Stephen Harper, like all politicians, flip flop more than an IHOP. He may have been against universal heath care in the past but it's only his stance as the leader of the Conservative party that matters in the current discussion.
Incorrect. Harper is a brilliant politician (!= leader unfortunately). He goes the way the wind blows. Since he knows opposing universal health care would never get him a majority government (he'd probably even lose his status as prime minister), Considering it's one of the few differentiators over the US, it's one of the things he's had to muzzle his true feelings about.
And private member bills DO matter. If you haven't realized it, everything in the Harper Government is run from the Prime Minister's Office. There is very little independent thought purely because all of it is, effecitvely, censored.
It's how he runs effective election campaigns - Conservative candidates are told they must adhere to the script, which makes them stay on the up and up when all the other candidates are making mis-steps because they're doing unrehearsed announcements.
So we never get a sense of what the party is REALLY doing (it's why people still hold a distrust of him and feel he's hiding something). So when someone speaks candidly or makes an error, everyone pounces on it.
Or why there's huge suspicion about the election - after all, if Harper was completely innocent on the matter, he'd call for some super-inquiry as it would make him look good, and make the opposition (if he was clean, they must've done it) completely guilty and give the Conservatives an overwhelming majority.. Right now he's blocking all attempts, which gives the impression he knows something, and it isn't good on him, but hopefully Elections Canada will be to inept to see any flaws in his hiding of evidence.
Vic Toews... his whole statement was unscripted, which is why it blew up in his face.
Abortion or same sex marriage - we don't know his real position - we know his apparent position (whatever will get him votes), but his real position we can only infer from the odd member's bill put forward.
To compete with Square? They are already established and don't have a reputation for taking everything that someone has in their account on a whim.
The internet is full of "paypal stole all my money" stories.
Depends. First, they're doing the easy way of taking 1.7% instead of 1.75%, and second, well, Paypal is the only company out there if you want to accept random credit card payments.
Square basically is a merchant account with all the merchant account stuff. If you're just a small time seller off Craigslist and eBay, you probably cannot use Square without incorporating yourself as a business. With Paypal, you can.
And that's always the funny thing - it's the one thing Paypal has over everyone else (Amazon Checkout, Google Wallet/Checkout/whatever they're calling it, Square, etc). I've never understood why it's only Paypal that can offer the "allow random Joe to accept a credit card payment" option. If you're not a company/non-profit org or something, accepting credit cards is extraordinarily difficult - your option really is Paypal.
Visa's supposed ot have something similar, but that only works for Visa.
As for all the paypal stole my money stuff - it's true. Except that merchants deal with this far more often, and often the agreement will state you cannot discuss this in public. At least if you wish to keep your account.
Accepting credit cards in general sucks and I'm sure businesses would love to get rid of it, except they're convenient, and if you're big enough, cheaper than cash (handling cash costs money - extra staff training, safes, money dropoffs/armored car costs, etc).
Though, I have also seen businesses push you towards Paypal because they charge less than their merchant account does. And I've also chosen Paypal over native credit card handling - one business really ticked me off by asking for a scanned image of my credit card "for my protection" (note - when a business asks you to do it - it's not for preventing fraud off your card, it's for protecting them. After all, if you used someone else's card, you're not protected (that someone else is)). I probably should've reported them because if their email gets hacked, boom your credit carde is all over the 'net with CVV and signature, too.
The company is still as strong as ever and has lots more markets in education etc. that it never had before and there is no competition for them yet. Wikipedia is not competition as it is not verified and most reputable universities and research institutes etc. will not accept citations from it, and who even knows where Encarta went.
Incorrect.
Wikipedia NOR Britannica are citable sources. EVER. Nor any other encyclopedia. They may be citable in grade school, but not once you get to university.
It's always been that way, and it affects all encyclopedias and Wikipedia equally. It does not matter at all if Britannica verified everything.
Encyclopedias are not primary sources. They never have, and never will, be citable.
The whole point of an encyclopedia is to gain knowledge in a general sense. If you know little about a subject, an encyclopedia works great because it gives you background information to begin your hunt. Even better, it's got a references section that helps direct you to the primary sources to which you can look up the information and get a deeper understanding. And THOSE sources are citable.
The same goes for Wikipedia. Ignoring errors and edit wars, Wikipedia will never be a primary source (and they aim not to be, either - no original research). Wikipedia's got an advantage over Britannica in that it has a lot of pop-culture articles and thus is more useful.
The quickest way to get laughed out of higher education is to cite an encyclopedia. Britannica, Encarta, Wikipedia, it doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter who's an authority figure. When you're doing research, they're excellent starting points because they cover the general background and have the much-needed reference section of every article to launch your research.
I know that in the US some pumps have a limit how much gas can be pumped on a single credit card swipe. I thought it was something like $70-$80 limit, and the pump would shut off and you'd either have to re-swipe or bring your credit card inside
Yes, because when you swipe, the pump puts a preauthorization hold on your card for around $100 usually. Because of higher gas prices, the limit is often upped to around $150. This means the pump can charge up to that preauthorized limit, so when it's hit, it stops pumping.
A preauthorized hold is a temporary lowering of your credit limit to guarantee that money's available. This is often used for online shopping where the hold is placed to ensure funds are there to be charged when the item ships, but also in cases where the final total isn't known ahead of time (e.g., restaurant tips or prepaid gas stations).
This has resulted in many people being unable to pump gas because they're so close to the credit limit that the hold can't be done.
