Apple's hallmark is to rush a product to market without thoroughly testing it. Hence, all the technical and usability problems since Jobs took over on the second go round, and, hence, the classic line by Apple apologists, "Never buy the first iteration of an Apple product."
It's usually a good rule do thumb to never buy the first iteration of any computer software or hardware product at all, especially software.
The rest of your post is either blatant trolling or a symptom of some psychological disorder and so not worthy of a response.
For requiring me to take a course on Victorian-era English literature as part of my engineering degree graduation requirements? By forcing me to take the course, they literally filled my brain up with useless stuff which will accelerate the onset of age-related dementia.
No, that's not useless. If you were paying attention it may have forced you to learn some proper English. I'm not sure if the summary headline fits the article content completely. TFA seems to be trying to say (caveat. I'm not a psychologist and I only read TFA and parts of the paper) is something to the effect that for example: in the old days when there was no internet or the net was more limited than it is now, you had to solve your own problems and that stimulates your brain and 'trains' it. A person who has the internet at his/her disposal and solves most of their problems by hitting experts-exchange, stack overflow or some such web and benefits from hard thinking done by others does not have their brain stimulated in the same way because they don't have to remember this stuff and don't figure it out on their own. They can just book mark it whereas 20 years ago you 'd better write yourself a private howto once you solved your conundrum in case you ran into this again five years and that makes things concerning the problem it self stick a bit more than hitting [Ctrl]+[D]. If you just use search engines to search for solutions to problems the information retained probably has more (though not exclusively) to do with how to find the solution than how to figure the problem out by yourself. Basically if you are hit by tough problems when you are younger and forced solve them yourself and to exercise your brain it means that when you get older it takes you longer to remember things because you have to 'search a bigger database'. not because your brain is getting slower. Furthermore if your short term memory and analytic abilities decline with age you can make up for it with experience, expertise and 'brain training' received in your youth. Finally, as you age, you also gain the ability to notice subtle side effects of doing something as you get older that a younger person does not notice as a result of your brain being trained more and having more experience. Something like:
Younger person: If we connect this doohickey with that thingemabomb we get effect X. Older person: Hmmmmm..... Younger person: (impatiently annoyed) What! Older person: Well, that's true but if somebody then presses button A while dohickey is in state Y the thingemabob will short out. Younger person: (slightly embarrased) Oh, yeah right.
Wow, did you really not just notice the tremendous irony in your black-and-white portrayal of the situation...in an article that says black-and-white portrayals are precisely the problem?
Is it really? In this debate the black position is complete surveillance 24 hours a day 7 days a week of every citizen and everything he/she does and controlling what information the citizenry has access to at all times (in the name of national security and protecting the children of course). The white position is a complete end to all surveillance activity. Neither position is attainable, the question is simply where do we end up when the fight between black and white ends and the dust settles? Will it be dark-grey or off-white? It all depends on how fiercely the architects of the modern police state such as the NSA/FBI/CIA/MI6/MI5/Specialbranch are opposed by the citizenry... i.e. it all depends on how apathetic the citizenry is.
The phone design is very similar to Galaxy phones, while the UI reminds us of Windows Phone 8.
Apple will undoubtedly claim to have invented some obscure detail, and insist that the product be banned here in the States. Unless, of course, it's a flop... Apple doesn't design flops.
You are really grasping at straws if you want to start an Apple hate frenzy over this. According to TFA summary it would appear that it's more likely Microsoft's turn to sue Samsung's ass off over copycatting the Windows 8 UI (and that's assuming that Microsoft will even bother).
"I saved it on one drive." "Which drive did you save it on?"
"On my one drive." "Like your C drive?"
"No, my One Drive to rule them all, One Drive to find them, One Drive to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. In the Land of Microsoft where the Shadows lie."
Oh come on. Guilt by association has always been a part of the scenery.
