You know, I'll never get why Tea Partiers feel replacing career politicians with AMATEUR politicians would be a good thing?
Because I'll take clueless idealists over seasoned criminals?
Because, jokes aside, the lot of losers we have now can't even manage to quit the bipartisan bickering long enough to pay to keep the goddamned lights on. We've gone how long without a proper budget? We have long term appropriations expiring left and right because of their incompetence, and we came so close to actually defaulting on the good name of US Debt, the most trustworthy financial instrument the world has ever seen, that we had our rating downgraded.
Because not everything counts as "better than nothing". I would go so far as to say that not only should we toss the current lot, we should toss them "with prejudice" and ban both the Democratic and Republican parties from even fielding a candidate in a national election for the next 50 years.
Instead, of course, nothing will change. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go check my food and ammo supplies for the tenth time today.
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has blurted out that young programmers are superior.
"Willing to put up with abuse" does not mean "superior", however much employers might like to conflate them.
As I approach the FP's end-of-career age, I find myself far, far more efficient than a decade ago, in not just my coding-for-coding's-sake work, but in my ability to address what the business wants out of my code. The beancounters don't care about skinnability, about what buzzword technologies went into the app, about how fast (beyond a very loose "fast enough") a program runs. They care if it answers their questions, and does so accurately.
Unfortunately, they can't easily see past how much I cost - Yes, at this point in my career, I make in the ballpark of twice as much as an entry level dev. And yes, I do provide that much more value to the company than I did fresh out of college (I'd even go so far as to say I provide far more than merely 2x the ROI, but will stay on the conservative side for now).
Important point to note about the FP... It talks about Intel and Facebook; TFA additionally mentions Microsoft - All companies that do tech for tech's sake, not as a means to satisfy a non-tech-related business need. Your time in Silicon Valley, your chance to strike gold in a startup, your 60 hour weeks and the glares for cutting out early when you need to attend Grandma's funeral, may all end by 40. But your career doesn't need to, as long as you've spent those first 15-20 years picking up the skills that matter outside the tech hubs.
By cooking your meals and not eating fast food for every meal.
This actually does not hold true anymore, for the most part. You may eat a hell of a lot healthier by cooking for yourself, but realistically, the cost of buying ingredients at the grocery store exceeds the cost of plopping down a few bucks at a non-snooty restaurant.
Case in point - Subway. Try buying just the bread, meat, and cheese that goes into a footlong for under $5. Now add on the extras like a quarter of a tomato, a few sheets of lettuce, a pickle or two, some hot peppers, a hefty squirt of one of their sauces, and to make the same thing at home would likely cost you nearly twice that much, and that doesn't even consider the additional prep time of doing one sandwich for yourself vs having all the ingredients laid out neatly in bins suitable for a sandwich assembly line.
Same goes for a burger - You can't buy an eighth of a pound of ground beef, a slice of cheese, and a burger roll for under a buck, even ignoring the rest of the condiments.
At best, if you buy in bulk from a restaurant supply store, you can probably break even - But you still have the extra time invested, not to mention you'd better damned well like having the same thing for lunch every day for a few months in a row.:)
Now, in fairness, you can save money on preparing your own higher-end meals - Fresh seafood, good Italian, a quality steak. But looking to save money on lunches or fast-food like meals, you just can't realistically do it.
I realize that semiconductor manufacturing has its own set of associated evils, but seriously? Did we actually have any doubt whatsoever that somewhere on the order of 500-2500 newspapers would damage the environment less to view them electronically than by cutting down the sole significant organic CO2 sink known to man, transporting them, bleaching them, drying them, transporting them again, pulping them, bleaching again, transporting them again, milling into paper, transporting them again, printing on them with hydrocarbon inks, and transporting yet one more time, a dead-tree edition of the Daily?
Okay, a single day's run, we might have a toss-up, conceptually. But over the life of the device? Seriously?
Ric Romero reports: Teens having sex? More likely than you think - Film at 11!
If there is any lesson to be learnt from this trial it gonna be this - Hire the right person [...snip...] I mean, what qualification that Mr. Lindholm has on legal stuffs ?
Google did not hire Mr. Lindholm to work as a lawyer. Would you also expect your janitors to know how to code? Your delivery drivers to reconcile AP? Your controller to weld deck plates?
How can an ex-Sun employee, currently employed by Google, write an email saying things like "Google need a license for Java" ?
Because non-lawyers can still put two and two together to come up with four. Because the average employee frequently needs to make recommendations within their own domain of knowledge that have implications outside that domain. Because IT people in particular don't generally give a shit about what HR thinks, and HR would already fire us in a heartbeat if the company could live without us.
Reading the email linked by the FP, I would call his claim fairly plausible - I wouldn't take him to have meant "gee, we've infringed the hell out of it, we need to get legal ASAP", but rather "Can you please just buy the best option for us so we can move on and stop the games?"