Let me preface by saying, I played D1 and D2 to the exclusion of most other games on the market for YEARS. Everything blizzard (not in the warcraft universe) has me from day 1 till long after the fervor dies down. D3 is horrible.
Well, I was the same. Then I had the misfortune of getting Starcraft 2. Ignoring all the crap about 3 campaigns I'd have to buy and such... let's just say the game was good, but the crap around it, like B.net 2.0, sucked balls.
You can clearly see where the execs at Activision start putting their hands in your pockets. Naming your character - it's permanent, unless you want to pay $10 to change it. Oh, we told you it's permanent, didn't you read the fine print? We'd warn you during signup it was permanent, but that would mean $10 less for us, so we'll tuck it away in fine print you're not going to read because you want to play the game. And no, the $10 came a couple of months after the game came out - until then you were stuck with it unless you deleted your b.net account and started anew (losing all your games in the process).
It was a bad enough experience that while I considered preordering D3 when I picked up SC2, I lost immediate interest in doing so after going through the hassles of doing so.
Hell, the free PvP "addon" just smacks of "freemium" to me - yes, PvP is free. No, you'd better open you wallet wide if you want to actually do anything. Especially after reports of how PvP were to be removed.
Acrivision's screwed up Blizzard, and they'll screw up everyone else they touch with their money-grubbing ways.
Hell, I didn't know until SC2 that there could be anyone worse than EA.
Irony is, most people probably already have a G+ account, even if they never signed up for one.
Of course, if you're wanting to go to Google I/O you probably are an Android user, which means you have a Google account and by definition, it's a G+ account even if you did nothing...
Hell, I bet if all you did was sign up for YouTube you have a G+ account.
But 48VDC also means dual conversion. Convert the AC to 48VDC, then do the conversion again with the PSU in each chassis. You have to get both conversions to be very, very efficient to make that worthwhile.
The problem is, you need high voltages. You cannot run 12VDC to every server because you're talking about HUGE currents.
Let's say the server is high powered and takes say, 480W. At 120VAC, that's 4A, maybe 5A after power supply inefficiency. 5A isn't a lot of current and wires are nice and thin (like they are now).
But we switch to 12VDC, all of a sudden we're talking about 40A. A cable capable of handling 40A is thick, unwieldy and the connectors are even bigger and bulkier. The reason for this is you don't want to lose all your power in the cables - power loss in cables (IIR losses) increases with the SQUARE of the current. At 4A, you're looking at a loss of 16*cable resistance. At 40A, it's 1600*cable resistance.
So out of necessity we're already having ot use DC systems that are at the same voltages (120, 208, 240, 480V) and incurring the conversion loss.
AC is better than DC for transporting electricity because you can convert between voltages with just a transformer. But in a data centre, when all the equipment will be powered by the same voltage, it makes sense to use one good efficient power supply for multiple computers, so that all the components don't have to be duplicated for each computer.
It depends.
AC wins out because of ease of conversion, becaues the higher the voltage, the lower the current, and lower the current, the lower the IIR losses in the wire. DC didn't win because at the time, efficient (and cheap) voltage converters didn't exist. These days, a switching DC-DC supply can easily exceed 90% efficiency, and you can get solid-state converters that can handle transmission line powers easily. Hence the launching of HVDC transmission lines which don't have resonant losses and no phasing issues
In a datacenter, you'd probably take the incoming power and turn it into an intermediate voltage like 48VDC per rack or something - something that minimizes IIR losses (you want high voltages) and DC-DC converter losses (ideally you want output voltage and no converter).
It will have to be per-rack at the minimum purely because of the losses - if we did 12V lines and a few servers take 1200W total, we're talking 100A in current If we bump it to 48V, we're dealing with 25A (maybe 30A after inefficiencies), and IIR losses at 25A are lower than at 100A (it increases with the square of the current).
Also, the 100A cables are big and chunky (which you need because they reduce the "R" part of IIR losses).
The same thing happened in Canada. Why don't they lower the prices? Because we're used to paying them, so they don't have to. If we stop paying artificially inflated prices for all of our media, it'll change.
Actually, what happened is consumers revolted, and the government started asking questions. They started demanding answers to why, when the loonie was at par, why they were still paying anywhere from 1.2-1.5x as much.
The first retailers to do so were Best Buy/Future Shop who basically started matching US pricing, realizing that big ticket items would make it more affordable to go the US to buy. The prices started dropping and it's no longer worth going to the US to pick it up - it can even cost more after shipping and customs and duties and other fees. The only reason to shop in the US the expanded selection. After this, most other retailers started doing the same thing.
The industries which are still failing this are the books and toys, where the Canadian price still has a premium. Amazon.ca, while not as good as Amazon.com fixes the first issue, and Wal-mart fixes the second )when you get them on sale).
Australians - do what Canada did - revolt and start demanding answers.
what they would have done would be to cancel all employee training, thus saving themselves that 1.8 million and who cares to revolving door employees.
Actually, it doesn't work that way. No employee can jump in and be immediately productive - there's always a ramp up time. It could be simple things like where's where your office is, bathroom is here, etc. all the way to here's how you check out source code, what code review process you have, where to install the software you need, etc.
It usually takes a few weeks before the employee is fully productive and not bothering anyone every 5 minutes on how to do something. Especially if you have an IT department that controls everything, where getting the basics installed basically mean an off day in making the IT request, waiting for IT to respond, waiting for IT to do it, etc.
And then there's the ramp up time to the project - understand the source code, building, running, where specs and test plans are, running some basic tests, etc.