That does not make it OK. It used to be that royalty and the aristocracy could walk all over commoners until a bunch of rag-tag colonists in the Americas got fed up with it, a few years later the French took this idea to the next level an culled their elites. Let's hope it won't come to that this time but eventually people will get fed up with the surveillance society and march on NSA HQ and Thames House like the East Germans did in the 80s except this time they won't be chanting 'I want my Stasi file!', they'll be chanting something like 'Delete my surveillance profile and tear down the cameras!'
absolutely not. 5% false positive is terrible, and will create a lot of negative feelings for the platform. imagine a teacher trying to use skype with a class of 20 or more. it would be very rare if someone didn't get falsely flagged as a bot.
If we are to abstain from the use of any detection technology that has false positives we'd never use any of them at all since every detection technology has false positives and just for the record 5% is pretty good for any algorithm trying to detect complex patterns in large amounts of data. The effect that this will likely have is that Skype will hand much of the fraud detection over to the automated tools so that the case workers assigned to the fraud division can concentrate more on investigating individual cases rather than manually weeding through mountains of data trying to ferret out fraudsters like they are doing now (at least that's what I'd do). The fraudsters' main adversary will no longer be the investigators, they'll be playing cat and mouse with detection algorithm design team. As long as Skype filters any hit generated by this thing through humans I won't be very worried.
Your presidential oath is finished by a beautiful "So help me God", as is the citizenship oath, and every coin and bank note feature a the famous "In god we trust". So I really don't know what you are talking about...
The degree of separation between church and state in the USA is in theory guaranteed by the first amendment to the US constitution, specifically the 'Establishment Clause' which has generally been understood to prohibit congress from designating a national religion and to forbid the US government from preferring one religion over the other. In reality, however, the extent of this separation has been the subject of fierce debate. It is clear from the private correspondence of US founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson that they wanted "a wall of separation between church and State". Even so there are powerful forces at work trying to minimise the height and thickness of that wall and as you pointed out they have already chiseled a few gates into it.
Obama is a very smart man. He's a scholar who taught Constitutional Law for twelve years. He campaigned on a reduction of surveillance and spying. Then, once President, he did a 180.
Something happened to make him change his mind. Was he corrupted by power? Are the monied interests that powerful that they made him deny what he'd been teaching for years? Or is there something else afoot?
He's a politician and 180 degree reversals are a standard ploy in that business. Why is everybody so surprised about that?
This type of reuse of ex-military kit quite often happens, although not normally so long after it was originally used. I'm not sure if it's still running on the same engines but I know that the Lovell Radio Telescope at Jodrell Bank (UK), at one time the largest movable dish telescope, originally had a lot of parts cannibalised from engines taken from two battleships. Lovell, the maker of the telescope, had also previously been using quite a lot of reclaimed military kit for his astronomical observations before the actual radio telescope was built.
After WWII German Würzburg 'Riese' GCI radar antennas were repurposed for radio astronomy. Some of them remained in use at least into the 1980s. I wonder if any are still in use?
Because we have no economic framework that could accommodate such a situation. It doesn't matter if machines can do all the work is there is no means to ensure access to their produce. Economics as we practice now is entirely centered around the labor market: People work for wages, use the wages to buy things, and producing those things pays wages back to the workers. Money circulates, everyone gets fed and clothed.
Take away the jobs, and what are you left with? A few factory owners swimming in food and products they cannot sell because no-one has any money to buy it, and a load of ex-workers who have no money to buy even the essentials of life.
Wouldn't it just end like Atlas Shrugged? All the truly valuable rationally selfish wealthy people who own the robots move to Galt's Gulch while remaining useless part of humanity, that wasn't bored do death by Galt's 70 page speech, perishes in the chaos and wars caused by the absence of the rationally selfish. The world would then be repopulated by the rationally selfish living in luxury and pampered by their armies of robots. Let's just hope that the rationally selfish never succumb to the temptation to make their robots smart enough to read Atlas Shrugged and Das Kapital and figure out that they don't really need their rationally selfish masters for anything except perhaps to liposuction off their fat so that it can be used as a lubricant... but that's another story... I recommend watching the movie... although, in the best spirit of rational selfishness, you should pirate it.
