Most of the content on Netflix was already captioned at some point in the past.
The problem is really that the captions are either not provided in a form that Netflix can accept them or they get lost when the material is transcoded. There already exists a patch for ffmpeg to maintain MPEG2 user_data and hence captions during transcode and SMPTE has released a standard for translating those captions into timed text for use with codecs that can't carry the captions natively. The cost to maintain the captions in already captioned content is near zero.
The remaining content, such as independent documentaries, would impose some additional cost but this can be pushed onto the content provider. The providers of that content are ecstatic to have an outlet like Netflix available to them and can spend a few days creating the captions themselves for the opportunity to monetize content that before could only play in a few art houses and could rarely break even before Netflix existed.
The CC rules would be very difficult on services that accept gobs of user generated content, but I would be surprised if larger players like YouTube aren't already working on a speach-to-text algorithm for that content.
As the father I see how hard the community pushes boys and girls into their gender roles. My daughter doesn't love pink because of the color, she loves it because no one calls her a boy when she wears it. She plays with cars at home, but she won't touch one when another kid is around. When she wears any dress she gets constant compliments, not so when she wears a very cute outfit consisting of a shirt and pants. And whenever we talk with other parents the talk of the "inate" characteristics of girls and boys is usually constant, even when the characteristics are obviously universal.
It doesn't just stop at childhood either, as an involved father that stayed at home for a 18 months after my kids were born I met the most sexist women I've ever encountered on the playground. Now there were many women who weren't and I wasn't the only dad around, but even a woman I knew before, who had a kid around the same time, couldn't stop herself from saying men can't do X and women always do Y when I was doing those things everyday by choice before and after my wife went back to work. Mom's groups were also extreemely unwelcoming. I understand that they might not want to talk about their breastfeeding problems with a man around but there are a plethora of things to talk about when cooped up all day with a small child. For any mothers-to-be out there, taking a vote on whether do admit me and my kids to a playdate makes you appear about as democratic as an apartheid jury deciding if I looked white enough to join you at the pool; I won't really care which way the vote goes, I don't want my children around bigots.
FYI I also see sexism alive and well when hiring in IT. At work we'd been interviewing for a programming position for months and finally found a decent candidate. I wanted to hire her and kept getting resistance and unqualified alternate prospects pushed at me. When I finally found out what the reservations were, it came down to "she'll be the only woman on the team and will be lonely" and "this job involves working late and it's dangerous for a woman to go home alone at night." I reminded them that as a woman in IT she is surely used to a male dominated workplace and the position rarely involves working very late, we could call a car service when it does as is company policy for all day-shift employees anyway. Luckilly she was hired, but we could have easily lost her to another company with the delay these unstated concerns caused.
Qt has been available under both LGPL and GPL since version 2.2. But there were always some extensions that were only available in the commercial libary.
What you are probably remembering is that Trolltech only produced this version for free platforms like Linux and the BSD's. If you wanted to run this version on Windows you had to jump through hoops and wouldn't get any support from TrollTech people. For Windows, Trolltech only packaged and supported commercially licensed and later GPL licensed versions. After Nokia bought TrollTech the next version was released as LGPL on all platforms. Nokia could produce the product as a loss leader and didn't have to make a profit on the commercial version, although it is still sold by a 3rd party mostly for the support that comes with it.
TrollTech also used to have this clause in the commercial license that wouldn't allow you to switch from LGPL to the commercial license. I don't know if they actually refused to sell the commercial license to anyone in practice though as that would seem counterproductive for a for-profit company supported by licensing and support.
The law regarding recording telephone conversations is more variable, but most jurisdictions have a "so long as one party consents" law, which in this case wouldn't be met. It doesn't matter, in UK law at least, whether the recording is done on the electrical or the acoustic side of the proceedings, and I'd be surprised if other legislation draws that distinction: recording phone calls with a sucker mic on the receiver is just as illegal as doing it electrically.
This is the second time I've heard this about English law and it strikes me as extremely odd, and indeed I'd be very surprised if this applied in a general sense in other jurisdictions+. The packets being incidentally recorded were broadcast and the listener had no intention to listen to that broadcast. That is like shouting out your window or making a speech on Speaker's corner (the broadcaster) and someone walking down the street dictating a voicemail (google) incidentally captured your yelling as background on that recording. What purpose does it serve to make it illegal to listen in this case? Obviously the Queen's subjects aren't required to icepick their ears because someone might yell at them without first giving them permission to listen, why would the icepick in ear logic be applied here? You won't convince such a law is a good idea, but I'd like to understand what the rationale is.
+ I know it is applied in some specific sections of the electromagnetic spectrum in other countries when used for specific purposes, but the assumption is it is legal to listen except for some carved out exceptions where the harms have been weighed and ignorance has been deemed the lesser evil (these exemptions are in themselves controversial.)
I said, Apple has said that 50% of their suppliers violate the 60 hour work week.
Gnasher said, The first statement is plain incorrect. Read Apple's Supplier Responsibility report to find what Apple _actually_ said. Yes, the words 50%, suppliers, violate, 60 hour, are all there, but what Apple says is significantly different. And these reporters should urgently visit some US software companies.
Sorry, "93 facilities had records that indicated more than 50 percent of their workers exceeded weekly working hour limits of 60", "At 90 facilities, more than half of the records we reviewed indicated that workers had worked more than 6 consecutive days at least once per month", "Practices in compliance : Working Hours : 38%"
So I should have said, "Apple has said that 62% of their suppliers violate their 60 hour work week practice."