All this costs time and money, and every new employee has to be re-taught. By letting the employee walk out the door, this one-time startup process must be repeated, and in the end, it can really cost $20,000 all said and done between the employee diddling about to all the lost time and productivity in asking "how do I do X?". It can't be swept under the floor because it's required training.
It's just like customers - it's cheaper to keep an existing customer than to get new ones. It's cheaper to keep an existing employee than to have to train a new one up (and the associate risks as well). Plus, in the last few days, said employee before giving notice may very well be unproductive as they're job hunting and other stuff.
Maybe Google could buy MPEG-LA and end this nonsense once and for all?
Well, you can't really buy MPEG-LA. They just offer a license of the patents in h.264 depending on use (consumer amateur use, professional use, etc).
You are, however, free to NOT use MPEG-LA and implement your own h.264 stuff. You just go and license each patent individually from every company. Of course, the general time and cost of doing so is rather prohibitive since you're going to be dealing with dozens of companies and hundreds of patents and individual terms and conditions on the use of each one. It's why MPEG-LA exists - so everyone who wants to use those standards can go to one place, and license them all at once under FRAND type rules (very handy if you're a competitor - the MPEG-LA will license to you, but the individual company may refuse).
An alternative is like the 3G stuff, where everyone who wants to make a phone has to go every company and license patents seperately. The only rule governing it is that all patents must be licensed under FRAND rules, but you have to go to each company and license them. At least though, the various organizations are enforcing FRAND-ness.
Still it is copyrighted and the requirements to use mean your os and browser must support DRM. The issue mentioned on Ars Technica, is that XP does not support h.264 because its GDI does not support DRM like Vista/7 due with HDMI.
XP supports h.264 just fine. You can get lots of h.264 decoders and encoders for XP. It's just that Microsoft hasn't extended licensing of h.264 to XP (it costs money).
The DRM thing is a non-issue. "Protected Path" is a DRM technology for use in specific use cases - e.g., playing back Blu-Ray movies, where a software playback app MUST use measures to protect the stream. So if you want to play back Blu-Ray, you need Vista or Win7.
Heck, XP plays h.264 just fine - if you ever view YouTube videos in 720p or 1080p (and sometimes 480p) YouTube is sending you an h.264 stream.
h.264 has nothing to do with copyrights - it's just that the algorithm uses a lot of patented technologies and it's the patents that require paying royalties to use (you can make agreements with every patent holder, or just pay a flat fee to the MPEG-LA). The mateiral encoded in h.264 is copyrighted.
So an XP user has at least three ways to play back an h.264 video without spending a dime. First would be Flash player which includes h.264 support for videos. Second is iTunes/QuickTime which provides its own h.264 decoder for free. Third is to install VLC.
They have "clientless" VPN solutions (you connect via https to the VPN server and access everything through that - you can RDP, SSH (I think) and access fileshares from your web browser. This gets extended with NetExtender that takes that HTTPS connection and turns it into a full blown VPN (ssl-vpn).
It's really useful at places where the only ports you can send traffic through are 80 and 443. Heck, one place actively denies all other ports - you get connection resets over just timeouts.
Fidonet actually has a claim to fame on this - while governments are restricting net access, the lowly modem is often free and clear as POTS aren't monitored as heavily, so the passage of messages through Fidonet is often much easier and much safer. It's just a lot slower as it's basically computers synchronizing with each other daily via modem.
And apparently it's been used for just that purpose to get information out.
While interviewing for an internship with Google, one engineer I spoke to described what Google does from his perspective: Google once discovered a hose that money poured out of. Its name is online advertising. Now, they spend their time searching for either the next hose, or new ways to increase the flow rate of that first one.
Now, whether this is the Chrome browser, Google+, Google Docs, self driving cars, whatever- they have no idea if any of them will be worthwhile. But, they have some of the smartest people in the world tinkering around to try to find out. And if they spend $16 Billion to find a hose worth $100 Billion, or more, then they come out ahead. But, that's the thing about exploration- you don't know what you're going to find.
Or to do what ensures that the first hose continues to flow freely. Google's basically the only company left if you want to do online ads, having gobbled up large chunks of the market. (They're simultaneously purveyors of the best online ads (AdWords) and the worst (popunders/flash/etc from Doubleclick). They own the mobile market ad space (Apple's got a token offering in iAds), and all the other projects like Google+ and Chrome are just enhanced methods for Google to try to sell more ads. Google+ by "getting to know you better" (like the unified privacy policy), Chrome to seek out how people use the web to enhance appeal of ads.
Anyhow - has Google gone away from AdWords? I seem to see less of them these days and more of the Doubleclick style ads.
Of course, the irony in all this is a vast interdependency of companies on each other. Google needs Apple, for example. Not just because iOS users buy apps loaded with AdMob ads, but because AdMob only survives under Google's control while Apple hangs onto iAds (the only way Google was allowed to by AdMob was because Apple announced iAds a few months earlier)
I suppose the redeeming quality is Google is taking the long-term view. Advertising isn't going away anytime soon, and Google's the largest online advertising company on the planet.
Some long shots Google is doing definitely help in that respect. Self-driving cars, for example, would allow the now-passenger to do more stuff, perhaps see more billboards, printed ads, or go online and see more ads that way. Or outfitting a city with fiber - by becoming an ISP, they're setting up a goldmine opportunity to analyze traffic patterns at the user level to better tailor ads and see where traffic goes. Even if all Google logs is the IP address of the website you visit, that information can be quite valuable.