It is generally thought that Paranthropus bosei is an/offshoot/ of the line that ultimately led to modern man, not a direct ancestor. We share ancestors, but do not descend from his line. The two lines diverged about 3 million years ago to follow their own evolutionary paths - homo towards an omnivorous diet and world domination, panthropus to munching on nuts and extinction.
He was a relative, not an ancestor.
Plus it is pretty iffy to base too many conclusions on a handful of skeletons (or in the case of such old homonids it's usually skeletal fragments). If archaeologists of the future only had five 20th century human skeletons available that were all found in the general area that used to be New York they might conclude that most humans of the 20th century were over weight and lived off a meat rich diet. If those five skeletons came from the horn of Africa they would conclude that during the 20th century the human race suffered from frequent famines. If the five skeletons came from the graveyard of a vegan colony they'd conclude humans of the 20th century were predominantly vegan. If the discoveries in Dmanisi, Georgia have taught us anything it is that one should not base too many sweeping conclusions on a handful of samples. http://rt.com/news/skull-homo-georgia-species-373/
It's not just about prices... from that Forbes article:
An overwhelming majority – some 84% – of the more than 1,000 Germans interviewed for a recent survey expressed support for Germany’s plan to shift the lion’s share of the nation’s electricity supply to renewable energy over the next decade.
What gives? How has such a radical energy policy remained so popular in the face of rising costs?
Take John Farrell’s recent treatment of the subject in Renewable Energy World:
Support for Germany’s renewable energy quest isn’t about cost of energy, but about the opportunity to own a slice of the energy system . . . Nearly half of the country’s 63,000 megawatts of wind and solar power is owned locally, and these energy owners care as much about the persistence of renewable energy they own as they do about the energy bill they pay. Not only do these German energy owners reduce their own net cost of energy, every dollar diverted from a distant multinational utility company multiplies throughout their local economy . . . Three-quarters of Germans want to maintain a focus on ‘citizen-managed, decentralized renewable energy.’
Which banks, please? Can we please have a list of which banks fail basic programming???
While I agree a list would be nice, please don't spread lies that this is "basic" programming. If it were, there wouldn't be so many issues.
Hardening and securing an application against sophisticated attacks (yes, I know not all of the attacks are 'sophisticated') is a non-trivial piece of work requiring expert knowledge and experience in security programming. I doubt you could do it. I doubt most people here could do it. I consider myself an expert software developer and I doubt I could do it.
More to the point, spreading the myth that this is "basic" is exactly the sort of attitude that allows these practices to continue. When Joe Graduate hears how "basic" and "easy" this securing software stuff is, from people like you that have no clue, they go off and do it themselves. It's easy, right? Rather than respecting this field for what it is - highly specialized and difficult work - the exact problem that needs solving is perpetuated by your snarky and uninformed attitude.
So for everybody's sake, just cut the condescending attitude. Thanks.
Plus let's not make life any easier for thieves than it already is by providing them with a list of targets. The banks who have such crappy apps may deserve being taught a lesson but the customers whose bank accounts end up being raided don't since they can't be expected to have every bank they do business with vetted by a team of security and cryptographic experts.
The government already has access to my bank account. They don't need to break into my computer to get it.
They'd be interested in your password though. Either in case you re-use it elsewhere or to help them guess the type of passwords you'd use for other accounts.
Why would they need a password? Judging from what we have learned about NSA standard practice all they have to do is show up at your bank, twist some arms, drop the words "We're post 911 here, are you telling us you are refusing to contribute to national security?" and your bank will set up a dedicated back-door that allows them to access any data they want.
The sad part is this hurts British people the most, especially those with foreign spouses. I can't get a visa for mine at the moment. Essentially my country thinks I am some kind of scammer because I didn't choose to marry another UK subject. In the end it may drive me away from this country to live with her abroad, meaning the country will lose my skills, my contributions in tax and my business.
All this because the Daily Mail hates everyone, especially foreigners.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill:
In politics xenophobia is a good starter but a bad sticker.
The British should heed that advice. The guy whom Winston directed the original quote at didn't listen and things ended pretty badly for him.