I stand corrected! Working conditions much are worse than I stated.
And what about Intel, where a huge dust explosion happened at about the same time? Shouldn't that have been addressed by simple ventilation? But I guess that happened at a part of their factory that exclusively made chips for Apple?
From a quick google, in the May explosion, 3 dead and 9 others hospitalized, 2 weeks after SACOM released a report detailing the ventilation problem. In the December explosion, 23 hospitalized. Apple contractors are blown up due to poor ventilation and then seven months later Apple contractors are again blown up for the same reason and you deflect to Intel?
If my workers start dying in easily preventable explosions you can be sure no one will be exploding for the same reason seven months later. As dust goes aluminum is a lot easier to deal with than wood dust, yet Ikea isn't beset with claims of the dead toll from the production of LACK tables like Apple is with the iPad deaths.
The only explosion I can find in Google at an Intel plant was last June in the solvent room when testing chemicals. There are some things with inherent risk, like volatile solvent testing, there are other things, like polishing an Apple iPad, where an explosion only occurs through gross negligence.
Apple has said that 50% of their suppliers violate the 60 hour work week. Real reporters have interviewed the employees who did feel pressured to do the overtime they didn't want. There were two explosions separated by seven months at factories polishing the aluminum for Apple products; deaths and injuries that could have been addressed by simple ventilation.
You don't need to visit a factory personally to comment on the issue. There are facts about working conditions that are not in dispute. Some of these are reprehensible enough to make headlines in China.
Mike Daisey said he saw some things that from other accounts are really rare, like child labor and debilitating incidents of poisoning, and he said he witnessed an outright repressive atmosphere (angry guards with guns, cameras in bedrooms) which simply does not reflect reality. By saying he saw these he made it appear like these were common, when they are outliers.
The day-to-day problems are a lot more mundane. Factory managers that don't follow basic safety guidelines not because they are malevolent, but because they don't know which safety measures are really necessary and which are nice-to-haves. I have visited a workplace in India where the second means of egress was blocked; it took a while for me to explain why exactly this was a serious hazard. The managers there really cared about their workers, they kept a 5 day work schedule instead of the typical 6 day schedule, they had a break room with internet terminals. Work hours are a real issue in the 3rd world too. The workers want to work more hours, up to a point of course. The research shows that you hit diminishing returns very quickly after 35-40 hours, especially when this extends past a couple weeks into death march mode. But if the managers are inexperienced and don't understand this, overtime becomes chronic and this costs the company a lot of money.
I'm no potty expert, but I thought that water that is output from a toilet is called black water, water collected from the bathtub, and kitchen are called grey water, and what they are actually using is called treated water.
Am I just behind the times on the terminology or is the article's writer just being sloppy?
This is how you should implement unlimited scrollback, create a tmp file in/tmp and then unlink it so it will be freed on exit.
/tmp is something a sysadmin should be aware of. All kinds of sensitive data is written there by applications and if the computer might be stolen and contains sensitive information then/tmp and swap (and a few other things) should be encrypted or otherwise secured. But honestly if someone with malicious intent gets physical access to an unencrypted disk I'm sure they wouldn't even bother with this. There are a lot more interesting things to look at than some fragmentary shell history. And if they get root while you are still typing then they have the keys to the kindom, access everything you type and everything you see without bothering with this.
I'm hoping the VTE guys don't change to a less good implementation just because some idiot is screaming off rooftops, "The sky is blue! The sky is blue!"
When I first read this my thought was, "OMG this is as bad as counting LoC for evaluations." But then I thought, "If a programmer was fired after producing less than 300 LoC in 4 years I would not be shocked."
The number of papers expected this isn't really so bad. When I was in graduate school I published 0.75 paper per year. Professors each had at 3-6 graduate students.. It would be really hard not to make those numbers. There were some professors who had only one graduate student, but those students published more often. In my field at least, my advisor's name was always on that paper and deservedly so.
I do feel bad for the people let go, I think this type of metric should be given up front. I can envision someone working hard on something for three years and not publishing anything because the results are very surprising and require more verification before they put their reputation on the line, but they should still be writing technical reports. This also obviously shouldn't apply to teaching faculty, but then at my University their salary was in the $10k/yr - $150k/yr range vs. $300k/yr - $1.5M/yr for the research faculty.
I'm not as brave as I wish I were with the random searches in NYC. What I do is say "no thank you" and leave the station and then re-enter the station at another entrance.
There is a good book on this subject, "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45" by Milton Mayer. It gives you a much better understanding of how the Nazi's really gained power vs. the silly version you get from popular culture and high school history classes. In some senses it's very chilling because the parallels are strong but you also see how powerful the parallels were to what happened here during the cold war yet we managed self correct. Reading that book was what made me realise why Joseph Welch's standing up to McCarthy was so important, if decent people had done the same thing early enough in Germany it really would have prevented the Holocaust. Again I'm not as brave as I'd like, but I've seen the a little bit of power of standing up to the thugs at the airport. When I opt-out of the porno-vision scanner there are often a number of people who summon up the courage to do so as well.