The US would vote overwhelmingly in favor of protectionism -- it's a hugely protectionist country despite claiming to want free trade.
The US does want free trade though. It wants free trade that benefits itself exclusively. The whole goal is to be as protectionist as possible, but allow token free trade that benefits it. For example, by allowing US companies to sell to other countries freely, but putting up roadblocks when other countries try to sell their goods in the US. The US benefits because its companies are selling more, while being protected from being undercut in other markets by what that country tries to sell the US.
When groups of incumbent telecom providers gather together to protect consumers, it's usually to protect consumers from the distraction of non-incumbent providers striving to provide superior and less expensive service.
Got that right. Remember the Industry Canada wireless calculator? No?
Basically it was an online tool that helped consumers figure out the best deal on their cellphone by letting them compare apples with apples.
Just over a month ago, the Harper Government killed it. Not that it was overbudget or anything - it was in beta and apparently worked *really* well and was basically due to be unveiled. All the people who beta tested it agreed it was a very useful tool.
Naturally, the big 3 were very upset, because all the new budget carriers were showing up as the cheapest while they were solidly at the bottom consistently.
by realityimpaired (1668397) Alter Relationship on Tuesday March 13, @03:57AM (#39336927)
Ontario has one up for debate with tri-party support in the legislature right now. While the specifics are different, the essentials are the same as the Manitoba law. One thing I'm particularly fond of is the changes to the early termination fees, which they're looking at turning into an extra charge on your monthly bill. Essentially like the Koodo Tab, only with it being a real charge on top of the monthly fees, so that when you're not on a contract, you pay less.
Rogers probably realizes they can't win this one. In the long run, every province will go this way. What they probably want is for the CRTC to enact a national policy so that they don't get stuck with the administrative hassle that is having 12 separate contract fee and termination structures.
You mean, "pay less".
You see, the end goal is for you to pay the same bill you do, AND tack on another $15/month ?cellphone subsidy fee" to it. Sure you pay less once the phone's paid off, but while you were on contract, the carriers were getting an extra $15 from that "fee" that they would've had to eat from your plan.
They aren't going to change their plans to remove the subsidy. They were planning on having it as another fee they could charge to even greater profit.
I once found an iPhone 4, locked, of course. I took the SIM card out, contacted the service provider. They where not able to reach the owner, but left a note on their account with my name and phone number.
After a month, I called back. They could not find the account to which I was referring to because the owner changed phone, and,evidently, SIM cards, disassociating it with the account.
I find that hard to believe, unless the phone wasn't receiving service. If the phone had service, the SIM card will have a record with the carrier (because the service is tied to the SIM). Thus they can track the SIM to the owner. Hell, if the SIM was at one time activated, then there would be a record of who the customer was at the time it was usable.
The only way there's no record is if the owner never activated the SIM, and bought the iPhone from the Apple store (otherwise the carrier can look up the IMEI from sales records).
And no, the Apple store won't help you out since it requires a police report from the owner for them to be the slightest bit interested.
Well, you switch it to vibrate. There's a nice convenient toggle switch on the side (right beside the volume button) that brings the phone into and out of vibrate mode.
Of all the other patented things other phones could copy from the iPhone, I never understood why they copy that switch. It's handy, you can flip it without looking at your phone (when you enter silence mode, it buzzes the vibrator. When you exit, it does nothing, so if you aren't sure, a quick flip can tell you). If your phone accidentally rings, you can flip it and not bother anyone else or fumble with the phone, etc.
Considering Steve Jobs' attitude towards buttons and other protrusions, the fact that the switch survives means quite a lot.
The problem comes from Stallman's idea that all software should be FOSS and money should be made from support(Stallman isn't opposed to selling the software, but having a buildable source will allow any user to post the software for any cost or free). So the money to be made is squeezed into only support. Take RedHat. The community immediately took the sources and made CentOS which is used in many small businesses instead of paying for Red Hat.
Maybe some companies and developers can live on giving support, but for the vast majority of software developers, thats not possible when anyone out there can take your code and build their own. Apply this model to the Android or Apple app stores and there would disaster with the software clones. Already games are being cloned without the source code available and this is a huge problem. Forcing the apps to be open source will lead of chaos and there will be no incentive to create big games like Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja and Infinity Blade(cost a million or more develop). What should they do? Sell support for Angry Birds?
Problem is, "sell support" doesn't go very far when the "buyers" are cheapskates.
Stallman's model works fine back in the day when computer operators were revered people, but falls down flat these days when 90%+ of computers are used to accomplish some task, and those knowledgable enough to fix/understand computers are tiny minority. The majority want computers that work, but they also don't want to pay for it.
If you don't believe me, tell your family member to go to Geek Squad to get their computer fixed. They'll balk at the $40/hour charges, and see no reason why you can't spend the 20 hours it takes to fix up their computer.
And if you're trying to do computer support, be prepared to have your clients spend hours dickering over every hour you charge. You billed 10 hours, they'll ding it down to 9 and waste 4 hours of your time doing so.
And no, it doesn't matter what profession the client is - lawyers will dicker just as hard (or harder) over that hour that they charge $200/hr for.
Do you want to know who owns systems like this? There's one big group I know of - next time you see a movie, watch the names in big type in the credits. When their home systems stop working, I hope they direct their ire at the DVD CCA, because those are the folks that broke their toys.
