Google is intentionally breaking laws here and should be punished.
BS. "Google" has not, intentionally or not, done anything here. Some Brazilian citizen has chosen to violate their laws, try going after the actual problem.
Consider this from a slightly different angle - If Google had no official presence in Brazil, how would this headline read? Hint - More along the lines of a Great Firewall style pissing-in-the-wind, than some sort of BS "arrest the messenger" attack on free speech.
Dear Brazil (and every other government on the planet) - Welcome to the Internet: Not yours to shut down. Have a nice day.
If anything, utilities should have a pricing structure that punishes overconsumption and rewards under-consumption. In this instance the utility is ass backwards and they should be the ones who are shamed.
The utility company deals in huge aggregates of power, offering a relatively stable pricing structure by virtue of hedging against their know demand curve.
In the case of overwhelmingly large consumers like a datacenter, utilities offer them reduced rates in exchange for locking in to a given use over a given period of time. When Microsoft says they want a contract for 200GWH over the next year, their supplier has a legal (as well as fiscal) obligation to make sure they actually cover their side of the deal. They pay real money, that day, to "cover the bet", so to speak. Then when Microsoft comes up $210k short of honoring their side of the bargain, the utility ends up on the hook for the remainder. As a result, the utility phrases their contracts to basically force delivery whether they want it or not.
So really, this boils down to a simple contractual issue. Microsoft used less than they agreed to, the contract specified damages for that, end of story. If you really want to spin this as an environmental atrocity issue, look at it like this - Microsoft agreed to buy X from their CEP. The CEP agreed to sell that power, and then in turn agreed to buy X from someone who actually makes electricity, on the open market. Someone bought that option and then bought real, actual fuel to produce the power it represents.
So somewhere, Microsoft has effectively wasted $210k worth of fuel. Yes, we should certainly applaud them for using less energy - But they need to reflect that in their supply contracts.
It sounds great to say that I used less water this year, until you realize that I have an open pipe gushing from my front lawn and "used less" just means I let more of it water the lawn.
I find it simply fascinating how on every tech-oriented blog - And increasingly, even in infotainment news aggregator sites like Slashdot - we have every question met with some form of a moralistic "don't do that".
If you don't have an answer, don't give one. If you have it - Give it. Save the moralizing for Sunday mornings.
I don't give two shits if you want to get arrested in China, if you want to run a P2P client on your university's network, if you want to get fired for viewing porn at work. Everyone knows those things count as "wrong". Just answer the goddamned questions, or don't; but not one... single... person will ever suddenly say, "Oh! You mean China doesn't just use that as an IQ test to reach the real internet? Well gol-lee, color my face red!".
'disrespect to the religious beliefs of others.' is exactly what he have done.
People need to earn my respect. You don't automatically get it by virtue of your gender, you don't get it because of your age, you don't get it because you have nice hair, you don't get it because some morons voted for you... And you certainly don't get it just because you have the older fairy tale.
When you can rephrase a law that still amounts to an anachronism in a way that it doesn't refer to thoughtcrime, let me know.
We need to get over this BS of "religious tolerance". I "tolerate" anything that doesn't affect me. If your brand of delusions negatively affect me, then no, I will not tolerate that.
A regulator in the tire senses when tire-inflation pressure drops below a pre-set point
Aside from the "self-inflating" part, all new cars sold in the US have a built-in tire pressure sensor.
Sounds great, right? The car lets you know when you need to add air, so you always have safe, optimal-fuel-efficiency tires. Right?
Except... If you live anywhere North of, say, Miami, these goddamned useless sensor will tell you to add air all fucking winter long.
I see these tires, if they work at all (and gimmicky crap like this has a long history of failing at the drop of a hat), lasting exactly one season... On the coldest night of the year when you drive home late, they'll "fix" your low pressure. Then six months later, after a long tire-warming road trip 400 miles from home, the massively over-spec pressure will blow out your bulb seals. Time for new tires, thank you for buying Goodyear!