Yes, of course. But the alternative would be to run a water cooled electrical power-plant that uses the water on the cool end of their heat engine and pumps more heat into the water and then run an AC that pumps the heat from the data center into the atmosphere. So this ends up putting less heat into the environment overall. There can be arguments for why not to put this type of data center in some sensitive environment, say spawning grounds, but those same arguments would be made about the power plant and there is no reason to think Norway doesn't do the type of environmental assessments that would prevent you from dumping heat into a sensitive area. Using a body of water for cooling isn't a new idea, it's used for air-conditioning skyscrapers all over the world. Data centers have been built up very quickly in the couple decades and are just now starting to be made more efficient. As far as I know all the issues have solutions. The water intakes are designed not to suck in too much fauna and the exhaust is mixed with cold water and/or located where it will have minimal impact (there are of course a lot of grandfathered in power-plants that don't do this, but the solutions exist.)
The per-capita argument will be made by any poor country, you need to counter it with a strong fairness argument based on something else. For instance, you might divide by CO2 emissions by GDP instead and get a different map. The argument for that is that the goal is to lower CO2, but you want to increase the overall standard of living so a factory producing a widget at 1 ton of CO2 is preferable to one producing the same widget using 2 tons of CO2 no matter what country it sits in. Then the counter argument becomes, "Raw GDP isn't fair because some widgets will sell for less in China than in the US, you need to adjust for purchasing power." So then you adjust for purchasing power. After a series of such adjustments we can end up with something that a citizen in both a developed nation and an underdeveloped nation understand as fair. From that point you plug it into economic growth models and come up with efficiency targets that will over time lower world emissions as the world economy grows. How to meet those efficiency targets can be handled per country knowing you won't be penalized for your country's economy growing as a proportion of the overall world economy.
* It's significantly lighter!
* It plays movies as well as the iPad
* The interface is faster and easier to use than the iPad.
* The web browser is infinitely better than the cr*p browser on the iPad.
I have the original iPad and not the iPad2, maybe they fixed the horrendous UI and the lack of responsiveness of the original iPad. I find neither tablet a usable replacement for a book or an e-reader. Both that have screens too much glare to use for reading more than about 5,000 words at a time and the back-lit displays make them unsuitable for use in either low light or sunlight conditions so using either to read a book or other lengthy material out of the question.
I didn't even think of it until this was posted on slashdot, but the iPad hasn't left it's cradle since the Fire was activated.
That said there are a couple issues.
* The "power button issue" has an easy workaround, hold it so the button is on the top and not resting on your tummy. But this could have been avoided by making it not stick out and instead needing you to use the point end of a finger to push it.
* The is no way to password protect the purchase function. This means you can't have a credit card associated with the account if you have small children which in turn makes purchasing apps a chore. I'd prefer something where a password isn't required to just update apps or "purchase" free apps like on the iPad, because that is really annoying. But whenever a debit is being made against my CC I'd like a password prompt.
Huh, I never considered hedge fund managers or high frequency traders to be providing value via "creativity" and "inventiveness", but I'm sure happy to let them argue that before being hung in a public square.
Hedge fund managers make investments on behalf of their clients. Here the idea is specialization. Instead of you having to research a bunch of investment vehicles for your small pile of cash, you along with hundreds of other people hire a hedge fund manager to do that for you. This means only a few people have to do that research that before specialization hundreds had to do. As long as there are enough fund managers to avoid group-think society benefits by having fewer work hours spent on finance overall.
High frequency traders have driven down the insane profits that used to be made by human traders on the trading floors. This has succeeded to the point where many of my neighbors in NYC who used to be traders have now switched to the other side of the house and have become fund managers and investment advisors. This is often misunderstood because trading itself is a zero-sum game so there is no benefit to society in the profits that are made, but the HF traders have driven down the overall profits which is a net benefit to society.
None of this means I will defend the privatization of profits and the socialization of losses. But I don't think that is a problem with the financial industry per-say. Other industries have been equally successful at fleecing society, Hollywood with the copyright laws, large 'real' property owners with the zoning laws, the drug industry with our patent laws, and industrial farmers with our food labeling and inspection laws. The problem is not with our financial industry, it is with us and our inattentiveness to managing our own government.
I think the ban is on Sodium Chloride - try cooking with Sea salt.
Sea salt is almost entirely Sodium Chloride with just an insignificant portion of shellfish and Potassium Chloride thrown in.
Meanwhile, I'd like a ban on Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) in restaurants
Ok, so you want no meat, no tomatoes, no mushrooms, no cheese, no dairy at all. It sounds like you would like restaurants to serve only black coffee with refined sugar.
Corporations shouldn't be taxed, period. Money that comes OUT of that corporation through stock dividends and wages and bonuses and perks should be taxed. And that should all be taxed as plain old income, not special kinds of income like "capital gains" that has lower rates to compensate for corporate taxes already taken out.
The biggest problem with this is that if you don't have a different rate for capital gains and dividends then inflation will mean that even if you sell an asset at a loss when adjusted for inflation you will end up paying taxes. This means there will be a disincentive to sell under-performing assets to someone who might make better use of the asset. I would say have the same rate as other income, but also allow deductions based on the same official inflation rate as is used to adjust social security payments. Right now capital gains taxes are way too low on goods held year and a day to about 10 years. The Crazy Eddie rates on capital gains mean businesses are highly encouraged to convert their income into capital gains via acquisitions that may not make a whole lot of sense in terms of overall profitability. This means that a tax being too low actually hurts growth because of its distorting effect.
If you got rid of the corporate income tax and replaced capital gains by regular income tax minus inflation adjustments, I think that would help businesses of all sizes a great deal. But the income tax rates might have to be adjusted upwards to make up for the income shortfall, and if you did the change too quickly the capital flows to adjust to the new tax regime might be problematic (though in terms of political will it is when the economy is bad is really the best time to make this type of large structural change.)