Fat chance, because those big names are also controlled by the MPAA, and the DVD CCA will simply say their systems were disabled because of "piracy fears" and "you DO want your royalty cheques, right?".
Or maybe that's why the DVD Forum pulled the license - the MPAA exerted pressure to disallow "ripping" even if it was impossible to move the image to another system. In which case again, the MPAA controls those big names and any future work they can get.
So wait, they interviewed a guy from Gawker/Gizmodo as evidence? Their fucking articles are complete shit in the first place, let alone their comments section. That's like citing Fox News as evidence that all TV is terrible and does not work as a communication method.
Exactly.
Gizmodo was good when Brian Lam salvaged it years ago, but since the whole iPhone 4 thing, all the original writers have left and what's left over is basically crap. The site redesign in 2011 didn't help one thing - it turned a usable site into some javascript monstrosity that makes it completely useless to open in tabs. So now you have a formerly popular site that's bleeding visitors because the competition has better site design, and writers who basically write crap to get pageviews.
In the struggle for page views, the writing and article quality has nosedived to the point where the crowd that's left over is made up of trolls and such.
So what happened was the whole iPhone 4 deal, which led to writers being chatised for milking it. An awful site redesign that basically makes the site unusable, and the subsequent bleeding of visitors that leads to the writers leaving (all the original writers have gone), and now you've got crap attracting crap.
Contrast this to say, Ars Technica, who has had writer turnover, but in general tries to maintain a high-quality site and proper journalistic measures, and you find their comment section very well respected.
Basically - you reap what you sow. The core audience of Gizmodo departed after the iPhone 4 fiasco and the site redesign. Traffic went down and writers (who are paid by page views) started getting desperate and put up any old crap to get page views. People who read the articles and found them low quality end up leaving low quality comments.
Online comment systems work just fine. It's Gawker thta's the problem.
The problem is, he's an idiot who doesn't understand how credit cards work. Fraudulent charges to charities actually hurts them because they get fined when chargebacks occur. So they don't get to keep the money, they lose extra money on top, and VISA/MC have a habit of disconnecting you from the credit card system entirely if they get too many chargebacks.
It's really tough to imagine a nastier or more stupid thing to do than use stolen credit cards with charities.
I don't know if there's the option to allow the charitable donations to stand and then refuse other charges; Technically it wasn't me who made the donation, yet I'd rather not cost the charity money for the sake of ã5. It wasn't their fault.
Charities do get special consideration by Visa/MC - they often have very special deals where Visa/MC will NOT charge them transaction fees (lets Visa/MC "donate" the charges), nor other fees for accepting credit cards (most charities would probably wither off and die if they couldn't accept credit cards, so the credit card companies offer them this in exchange for tax receipts most likely).
So monetarily, most charities will not be penalized. They will be penalized in that someone has to go over the chargeback paperwork and handle it, which means one less volunteer helping out and increased administration costs for the charity.
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Incorrect. Harper is a brilliant politician (!= leader unfortunately). He goes the way the wind blows. Since he knows opposing universal health care would never get him a majority government (he'd probably even lose his status as prime minister), Considering it's one of the few differentiators over the US, it's one of the things he's had to muzzle his true feelings about.
And private member bills DO matter. If you haven't realized it, everything in the Harper Government is run from the Prime Minister's Office. There is very little independent thought purely because all of it is, effecitvely, censored.
It's how he runs effective election campaigns - Conservative candidates are told they must adhere to the script, which makes them stay on the up and up when all the other candidates are making mis-steps because they're doing unrehearsed announcements.
So we never get a sense of what the party is REALLY doing (it's why people still hold a distrust of him and feel he's hiding something). So when someone speaks candidly or makes an error, everyone pounces on it.
Or why there's huge suspicion about the election - after all, if Harper was completely innocent on the matter, he'd call for some super-inquiry as it would make him look good, and make the opposition (if he was clean, they must've done it) completely guilty and give the Conservatives an overwhelming majority.. Right now he's blocking all attempts, which gives the impression he knows something, and it isn't good on him, but hopefully Elections Canada will be to inept to see any flaws in his hiding of evidence.
Vic Toews... his whole statement was unscripted, which is why it blew up in his face.
Abortion or same sex marriage - we don't know his real position - we know his apparent position (whatever will get him votes), but his real position we can only infer from the odd member's bill put forward.
Depends. First, they're doing the easy way of taking 1.7% instead of 1.75%, and second, well, Paypal is the only company out there if you want to accept random credit card payments.
Square basically is a merchant account with all the merchant account stuff. If you're just a small time seller off Craigslist and eBay, you probably cannot use Square without incorporating yourself as a business. With Paypal, you can.
And that's always the funny thing - it's the one thing Paypal has over everyone else (Amazon Checkout, Google Wallet/Checkout/whatever they're calling it, Square, etc). I've never understood why it's only Paypal that can offer the "allow random Joe to accept a credit card payment" option. If you're not a company/non-profit org or something, accepting credit cards is extraordinarily difficult - your option really is Paypal.
Visa's supposed ot have something similar, but that only works for Visa.
As for all the paypal stole my money stuff - it's true. Except that merchants deal with this far more often, and often the agreement will state you cannot discuss this in public. At least if you wish to keep your account.
Accepting credit cards in general sucks and I'm sure businesses would love to get rid of it, except they're convenient, and if you're big enough, cheaper than cash (handling cash costs money - extra staff training, safes, money dropoffs/armored car costs, etc).