When I traveled to Europe, met foreign exchange students, or engaged with family friends who were from other countries, I was consistently impressed by their casual grasp of mathematics, history, and philosophy.
It is worth noting that in my experience, "foreign exchange students" do not accurately represent the overall population. Average and below-average students are far more likely to stay where they are.
Your family friends are probably not a random/average sample either.
For what it is worth it's not exclusively the best and the brightest that sign up for being exchange students in the USA. A whole lot of them are average specimens who sign up mainly because they are members of "Fanclub USA", because American students throw fantastic keg-parties and because they have Cheerleaders over there (who turn out to be a bit less cute in real life than they are in the movies). A significant proportion of the exchange student traffic in the other direction seem to be male USians who signed up because they heard that French/German/Swedish girls are hot, or female USians ones who think French/Italian/Spanish guys are hunky and more 'sensitive' than their US counterparts (they are not, they're just better at pretending).
The problems with liberals and leftists in the U.S. were they were pretty much all pussies and they couldn't counterpunch with a master like Hoover. Hoover also had the power that comes from knowledge, and he had more knowledge than anyone thanks to all the files he had the FBI build on all of his enemies. If you think the NSA surveillence state isn't dangerous just look back at what Hoover did with a tiny fraction of the information the NSA has.
Hoover had an entire security service and the state backing him up. When you are a political organisation being persecuted by the FBI which is being backed to the hilt by the state it self, 'punching back' is a lot easier to say than it is to do.
There is also a website with the implementations of the Perl cookbook in a bunch of languages: http://pleac.sourceforge.net/
Where performance is concerned I'd go for something like the Debian Benchmarks game. The time taken for this benchmark task, by this toy program, with this programming language implementation, with these options, on this computer, with these workloads. With enough people participating in the pissing contest you eventually get things optimized to hell and the wheat is separated from the chaff.
As for productivity, that's harder since this is highly subjective. While you can generally postulate that coding in non typed scripting languages where you don't have to worry about memory management is going to be faster than coding in a typed, manually memory managed language like C. But what happens when you compare more similar languages like Python vs. Perl? Your productivity in a language is highly dependent on your experience with it, how fast you are at typing, how intuitive the syntax is to you.... etc... But different programmers can have different issues with languages. In Perl for example the syntactic freedom can actually lead some programmers to write bugs bugs into their code because they are used to languages with a more nailed down syntax.
So, does this mean that Slashdot's resident patent critics will now now stop poking fun at companies who patent rounded rectangles and upgrade to three dimensional patent joking by making fun of companies who sue other companies over regularly spaced sequences of rounded boxes? I for one would welcome a change. That rounded rectangles joke is getting so old it has grown a long white beard , plus 3D patent joking is just way cooler that 2D patent jokes.
I'm sorry, but I have no sympathy for people who take jobs that largely consist of annoying people. And that includes all cold-calling. We should do nothing to make their job easier and everything to make their job harder.
If this was a telemarketer I'd agree with you, those people can be terribly annoying. But in my experience my telco's support centre staff are not there to annoy me. The handful of times they have cold-called me over the years it was to offer me more economical plans for my mobile phone and my iPad. As it turned out they were right, given my usage pattern I was actually paying less with the plan they recommended.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they don't.
Apple's hallmark is to rush a product to market without thoroughly testing it. Hence, all the technical and usability problems since Jobs took over on the second go round, and, hence, the classic line by Apple apologists, "Never buy the first iteration of an Apple product."
It's usually a good rule do thumb to never buy the first iteration of any computer software or hardware product at all, especially software.
The rest of your post is either blatant trolling or a symptom of some psychological disorder and so not worthy of a response.
You do know that 25 KM is not a long distance, it's only 17 miles if you're not competent with metric measurements.
And only 15.5 miles if you are competent with Metric to English conversions.
Arrr... but at sea we use nautical miles, ye clueless landlubber.
For requiring me to take a course on Victorian-era English literature as part of my engineering degree graduation requirements? By forcing me to take the course, they literally filled my brain up with useless stuff which will accelerate the onset of age-related dementia.
