... than to constantly use fear of imminent danger to try to scare them into action, and then have nothing happen.
It's classic 'boy who cried wolf'. I don't know what the right way is, but I can't see any evidence that the Doomsday Clock is having any effect (...is there any?)
Interesting idea. I wonder if you could just/say/ you had gun parts to get this check, but not actually carry any so you don't have to deal with the local gun control laws at all no matter where you're flying. (Just take a weird piece of metal pipe or something and say its gun-related.)
That's basically why I think utilities should be public services provided by the government. They're the only ones that can have a planning horizon that extends that far.
No, the Internet used to be ad-free. People used to use the Internet to learn things, and to share information with other people. Until the unwashed massed got to it in the mid 90's, the Internet was wonderful: Email, Gopher, WWW, FTP, etc.
It used to be ad-free because the cost of running those services was trivial and handled by educational and research institutions.
Now the number of services has multiplied (by a lot), both to cater to a wider variety of experiences and a larger number of people.
The cost of running those services has multiplied (by a lot) - no longer just a few kilobytes of plain text, they are rich multimedia experiences including, in many cases gigabytes of high definition video.
I too remember the good old days of the "wonderful" 90s Internet of using lynx to look at web pages and figuring out Trumpet so I could get Mosaic going to look at images. It was fun and exciting and great. But when I compare it to what is possible now - in many cases, completely for free if I'm prepared to sacrifice a tiny part of my attention and privacy (both of which I am conscious of and careful to manage) - well, I'm pretty amazed and what is on offer.
Any time you want to put your hand up to be one of those intelligent, compassionate human beings and provide ad-free wonderful services - please let me know because I'll happily sign up to take advantage of them!
- Research ways to artificially create horn/tusk material in the lab (similar to what was done with pearls), and flood the market with it so that the value of the product plummets.
Is there any reason to artificially create it? Surely people that are buying this stuff are not putting a lot of skeptical analysis into its actual providence. I would actually be surprised if the majority of it that was sold was fake anyway and only the ultra-rich are buying legit stuff.
Just because you mentioned Switzerland, Wuala is a Swiss secure storage mob. Servers in Switzerland, Germany and France. Good focus on client-side encryption.
Free-to-play is an awful model, thrust upon gamers because the publishers have decided it must be so
Free-to-play exists because the developers that have nailed it with a good game are making money hand over first, and everyone else wants to do that too.
Nobody really likes free-to-play. I don't know anyone for whom it is their first choice of gaming platform.
Allow me to introduce myself - I'm someone that likes free-to-play!
I've been playing Dota 2 a lot in the last 6-8 months. It is as often frustrating as hell, but it's great fun having a good game with friends.
It is a free-to-play game; they make revenue selling in-game content like clothes and effects for characters. I am totally, completely uninterested in this, but I am by far the unusual one - most of the people I've played have dropped at least the cost of a normal AAA game buying stuff, and I know a few people who have spent over $100 - no doubt there are even more.
There's the occasional in your face thing trying to get you to buy something - usually just an item expiring notice or something - but they are few and far between. I am easily able to ignore it.
I often spend hours a day playing this and cannot believe they're giving something this awesome away for free. Maybe I'll buy something some day - some of the in-game content looks really visually impressive and it gives your character a unique flavour - I can see why people like doing it, although it seems like playing dress up with virtual dolls.
Some games are more obnoxious about it - I play a bit of Tapped Out, the Simpsons game. It is much more in your face trying to get you to buy stuff. I love the game because I love the Simpsons, but it's just idle pleasure for me and I have no plans to drop money in it either.
(plug: I did a review of Dota 2 which outlines the game for noobs. I encourage people to play it because it's F2P done right, it's extremely well engineered and well featured - and it's great fun.)
Here in Australia, I have heard tell that giving people a bad reference is grounds for a defamation lawsuit. As a result many companies (including mine now) refuse to give a bad reference and will instead only confirm the person was employed there and politely decline to answer any further questions.
Positive references are not a problem. So typically, if you ask for a reference and the person only is prepared to confirm they worked there, I think it's safe to assume bad reference.