Though, I have also seen businesses push you towards Paypal because they charge less than their merchant account does. And I've also chosen Paypal over native credit card handling - one business really ticked me off by asking for a scanned image of my credit card "for my protection" (note - when a business asks you to do it - it's not for preventing fraud off your card, it's for protecting them. After all, if you used someone else's card, you're not protected (that someone else is)). I probably should've reported them because if their email gets hacked, boom your credit carde is all over the 'net with CVV and signature, too.
Incorrect.
Wikipedia NOR Britannica are citable sources. EVER. Nor any other encyclopedia. They may be citable in grade school, but not once you get to university.
It's always been that way, and it affects all encyclopedias and Wikipedia equally. It does not matter at all if Britannica verified everything.
Encyclopedias are not primary sources. They never have, and never will, be citable.
The whole point of an encyclopedia is to gain knowledge in a general sense. If you know little about a subject, an encyclopedia works great because it gives you background information to begin your hunt. Even better, it's got a references section that helps direct you to the primary sources to which you can look up the information and get a deeper understanding. And THOSE sources are citable.
The same goes for Wikipedia. Ignoring errors and edit wars, Wikipedia will never be a primary source (and they aim not to be, either - no original research). Wikipedia's got an advantage over Britannica in that it has a lot of pop-culture articles and thus is more useful.
The quickest way to get laughed out of higher education is to cite an encyclopedia. Britannica, Encarta, Wikipedia, it doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter who's an authority figure. When you're doing research, they're excellent starting points because they cover the general background and have the much-needed reference section of every article to launch your research.
Yes, because when you swipe, the pump puts a preauthorization hold on your card for around $100 usually. Because of higher gas prices, the limit is often upped to around $150. This means the pump can charge up to that preauthorized limit, so when it's hit, it stops pumping.
A preauthorized hold is a temporary lowering of your credit limit to guarantee that money's available. This is often used for online shopping where the hold is placed to ensure funds are there to be charged when the item ships, but also in cases where the final total isn't known ahead of time (e.g., restaurant tips or prepaid gas stations).
This has resulted in many people being unable to pump gas because they're so close to the credit limit that the hold can't be done.
Well, I was the same. Then I had the misfortune of getting Starcraft 2. Ignoring all the crap about 3 campaigns I'd have to buy and such... let's just say the game was good, but the crap around it, like B.net 2.0, sucked balls.
You can clearly see where the execs at Activision start putting their hands in your pockets. Naming your character - it's permanent, unless you want to pay $10 to change it. Oh, we told you it's permanent, didn't you read the fine print? We'd warn you during signup it was permanent, but that would mean $10 less for us, so we'll tuck it away in fine print you're not going to read because you want to play the game. And no, the $10 came a couple of months after the game came out - until then you were stuck with it unless you deleted your b.net account and started anew (losing all your games in the process).
It was a bad enough experience that while I considered preordering D3 when I picked up SC2, I lost immediate interest in doing so after going through the hassles of doing so.
Hell, the free PvP "addon" just smacks of "freemium" to me - yes, PvP is free. No, you'd better open you wallet wide if you want to actually do anything. Especially after reports of how PvP were to be removed.
Acrivision's screwed up Blizzard, and they'll screw up everyone else they touch with their money-grubbing ways.
Hell, I didn't know until SC2 that there could be anyone worse than EA.
Irony is, most people probably already have a G+ account, even if they never signed up for one.
Of course, if you're wanting to go to Google I/O you probably are an Android user, which means you have a Google account and by definition, it's a G+ account even if you did nothing...
Hell, I bet if all you did was sign up for YouTube you have a G+ account.
The problem is, you need high voltages. You cannot run 12VDC to every server because you're talking about HUGE currents.
Let's say the server is high powered and takes say, 480W. At 120VAC, that's 4A, maybe 5A after power supply inefficiency. 5A isn't a lot of current and wires are nice and thin (like they are now).
But we switch to 12VDC, all of a sudden we're talking about 40A. A cable capable of handling 40A is thick, unwieldy and the connectors are even bigger and bulkier. The reason for this is you don't want to lose all your power in the cables - power loss in cables (IIR losses) increases with the SQUARE of the current. At 4A, you're looking at a loss of 16*cable resistance. At 40A, it's 1600*cable resistance.
So out of necessity we're already having ot use DC systems that are at the same voltages (120, 208, 240, 480V) and incurring the conversion loss.
It depends.
AC wins out because of ease of conversion, becaues the higher the voltage, the lower the current, and lower the current, the lower the IIR losses in the wire. DC didn't win because at the time, efficient (and cheap) voltage converters didn't exist. These days, a switching DC-DC supply can easily exceed 90% efficiency, and you can get solid-state converters that can handle transmission line powers easily. Hence the launching of HVDC transmission lines which don't have resonant losses and no phasing issues
In a datacenter, you'd probably take the incoming power and turn it into an intermediate voltage like 48VDC per rack or something - something that minimizes IIR losses (you want high voltages) and DC-DC converter losses (ideally you want output voltage and no converter).
It will have to be per-rack at the minimum purely because of the losses - if we did 12V lines and a few servers take 1200W total, we're talking 100A in current If we bump it to 48V, we're dealing with 25A (maybe 30A after inefficiencies), and IIR losses at 25A are lower than at 100A (it increases with the square of the current).
Also, the 100A cables are big and chunky (which you need because they reduce the "R" part of IIR losses).
Desktops maybe. Laptops though... I don't think I've seen a floppy drive standard on a laptop since the early 2000's.
