the right and other countries are in the wrong, but unless you think the U.S. government is, and will remain, infallible then Wikileaks serves as an important check.
The problem would have ended and would have been very unlikely to repeat.
I disagree on both counts. Given that Assange was in a country that was a firm U.S. ally then declaring war (missiles into a sovereign country) would create far more problems than it would solve. Admittedly it is debated, but U.S. interference encouraged terrorism, and in fact, the very leaks you are proposing even more heavy-handedness would stop.
Australia actually has a similar tax rate to the U.S. and provides free health care.
The problem, though, is that the demand for health is almost unlimited. If you expand the number of doctors and hospital beds enough people will start staying overnight when they get a common cold. At some point it has to be curtailed.
One disadvantage is the relative size of the U.S. to most Western countries. The larger you are the more difficult it is to administer efficiently. of course size provides its own efficiencies in other areas.
you still have to justify that the government should be seeking to maximize revenue.
This is spot on, but...
I propose that we are all better off if we work towards maximizing the growth rate of our GDP [...] and make us all twice as rich in the process
the keyword 'all' only works collectively, if at all, and you are essentially advocating trickle-down economics. The problem of (first-world) society is one of distribution not of total wealth, and yes, governments do not necessarily need to maximise revenue to effect equitable distribution (wherever we decide that is).
if you can't tell the difference between the candidates, this says more about you than the candidates
Even if that were true, it's unhelpful. Some people are naturally less interested in politics or have a lower 'political IQ', or IQ in general. How do you suggest they discern between the candidates?
One possible flaw is that these studies aimed at trackers, and I'm guessing Blizzard use their own tracker for Warcraft patches.
On the other hand, a Warcraft patch can be considered a single torrent and so would not affect these statistics greatly as they counted torrent files, not traffic. There is some mention of traffic but it is not clearly analysed into illegal/legal in the summary.
This is a perfect example of how culturally it has become completely acceptable for women to beat men in public
I don't think it's 'become', rather it's always been that way. The reason is that, to almost 100%, men win in physical altercations with women. If an attacked man knows he is in this situation then it removes any real fear or threat and can make it 'cute' or humourous.
That notwithstanding, there is something unhealthy about that attitude. Especially in the context of male-on-female violence, it's hard to see how female-on-male violence is then funny. Responding with such a threat is tasteless and possibly escalates the situaton.
There's no reason for a web browser to eat up 2GB of memory
There is for me. Maybe it's not regular use but I currently have *cough* 390 tabs open in a FF session that's been up since it updated to version 14 about 19 days ago. It has a commit size of 1.2GB, less than I expected (probably due to the new deferred tab loading).
I've suffered through many versions that had slow memory creep (visible in the Windows process explorer, a session would last about 7 hours until it hit the 2GB cap). This is on a particular machine, while other machines with the same OS and plugins were fine. Recent versions have been very stable.
So, I'm not denying a history of memory problems, or trying to claim my experience trumps yours, but usage is different from leakage, and I think your experience is atypical. Firefox has taken a design decision to use memory in a particular way and cleaned up many leaks of late, as well as going beyond the call of duty to manage bad plugins.
The about:memory memory page is interesting. I wish they had it on a per-tab basis to identify troublesome sites, but I suspect there is a lot of shared memory (i.e. the JavaScript garbage collector) that would make this less informative.
Linux on the desktop is dead. It's linux on the "device" that has a chance.
But what does that matter, what does Linux-on-the-device achieve? Devices are more locked-down and restricted than desktops so the benenfits of openness and user empowerment that were hoped for in the desktop era just aren't realised. It's a bit of a Pyrrhic victory (loosely).
Google failed me. I googled for "2002 concorde temperatre control schematics" and not a single result ha dthe word "schematics" in it. I was horrified that advanced search is GONE now, and "+schematics" still didn't return anything with that word.
Google appears to make only the first three words compulsory, and even then only if there are a certain amount of matches for them together.
The + operator has been removed in favour of quotes, I think for syntactical consistency with some other product of theirs. The - still works though. I'd start with;
It depends on the genre. Classical is very organic with little attention paid to the beat. Rock and pop are much more beat-oriented, and consistency is more important to that sense of drive and forward momentum. Jazz in particular is very fussy about that*. Of course music being a creative endeavour there are no hard and fast rules.