No, that's not useless. If you were paying attention it may have forced you to learn some proper English. I'm not sure if the summary headline fits the article content completely. TFA seems to be trying to say (caveat. I'm not a psychologist and I only read TFA and parts of the paper) is something to the effect that for example: in the old days when there was no internet or the net was more limited than it is now, you had to solve your own problems and that stimulates your brain and 'trains' it. A person who has the internet at his/her disposal and solves most of their problems by hitting experts-exchange, stack overflow or some such web and benefits from hard thinking done by others does not have their brain stimulated in the same way because they don't have to remember this stuff and don't figure it out on their own. They can just book mark it whereas 20 years ago you 'd better write yourself a private howto once you solved your conundrum in case you ran into this again five years and that makes things concerning the problem it self stick a bit more than hitting [Ctrl]+[D]. If you just use search engines to search for solutions to problems the information retained probably has more (though not exclusively) to do with how to find the solution than how to figure the problem out by yourself. Basically if you are hit by tough problems when you are younger and forced solve them yourself and to exercise your brain it means that when you get older it takes you longer to remember things because you have to 'search a bigger database'. not because your brain is getting slower. Furthermore if your short term memory and analytic abilities decline with age you can make up for it with experience, expertise and 'brain training' received in your youth. Finally, as you age, you also gain the ability to notice subtle side effects of doing something as you get older that a younger person does not notice as a result of your brain being trained more and having more experience. Something like:
Younger person: If we connect this doohickey with that thingemabomb we get effect X.
Older person: Hmmmmm.....
Younger person: (impatiently annoyed) What!
Older person: Well, that's true but if somebody then presses button A while dohickey is in state Y the thingemabob will short out.
Younger person: (slightly embarrased) Oh, yeah right.
Wow, did you really not just notice the tremendous irony in your black-and-white portrayal of the situation...in an article that says black-and-white portrayals are precisely the problem?
Is it really? In this debate the black position is complete surveillance 24 hours a day 7 days a week of every citizen and everything he/she does and controlling what information the citizenry has access to at all times (in the name of national security and protecting the children of course). The white position is a complete end to all surveillance activity. Neither position is attainable, the question is simply where do we end up when the fight between black and white ends and the dust settles? Will it be dark-grey or off-white? It all depends on how fiercely the architects of the modern police state such as the NSA/FBI/CIA/MI6/MI5/Specialbranch are opposed by the citizenry ... i.e. it all depends on how apathetic the citizenry is.
The phone design is very similar to Galaxy phones, while the UI reminds us of Windows Phone 8.
Apple will undoubtedly claim to have invented some obscure detail, and insist that the product be banned here in the States. Unless, of course, it's a flop... Apple doesn't design flops.
You are really grasping at straws if you want to start an Apple hate frenzy over this. According to TFA summary it would appear that it's more likely Microsoft's turn to sue Samsung's ass off over copycatting the Windows 8 UI (and that's assuming that Microsoft will even bother).
I can hear this now:
"I saved it on one drive."
"Which drive did you save it on?"
"On my one drive."
"Like your C drive?"
"No, my One Drive to rule them all, One Drive to find them,
One Drive to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
In the Land of Microsoft where the Shadows lie."
MWUHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
There, now it's been properly Slashdotified.
Oh come on. Guilt by association has always been a part of the scenery.
That does not make it OK. It used to be that royalty and the aristocracy could walk all over commoners until a bunch of rag-tag colonists in the Americas got fed up with it, a few years later the French took this idea to the next level an culled their elites. Let's hope it won't come to that this time but eventually people will get fed up with the surveillance society and march on NSA HQ and Thames House like the East Germans did in the 80s except this time they won't be chanting 'I want my Stasi file!', they'll be chanting something like 'Delete my surveillance profile and tear down the cameras!'
absolutely not. 5% false positive is terrible, and will create a lot of negative feelings for the platform.
imagine a teacher trying to use skype with a class of 20 or more. it would be very rare if someone
didn't get falsely flagged as a bot.