How someone could say that with a straight face after 10 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq is beyond me. Instead of being used to export high explosive to the Middle East, maybe some of those delicious tax dollars could have done some good to the actual citizens of the United States?
Maybe instead of the random errant 'nuts' that you describe we should all take a personal responsibility and march on Washington and force our elected officials out of office for not working as agents of the people and therefore violating the entire purpose of their postings.
Do you need to force them? Every four years there's a great opportunity to really change things, and that's just at a head-of-government level - I don't know anything about how Senators or Congressmen are voted in (I'm Australian), but it seems like the ballot box is a good place to start.
It seems (from reading/. and other sites) that even seriously committed Democrats aren't happy with how the last "Change" you were promised worked out. The two party option seems to be killing you guys. Get some independents in there.
To an outsider it just looks like there's no difference at all between the parties, and that everything is set up to try to force people to think "well if I don't vote [Republican|Democrat], then those damn [Democrats|Republicans] will get in!"
Fwiw I know heaps of people here in Australia that have never bought from Amazon; as you speculate the shipping costs remove a lot of the benefits for the casual item. Because of often hyperinflated costs here though it's still sometimes cheaper to pay the huge shipping costs, but most people I know don't bother or end up shopping an an alternative store.
I buy all my books from Book Depository (which iirc is now owned by Amazon, so that may count:) because they she from the UK and somehow have no shipping charges.
If you actually care about this stuff though, you basically have to vote Greens - they (thanks to Senator Ludlam) have a good track record in fighting this sort of thing. The two main parties have shown not only that they're on board, but there's basically no room for compromise.
(Though really, buying them through Amazon instead of direct from Baen is silly - Baen gives you your books in Kindle's.mobi, Nook/everyone else's epub, EBookwise, Microsoft.LIT, Sony Digital Reader, HTML, and as a.rtf file.)
I've bought a bunch of books from Baen - Baen are the only place I've found that I can access easily from Australia that simply will just sell me a.epub file that I download and put wherever I want.
I would love to buy more, but they simply don't have the range.
Citation? I'm not sure that Spain and Italy were accused, but I know that at least so far Portugal and France have not denied the accusations. They refuse to comment on the matter.
The BBC are reporting that "Bolivia accused France, Italy, Spain and Portugal", and that the French foreign ministry has now issued a statement.
Surely that's what legislation like this provides - a useful indicator that your state is prepared to preserve the status quo to protect businesses at the expense of the citizens, so that ultimately cars will just end up costing more in your state because of the extra layer of overhead?
I'd just fly to another state, buy a car and drive it back home. Well, once they finish rolling out their charger station network, anyway:)
Apropos of absolutely nothing, here's some open source alternatives that also offer encryption (YMMV on how robust the encryption is).
- Jitsi (formerly SIP Communicator) is an audio/video and chat communicator that supports protocols such as SIP, XMPP/Jabber as well as a bunch of other protocols. Set up an XMPP server wherever you want and you're done. (I tried to set up Jabber to use with it on a Linux box on the weekend though and hit a few roadblocks, but more tech savvy people can probably power through them.)
- Mumble - voice communications, intended primarily for gaming but will work with anything. Run your own voice servers and clients connect in, a la TeamSpeak/Ventrilo.
- RetroShare - decentralised p2p file sharing and messaging system.
In comparison, an Apple TV box has a much simpler user interface. However, the main problem with Apple TV is that it won't receive cable channels. If I could purchase a set top box that simply displayed a few key channels - then it would be game over.
Fortunately for them (if Canada is anything like Australia and the US), the utter stranglehold control the cable companies seem to have on all the content will ensure that they can continue to peddle their crappy wares and not have to deal with competition.
Our main cable provider here in Australia recently was able to stop iTunes from carrying Season 4 of Game of Thrones. They have some exclusive license to HBO content and are leveraging their weight (I assume by throwing giant bags of money at HBO) to stop anyone getting it unless they sign up for an expensive cable service.
Needless to say, not many people are interested in paying $60-90 a month (the first package I can see with GoT included is $75/mo, but there might be slightly cheaper options) for a bunch of channels that they're not really interested in just to get access to one show. And Australia has the highest rate of GoT piracy in the world.