Honestly, something like that exact discussion comes up on a monthly basis where I work, and some shyster could probably find examples of me saying substantially the same thing in my emails. And I don't give two shakes of a rat's ass about whether or not my employer wants to stay legal on the licensing side - If they don't mind me using a copy of Windows registered to Razor1911, no skin off my back (and hell, good ammo for me if things get ugly).
Wimpy politicians that have forgotten who they represent.
Actually, no, they haven't. This move fits perfectly with those the politicians really represent - Corporations that would find it a nuisance to need to get a visa every time they want to send someone to a conference in Vegas.
The corporations don't give a damn about the privacy of their employees or the hassle of the travel itself, just the cost and timescale. The governments don't give a damn about the privacy of their citizens (hell, they probably see this as a thin excuse to collect extra data for their own uses), just the political donations that come in from the regional megacorps. The only ones with any actual interest in opposing crap like this, The People, have no real voice (aka "Euros") with which to protest.
Face it, no modern pseudo-democracy, not even Greece, has come anywhere near the point where real live comfy fat citizens will rise up and slaughter their leaders wholesale. Until we reach that point, the governments have no real reason to fear, or even listen to us.
How else will they be able to raise enough money to pay the athletes AND the various big name "non-profit" figures that need to get their cut from these games?
Pay?
The IOC doesn't pay anyone. They require their athletes have no sponsors, make them pay their own way, and them milk them for as many free performances (copyright the IOC, the athletes don't even own the rights to their own images) as they can get out of them. All the while, they demand host cities build them massive stadiums and pay for traffic and populace control; demand that host countries PASS FUCKING LAWS making the FP not just a civil, but a criminal issue; Milk sponsors of every last penny and aggressively prevent you from wearing, at a publicly paid-for stadium usually on public land, even the colors of a non-sponsor. God help you if you wear red-white-and-blue to an event paid for by Coke, prepare to spend the night in a cage, you worthless Pepsi-promoting piece of shit!
Just fuck the IOC. They have zero relevance to the modern world, and have only pushed themselves further and further into that irrelevance - Case in point, search for "Rome 2020", some countries have finally said "y'know? Screw that - Take your ball somewhere else, we don't want you here".
This is sick stuff, professional stealing children's lollipops in real life. It is mind boggling, can you imagine the meetings were psychologists, accounts, coders get togethor to create games to scam the pocket money from ten year olds. Each plotting more enticing, psychological manipulations to get the kids to press the pocket money wiping out button. "Yeah add that, that'll suck in the little rats","Oh Yeah, that'll get the little beggars competing","We need that to feed the little suckers egos so they spend big","We all gonna get rich scamming dumb kids pocket money, what a bunch of suckers, yuck, yuck ".
Do you really live in such a world of angels and demons, with real bogeymen waiting in every closet to suck out kids' eyes?
No one says "I want to screw kids" (spare me the priest jokes, please) - Few people, even scam artists, would say as much about setting out to screw even adults; Most either rationalize it or dehumanize their marks into mere wallets-on-legs.
In the case of games, they say "Okay, we have this pretty decent game. Do we sell it for $5, or push it as a freemium? Let's see, our intended age group doesn't have any income, so freemium would work better; Now, what can we take out and make for-pay that doesn't completely break the game?"
If you answered "nonfunctional character skins", congrats, you count as kid-friendly and would probably go bankrupt from your hosting costs. If you answered "The most valuable currency in the game, that you have to grind for a week just to get one of them but can still realistically complete the game without using", then you have a winner that might actually pay for itself - no demons involved.
Seriously wake the fuck up to yourself, "ADULTS SCAMMING CHILDREN'S POCKET MONEY", what the fuck is the matter with you.
Ooooh, big letters! Scary! I get your point now, FOR TEH CHILLINS!1!11
Sigh.
For starters, this involves, at worst, adults using kids to annoy their parents into giving money to the game. The fact that Apple had an anti-nuisance feature that some kids figured out how to exploit - Yes, exploit, don't play these kids as innocent little angels who can't tell real money from virtual currency, talkin' bout a 9YO girl, not a toddler - Has no bearing on the fact that these purchases normally would have required parental permission to make.
And we can't even blame Apple for leaving such a glaring loophole in the purchase authorization system open, since users can turn it off - Apple has since changed the behavior to default it to off, but I'd dare say most of their users prefer it in its original state, for the simple reason that sane people don't just hand a $600 shiny-attached-to-a-credit-card to their kid and tell them to have fun. If you really don't want to interact with your kids, buy them a DS, not an iPhone - Or better yet, don't have any, but we'll save that for another topic.
/ At 7YO I damned well knew the value of a dollar for what it could buy // At 10YO I damned well understood the meaning of working for a dollar, mowing lawns for a pittance /// I suppose Beautiful and Unique Snowflakes(tm) don't do that anymore, though, so, who knows.