Actually, what happened is consumers revolted, and the government started asking questions. They started demanding answers to why, when the loonie was at par, why they were still paying anywhere from 1.2-1.5x as much.
The first retailers to do so were Best Buy/Future Shop who basically started matching US pricing, realizing that big ticket items would make it more affordable to go the US to buy. The prices started dropping and it's no longer worth going to the US to pick it up - it can even cost more after shipping and customs and duties and other fees. The only reason to shop in the US the expanded selection. After this, most other retailers started doing the same thing.
The industries which are still failing this are the books and toys, where the Canadian price still has a premium. Amazon.ca, while not as good as Amazon.com fixes the first issue, and Wal-mart fixes the second )when you get them on sale).
Australians - do what Canada did - revolt and start demanding answers.
Actually, it doesn't work that way. No employee can jump in and be immediately productive - there's always a ramp up time. It could be simple things like where's where your office is, bathroom is here, etc. all the way to here's how you check out source code, what code review process you have, where to install the software you need, etc.
It usually takes a few weeks before the employee is fully productive and not bothering anyone every 5 minutes on how to do something. Especially if you have an IT department that controls everything, where getting the basics installed basically mean an off day in making the IT request, waiting for IT to respond, waiting for IT to do it, etc.
And then there's the ramp up time to the project - understand the source code, building, running, where specs and test plans are, running some basic tests, etc.
All this costs time and money, and every new employee has to be re-taught. By letting the employee walk out the door, this one-time startup process must be repeated, and in the end, it can really cost $20,000 all said and done between the employee diddling about to all the lost time and productivity in asking "how do I do X?". It can't be swept under the floor because it's required training.
It's just like customers - it's cheaper to keep an existing customer than to get new ones. It's cheaper to keep an existing employee than to have to train a new one up (and the associate risks as well). Plus, in the last few days, said employee before giving notice may very well be unproductive as they're job hunting and other stuff.
Well, you can't really buy MPEG-LA. They just offer a license of the patents in h.264 depending on use (consumer amateur use, professional use, etc).
You are, however, free to NOT use MPEG-LA and implement your own h.264 stuff. You just go and license each patent individually from every company. Of course, the general time and cost of doing so is rather prohibitive since you're going to be dealing with dozens of companies and hundreds of patents and individual terms and conditions on the use of each one. It's why MPEG-LA exists - so everyone who wants to use those standards can go to one place, and license them all at once under FRAND type rules (very handy if you're a competitor - the MPEG-LA will license to you, but the individual company may refuse).
An alternative is like the 3G stuff, where everyone who wants to make a phone has to go every company and license patents seperately. The only rule governing it is that all patents must be licensed under FRAND rules, but you have to go to each company and license them. At least though, the various organizations are enforcing FRAND-ness.
XP supports h.264 just fine. You can get lots of h.264 decoders and encoders for XP. It's just that Microsoft hasn't extended licensing of h.264 to XP (it costs money).
The DRM thing is a non-issue. "Protected Path" is a DRM technology for use in specific use cases - e.g., playing back Blu-Ray movies, where a software playback app MUST use measures to protect the stream. So if you want to play back Blu-Ray, you need Vista or Win7.
Heck, XP plays h.264 just fine - if you ever view YouTube videos in 720p or 1080p (and sometimes 480p) YouTube is sending you an h.264 stream.
h.264 has nothing to do with copyrights - it's just that the algorithm uses a lot of patented technologies and it's the patents that require paying royalties to use (you can make agreements with every patent holder, or just pay a flat fee to the MPEG-LA). The mateiral encoded in h.264 is copyrighted.
So an XP user has at least three ways to play back an h.264 video without spending a dime. First would be Flash player which includes h.264 support for videos. Second is iTunes/QuickTime which provides its own h.264 decoder for free. Third is to install VLC.
I do like their VPN solutions.
They have "clientless" VPN solutions (you connect via https to the VPN server and access everything through that - you can RDP, SSH (I think) and access fileshares from your web browser. This gets extended with NetExtender that takes that HTTPS connection and turns it into a full blown VPN (ssl-vpn).
It's really useful at places where the only ports you can send traffic through are 80 and 443. Heck, one place actively denies all other ports - you get connection resets over just timeouts.
Or to do what ensures that the first hose continues to flow freely. Google's basically the only company left if you want to do online ads, having gobbled up large chunks of the market. (They're simultaneously purveyors of the best online ads (AdWords) and the worst (popunders/flash/etc from Doubleclick). They own the mobile market ad space (Apple's got a token offering in iAds), and all the other projects like Google+ and Chrome are just enhanced methods for Google to try to sell more ads. Google+ by "getting to know you better" (like the unified privacy policy), Chrome to seek out how people use the web to enhance appeal of ads.
Anyhow - has Google gone away from AdWords? I seem to see less of them these days and more of the Doubleclick style ads.
Of course, the irony in all this is a vast interdependency of companies on each other. Google needs Apple, for example. Not just because iOS users buy apps loaded with AdMob ads, but because AdMob only survives under Google's control while Apple hangs onto iAds (the only way Google was allowed to by AdMob was because Apple announced iAds a few months earlier)
I suppose the redeeming quality is Google is taking the long-term view. Advertising isn't going away anytime soon, and Google's the largest online advertising company on the planet.
Some long shots Google is doing definitely help in that respect. Self-driving cars, for example, would allow the now-passenger to do more stuff, perhaps see more billboards, printed ads, or go online and see more ads that way. Or outfitting a city with fiber - by becoming an ISP, they're setting up a goldmine opportunity to analyze traffic patterns at the user level to better tailor ads and see where traffic goes. Even if all Google logs is the IP address of the website you visit, that information can be quite valuable.