If we are to abstain from the use of any detection technology that has false positives we'd never use any of them at all since every detection technology has false positives and just for the record 5% is pretty good for any algorithm trying to detect complex patterns in large amounts of data. The effect that this will likely have is that Skype will hand much of the fraud detection over to the automated tools so that the case workers assigned to the fraud division can concentrate more on investigating individual cases rather than manually weeding through mountains of data trying to ferret out fraudsters like they are doing now (at least that's what I'd do). The fraudsters' main adversary will no longer be the investigators, they'll be playing cat and mouse with detection algorithm design team. As long as Skype filters any hit generated by this thing through humans I won't be very worried.
Cheap hot air is actually great if you have a gas turbine and a generator and can sell the resulting electricity.
So can we fit one to the capitol building? Lots of cheap hot air is going to waste there at the moment.
One sheep's "blasphemy" is another man's truth.
Government and law should stay the hell out of religious debates.
Historically its' been the other way around hasn't it? It's religion that had trouble staying the hell out of government and law.
What separation ?
Your presidential oath is finished by a beautiful "So help me God", as is the citizenship oath, and every coin and bank note feature a the famous "In god we trust". So I really don't know what you are talking about...
The degree of separation between church and state in the USA is in theory guaranteed by the first amendment to the US constitution, specifically the 'Establishment Clause' which has generally been understood to prohibit congress from designating a national religion and to forbid the US government from preferring one religion over the other. In reality, however, the extent of this separation has been the subject of fierce debate. It is clear from the private correspondence of US founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson that they wanted "a wall of separation between church and State". Even so there are powerful forces at work trying to minimise the height and thickness of that wall and as you pointed out they have already chiseled a few gates into it.
That's what scares me the most.
Obama is a very smart man. He's a scholar who taught Constitutional Law for twelve years. He campaigned on a reduction of surveillance and spying. Then, once President, he did a 180.
Something happened to make him change his mind. Was he corrupted by power? Are the monied interests that powerful that they made him deny what he'd been teaching for years? Or is there something else afoot?
He's a politician and 180 degree reversals are a standard ploy in that business. Why is everybody so surprised about that?
This type of reuse of ex-military kit quite often happens, although not normally so long after it was originally used. I'm not sure if it's still running on the same engines but I know that the Lovell Radio Telescope at Jodrell Bank (UK), at one time the largest movable dish telescope, originally had a lot of parts cannibalised from engines taken from two battleships. Lovell, the maker of the telescope, had also previously been using quite a lot of reclaimed military kit for his astronomical observations before the actual radio telescope was built.
After WWII German Würzburg 'Riese' GCI radar antennas were repurposed for radio astronomy. Some of them remained in use at least into the 1980s. I wonder if any are still in use?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Würzburg_radar
http://www.astron.nl/~leeuwen/video/dloo/JAHH9p3.pdf
Because we have no economic framework that could accommodate such a situation. It doesn't matter if machines can do all the work is there is no means to ensure access to their produce. Economics as we practice now is entirely centered around the labor market: People work for wages, use the wages to buy things, and producing those things pays wages back to the workers. Money circulates, everyone gets fed and clothed.
Take away the jobs, and what are you left with? A few factory owners swimming in food and products they cannot sell because no-one has any money to buy it, and a load of ex-workers who have no money to buy even the essentials of life.
Wouldn't it just end like Atlas Shrugged? All the truly valuable rationally selfish wealthy people who own the robots move to Galt's Gulch while remaining useless part of humanity, that wasn't bored do death by Galt's 70 page speech, perishes in the chaos and wars caused by the absence of the rationally selfish. The world would then be repopulated by the rationally selfish living in luxury and pampered by their armies of robots. Let's just hope that the rationally selfish never succumb to the temptation to make their robots smart enough to read Atlas Shrugged and Das Kapital and figure out that they don't really need their rationally selfish masters for anything except perhaps to liposuction off their fat so that it can be used as a lubricant ... but that's another story... I recommend watching the movie ... although, in the best spirit of rational selfishness, you should pirate it.
A somewhat minor nitpick, but...