To those saying why does it matter what the tax rate is... Tiny but growing businesses do pay the top tax rates; you need to build up cash on hand disproportionate to the size of the business when you are growing rapidly. It's not good for prices or for jobs to quell competition against established players via tax policy.
I fear the rich will have to rediscover the situation they were in with a massive uneducated population before they stop this downward spiral.
The rich are by and large begging for higher taxes and higher government expenditures. It's the poor simpletons that are railing against the $40k/yr of services they receive. Outside professional pundits and the politicians you will find practically no one making over $379k/yr after deductions complaining about a marginal tax rate on income above that mark increasing from 35% to 39%, it's poor people making $140k/yr that in practical terms pay no income tax that have their panties in a bunch.
If someone has named an employee as selling your trade secrets that's a legitimate reason to spy on that employee. But it's not legitimate to spy on everyone because you have a bad apple in the bunch.
If your boss gets a hair brained idea like that you should first attempt to talk them off the ledge, and if that fails hand in your resignation. You don't want that on your conscience for the rest of your life and a company with that kind of oppressive corporate culture is not likely be a good place to work in the short run or to succeed in the long run.
What she really needs to do is talk to her insurance agent and get coverage that protects the company when it gets sued. She should also hire a lawyer to sit with you and someone from operations and come up with an employee handbook that burdens the company's business with as few addition costs as possible while still allowing the company to fire employees that cause more trouble than they are worth. Once a decent cost estimate for all this is available she needs to adjust her prices 5%-20% to account for the new costs imposed by the law, other business in the same sector will be under the same pressure as well. She should make sure that she lists the reason for the price increases in the announcement.
She should also join some kind of business lobbying coalition. Many countries have "Chamber of Commerce" type lobbying groups which will give your Senators and Representatives and their families free vacations to Bali and the like if they "play ball". This should make sure the really dumb laws mostly just hurt poor people.
They are very reasonable. The free tier looks like it offers enough to replace what I was paying $70/mo for an old server with just 80GB of storage in a colo facility not so long ago. In particular, it looks like it's easier to host low resource servers for 24/7 for free than with AWS.
Reading the comments it looks like some people have gone hog wild on server resource utilization when it was free. One commenter said his free app was using eight 24/7 servers. But if you're using those kind of server resources you should have what, 500k active users? At that point you should have enough advertising revenue to recover costs.
How many people actually read it since Doc Searls decided to make the magazine articles more shallow and "approachable" ?
Like Dr. Dobbs Journal, it was really already gone when it went "100% Digital". Same as BYTE Magazine, by the time it was "100% Digital" all that was left was single mildly entertaining column.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
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Debt Deal Reached
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The politicians are able to make so much hay about this because a national budget isn't at all like balancing your checkbook.
The key to keeping a national debt under control is too keep it a constant in proportion to your GDP. You can't do this at all times because government spending is counter cyclical but revenues follow the business cycle. When the economy is good the government should be paying down it's debt or just keeping it constant since the GDP is growing at that point; but when the economy is bad it should be spending more, this is when property and labor to achieve the goals of the government is least expensive and this is also when people are making claims against their unemployment insurance and the going back to school (which is subsidized by the government, via loan insurance, tax rebates, etc). Politicians find it really hard to reign in spending when revenues are up and to up spending when revenues are down because this is so hard to explain to regular people that need to balance their checkbook every month. That's why we always spend too much and tax too little when the economy is up and spend too little when it is down.
The debt ceiling is an anachronism dating from a point in the nation's history when the House did not pass detailed budgets, today it is self-defeating since the House does tell the president exactly how much money he should be spending and taking in via the budget. Today it's just a tool for the majority party in either the House or Senate to hold a gun to the nation's head and hold the country hostage. Normally this is just for show and doesn't happen because the if they did pull the trigger everyone would notice that their credit card interest shot up 20% and their taxes went up 20% when the issue was finally resolved and the citizens would severely punish the party that pulled the trigger at the next election. But this time the Tea Party members of the House convinced everyone they really were crazy enough to kill -- and the Democrats capitulated to the terrorist's demands.
I am a New Yorker so I've considered going the banking route a few times. It sounds like there are interesting problems to be solved and I enjoy constructing efficient code. But what always dissuades me is the talk of 12 hour days. Are there enough jobs north of 200k where you put in normal work hours to make it worthwhile to switch specialties?
I for one wouldn't mind an engineering job at Google. But the pickings in NYC appear to be pretty slim and I'm getting tired of startups & getting bumped "up" to management when what I really enjoy is writing code.
This is a problem of incentives. We could pass one three sentence law and clean up the patent mess within a couple decades:
1. For each claim of a patent later overturned in court each defendant shall be paid $5,000,000 out of the general budget of the PTO; adjusted for inflation each year.
2. Patent fees shall be be set by the PTO to be at minimum $1,000,000 per claim.
3. Fees shall be set so as to collect sufficient revenues to fund all spending by the PTO plus an additional 5,000% (to account for some of the cost of patent holder's rent seeking to the greater economy.)
The first sentence helps clean up the backlog of existing bad patents and the other two will help stem the flood of future crap.
The "East River" is what people outside of New York City like to call the Atlantic Ocean.
You can already go swimming in it, but as I understand it the idea here is to let you swim in the ocean without worrying about jellyfish, the tide pulling you out to sea, or the occasional shark frightening you.