You can legislate education, however. And as people become more educated, they become less religious. Win-win!
More to the point, you want respect? Start by learning why we think you sound like a complete idiot when you go frothing about your preferred fairy-tale. You want tolerance? Behave like civilized humans rather than rabid dogs. You want the freedom to practice your religion? Clean house and stop letting the worst among you represent your religion to the rest of the world.
Petitions worked in the old days because it meant a real person had heard the news and cared enough to sign.
Petitions have never worked, not even in the "old days".
Much like boycotts, they depend on getting a significant fraction of a company's customer base to participate. And put bluntly, on any scale larger than your friendly neighborhood greengrocer, you just won't get enough people to participate.
So it really comes down to a simple business decision - Twitter decided to alienate some portions of its user base for a reason. They already know it will piss some people off, and they have already decided they can accept that.
Because for DECADES people have been shouting doom with no reasonable, practical explanation for it, solution of it, or analysis of the impact of said solutions.
And for DECADES, we've heard the answer, over and over, from a variety of groups generally interested in the environment - "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle".
Now just extend that to the concept of carbon emissions, and you have your answer. Zero landfill, zero emissions.
The bigger problem, which that doesn't address - We also need zero population growth. No amount of per-person conservation can make up for the number of people increasing without limit. Fortunately, rising sea levels and global warming will help with that, by killing off a good many of us (no, not drowning - Mosquitoes or viral pandemics, most likely).
The other side of the coin... why non marketing guys shouldn't write marketing materials:
The difference: Even the craziest of PHBs wouldn't ask a coder to write marketing materials. Then again, yesterday I would have said the same thing about expecting marketing people to write code.
"We think you should buy our product. It doesn't really work, as such, but we would like to continue to get paid".
No, FLAC is lossless. 99.99% of us just have no higher quality source material to encode than standard audio CDs.
If a studio (or semi-indie artist) wanted to release 40 channels of 32 bit 192KHz raw data, FLAC could encode that just fine. Of course, that would take basically one DVD per song to store (roughly 1GB/minute given FLAC's typical 50% compression ratio), but it could do it just fine.:)
That's why audiophiles prefer vinyl, because it captures more sound from thestudio recording.
Sorry, but that doesn't even hold true from the "analog = better" point of view. Vinyl has a lower dynamic range, a lower maximum frequency, and much muchlower stereo separation, than an audio CD. Audiophiles prefer vinyl simply because their "hipster douche" persona requires it.
Keep in mind that audiophiles also prefer $600 ultra-low-oxygen digital interconnects with hand-wavy allusions to "bit slew".
And as for the appeal to audiophiles, vinyl, and all things Steve Jobs... I got a kick out of TFA: "When asked if Young had approached Apple about the idea, Young said that he had, in fact, met with Jobs and was "working on it," but that "not much" ended up happening to the pursuit."
Perhaps the fluffy dead-celebrity endorsements would work better if said celebrity had actually shown an interest in this new format?
FTA: "The famous musician has filed several trademarks related to a new high-definition MP3 alternative, reports Rolling Stone. The government could register the trademarks by the holidays."
Neil Young primarily seems concerned with not having his own proprietary format to fight over.
When you taunt the victims of your drunk driving accident with a flippant post, I am glad a judge can make you take it down
You can taunt your victims in person. You can taunt your victims by mail. You can taunt your victims by phone. You can taunt your victims via press conference (if the press considers you important enough to give you an audience). You can taunt your victims with frickin' sky-writing for all it matters.
And yes, you can taunt your victims on Facebook.
The fact that she chose to do it at all makes her an ass, but it doesn't take away her first amendment right to act like an ass.
That said - She may have agreed to delete her account as a condition of a lighter sentence. Personally, I have a problem with games like that in general, but since it happens, and she took the deal, she damned well better hold up her side if she wants to remain on the outside of a cage.
But he has done something. Communicating threats is a crime in most states.