Another reason to play to a click is it helps immensely during recording.
* A tangent, but check out Billy Cobham on Scofield's "Works for Me". His health was failing at the time and on some tracks he finishes a good 20bpm slower than he starts.
Pop metal is most likely a derogative term for metalcore, used by 'true' metal fans, so unlikely your son would use the term if he liked it.
What it shares with more modern metal (i.e. from the last 20 years) is the vocal growl or screech, a near-monotone that makes the music sound the same to people used to more traditional styles. There's still plenty of melody in a lot of it, just not in the vocals.
I sometimes wonder how much of a joke this period will seem (metalwise), but it shows no sign of abating. There are still things like Jobim's One Note Samba. Even though the chorus deliberately breaks the monotone the verse is still quite pleasant on its own, and even Girl from Ipanema doesn't have much melodic variation.
You would hope they accounted for that. One other concern I have it that music of the past 4 or so decades has increasingly focused on unique sound 'colour' rather than unique melodies or chord progressions, so any analysis of the latter is likely to find similarities. Hopefully they accounted for that too, I'd better read the article...
Pointless for the employee, but then so is doing any further work or a handover, yet you're still being paid for it.
I left my last job, somewhat reluctantly, with the entire local programming team to move to a competitor. They flew the HR manager over to give us all an exit interview. One of the guys let fly. I was far more positive, riding on the euphoria of change and the relief of finally making a decision.
Halfway through the interview it became clear her directive was to gleen information on our competitor and the circumstances of our poaching, presumably to gain some legal leverage. She wasn't particularly subtle, I doubt any of us were fooled. After we left we all received letters from the company's lawyers warning us (incorrectly) we couldn't work in the same industry.
All this underscores that HR is there to protect the company from employees and not the other way around. It was all fair enough, the company had to make sure they were protecting their structure in a situation that appeared suspicious.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it is generally dictatorships that can give such guarantees. Modern democracies tend to have separate legislatures and judiciaries. Note Ecuador also has this separation but does not have the same extradition agreements with the U.S.
person of a diplomatic agent. Big difference. That's anyone the diplomatic staff says is under their protection
I think you have the wrong definition of person. My reading of this is as the 'physical body' of a diplomatic agent as per definition 2 on wiktionary.
Note that if article 29 did refer to 'associates' of actual diplomats then the Vienna Convention is strangely silent on the protections afforded to the actual diplomats themselves.
It's tricky as Assange has been given asylum for politcal reasons, not because Ecuador believes he is being unfairly persecuted for a criminal act. I can't imagine the UK embassy in China, for example, giving asylum to a random Chinese dissident, although they might for a UK citizen. They certainly wouldn't for a UK citizen apparently guilty of raping a Chinese citizen.
In this case Assange is not a citizen but has a weak prior relationship with Ecuador. Ecuador is certainly burning some political capital to do this. Perhaps they are somehow hoping to benefit from his celebrity.
From the first picture in the article the author is using Ubuntu with Unity which would make it 11.10 or 12.04.
It astonishes me every time I do an update on Windows just how long it takes to analyse which ones you need. Sure there's side-by-side DLL complexity and so on, but I try to imagine how I would program such a system and can't for the life of me figure out how it would take more than a few seconds once it has received a few K to a MB of info on new packages.
It's even worse considering how standardised an environment Windows is compared to Linux - a distro typically manages a lot more software and variations.
Windows 7 is definitely an improvement for installation simplicity though.
Moving the C compiler codebase to C++ allows C++ compiler to more easily advance.
This is unrelated. The job that a piece of software does is theoretically independent from the language. They are moving to C++ because they believe the language features better help them organise their codebase. You could write a C++ compiler in Java, Python, Lolcode - whichever language is best suited to parsing text, arranging it into expression trees, optimising those trees and writing out binary files. I don't think OpenCobol would benefit from being writting in Cobol rather than C!
Unless I'm missing something in your comment..