In practice, the child most likely had the password.
This.
Look, I normally count as the last one to defend Apple for anything, but seriously?
Guy gives his daughter a way to rack up bills, she does so, he pleads ignorance. Gimme a frickin' break! "Parenting" means more than buying an expensive pacifier.
Pay the damned bill, spank the little brat raw, and both of you take a lesson from this.
So, are you going to finally admit you were wrong about Teller being able to copyright the performance of this trick?
No one has said he can't copyright the performance of the trick. Just not the trick itself.
And as far as I can tell, no one has claimed Bakardy has tried to hawk the actual performance - Not even a himself doing a substantially similar "fan-recreation" of the trick - But only the underlying mechanics of the trick. Which differs from the performance of the trick.
Or put another way, any hack amateur magician can do a million and one card tricks, but only a pro with a kickass performance surrounding the trick will elicit anything but groans from the audience. Teller has the performance. Bakardy only has the trick.
The problem is that IT people always think that nobody but an IT person can possibly manage an IT department, and MBAs can't possibly understand the needs.
No, actually, the problem comes from MBAs thinking they don't need all the skills you mentioned. And then, won't someone think of the poor, poor executives when they start playing over par as they struggle to understand why the minimum wage delivery drivers don't like the new "smile or we fire you" morale-boosting initiative; why the AR clerks raise an eyebrow when you explain to them how even though we lose money consistently from the same set of deadbeat customers, we need to keep those same deadbeats happy so just let it slide again this month; why the nurses keep talking about stupid shit like "patients dying" when forced to work 18-hour shifts.
Yes, the truck driver (or the highly skilled engineer, for that matter) doesn't necessarily understand the world of business. But the business side most definitely does need to understand the operational details of what their company does.
God I hope not. Unless wireless providers have found a way to best physics, a hard line will always be the faster (higher bandwidth and lower latency) option and thus, for me, the preferred delivery channel.
Just out of curiosity, to which physical limits do you refer?
Light travels at better than 0.99c in open air, vs 0.66c in glass; and electricity "travels" at 0.8c (+/- 0.1) in copper. Thus, RF or open-air laser can always beat a wired/fiber connection for speed.
That said, using current multipoint-to-multipoint WiFi gear rather than a truly dedicated RF link, yes, a wire will blow it out of the water every time.
Why are so many/.ers insisting that Dems are less guilty than the Republicans in this fight we've recently been having over internet freedom.
Not less guilty - "Differently" guilty.
The Republicans want to take our money and freedoms and, ideally, would have us all living as mindless zombie serfs to the Corporate Police state.
The Democrats want to take our money and freedoms and, ideally, would have us all living as politically correct zombies who don't want to float to the top (and aggressively push down those who do).
Both sides "hate our freedom" far more than the bogeyman of the week, and will take any steps necessary to strip us of what little sense of individuality we cling to.
Granted, Verizon Wireless doesn't want to cannibalize the customer base for Verizon DSL or Verizon FiOS
Actually, they do.
In my area (northern New England), Verizon sold off their entire land-line business to FairPoint explicitly for the purpose of focusing on wireless by ditching a dying market.
Interestingly, while the public screamed "no" in every state affected, the various PUCs rubber stamped the deal grinning broadly the whole time. Yes, Virginia, many suspect hookers 'n blow had something to do with this.
So now, a few years later, FairPoint (not big enough to handle the new service area in the first place) has done miserably, sits on the verge of bankruptcy and pretty much begging regulators (the same ones they wined and dined into their present situation) to let them die in peace. The public universally loathe FairPoint, but in such a rural area, many have no alternative (and I refer to boring ol' POTS here, not even anything as exotic as DSL).
And the IEEE says the wireless carriers might cap their service to keep people on land-lines? No. In another decade, only power, cable TV*, and fiber will still use poles on the side of the road as their primary transport. Phone and consumer-grade internet will universally use wireless.
* And even that, only until someone like Hulu manages to perfect the whole TV-over-the-internet thing, at which point cable TV will die almost overnight.
2/5 - Not believable enough that you would go so far as to put all the "trigger" words among your target audience in bold.
That said...
Oh, so you mean that somehow the RIAA/MPAA should be concerned about the thieves (not even gonna try and mince words here) who "love using Torrents and such", that steal all their content for free is going to now be suddenly worried about losing...that ZERO-profit section of their consumer base?
Yes, they should - Because this entire discussion misses the simple fact that the "audience" refers to the product, not the customers. the fact that the studios can get the cows to produce a bit of milk before taking them to slaughter (and yes, pedants, I realize you don't generally eat dairy cows) just frosts the cake.