TFA doesn't quote what he said, so we don't really know whether he did or did not make a "threat".
If he said "I've had it, gonna go kill those little punks skateboarding on my sidewalk, back in a few", okay, possible threat (though in plenty of contexts it still would not count as a threat).
If, as seems more likely, he said "I hate those goddamned kids, hope they get hit by a bus, might even do it myself one of these days", then no, not a threat.
Fortunately, in situations like this the courts actually do fairly well at separating hurp from fact. Unfortunately, he will either cop a plea, or end up bankrupt paying for a lawyer.
Oh, I don't know... a printed image in a book has a pretty limited resolution. An on-line image can offer a lot more
A professionally printed book can have a resolution upwards of 2400dpi. At a typical college textbook size of 7.5"x9.5", that comes out to a 410 megapixel image.
While you could present that, or even much, much, larger, in an online form - No actual monitor in existence would let you view the whole thing at once. And while I certainly consider the ability to zoom (such as with the Google Art Project) a cool feature, it just doesn't even come close to having the entire work right in front of you at a higher resolution than your eyes can resolve.
imagine what a book would cost that was printed on 1/4th the amount of paper and just included URL's instead of blank placeholder boxes.
Now lets take that even further - Since this book has no pictures, a student's only reason to buy it comes from the questions likely to end up as homework assignments.
So, imagine a book that has only the chapter questions ("paraphrased" of course), and a link to Wikipedia for the answers.
Hmmm... On second thought, don't imagine that. I think I need to go file a business method patent now...
Considering that the UK didn't fight the US in WWII, and they didn't actually lose WWII (despite London taking some heavy damage) - I'd have to go with "no".:)
Your joke aside, I don't think you've really missed the mark by much, here...
I firmly believe that somewhere around half (possibly much higher) the population cannot ever learn programming to any meaningful level. Perhaps really simple Excel formulas, but they learn them more by rote than through any true understanding of what really goes on to make the magic happen.
Of the other half of the population, who have a sufficient grasp of logic and can grasp the idea of breaking a problem down into tiny steps to solve it methodically - The vast majority, well over 95%, hate doing so. Hate it. They would rather have a root canal than do that for a living. They might have managed to suffer through an intro-to-programming course or two in college, but they really would go completely bonkers if you asked them to program on any regular basis.
Programmers, on the other hand, tend to view our art almost as a form of meditation - The real "skill" of our art doesn't involve the ability to handle boolean logic or memorize APIs (those just count as a sort of prerequisite), but rather, the ability to go into a deep alpha state and stay there for hours at a time.
So... No. Not anyone can become a programmer. And of those who can - Most don't want to, not for any amount of money.
If you think that Libya was "closer to a true democracy" under Gaddafi, you're outright insane.
Even the most sham-elected de facto dictatorship on the planet blows the doors off any theocracy ever, when it comes to "closer to a true democracy".
At some point, the people can appeal to a (human) tyrant, and he might respond to their concerns.
Whether or not it exists, god never responds.
We need to get out of the Middle East/North Africa, until the savages either settle their differences or kill each other off. Screw this "democracy" crap, we've now plunged three "questionable" but relatively secular democracies into borderline (or even outright) sharia over the past decade. We need to quit while only that far behind.
Slashdot Mirror
Google is intentionally breaking laws here and should be punished.
BS. "Google" has not, intentionally or not, done anything here. Some Brazilian citizen has chosen to violate their laws, try going after the actual problem.
Consider this from a slightly different angle - If Google had no official presence in Brazil, how would this headline read? Hint - More along the lines of a Great Firewall style pissing-in-the-wind, than some sort of BS "arrest the messenger" attack on free speech.
Dear Brazil (and every other government on the planet) - Welcome to the Internet: Not yours to shut down. Have a nice day.
If anything, utilities should have a pricing structure that punishes overconsumption and rewards under-consumption. In this instance the utility is ass backwards and they should be the ones who are shamed.