You can also go swimming in the Hudson which is an actual river. There it is best to stay within the designated swimming areas mostly because it's relatively easy to get washed out to sea.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the content on Netflix was already captioned at some point in the past.
The problem is really that the captions are either not provided in a form that Netflix can accept them or they get lost when the material is transcoded. There already exists a patch for ffmpeg to maintain MPEG2 user_data and hence captions during transcode and SMPTE has released a standard for translating those captions into timed text for use with codecs that can't carry the captions natively. The cost to maintain the captions in already captioned content is near zero.
The remaining content, such as independent documentaries, would impose some additional cost but this can be pushed onto the content provider. The providers of that content are ecstatic to have an outlet like Netflix available to them and can spend a few days creating the captions themselves for the opportunity to monetize content that before could only play in a few art houses and could rarely break even before Netflix existed.
The CC rules would be very difficult on services that accept gobs of user generated content, but I would be surprised if larger players like YouTube aren't already working on a speach-to-text algorithm for that content.
The food she photographed looks pretty amazing compared with what I recall eating in primary school.
As the father I see how hard the community pushes boys and girls into their gender roles. My daughter doesn't love pink because of the color, she loves it because no one calls her a boy when she wears it. She plays with cars at home, but she won't touch one when another kid is around. When she wears any dress she gets constant compliments, not so when she wears a very cute outfit consisting of a shirt and pants. And whenever we talk with other parents the talk of the "inate" characteristics of girls and boys is usually constant, even when the characteristics are obviously universal.
It doesn't just stop at childhood either, as an involved father that stayed at home for a 18 months after my kids were born I met the most sexist women I've ever encountered on the playground. Now there were many women who weren't and I wasn't the only dad around, but even a woman I knew before, who had a kid around the same time, couldn't stop herself from saying men can't do X and women always do Y when I was doing those things everyday by choice before and after my wife went back to work. Mom's groups were also extreemely unwelcoming. I understand that they might not want to talk about their breastfeeding problems with a man around but there are a plethora of things to talk about when cooped up all day with a small child. For any mothers-to-be out there, taking a vote on whether do admit me and my kids to a playdate makes you appear about as democratic as an apartheid jury deciding if I looked white enough to join you at the pool; I won't really care which way the vote goes, I don't want my children around bigots.
FYI I also see sexism alive and well when hiring in IT. At work we'd been interviewing for a programming position for months and finally found a decent candidate. I wanted to hire her and kept getting resistance and unqualified alternate prospects pushed at me. When I finally found out what the reservations were, it came down to "she'll be the only woman on the team and will be lonely" and "this job involves working late and it's dangerous for a woman to go home alone at night." I reminded them that as a woman in IT she is surely used to a male dominated workplace and the position rarely involves working very late, we could call a car service when it does as is company policy for all day-shift employees anyway. Luckilly she was hired, but we could have easily lost her to another company with the delay these unstated concerns caused.
Qt has been available under both LGPL and GPL since version 2.2. But there were always some extensions that were only available in the commercial libary.
What you are probably remembering is that Trolltech only produced this version for free platforms like Linux and the BSD's. If you wanted to run this version on Windows you had to jump through hoops and wouldn't get any support from TrollTech people. For Windows, Trolltech only packaged and supported commercially licensed and later GPL licensed versions. After Nokia bought TrollTech the next version was released as LGPL on all platforms. Nokia could produce the product as a loss leader and didn't have to make a profit on the commercial version, although it is still sold by a 3rd party mostly for the support that comes with it.
TrollTech also used to have this clause in the commercial license that wouldn't allow you to switch from LGPL to the commercial license. I don't know if they actually refused to sell the commercial license to anyone in practice though as that would seem counterproductive for a for-profit company supported by licensing and support.
The law regarding recording telephone conversations is more variable, but most jurisdictions have a "so long as one party consents" law, which in this case wouldn't be met. It doesn't matter, in UK law at least, whether the recording is done on the electrical or the acoustic side of the proceedings, and I'd be surprised if other legislation draws that distinction: recording phone calls with a sucker mic on the receiver is just as illegal as doing it electrically.
This is the second time I've heard this about English law and it strikes me as extremely odd, and indeed I'd be very surprised if this applied in a general sense in other jurisdictions+. The packets being incidentally recorded were broadcast and the listener had no intention to listen to that broadcast. That is like shouting out your window or making a speech on Speaker's corner (the broadcaster) and someone walking down the street dictating a voicemail (google) incidentally captured your yelling as background on that recording. What purpose does it serve to make it illegal to listen in this case? Obviously the Queen's subjects aren't required to icepick their ears because someone might yell at them without first giving them permission to listen, why would the icepick in ear logic be applied here? You won't convince such a law is a good idea, but I'd like to understand what the rationale is.
+ I know it is applied in some specific sections of the electromagnetic spectrum in other countries when used for specific purposes, but the assumption is it is legal to listen except for some carved out exceptions where the harms have been weighed and ignorance has been deemed the lesser evil (these exemptions are in themselves controversial.)
I said,
Apple has said that 50% of their suppliers violate the 60 hour work week.
Gnasher said,
The first statement is plain incorrect. Read Apple's Supplier Responsibility report to find what Apple _actually_ said. Yes, the words 50%, suppliers, violate, 60 hour, are all there, but what Apple says is significantly different. And these reporters should urgently visit some US software companies.