With TV, they made that fact glaringly obvious by having well-delineated commercial breaks. With movies, they simply make the ads more subtle, part of the actual content (or did you actually take "Transformers: Dark Side of GM Product Placement" as anything more than a feature-length ad? Not that that differs from the original in any way, since the cartoon existed only to hawk crappy toys, mind you).
You know, I don't want to watch ads for free. I would say the studios should pay us to watch them.
Generally speaking, highway patrol and state troopers will always cite you for an infraction. Town and city cops will let things slide depending on your attitude.
I would agree with that, with a comment - Highway patrol generally won't bother pulling you over until you hit 20 over or drive in a dangerous/erratic manner; Local cops may or may not pull you over for absolutely nothing, depending on their attitude.
Citys and rural farms have coexisted since mankind invented agriculture because neither can survive without the other.
Pretty sure "food" predates "cities", dude.
But yes, this has turned into a silly argument, and you have it pretty much nailed - Both benefit each other, and talking about one "cutting off" the other amounts to nothing more than meaningless posturing.
/ Not a farmer, but I can grow my own food. // Not a city-dweller, but I work in one. /// Would take the former over the latter, given the choice.
I can tell you have absolutely no working knowledge of anything related to running fiber optics (or any kind of physical plant), much less the networks running over them.
...Other than doing small-scale network installations (yes, including fiber when necessary) on the side for damned good money, of course. But carry on...
Bandwidth is limited by how much we can stuff over a single fiber strand.
Explain to me then, oh guru of all things fiber, why companies like Tyco pay millions to run more than one transatlantic fiber, when clearly paying for five minutes of your expert time could have shown them that doing so wouldn't actually increase their bandwidth?
You have to actually [blah blah poles lasers power Indians cooling blah blah snipped] The costs add up and the physical constraints are not to be taken lightly.
Do you need me to rewrite "Our ISPs would rather book double-digit profit margins this quarter than actually do something so mundane as lay another fiber, however" in smaller words? I didn't mean to make it so hard to understand, my apologies.
On a more serious note, don't act so obtuse. This has nothing to do with the 90%-dark fiber backbone in the US, and everything to do with the fact that I pay a completely BS "universal service fee" on a data-only 3G plan, the best option available in my area at 3x the price of DSL/cable and with a woefully inadequate monthly cap, for the simple reason that the telecoms won't get off their asses and run a fiber to somewhere within 20000ft of my house (nevermind right to my house - I'll start fighting that battle when we finally make it out of the 1980s).
And not just "my" house - A hell of a lot of houses outside the urban hubs fall into the same situation. And not just houses, either - We complain about how American companies can't compete with China and India and Mexico because of the costs of doing business, while at the same time making it all but impossible for them to locate to the parts of the US with costs that can compete with China.
I don't generally respond to ACs, but congrats, your pretentious cluelessness has inspired me to rant. Well played, troll, well played!
Brilliant! If I just tell the router not to go over my 10GB monthly cap, I won't go over my monthly cap!
But... Wait... What if someone actually produces more than 10GB/month of data?
manage your data at the source better?
Ah! So people just need to do less, brilliant! They could... Sleep more! Or take up solitaire. Or Knitting. Those damned kids with cancer can just wait, the next Einstein of biomedical research needs to take a nap while his bandwidth cap recovers.
Allocate resources as needed?
What, precisely, does that actually mean?
This isnt rocket science. You have a specific amount of X to use, meter accordingly.
True, and absolutely false. We have an effectively infinite bandwidth - Our ISPs would rather book double-digit profit margins this quarter than actually do something so mundane as lay another fiber, however.
Meanwhile, South Korea, a friggin' 2.5th-world country, has ubiquitous FTTP.
If Urban America ever stopped providing tax money to Rural America
...Urban America would starve to death within a week, while...
the rioters in the farmlands would run out of gas money in minutes.
...The Farmers wouldn't notice for about a month. They buy diesel in bulk and store it in 500-5000 gallon on-site tanks. And while the foreign oil may arrive via barge to NYH and the parasites at the CME take their cut right off the top, the refineries have more to do with "rural" than "urban" as well (though more because no one wants to live near them than location).
Cities do share resources more efficiently than rural areas. But "more efficient" doesn't actually mean "self sustaining" - That farmer, while sucking 1000x as much energy per acre than the Manhattanite, wouldn't notice if NYC vanished tomorrow. The opposite doesn't hold true.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I'll never get why Tea Partiers feel replacing career politicians with AMATEUR politicians would be a good thing?
Because I'll take clueless idealists over seasoned criminals?
Because, jokes aside, the lot of losers we have now can't even manage to quit the bipartisan bickering long enough to pay to keep the goddamned lights on. We've gone how long without a proper budget? We have long term appropriations expiring left and right because of their incompetence, and we came so close to actually defaulting on the good name of US Debt, the most trustworthy financial instrument the world has ever seen, that we had our rating downgraded.