The utility company deals in huge aggregates of power, offering a relatively stable pricing structure by virtue of hedging against their know demand curve.
In the case of overwhelmingly large consumers like a datacenter, utilities offer them reduced rates in exchange for locking in to a given use over a given period of time. When Microsoft says they want a contract for 200GWH over the next year, their supplier has a legal (as well as fiscal) obligation to make sure they actually cover their side of the deal. They pay real money, that day, to "cover the bet", so to speak. Then when Microsoft comes up $210k short of honoring their side of the bargain, the utility ends up on the hook for the remainder. As a result, the utility phrases their contracts to basically force delivery whether they want it or not.
So really, this boils down to a simple contractual issue. Microsoft used less than they agreed to, the contract specified damages for that, end of story. If you really want to spin this as an environmental atrocity issue, look at it like this - Microsoft agreed to buy X from their CEP. The CEP agreed to sell that power, and then in turn agreed to buy X from someone who actually makes electricity, on the open market. Someone bought that option and then bought real, actual fuel to produce the power it represents.
So somewhere, Microsoft has effectively wasted $210k worth of fuel. Yes, we should certainly applaud them for using less energy - But they need to reflect that in their supply contracts.
It sounds great to say that I used less water this year, until you realize that I have an open pipe gushing from my front lawn and "used less" just means I let more of it water the lawn.
I find it simply fascinating how on every tech-oriented blog - And increasingly, even in infotainment news aggregator sites like Slashdot - we have every question met with some form of a moralistic "don't do that".
If you don't have an answer, don't give one. If you have it - Give it. Save the moralizing for Sunday mornings.
I don't give two shits if you want to get arrested in China, if you want to run a P2P client on your university's network, if you want to get fired for viewing porn at work. Everyone knows those things count as "wrong". Just answer the goddamned questions, or don't; but not one... single... person will ever suddenly say, "Oh! You mean China doesn't just use that as an IQ test to reach the real internet? Well gol-lee, color my face red!".
I like how you conveniently omit the "Stuff that matters" part.
Well, they did sell out to Dice, which hasn't mattered since the dot-bomb.
'disrespect to the religious beliefs of others.' is exactly what he have done.
People need to earn my respect. You don't automatically get it by virtue of your gender, you don't get it because of your age, you don't get it because you have nice hair, you don't get it because some morons voted for you... And you certainly don't get it just because you have the older fairy tale.
When you can rephrase a law that still amounts to an anachronism in a way that it doesn't refer to thoughtcrime, let me know.
We need to get over this BS of "religious tolerance". I "tolerate" anything that doesn't affect me. If your brand of delusions negatively affect me, then no, I will not tolerate that.
A regulator in the tire senses when tire-inflation pressure drops below a pre-set point
Aside from the "self-inflating" part, all new cars sold in the US have a built-in tire pressure sensor.
Sounds great, right? The car lets you know when you need to add air, so you always have safe, optimal-fuel-efficiency tires. Right?
Except... If you live anywhere North of, say, Miami, these goddamned useless sensor will tell you to add air all fucking winter long.
I see these tires, if they work at all (and gimmicky crap like this has a long history of failing at the drop of a hat), lasting exactly one season... On the coldest night of the year when you drive home late, they'll "fix" your low pressure. Then six months later, after a long tire-warming road trip 400 miles from home, the massively over-spec pressure will blow out your bulb seals. Time for new tires, thank you for buying Goodyear!
You can't legislate respect.
You can legislate education, however. And as people become more educated, they become less religious. Win-win!
More to the point, you want respect? Start by learning why we think you sound like a complete idiot when you go frothing about your preferred fairy-tale. You want tolerance? Behave like civilized humans rather than rabid dogs. You want the freedom to practice your religion? Clean house and stop letting the worst among you represent your religion to the rest of the world.
You can't legislate respect, but you can earn it.
Why did this get modded down? AC makes a damned good point. With TV, we found a way to reach virtually everyone, all at once.