The C++ standard mandates a vector of bools be implemented as a bit string, so I'm afraid you switched languages for no reason :)
Since the summary is a teaser;
* Generally the same performance as Windows 7, sometimes marginally faster
* Faster startup and shutdown
* Games and web browsing the same (IE10 no better than IE9)
* Multimedia slightly faster (x264 encoding/decoding)
I'm sure corporate group policy will take care of the faster startup and shutdown times :)
My theory is that most Americans are exposed almost exclusively to American entertainment, given the dominance of Hollywood in English-speaking entertainment. Other English-speaking countries have a combination of this and entertainment in their own language. Also, Americans tend to be culturally insular (in a non-perjorative sense), and why not, since it's a huge country capable of providing almost everything internally. Finally, unlike Europe, the geography provides little pressure to be bilingual (changing of late with Mexican interaction).
I think our ideas on how to behave toward others, manage a society and diplomacy are too different to get far here, but a couple of points;
Assange is leaking military secrets intended to kill US servicemen in a war authorized by our Congress
That's not a fair analysis of Wikileak's intentions. If it were they would have redacted nothing. Their intention is to reveal 'unethical' behaviour and embarass the U.S. government into behaving better.
Don't we have any goddamned spies anymore? We should have stuck a shiv [..] quiet and off the public radar.
Why off the public radar, unless you think the government knows best and the opinion of the people should be disregarded? This is the sort of behaviour Wikileaks attempts to reveal because most people disagree with it. Information furthers democracy.
Spying is a strange endeavour, borderline illegal, basically declaring war without declaring war. If the U.S. is allowed to send spies to assassinate people in other countries when it considers they are acting in a warlike way towards them, then shouldn't other countries be allowed to do the same on U.S. soil? You may argue that the U.S. is in the right and other countries are in the wrong, but unless you think the U.S. government is, and will remain, infallible then Wikileaks serves as an important check.
The problem would have ended and would have been very unlikely to repeat.
I disagree on both counts. Given that Assange was in a country that was a firm U.S. ally then declaring war (missiles into a sovereign country) would create far more problems than it would solve. Admittedly it is debated, but U.S. interference encouraged terrorism, and in fact, the very leaks you are proposing even more heavy-handedness would stop.
The summary mentions quite a few things that go beyond bug fixes, have they oversold it? I've stuck with Rhythmbox personally.
Australia actually has a similar tax rate to the U.S. and provides free health care.
The problem, though, is that the demand for health is almost unlimited. If you expand the number of doctors and hospital beds enough people will start staying overnight when they get a common cold. At some point it has to be curtailed.
One disadvantage is the relative size of the U.S. to most Western countries. The larger you are the more difficult it is to administer efficiently. of course size provides its own efficiencies in other areas.
you still have to justify that the government should be seeking to maximize revenue.
This is spot on, but...
I propose that we are all better off if we work towards maximizing the growth rate of our GDP [...] and make us all twice as rich in the process
the keyword 'all' only works collectively, if at all, and you are essentially advocating trickle-down economics. The problem of (first-world) society is one of distribution not of total wealth, and yes, governments do not necessarily need to maximise revenue to effect equitable distribution (wherever we decide that is).
if you can't tell the difference between the candidates, this says more about you than the candidates
Even if that were true, it's unhelpful. Some people are naturally less interested in politics or have a lower 'political IQ', or IQ in general. How do you suggest they discern between the candidates?
Well, what does your intuition tell you from the circles in which you associate?
From a quick Google search 2010 appears to have been the year for these studies. There are two major ones sumarised here.
Princeton (USA): 99% illegal
Ballarat (Australia): 99.7% illegal (89% definitely, 10.7% likely)
One possible flaw is that these studies aimed at trackers, and I'm guessing Blizzard use their own tracker for Warcraft patches.
On the other hand, a Warcraft patch can be considered a single torrent and so would not affect these statistics greatly as they counted torrent files, not traffic. There is some mention of traffic but it is not clearly analysed into illegal/legal in the summary.
This is a perfect example of how culturally it has become completely acceptable for women to beat men in public
I don't think it's 'become', rather it's always been that way. The reason is that, to almost 100%, men win in physical altercations with women. If an attacked man knows he is in this situation then it removes any real fear or threat and can make it 'cute' or humourous.
That notwithstanding, there is something unhealthy about that attitude. Especially in the context of male-on-female violence, it's hard to see how female-on-male violence is then funny. Responding with such a threat is tasteless and possibly escalates the situaton.