Because not everything counts as "better than nothing". I would go so far as to say that not only should we toss the current lot, we should toss them "with prejudice" and ban both the Democratic and Republican parties from even fielding a candidate in a national election for the next 50 years.
Instead, of course, nothing will change. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go check my food and ammo supplies for the tenth time today.
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has blurted out that young programmers are superior.
"Willing to put up with abuse" does not mean "superior", however much employers might like to conflate them.
As I approach the FP's end-of-career age, I find myself far, far more efficient than a decade ago, in not just my coding-for-coding's-sake work, but in my ability to address what the business wants out of my code. The beancounters don't care about skinnability, about what buzzword technologies went into the app, about how fast (beyond a very loose "fast enough") a program runs. They care if it answers their questions, and does so accurately.
Unfortunately, they can't easily see past how much I cost - Yes, at this point in my career, I make in the ballpark of twice as much as an entry level dev. And yes, I do provide that much more value to the company than I did fresh out of college (I'd even go so far as to say I provide far more than merely 2x the ROI, but will stay on the conservative side for now).
Important point to note about the FP... It talks about Intel and Facebook; TFA additionally mentions Microsoft - All companies that do tech for tech's sake, not as a means to satisfy a non-tech-related business need. Your time in Silicon Valley, your chance to strike gold in a startup, your 60 hour weeks and the glares for cutting out early when you need to attend Grandma's funeral, may all end by 40. But your career doesn't need to, as long as you've spent those first 15-20 years picking up the skills that matter outside the tech hubs.
By cooking your meals and not eating fast food for every meal.
This actually does not hold true anymore, for the most part. You may eat a hell of a lot healthier by cooking for yourself, but realistically, the cost of buying ingredients at the grocery store exceeds the cost of plopping down a few bucks at a non-snooty restaurant.
Case in point - Subway. Try buying just the bread, meat, and cheese that goes into a footlong for under $5. Now add on the extras like a quarter of a tomato, a few sheets of lettuce, a pickle or two, some hot peppers, a hefty squirt of one of their sauces, and to make the same thing at home would likely cost you nearly twice that much, and that doesn't even consider the additional prep time of doing one sandwich for yourself vs having all the ingredients laid out neatly in bins suitable for a sandwich assembly line.
Same goes for a burger - You can't buy an eighth of a pound of ground beef, a slice of cheese, and a burger roll for under a buck, even ignoring the rest of the condiments.
At best, if you buy in bulk from a restaurant supply store, you can probably break even - But you still have the extra time invested, not to mention you'd better damned well like having the same thing for lunch every day for a few months in a row. :)
Now, in fairness, you can save money on preparing your own higher-end meals - Fresh seafood, good Italian, a quality steak. But looking to save money on lunches or fast-food like meals, you just can't realistically do it.
How is this in any way counter-intuitive?
This.
I realize that semiconductor manufacturing has its own set of associated evils, but seriously? Did we actually have any doubt whatsoever that somewhere on the order of 500-2500 newspapers would damage the environment less to view them electronically than by cutting down the sole significant organic CO2 sink known to man, transporting them, bleaching them, drying them, transporting them again, pulping them, bleaching again, transporting them again, milling into paper, transporting them again, printing on them with hydrocarbon inks, and transporting yet one more time, a dead-tree edition of the Daily?
Okay, a single day's run, we might have a toss-up, conceptually. But over the life of the device? Seriously?
Ric Romero reports: Teens having sex? More likely than you think - Film at 11!
If there is any lesson to be learnt from this trial it gonna be this - Hire the right person [...snip...] I mean, what qualification that Mr. Lindholm has on legal stuffs ?
Google did not hire Mr. Lindholm to work as a lawyer. Would you also expect your janitors to know how to code? Your delivery drivers to reconcile AP? Your controller to weld deck plates?
How can an ex-Sun employee, currently employed by Google, write an email saying things like "Google need a license for Java" ?
Because non-lawyers can still put two and two together to come up with four. Because the average employee frequently needs to make recommendations within their own domain of knowledge that have implications outside that domain. Because IT people in particular don't generally give a shit about what HR thinks, and HR would already fire us in a heartbeat if the company could live without us.
Or more accurately - Because someone asked.
How you could possibly interpret that statement as meaning anything other than "we need to negotiate a license" is beyond me.
"We need to buy shiny toy X" doesn't always, or (IMO) even usually, mean "we've already chewed the fingers off it, guess we need to pay for it now".
Reading the email linked by the FP, I would call his claim fairly plausible - I wouldn't take him to have meant "gee, we've infringed the hell out of it, we need to get legal ASAP", but rather "Can you please just buy the best option for us so we can move on and stop the games?"