And how did that effect interactivity?
Short answer - I don't even know my neighbors' names.
But can they scale student interaction?
If you mean "scale it from its real world analogue", then no. No, they cannot, because...
If you mean "scale it from smaller online courses", then yes, because online classes essentially have no interaction, at any scale.
Petitions worked in the old days because it meant a real person had heard the news and cared enough to sign.
Petitions have never worked, not even in the "old days".
Much like boycotts, they depend on getting a significant fraction of a company's customer base to participate. And put bluntly, on any scale larger than your friendly neighborhood greengrocer, you just won't get enough people to participate.
So it really comes down to a simple business decision - Twitter decided to alienate some portions of its user base for a reason. They already know it will piss some people off, and they have already decided they can accept that.
Because for DECADES people have been shouting doom with no reasonable, practical explanation for it, solution of it, or analysis of the impact of said solutions.
And for DECADES, we've heard the answer, over and over, from a variety of groups generally interested in the environment - "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle".
Now just extend that to the concept of carbon emissions, and you have your answer. Zero landfill, zero emissions.
The bigger problem, which that doesn't address - We also need zero population growth. No amount of per-person conservation can make up for the number of people increasing without limit. Fortunately, rising sea levels and global warming will help with that, by killing off a good many of us (no, not drowning - Mosquitoes or viral pandemics, most likely).
The other side of the coin... why non marketing guys shouldn't write marketing materials:
The difference: Even the craziest of PHBs wouldn't ask a coder to write marketing materials. Then again, yesterday I would have said the same thing about expecting marketing people to write code.
"We think you should buy our product. It doesn't really work, as such, but we would like to continue to get paid".
FLAC is lossless from an audio CD perspective.
:)
No, FLAC is lossless. 99.99% of us just have no higher quality source material to encode than standard audio CDs.
If a studio (or semi-indie artist) wanted to release 40 channels of 32 bit 192KHz raw data, FLAC could encode that just fine. Of course, that would take basically one DVD per song to store (roughly 1GB/minute given FLAC's typical 50% compression ratio), but it could do it just fine.
That's why audiophiles prefer vinyl, because it captures more sound from thestudio recording.
Sorry, but that doesn't even hold true from the "analog = better" point of view. Vinyl has a lower dynamic range, a lower maximum frequency, and much much lower stereo separation, than an audio CD. Audiophiles prefer vinyl simply because their "hipster douche" persona requires it.
Keep in mind that audiophiles also prefer $600 ultra-low-oxygen digital interconnects with hand-wavy allusions to "bit slew".
And as for the appeal to audiophiles, vinyl, and all things Steve Jobs... I got a kick out of TFA: "When asked if Young had approached Apple about the idea, Young said that he had, in fact, met with Jobs and was "working on it," but that "not much" ended up happening to the pursuit."
Perhaps the fluffy dead-celebrity endorsements would work better if said celebrity had actually shown an interest in this new format?
FTA: "The famous musician has filed several trademarks related to a new high-definition MP3 alternative, reports Rolling Stone. The government could register the trademarks by the holidays."
Neil Young primarily seems concerned with not having his own proprietary format to fight over.
When you taunt the victims of your drunk driving accident with a flippant post, I am glad a judge can make you take it down
You can taunt your victims in person. You can taunt your victims by mail. You can taunt your victims by phone. You can taunt your victims via press conference (if the press considers you important enough to give you an audience). You can taunt your victims with frickin' sky-writing for all it matters.
And yes, you can taunt your victims on Facebook.
The fact that she chose to do it at all makes her an ass, but it doesn't take away her first amendment right to act like an ass.
That said - She may have agreed to delete her account as a condition of a lighter sentence. Personally, I have a problem with games like that in general, but since it happens, and she took the deal, she damned well better hold up her side if she wants to remain on the outside of a cage.
But he has done something. Communicating threats is a crime in most states.
TFA doesn't quote what he said, so we don't really know whether he did or did not make a "threat".