Sorry, "93 facilities had records that indicated more than 50 percent of their workers exceeded weekly working hour limits of 60", "At 90 facilities, more than half of the records we reviewed indicated that workers had worked more than 6 consecutive days at least once per month", "Practices in compliance : Working Hours : 38%"
So I should have said, "Apple has said that 62% of their suppliers violate their 60 hour work week practice."
I stand corrected! Working conditions much are worse than I stated.
And what about Intel, where a huge dust explosion happened at about the same time? Shouldn't that have been addressed by simple ventilation? But I guess that happened at a part of their factory that exclusively made chips for Apple?
From a quick google, in the May explosion, 3 dead and 9 others hospitalized, 2 weeks after SACOM released a report detailing the ventilation problem. In the December explosion, 23 hospitalized. Apple contractors are blown up due to poor ventilation and then seven months later Apple contractors are again blown up for the same reason and you deflect to Intel?
If my workers start dying in easily preventable explosions you can be sure no one will be exploding for the same reason seven months later. As dust goes aluminum is a lot easier to deal with than wood dust, yet Ikea isn't beset with claims of the dead toll from the production of LACK tables like Apple is with the iPad deaths.
The only explosion I can find in Google at an Intel plant was last June in the solvent room when testing chemicals. There are some things with inherent risk, like volatile solvent testing, there are other things, like polishing an Apple iPad, where an explosion only occurs through gross negligence.
Apple has said that 50% of their suppliers violate the 60 hour work week. Real reporters have interviewed the employees who did feel pressured to do the overtime they didn't want. There were two explosions separated by seven months at factories polishing the aluminum for Apple products; deaths and injuries that could have been addressed by simple ventilation.
You don't need to visit a factory personally to comment on the issue. There are facts about working conditions that are not in dispute. Some of these are reprehensible enough to make headlines in China.
Mike Daisey said he saw some things that from other accounts are really rare, like child labor and debilitating incidents of poisoning, and he said he witnessed an outright repressive atmosphere (angry guards with guns, cameras in bedrooms) which simply does not reflect reality. By saying he saw these he made it appear like these were common, when they are outliers.
The day-to-day problems are a lot more mundane. Factory managers that don't follow basic safety guidelines not because they are malevolent, but because they don't know which safety measures are really necessary and which are nice-to-haves. I have visited a workplace in India where the second means of egress was blocked; it took a while for me to explain why exactly this was a serious hazard. The managers there really cared about their workers, they kept a 5 day work schedule instead of the typical 6 day schedule, they had a break room with internet terminals. Work hours are a real issue in the 3rd world too. The workers want to work more hours, up to a point of course. The research shows that you hit diminishing returns very quickly after 35-40 hours, especially when this extends past a couple weeks into death march mode. But if the managers are inexperienced and don't understand this, overtime becomes chronic and this costs the company a lot of money.
I'm no potty expert, but I thought that water that is output from a toilet is called black water, water collected from the bathtub, and kitchen are called grey water, and what they are actually using is called treated water.
Am I just behind the times on the terminology or is the article's writer just being sloppy?
This is how you should implement unlimited scrollback, create a tmp file in /tmp and then unlink it so it will be freed on exit.
I'm hoping the VTE guys don't change to a less good implementation just because some idiot is screaming off rooftops, "The sky is blue! The sky is blue!"
When I first read this my thought was, "OMG this is as bad as counting LoC for evaluations." But then I thought, "If a programmer was fired after producing less than 300 LoC in 4 years I would not be shocked."
The number of papers expected this isn't really so bad. When I was in graduate school I published 0.75 paper per year. Professors each had at 3-6 graduate students.. It would be really hard not to make those numbers. There were some professors who had only one graduate student, but those students published more often. In my field at least, my advisor's name was always on that paper and deservedly so.
I do feel bad for the people let go, I think this type of metric should be given up front. I can envision someone working hard on something for three years and not publishing anything because the results are very surprising and require more verification before they put their reputation on the line, but they should still be writing technical reports. This also obviously shouldn't apply to teaching faculty, but then at my University their salary was in the $10k/yr - $150k/yr range vs. $300k/yr - $1.5M/yr for the research faculty.
Just as a correction, you don't need to carry papers in New York State:
http://www.nyclu.org/oped/column-showing-id-nypd-our-times
I'm not as brave as I wish I were with the random searches in NYC. What I do is say "no thank you" and leave the station and then re-enter the station at another entrance.
There is a good book on this subject, "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45" by Milton Mayer. It gives you a much better understanding of how the Nazi's really gained power vs. the silly version you get from popular culture and high school history classes. In some senses it's very chilling because the parallels are strong but you also see how powerful the parallels were to what happened here during the cold war yet we managed self correct. Reading that book was what made me realise why Joseph Welch's standing up to McCarthy was so important, if decent people had done the same thing early enough in Germany it really would have prevented the Holocaust. Again I'm not as brave as I'd like, but I've seen the a little bit of power of standing up to the thugs at the airport. When I opt-out of the porno-vision scanner there are often a number of people who summon up the courage to do so as well.
Yes, of course. But the alternative would be to run a water cooled electrical power-plant that uses the water on the cool end of their heat engine and pumps more heat into the water and then run an AC that pumps the heat from the data center into the atmosphere. So this ends up putting less heat into the environment overall. There can be arguments for why not to put this type of data center in some sensitive environment, say spawning grounds, but those same arguments would be made about the power plant and there is no reason to think Norway doesn't do the type of environmental assessments that would prevent you from dumping heat into a sensitive area. Using a body of water for cooling isn't a new idea, it's used for air-conditioning skyscrapers all over the world. Data centers have been built up very quickly in the couple decades and are just now starting to be made more efficient. As far as I know all the issues have solutions. The water intakes are designed not to suck in too much fauna and the exhaust is mixed with cold water and/or located where it will have minimal impact (there are of course a lot of grandfathered in power-plants that don't do this, but the solutions exist.)