Honestly, something like that exact discussion comes up on a monthly basis where I work, and some shyster could probably find examples of me saying substantially the same thing in my emails. And I don't give two shakes of a rat's ass about whether or not my employer wants to stay legal on the licensing side - If they don't mind me using a copy of Windows registered to Razor1911, no skin off my back (and hell, good ammo for me if things get ugly).
Wimpy politicians that have forgotten who they represent.
Actually, no, they haven't. This move fits perfectly with those the politicians really represent - Corporations that would find it a nuisance to need to get a visa every time they want to send someone to a conference in Vegas.
The corporations don't give a damn about the privacy of their employees or the hassle of the travel itself, just the cost and timescale. The governments don't give a damn about the privacy of their citizens (hell, they probably see this as a thin excuse to collect extra data for their own uses), just the political donations that come in from the regional megacorps. The only ones with any actual interest in opposing crap like this, The People, have no real voice (aka "Euros") with which to protest.
Face it, no modern pseudo-democracy, not even Greece, has come anywhere near the point where real live comfy fat citizens will rise up and slaughter their leaders wholesale. Until we reach that point, the governments have no real reason to fear, or even listen to us.
How else will they be able to raise enough money to pay the athletes AND the various big name "non-profit" figures that need to get their cut from these games?
Pay?
The IOC doesn't pay anyone. They require their athletes have no sponsors, make them pay their own way, and them milk them for as many free performances (copyright the IOC, the athletes don't even own the rights to their own images) as they can get out of them. All the while, they demand host cities build them massive stadiums and pay for traffic and populace control; demand that host countries PASS FUCKING LAWS making the FP not just a civil, but a criminal issue; Milk sponsors of every last penny and aggressively prevent you from wearing, at a publicly paid-for stadium usually on public land, even the colors of a non-sponsor. God help you if you wear red-white-and-blue to an event paid for by Coke, prepare to spend the night in a cage, you worthless Pepsi-promoting piece of shit!
Just fuck the IOC. They have zero relevance to the modern world, and have only pushed themselves further and further into that irrelevance - Case in point, search for "Rome 2020", some countries have finally said "y'know? Screw that - Take your ball somewhere else, we don't want you here".
Seriously? This and that aren't even in the same ballpark. Talk about a leap in logic.
Okay, I skipped this one before, but since you apparently have zero sense of proportion...
Hyperbole. Get a grip, dude.
This is sick stuff, professional stealing children's lollipops in real life. It is mind boggling, can you imagine the meetings were psychologists, accounts, coders get togethor to create games to scam the pocket money from ten year olds. Each plotting more enticing, psychological manipulations to get the kids to press the pocket money wiping out button. "Yeah add that, that'll suck in the little rats","Oh Yeah, that'll get the little beggars competing","We need that to feed the little suckers egos so they spend big","We all gonna get rich scamming dumb kids pocket money, what a bunch of suckers, yuck, yuck ".
// At 10YO I damned well understood the meaning of working for a dollar, mowing lawns for a pittance
/// I suppose Beautiful and Unique Snowflakes(tm) don't do that anymore, though, so, who knows.
Do you really live in such a world of angels and demons, with real bogeymen waiting in every closet to suck out kids' eyes?
No one says "I want to screw kids" (spare me the priest jokes, please) - Few people, even scam artists, would say as much about setting out to screw even adults; Most either rationalize it or dehumanize their marks into mere wallets-on-legs.
In the case of games, they say "Okay, we have this pretty decent game. Do we sell it for $5, or push it as a freemium? Let's see, our intended age group doesn't have any income, so freemium would work better; Now, what can we take out and make for-pay that doesn't completely break the game?"
If you answered "nonfunctional character skins", congrats, you count as kid-friendly and would probably go bankrupt from your hosting costs. If you answered "The most valuable currency in the game, that you have to grind for a week just to get one of them but can still realistically complete the game without using", then you have a winner that might actually pay for itself - no demons involved.
Seriously wake the fuck up to yourself, "ADULTS SCAMMING CHILDREN'S POCKET MONEY", what the fuck is the matter with you.
Ooooh, big letters! Scary! I get your point now, FOR TEH CHILLINS!1!11
Sigh.
For starters, this involves, at worst, adults using kids to annoy their parents into giving money to the game. The fact that Apple had an anti-nuisance feature that some kids figured out how to exploit - Yes, exploit, don't play these kids as innocent little angels who can't tell real money from virtual currency, talkin' bout a 9YO girl, not a toddler - Has no bearing on the fact that these purchases normally would have required parental permission to make.
And we can't even blame Apple for leaving such a glaring loophole in the purchase authorization system open, since users can turn it off - Apple has since changed the behavior to default it to off, but I'd dare say most of their users prefer it in its original state, for the simple reason that sane people don't just hand a $600 shiny-attached-to-a-credit-card to their kid and tell them to have fun. If you really don't want to interact with your kids, buy them a DS, not an iPhone - Or better yet, don't have any, but we'll save that for another topic.