Technically I'm working from home today, but I guess good security dictates I log into WoW to change my password and check for any foul play.
There's no reason for a web browser to eat up 2GB of memory
There is for me. Maybe it's not regular use but I currently have *cough* 390 tabs open in a FF session that's been up since it updated to version 14 about 19 days ago. It has a commit size of 1.2GB, less than I expected (probably due to the new deferred tab loading).
I've suffered through many versions that had slow memory creep (visible in the Windows process explorer, a session would last about 7 hours until it hit the 2GB cap). This is on a particular machine, while other machines with the same OS and plugins were fine. Recent versions have been very stable.
So, I'm not denying a history of memory problems, or trying to claim my experience trumps yours, but usage is different from leakage, and I think your experience is atypical. Firefox has taken a design decision to use memory in a particular way and cleaned up many leaks of late, as well as going beyond the call of duty to manage bad plugins.
The about:memory memory page is interesting. I wish they had it on a per-tab basis to identify troublesome sites, but I suspect there is a lot of shared memory (i.e. the JavaScript garbage collector) that would make this less informative.
Linux on the desktop is dead. It's linux on the "device" that has a chance.
But what does that matter, what does Linux-on-the-device achieve? Devices are more locked-down and restricted than desktops so the benenfits of openness and user empowerment that were hoped for in the desktop era just aren't realised. It's a bit of a Pyrrhic victory (loosely).
Google failed me. I googled for "2002 concorde temperatre control schematics" and not a single result ha dthe word "schematics" in it. I was horrified that advanced search is GONE now, and "+schematics" still didn't return anything with that word.
Google appears to make only the first three words compulsory, and even then only if there are a certain amount of matches for them together.
The + operator has been removed in favour of quotes, I think for syntactical consistency with some other product of theirs. The - still works though. I'd start with;
"2002" "concorde" "temperature control" "schematics"
and go from there. There's also a way to set your Google preferences to consider everything as-you-damn-well-typed-it.
It depends on the genre. Classical is very organic with little attention paid to the beat. Rock and pop are much more beat-oriented, and consistency is more important to that sense of drive and forward momentum. Jazz in particular is very fussy about that*. Of course music being a creative endeavour there are no hard and fast rules.
Another reason to play to a click is it helps immensely during recording.
* A tangent, but check out Billy Cobham on Scofield's "Works for Me". His health was failing at the time and on some tracks he finishes a good 20bpm slower than he starts.
Pop metal is most likely a derogative term for metalcore, used by 'true' metal fans, so unlikely your son would use the term if he liked it.
What it shares with more modern metal (i.e. from the last 20 years) is the vocal growl or screech, a near-monotone that makes the music sound the same to people used to more traditional styles. There's still plenty of melody in a lot of it, just not in the vocals.
I sometimes wonder how much of a joke this period will seem (metalwise), but it shows no sign of abating. There are still things like Jobim's One Note Samba. Even though the chorus deliberately breaks the monotone the verse is still quite pleasant on its own, and even Girl from Ipanema doesn't have much melodic variation.
You would hope they accounted for that. One other concern I have it that music of the past 4 or so decades has increasingly focused on unique sound 'colour' rather than unique melodies or chord progressions, so any analysis of the latter is likely to find similarities. Hopefully they accounted for that too, I'd better read the article...
Pointless for the employee, but then so is doing any further work or a handover, yet you're still being paid for it.
I left my last job, somewhat reluctantly, with the entire local programming team to move to a competitor. They flew the HR manager over to give us all an exit interview. One of the guys let fly. I was far more positive, riding on the euphoria of change and the relief of finally making a decision.
Halfway through the interview it became clear her directive was to gleen information on our competitor and the circumstances of our poaching, presumably to gain some legal leverage. She wasn't particularly subtle, I doubt any of us were fooled. After we left we all received letters from the company's lawyers warning us (incorrectly) we couldn't work in the same industry.
All this underscores that HR is there to protect the company from employees and not the other way around. It was all fair enough, the company had to make sure they were protecting their structure in a situation that appeared suspicious.
Aren't you generally doing an exit interview during the mandatory X weeks of notice? The company is paying for it.