The per-capita argument will be made by any poor country, you need to counter it with a strong fairness argument based on something else. For instance, you might divide by CO2 emissions by GDP instead and get a different map. The argument for that is that the goal is to lower CO2, but you want to increase the overall standard of living so a factory producing a widget at 1 ton of CO2 is preferable to one producing the same widget using 2 tons of CO2 no matter what country it sits in. Then the counter argument becomes, "Raw GDP isn't fair because some widgets will sell for less in China than in the US, you need to adjust for purchasing power." So then you adjust for purchasing power. After a series of such adjustments we can end up with something that a citizen in both a developed nation and an underdeveloped nation understand as fair. From that point you plug it into economic growth models and come up with efficiency targets that will over time lower world emissions as the world economy grows. How to meet those efficiency targets can be handled per country knowing you won't be penalized for your country's economy growing as a proportion of the overall world economy.
* It's significantly lighter!
* It plays movies as well as the iPad
* The interface is faster and easier to use than the iPad.
* The web browser is infinitely better than the cr*p browser on the iPad.
I have the original iPad and not the iPad2, maybe they fixed the horrendous UI and the lack of responsiveness of the original iPad. I find neither tablet a usable replacement for a book or an e-reader. Both that have screens too much glare to use for reading more than about 5,000 words at a time and the back-lit displays make them unsuitable for use in either low light or sunlight conditions so using either to read a book or other lengthy material out of the question.
I didn't even think of it until this was posted on slashdot, but the iPad hasn't left it's cradle since the Fire was activated.
That said there are a couple issues.
* The "power button issue" has an easy workaround, hold it so the button is on the top and not resting on your tummy. But this could have been avoided by making it not stick out and instead needing you to use the point end of a finger to push it.
* The is no way to password protect the purchase function. This means you can't have a credit card associated with the account if you have small children which in turn makes purchasing apps a chore. I'd prefer something where a password isn't required to just update apps or "purchase" free apps like on the iPad, because that is really annoying. But whenever a debit is being made against my CC I'd like a password prompt.
Huh, I never considered hedge fund managers or high frequency traders to be providing value via "creativity" and "inventiveness", but I'm sure happy to let them argue that before being hung in a public square.
Hedge fund managers make investments on behalf of their clients. Here the idea is specialization. Instead of you having to research a bunch of investment vehicles for your small pile of cash, you along with hundreds of other people hire a hedge fund manager to do that for you. This means only a few people have to do that research that before specialization hundreds had to do. As long as there are enough fund managers to avoid group-think society benefits by having fewer work hours spent on finance overall.
High frequency traders have driven down the insane profits that used to be made by human traders on the trading floors. This has succeeded to the point where many of my neighbors in NYC who used to be traders have now switched to the other side of the house and have become fund managers and investment advisors. This is often misunderstood because trading itself is a zero-sum game so there is no benefit to society in the profits that are made, but the HF traders have driven down the overall profits which is a net benefit to society.
None of this means I will defend the privatization of profits and the socialization of losses. But I don't think that is a problem with the financial industry per-say. Other industries have been equally successful at fleecing society, Hollywood with the copyright laws, large 'real' property owners with the zoning laws, the drug industry with our patent laws, and industrial farmers with our food labeling and inspection laws. The problem is not with our financial industry, it is with us and our inattentiveness to managing our own government.
I think the ban is on Sodium Chloride - try cooking with Sea salt.
Sea salt is almost entirely Sodium Chloride with just an insignificant portion of shellfish and Potassium Chloride thrown in.
Meanwhile, I'd like a ban on Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) in restaurants
Ok, so you want no meat, no tomatoes, no mushrooms, no cheese, no dairy at all. It sounds like you would like restaurants to serve only black coffee with refined sugar.
Doh! I've been trolled!
Corporations shouldn't be taxed, period. Money that comes OUT of that corporation through stock dividends and wages and bonuses and perks should be taxed. And that should all be taxed as plain old income, not special kinds of income like "capital gains" that has lower rates to compensate for corporate taxes already taken out.
The biggest problem with this is that if you don't have a different rate for capital gains and dividends then inflation will mean that even if you sell an asset at a loss when adjusted for inflation you will end up paying taxes. This means there will be a disincentive to sell under-performing assets to someone who might make better use of the asset. I would say have the same rate as other income, but also allow deductions based on the same official inflation rate as is used to adjust social security payments. Right now capital gains taxes are way too low on goods held year and a day to about 10 years. The Crazy Eddie rates on capital gains mean businesses are highly encouraged to convert their income into capital gains via acquisitions that may not make a whole lot of sense in terms of overall profitability. This means that a tax being too low actually hurts growth because of its distorting effect.
If you got rid of the corporate income tax and replaced capital gains by regular income tax minus inflation adjustments, I think that would help businesses of all sizes a great deal. But the income tax rates might have to be adjusted upwards to make up for the income shortfall, and if you did the change too quickly the capital flows to adjust to the new tax regime might be problematic (though in terms of political will it is when the economy is bad is really the best time to make this type of large structural change.)