/ At 7YO I damned well knew the value of a dollar for what it could buy
In practice, the child most likely had the password.
This.
Look, I normally count as the last one to defend Apple for anything, but seriously?
Guy gives his daughter a way to rack up bills, she does so, he pleads ignorance. Gimme a frickin' break! "Parenting" means more than buying an expensive pacifier.
Pay the damned bill, spank the little brat raw, and both of you take a lesson from this.
So, are you going to finally admit you were wrong about Teller being able to copyright the performance of this trick?
No one has said he can't copyright the performance of the trick. Just not the trick itself.
And as far as I can tell, no one has claimed Bakardy has tried to hawk the actual performance - Not even a himself doing a substantially similar "fan-recreation" of the trick - But only the underlying mechanics of the trick. Which differs from the performance of the trick.
Or put another way, any hack amateur magician can do a million and one card tricks, but only a pro with a kickass performance surrounding the trick will elicit anything but groans from the audience. Teller has the performance. Bakardy only has the trick.
The problem is that IT people always think that nobody but an IT person can possibly manage an IT department, and MBAs can't possibly understand the needs.
No, actually, the problem comes from MBAs thinking they don't need all the skills you mentioned. And then, won't someone think of the poor, poor executives when they start playing over par as they struggle to understand why the minimum wage delivery drivers don't like the new "smile or we fire you" morale-boosting initiative; why the AR clerks raise an eyebrow when you explain to them how even though we lose money consistently from the same set of deadbeat customers, we need to keep those same deadbeats happy so just let it slide again this month; why the nurses keep talking about stupid shit like "patients dying" when forced to work 18-hour shifts.
Yes, the truck driver (or the highly skilled engineer, for that matter) doesn't necessarily understand the world of business. But the business side most definitely does need to understand the operational details of what their company does.
God I hope not. Unless wireless providers have found a way to best physics, a hard line will always be the faster (higher bandwidth and lower latency) option and thus, for me, the preferred delivery channel.
Just out of curiosity, to which physical limits do you refer?
Light travels at better than 0.99c in open air, vs 0.66c in glass; and electricity "travels" at 0.8c (+/- 0.1) in copper. Thus, RF or open-air laser can always beat a wired/fiber connection for speed.
That said, using current multipoint-to-multipoint WiFi gear rather than a truly dedicated RF link, yes, a wire will blow it out of the water every time.
Why are so many /.ers insisting that Dems are less guilty than the Republicans in this fight we've recently been having over internet freedom.
Not less guilty - "Differently" guilty.
The Republicans want to take our money and freedoms and, ideally, would have us all living as mindless zombie serfs to the Corporate Police state.
The Democrats want to take our money and freedoms and, ideally, would have us all living as politically correct zombies who don't want to float to the top (and aggressively push down those who do).
Both sides "hate our freedom" far more than the bogeyman of the week, and will take any steps necessary to strip us of what little sense of individuality we cling to.
Granted, Verizon Wireless doesn't want to cannibalize the customer base for Verizon DSL or Verizon FiOS
Actually, they do.
In my area (northern New England), Verizon sold off their entire land-line business to FairPoint explicitly for the purpose of focusing on wireless by ditching a dying market.
Interestingly, while the public screamed "no" in every state affected, the various PUCs rubber stamped the deal grinning broadly the whole time. Yes, Virginia, many suspect hookers 'n blow had something to do with this.
So now, a few years later, FairPoint (not big enough to handle the new service area in the first place) has done miserably, sits on the verge of bankruptcy and pretty much begging regulators (the same ones they wined and dined into their present situation) to let them die in peace. The public universally loathe FairPoint, but in such a rural area, many have no alternative (and I refer to boring ol' POTS here, not even anything as exotic as DSL).
And the IEEE says the wireless carriers might cap their service to keep people on land-lines? No. In another decade, only power, cable TV*, and fiber will still use poles on the side of the road as their primary transport. Phone and consumer-grade internet will universally use wireless.
* And even that, only until someone like Hulu manages to perfect the whole TV-over-the-internet thing, at which point cable TV will die almost overnight.
Bad guys do bad things and people are afraid to even name them for doing the said bad things... I think the bad guys might be winning.
This. You beat me to it, but, just wow. Fear of fucking retribution for outing the sort of scum who would poison schoolgirls?
GROW A PAIR, "OFFICIALS" - Or get the hell out of the way for someone who will do their job.
2/5 - Not believable enough that you would go so far as to put all the "trigger" words among your target audience in bold.
That said...
Oh, so you mean that somehow the RIAA/MPAA should be concerned about the thieves (not even gonna try and mince words here) who "love using Torrents and such", that steal all their content for free is going to now be suddenly worried about losing...that ZERO-profit section of their consumer base?