If he said "I've had it, gonna go kill those little punks skateboarding on my sidewalk, back in a few", okay, possible threat (though in plenty of contexts it still would not count as a threat).
If, as seems more likely, he said "I hate those goddamned kids, hope they get hit by a bus, might even do it myself one of these days", then no, not a threat.
Fortunately, in situations like this the courts actually do fairly well at separating hurp from fact. Unfortunately, he will either cop a plea, or end up bankrupt paying for a lawyer.
/ What do I call it? "Justice!"
Oh, I don't know... a printed image in a book has a pretty limited resolution. An on-line image can offer a lot more
A professionally printed book can have a resolution upwards of 2400dpi. At a typical college textbook size of 7.5"x9.5", that comes out to a 410 megapixel image.
While you could present that, or even much, much, larger, in an online form - No actual monitor in existence would let you view the whole thing at once. And while I certainly consider the ability to zoom (such as with the Google Art Project) a cool feature, it just doesn't even come close to having the entire work right in front of you at a higher resolution than your eyes can resolve.
imagine what a book would cost that was printed on 1/4th the amount of paper and just included URL's instead of blank placeholder boxes.
Now lets take that even further - Since this book has no pictures, a student's only reason to buy it comes from the questions likely to end up as homework assignments.
So, imagine a book that has only the chapter questions ("paraphrased" of course), and a link to Wikipedia for the answers.
Hmmm... On second thought, don't imagine that. I think I need to go file a business method patent now...
What is this crazy 'tech stuff' doing on this site?
Meh, y'know... Slow day for lawsuits, politics, and Apple press releases. Gotta fill the front page with something.
Ya think?
;)
Like, maybe Linus Torvalds, born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland?
What? Are you bloody serious?
:)
Considering that the UK didn't fight the US in WWII, and they didn't actually lose WWII (despite London taking some heavy damage) - I'd have to go with "no".
realize politics isn't a fucking sporting event between two teams
Except, it kinda does work that way.
Most people just have the teams wrong - Not red vs blue, not plebes vs silver-spoons, but rather "all of us" vs "anyone who runs for public office".
Oddly, despite having the bigger team, we usually lose.
Your joke aside, I don't think you've really missed the mark by much, here...
I firmly believe that somewhere around half (possibly much higher) the population cannot ever learn programming to any meaningful level. Perhaps really simple Excel formulas, but they learn them more by rote than through any true understanding of what really goes on to make the magic happen.
Of the other half of the population, who have a sufficient grasp of logic and can grasp the idea of breaking a problem down into tiny steps to solve it methodically - The vast majority, well over 95%, hate doing so. Hate it. They would rather have a root canal than do that for a living. They might have managed to suffer through an intro-to-programming course or two in college, but they really would go completely bonkers if you asked them to program on any regular basis.
Programmers, on the other hand, tend to view our art almost as a form of meditation - The real "skill" of our art doesn't involve the ability to handle boolean logic or memorize APIs (those just count as a sort of prerequisite), but rather, the ability to go into a deep alpha state and stay there for hours at a time.
So... No. Not anyone can become a programmer. And of those who can - Most don't want to, not for any amount of money.
If you think that Libya was "closer to a true democracy" under Gaddafi, you're outright insane.
Even the most sham-elected de facto dictatorship on the planet blows the doors off any theocracy ever, when it comes to "closer to a true democracy".
At some point, the people can appeal to a (human) tyrant, and he might respond to their concerns.
Whether or not it exists, god never responds.
We need to get out of the Middle East/North Africa, until the savages either settle their differences or kill each other off. Screw this "democracy" crap, we've now plunged three "questionable" but relatively secular democracies into borderline (or even outright) sharia over the past decade. We need to quit while only that far behind.
Try reading the article.
What, and ruin a perfectly good Slashdot tradition? Meh.
How about the next time you are injured we put you out of your misery?
DNR / DNI, baby! Please do!