To those saying why does it matter what the tax rate is... Tiny but growing businesses do pay the top tax rates; you need to build up cash on hand disproportionate to the size of the business when you are growing rapidly. It's not good for prices or for jobs to quell competition against established players via tax policy.
I fear the rich will have to rediscover the situation they were in with a massive uneducated population before they stop this downward spiral.
The rich are by and large begging for higher taxes and higher government expenditures. It's the poor simpletons that are railing against the $40k/yr of services they receive. Outside professional pundits and the politicians you will find practically no one making over $379k/yr after deductions complaining about a marginal tax rate on income above that mark increasing from 35% to 39%, it's poor people making $140k/yr that in practical terms pay no income tax that have their panties in a bunch.
If someone has named an employee as selling your trade secrets that's a legitimate reason to spy on that employee. But it's not legitimate to spy on everyone because you have a bad apple in the bunch.
If your boss gets a hair brained idea like that you should first attempt to talk them off the ledge, and if that fails hand in your resignation. You don't want that on your conscience for the rest of your life and a company with that kind of oppressive corporate culture is not likely be a good place to work in the short run or to succeed in the long run.
What she really needs to do is talk to her insurance agent and get coverage that protects the company when it gets sued. She should also hire a lawyer to sit with you and someone from operations and come up with an employee handbook that burdens the company's business with as few addition costs as possible while still allowing the company to fire employees that cause more trouble than they are worth. Once a decent cost estimate for all this is available she needs to adjust her prices 5%-20% to account for the new costs imposed by the law, other business in the same sector will be under the same pressure as well. She should make sure that she lists the reason for the price increases in the announcement.
She should also join some kind of business lobbying coalition. Many countries have "Chamber of Commerce" type lobbying groups which will give your Senators and Representatives and their families free vacations to Bali and the like if they "play ball". This should make sure the really dumb laws mostly just hurt poor people.
They are very reasonable. The free tier looks like it offers enough to replace what I was paying $70/mo for an old server with just 80GB of storage in a colo facility not so long ago. In particular, it looks like it's easier to host low resource servers for 24/7 for free than with AWS.
Reading the comments it looks like some people have gone hog wild on server resource utilization when it was free. One commenter said his free app was using eight 24/7 servers. But if you're using those kind of server resources you should have what, 500k active users? At that point you should have enough advertising revenue to recover costs.
How many people actually read it since Doc Searls decided to make the magazine articles more shallow and "approachable" ?
Like Dr. Dobbs Journal, it was really already gone when it went "100% Digital". Same as BYTE Magazine, by the time it was "100% Digital" all that was left was single mildly entertaining column.
The politicians are able to make so much hay about this because a national budget isn't at all like balancing your checkbook.
The key to keeping a national debt under control is too keep it a constant in proportion to your GDP. You can't do this at all times because government spending is counter cyclical but revenues follow the business cycle. When the economy is good the government should be paying down it's debt or just keeping it constant since the GDP is growing at that point; but when the economy is bad it should be spending more, this is when property and labor to achieve the goals of the government is least expensive and this is also when people are making claims against their unemployment insurance and the going back to school (which is subsidized by the government, via loan insurance, tax rebates, etc). Politicians find it really hard to reign in spending when revenues are up and to up spending when revenues are down because this is so hard to explain to regular people that need to balance their checkbook every month. That's why we always spend too much and tax too little when the economy is up and spend too little when it is down.
The debt ceiling is an anachronism dating from a point in the nation's history when the House did not pass detailed budgets, today it is self-defeating since the House does tell the president exactly how much money he should be spending and taking in via the budget. Today it's just a tool for the majority party in either the House or Senate to hold a gun to the nation's head and hold the country hostage. Normally this is just for show and doesn't happen because the if they did pull the trigger everyone would notice that their credit card interest shot up 20% and their taxes went up 20% when the issue was finally resolved and the citizens would severely punish the party that pulled the trigger at the next election. But this time the Tea Party members of the House convinced everyone they really were crazy enough to kill -- and the Democrats capitulated to the terrorist's demands.
I am a New Yorker so I've considered going the banking route a few times. It sounds like there are interesting problems to be solved and I enjoy constructing efficient code. But what always dissuades me is the talk of 12 hour days. Are there enough jobs north of 200k where you put in normal work hours to make it worthwhile to switch specialties?
I for one wouldn't mind an engineering job at Google. But the pickings in NYC appear to be pretty slim and I'm getting tired of startups & getting bumped "up" to management when what I really enjoy is writing code.
This is a problem of incentives. We could pass one three sentence law and clean up the patent mess within a couple decades:
1. For each claim of a patent later overturned in court each defendant shall be paid $5,000,000 out of the general budget of the PTO; adjusted for inflation each year.
2. Patent fees shall be be set by the PTO to be at minimum $1,000,000 per claim.
3. Fees shall be set so as to collect sufficient revenues to fund all spending by the PTO plus an additional 5,000% (to account for some of the cost of patent holder's rent seeking to the greater economy.)
The first sentence helps clean up the backlog of existing bad patents and the other two will help stem the flood of future crap.
The "East River" is what people outside of New York City like to call the Atlantic Ocean.
You can already go swimming in it, but as I understand it the idea here is to let you swim in the ocean without worrying about jellyfish, the tide pulling you out to sea, or the occasional shark frightening you.
You can also go swimming in the Hudson which is an actual river. There it is best to stay within the designated swimming areas mostly because it's relatively easy to get washed out to sea.