Yes, they should - Because this entire discussion misses the simple fact that the "audience" refers to the product, not the customers. the fact that the studios can get the cows to produce a bit of milk before taking them to slaughter (and yes, pedants, I realize you don't generally eat dairy cows) just frosts the cake.
With TV, they made that fact glaringly obvious by having well-delineated commercial breaks. With movies, they simply make the ads more subtle, part of the actual content (or did you actually take "Transformers: Dark Side of GM Product Placement" as anything more than a feature-length ad? Not that that differs from the original in any way, since the cartoon existed only to hawk crappy toys, mind you).
You know, I don't want to watch ads for free. I would say the studios should pay us to watch them.
Generally speaking, highway patrol and state troopers will always cite you for an infraction. Town and city cops will let things slide depending on your attitude.
I would agree with that, with a comment - Highway patrol generally won't bother pulling you over until you hit 20 over or drive in a dangerous/erratic manner; Local cops may or may not pull you over for absolutely nothing, depending on their attitude.
Citys and rural farms have coexisted since mankind invented agriculture because neither can survive without the other.
// Not a city-dweller, but I work in one.
/// Would take the former over the latter, given the choice.
Pretty sure "food" predates "cities", dude.
But yes, this has turned into a silly argument, and you have it pretty much nailed - Both benefit each other, and talking about one "cutting off" the other amounts to nothing more than meaningless posturing.
/ Not a farmer, but I can grow my own food.
I can tell you have absolutely no working knowledge of anything related to running fiber optics (or any kind of physical plant), much less the networks running over them.
...Other than doing small-scale network installations (yes, including fiber when necessary) on the side for damned good money, of course. But carry on...
Bandwidth is limited by how much we can stuff over a single fiber strand.
Explain to me then, oh guru of all things fiber, why companies like Tyco pay millions to run more than one transatlantic fiber, when clearly paying for five minutes of your expert time could have shown them that doing so wouldn't actually increase their bandwidth?
You have to actually [blah blah poles lasers power Indians cooling blah blah snipped] The costs add up and the physical constraints are not to be taken lightly.
Do you need me to rewrite "Our ISPs would rather book double-digit profit margins this quarter than actually do something so mundane as lay another fiber, however" in smaller words? I didn't mean to make it so hard to understand, my apologies.
On a more serious note, don't act so obtuse. This has nothing to do with the 90%-dark fiber backbone in the US, and everything to do with the fact that I pay a completely BS "universal service fee" on a data-only 3G plan, the best option available in my area at 3x the price of DSL/cable and with a woefully inadequate monthly cap, for the simple reason that the telecoms won't get off their asses and run a fiber to somewhere within 20000ft of my house (nevermind right to my house - I'll start fighting that battle when we finally make it out of the 1980s).
And not just "my" house - A hell of a lot of houses outside the urban hubs fall into the same situation. And not just houses, either - We complain about how American companies can't compete with China and India and Mexico because of the costs of doing business, while at the same time making it all but impossible for them to locate to the parts of the US with costs that can compete with China.
I don't generally respond to ACs, but congrats, your pretentious cluelessness has inspired me to rant. Well played, troll, well played!
Oh, wait, there weren't many irresponsible, can't-take-care-of-themselves PUSSIES back then DEMANDING someone saving their lame asses as a "right".
King Ludd would like a word with you...
Set a bandwidth quota at the router?
Brilliant! If I just tell the router not to go over my 10GB monthly cap, I won't go over my monthly cap!
But... Wait... What if someone actually produces more than 10GB/month of data?
manage your data at the source better?
Ah! So people just need to do less, brilliant! They could... Sleep more! Or take up solitaire. Or Knitting. Those damned kids with cancer can just wait, the next Einstein of biomedical research needs to take a nap while his bandwidth cap recovers.
Allocate resources as needed?
What, precisely, does that actually mean?
This isnt rocket science. You have a specific amount of X to use, meter accordingly.
True, and absolutely false. We have an effectively infinite bandwidth - Our ISPs would rather book double-digit profit margins this quarter than actually do something so mundane as lay another fiber, however.
Meanwhile, South Korea, a friggin' 2.5th-world country, has ubiquitous FTTP.
If Urban America ever stopped providing tax money to Rural America
...Urban America would starve to death within a week, while...
...The Farmers wouldn't notice for about a month. They buy diesel in bulk and store it in 500-5000 gallon on-site tanks. And while the foreign oil may arrive via barge to NYH and the parasites at the CME take their cut right off the top, the refineries have more to do with "rural" than "urban" as well (though more because no one wants to live near them than location).
the rioters in the farmlands would run out of gas money in minutes.
Cities do share resources more efficiently than rural areas. But "more efficient" doesn't actually mean "self sustaining" - That farmer, while sucking 1000x as much energy per acre than the Manhattanite, wouldn't notice if NYC vanished tomorrow. The opposite doesn't hold true.