It is generally thought that Paranthropus bosei is an /offshoot/ of the line that ultimately led to modern man, not a direct ancestor. We share ancestors, but do not descend from his line. The two lines diverged about 3 million years ago to follow their own evolutionary paths - homo towards an omnivorous diet and world domination, panthropus to munching on nuts and extinction.
He was a relative, not an ancestor.
Plus it is pretty iffy to base too many conclusions on a handful of skeletons (or in the case of such old homonids it's usually skeletal fragments). If archaeologists of the future only had five 20th century human skeletons available that were all found in the general area that used to be New York they might conclude that most humans of the 20th century were over weight and lived off a meat rich diet. If those five skeletons came from the horn of Africa they would conclude that during the 20th century the human race suffered from frequent famines. If the five skeletons came from the graveyard of a vegan colony they'd conclude humans of the 20th century were predominantly vegan. If the discoveries in Dmanisi, Georgia have taught us anything it is that one should not base too many sweeping conclusions on a handful of samples.
http://rt.com/news/skull-homo-georgia-species-373/
These are wholesale prices. Once you add in VAT and the EU's subsidy taxes the actual retail prices are quite a bit higher.
The prices also vary quite a bit from country to country, and within countries.
http://energy.globaldata.com/media-center/press-releases/power-and-resources/europe-paying-more-for-electricity-than-us-states-globaldata-consultant-with-dramatic-differences-seen-between-countries
http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2013/10/27/berlins-ballooning-electricity-rates-become-highest-in-europe/
It's not just about prices ... from that Forbes article:
An overwhelming majority – some 84% – of the more than 1,000 Germans interviewed for a recent survey expressed support for Germany’s plan to shift the lion’s share of the nation’s electricity supply to renewable energy over the next decade.
What gives? How has such a radical energy policy remained so popular in the face of rising costs?
Take John Farrell’s recent treatment of the subject in Renewable Energy World:
Support for Germany’s renewable energy quest isn’t about cost of energy, but about the opportunity to own a slice of the energy system . . . Nearly half of the country’s 63,000 megawatts of wind and solar power is owned locally, and these energy owners care as much about the persistence of renewable energy they own as they do about the energy bill they pay. Not only do these German energy owners reduce their own net cost of energy, every dollar diverted from a distant multinational utility company multiplies throughout their local economy . . . Three-quarters of Germans want to maintain a focus on ‘citizen-managed, decentralized renewable energy.’
Which banks, please? Can we please have a list of which banks fail basic programming???
While I agree a list would be nice, please don't spread lies that this is "basic" programming. If it were, there wouldn't be so many issues.
Hardening and securing an application against sophisticated attacks (yes, I know not all of the attacks are 'sophisticated') is a non-trivial piece of work requiring expert knowledge and experience in security programming. I doubt you could do it. I doubt most people here could do it. I consider myself an expert software developer and I doubt I could do it.
More to the point, spreading the myth that this is "basic" is exactly the sort of attitude that allows these practices to continue. When Joe Graduate hears how "basic" and "easy" this securing software stuff is, from people like you that have no clue, they go off and do it themselves. It's easy, right? Rather than respecting this field for what it is - highly specialized and difficult work - the exact problem that needs solving is perpetuated by your snarky and uninformed attitude.
So for everybody's sake, just cut the condescending attitude. Thanks.
Plus let's not make life any easier for thieves than it already is by providing them with a list of targets. The banks who have such crappy apps may deserve being taught a lesson but the customers whose bank accounts end up being raided don't since they can't be expected to have every bank they do business with vetted by a team of security and cryptographic experts.
The government already has access to my bank account. They don't need to break into my computer to get it.
They'd be interested in your password though.
Either in case you re-use it elsewhere or to help them guess the type of passwords you'd use for other accounts.
Why would they need a password? Judging from what we have learned about NSA standard practice all they have to do is show up at your bank, twist some arms, drop the words "We're post 911 here, are you telling us you are refusing to contribute to national security?" and your bank will set up a dedicated back-door that allows them to access any data they want.