The US does want free trade though. It wants free trade that benefits itself exclusively. The whole goal is to be as protectionist as possible, but allow token free trade that benefits it. For example, by allowing US companies to sell to other countries freely, but putting up roadblocks when other countries try to sell their goods in the US. The US benefits because its companies are selling more, while being protected from being undercut in other markets by what that country tries to sell the US.
Got that right. Remember the Industry Canada wireless calculator? No?
Basically it was an online tool that helped consumers figure out the best deal on their cellphone by letting them compare apples with apples.
Just over a month ago, the Harper Government killed it. Not that it was overbudget or anything - it was in beta and apparently worked *really* well and was basically due to be unveiled. All the people who beta tested it agreed it was a very useful tool.
Naturally, the big 3 were very upset, because all the new budget carriers were showing up as the cheapest while they were solidly at the bottom consistently.
You mean, "pay less".
You see, the end goal is for you to pay the same bill you do, AND tack on another $15/month ?cellphone subsidy fee" to it. Sure you pay less once the phone's paid off, but while you were on contract, the carriers were getting an extra $15 from that "fee" that they would've had to eat from your plan.
They aren't going to change their plans to remove the subsidy. They were planning on having it as another fee they could charge to even greater profit.
I find that hard to believe, unless the phone wasn't receiving service. If the phone had service, the SIM card will have a record with the carrier (because the service is tied to the SIM). Thus they can track the SIM to the owner. Hell, if the SIM was at one time activated, then there would be a record of who the customer was at the time it was usable.
The only way there's no record is if the owner never activated the SIM, and bought the iPhone from the Apple store (otherwise the carrier can look up the IMEI from sales records).
And no, the Apple store won't help you out since it requires a police report from the owner for them to be the slightest bit interested.
Methinks you got a hot phone that was ditched.
Well, you switch it to vibrate. There's a nice convenient toggle switch on the side (right beside the volume button) that brings the phone into and out of vibrate mode.
Of all the other patented things other phones could copy from the iPhone, I never understood why they copy that switch. It's handy, you can flip it without looking at your phone (when you enter silence mode, it buzzes the vibrator. When you exit, it does nothing, so if you aren't sure, a quick flip can tell you). If your phone accidentally rings, you can flip it and not bother anyone else or fumble with the phone, etc.
Considering Steve Jobs' attitude towards buttons and other protrusions, the fact that the switch survives means quite a lot.
Problem is, "sell support" doesn't go very far when the "buyers" are cheapskates.
Stallman's model works fine back in the day when computer operators were revered people, but falls down flat these days when 90%+ of computers are used to accomplish some task, and those knowledgable enough to fix/understand computers are tiny minority. The majority want computers that work, but they also don't want to pay for it.
If you don't believe me, tell your family member to go to Geek Squad to get their computer fixed. They'll balk at the $40/hour charges, and see no reason why you can't spend the 20 hours it takes to fix up their computer.
And if you're trying to do computer support, be prepared to have your clients spend hours dickering over every hour you charge. You billed 10 hours, they'll ding it down to 9 and waste 4 hours of your time doing so.
And no, it doesn't matter what profession the client is - lawyers will dicker just as hard (or harder) over that hour that they charge $200/hr for.
Fat chance, because those big names are also controlled by the MPAA, and the DVD CCA will simply say their systems were disabled because of "piracy fears" and "you DO want your royalty cheques, right?".
Or maybe that's why the DVD Forum pulled the license - the MPAA exerted pressure to disallow "ripping" even if it was impossible to move the image to another system. In which case again, the MPAA controls those big names and any future work they can get.
Exactly.
Gizmodo was good when Brian Lam salvaged it years ago, but since the whole iPhone 4 thing, all the original writers have left and what's left over is basically crap. The site redesign in 2011 didn't help one thing - it turned a usable site into some javascript monstrosity that makes it completely useless to open in tabs. So now you have a formerly popular site that's bleeding visitors because the competition has better site design, and writers who basically write crap to get pageviews.
In the struggle for page views, the writing and article quality has nosedived to the point where the crowd that's left over is made up of trolls and such.
So what happened was the whole iPhone 4 deal, which led to writers being chatised for milking it. An awful site redesign that basically makes the site unusable, and the subsequent bleeding of visitors that leads to the writers leaving (all the original writers have gone), and now you've got crap attracting crap.
Contrast this to say, Ars Technica, who has had writer turnover, but in general tries to maintain a high-quality site and proper journalistic measures, and you find their comment section very well respected.
Basically - you reap what you sow. The core audience of Gizmodo departed after the iPhone 4 fiasco and the site redesign. Traffic went down and writers (who are paid by page views) started getting desperate and put up any old crap to get page views. People who read the articles and found them low quality end up leaving low quality comments.
Online comment systems work just fine. It's Gawker thta's the problem.
Charities do get special consideration by Visa/MC - they often have very special deals where Visa/MC will NOT charge them transaction fees (lets Visa/MC "donate" the charges), nor other fees for accepting credit cards (most charities would probably wither off and die if they couldn't accept credit cards, so the credit card companies offer them this in exchange for tax receipts most likely).
So monetarily, most charities will not be penalized. They will be penalized in that someone has to go over the chargeback paperwork and handle it, which means one less volunteer helping out and increased administration costs for the charity.