The sad part is this hurts British people the most, especially those with foreign spouses. I can't get a visa for mine at the moment. Essentially my country thinks I am some kind of scammer because I didn't choose to marry another UK subject. In the end it may drive me away from this country to live with her abroad, meaning the country will lose my skills, my contributions in tax and my business.
All this because the Daily Mail hates everyone, especially foreigners.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill:
In politics xenophobia is a good starter but a bad sticker.
The British should heed that advice. The guy whom Winston directed the original quote at didn't listen and things ended pretty badly for him.
When I traveled to Europe, met foreign exchange students, or engaged with family friends who were from other countries, I was consistently impressed by their casual grasp of mathematics, history, and philosophy.
It is worth noting that in my experience, "foreign exchange students" do not accurately represent the overall population. Average and below-average students are far more likely to stay where they are.
Your family friends are probably not a random/average sample either.
For what it is worth it's not exclusively the best and the brightest that sign up for being exchange students in the USA. A whole lot of them are average specimens who sign up mainly because they are members of "Fanclub USA", because American students throw fantastic keg-parties and because they have Cheerleaders over there (who turn out to be a bit less cute in real life than they are in the movies). A significant proportion of the exchange student traffic in the other direction seem to be male USians who signed up because they heard that French/German/Swedish girls are hot, or female USians ones who think French/Italian/Spanish guys are hunky and more 'sensitive' than their US counterparts (they are not, they're just better at pretending).
The problems with liberals and leftists in the U.S. were they were pretty much all pussies and they couldn't counterpunch with a master like Hoover. Hoover also had the power that comes from knowledge, and he had more knowledge than anyone thanks to all the files he had the FBI build on all of his enemies. If you think the NSA surveillence state isn't dangerous just look back at what Hoover did with a tiny fraction of the information the NSA has.
Hoover had an entire security service and the state backing him up. When you are a political organisation being persecuted by the FBI which is being backed to the hilt by the state it self, 'punching back' is a lot easier to say than it is to do.
There is already a pretty good collection http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/
There is also a website with the implementations of the Perl cookbook in a bunch of languages: http://pleac.sourceforge.net/
Where performance is concerned I'd go for something like the Debian Benchmarks game. The time taken for this benchmark task, by this toy program, with this programming language implementation, with these options, on this computer, with these workloads. With enough people participating in the pissing contest you eventually get things optimized to hell and the wheat is separated from the chaff.
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/play.php
As for productivity, that's harder since this is highly subjective. While you can generally postulate that coding in non typed scripting languages where you don't have to worry about memory management is going to be faster than coding in a typed, manually memory managed language like C. But what happens when you compare more similar languages like Python vs. Perl? Your productivity in a language is highly dependent on your experience with it, how fast you are at typing, how intuitive the syntax is to you.... etc... But different programmers can have different issues with languages. In Perl for example the syntactic freedom can actually lead some programmers to write bugs bugs into their code because they are used to languages with a more nailed down syntax.
1. Patent all the possible angles of key tilt and pitch on QWERTY keyboards.
Why bother patenting all those permutations? Your process can be simplified into the following:
1. Patent evenly spaced sequences of rounded cubes.
2. Sue everybody.
3. Profit!!
So, does this mean that Slashdot's resident patent critics will now now stop poking fun at companies who patent rounded rectangles and upgrade to three dimensional patent joking by making fun of companies who sue other companies over regularly spaced sequences of rounded boxes? I for one would welcome a change. That rounded rectangles joke is getting so old it has grown a long white beard , plus 3D patent joking is just way cooler that 2D patent jokes.
I'm sorry, but I have no sympathy for people who take jobs that largely consist of annoying people. And that includes all cold-calling. We should do nothing to make their job easier and everything to make their job harder.
If this was a telemarketer I'd agree with you, those people can be terribly annoying. But in my experience my telco's support centre staff are not there to annoy me. The handful of times they have cold-called me over the years it was to offer me more economical plans for my mobile phone and my iPad. As it turned out they were right, given my usage pattern I was actually paying less with the plan they recommended.