The difference though (at least from my point of view) is that the tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy brigade never had any actual real evidence to justify their complaints that the government was listening in on everything.
Snowden has flipped that around. It's no longer a suspected conspiracy theory, because it has been proven to exist (... assuming his evidence pans out to be real, which I have no reason to doubt at the moment).
Slashdot Mirror
It's http://baboom.com/ . Sheesh.
Pretty sure the interesting thing isn't that he made an album - it's whether or not he can make a free music service that artists want to use.
... than to constantly use fear of imminent danger to try to scare them into action, and then have nothing happen.
It's classic 'boy who cried wolf'. I don't know what the right way is, but I can't see any evidence that the Doomsday Clock is having any effect (...is there any?)
Interesting idea. I wonder if you could just /say/ you had gun parts to get this check, but not actually carry any so you don't have to deal with the local gun control laws at all no matter where you're flying. (Just take a weird piece of metal pipe or something and say its gun-related.)
Now, getting your robot to heard cats... THAT would be something. Herding Cows is something most people can do in their sleep.
Presumably, that is the point - take a rather boring job that humans have to do, and make it so a robot can do it.
The Tor guys just went through this process of creating deterministic builds to solve this problem. Fascinating process and some more info here: https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2013-June/009257.html
That's basically why I think utilities should be public services provided by the government. They're the only ones that can have a planning horizon that extends that far.
No, the Internet used to be ad-free. People used to use the Internet to learn things, and to share information with other people. Until the unwashed massed got to it in the mid 90's, the Internet was wonderful: Email, Gopher, WWW, FTP, etc.
It used to be ad-free because the cost of running those services was trivial and handled by educational and research institutions.
Now the number of services has multiplied (by a lot), both to cater to a wider variety of experiences and a larger number of people.
The cost of running those services has multiplied (by a lot) - no longer just a few kilobytes of plain text, they are rich multimedia experiences including, in many cases gigabytes of high definition video.
I too remember the good old days of the "wonderful" 90s Internet of using lynx to look at web pages and figuring out Trumpet so I could get Mosaic going to look at images. It was fun and exciting and great. But when I compare it to what is possible now - in many cases, completely for free if I'm prepared to sacrifice a tiny part of my attention and privacy (both of which I am conscious of and careful to manage) - well, I'm pretty amazed and what is on offer.
Any time you want to put your hand up to be one of those intelligent, compassionate human beings and provide ad-free wonderful services - please let me know because I'll happily sign up to take advantage of them!
When are they going to figure out that they're not qualified to make public policy on technology matters?
When we stop voting the same people in, I guess
- Research ways to artificially create horn/tusk material in the lab (similar to what was done with pearls), and flood the market with it so that the value of the product plummets.
Is there any reason to artificially create it? Surely people that are buying this stuff are not putting a lot of skeptical analysis into its actual providence. I would actually be surprised if the majority of it that was sold was fake anyway and only the ultra-rich are buying legit stuff.
Yeh, except in NZ you have to worry about them sending a SWAT squad to your door for copyright infringement issues, a la Kim Dotcom :)
Just because you mentioned Switzerland, Wuala is a Swiss secure storage mob. Servers in Switzerland, Germany and France. Good focus on client-side encryption.
Free-to-play is an awful model, thrust upon gamers because the publishers have decided it must be so
Free-to-play exists because the developers that have nailed it with a good game are making money hand over first, and everyone else wants to do that too.
Nobody really likes free-to-play. I don't know anyone for whom it is their first choice of gaming platform.
Allow me to introduce myself - I'm someone that likes free-to-play!
I've been playing Dota 2 a lot in the last 6-8 months. It is as often frustrating as hell, but it's great fun having a good game with friends.
It is a free-to-play game; they make revenue selling in-game content like clothes and effects for characters. I am totally, completely uninterested in this, but I am by far the unusual one - most of the people I've played have dropped at least the cost of a normal AAA game buying stuff, and I know a few people who have spent over $100 - no doubt there are even more.
There's the occasional in your face thing trying to get you to buy something - usually just an item expiring notice or something - but they are few and far between. I am easily able to ignore it.
I often spend hours a day playing this and cannot believe they're giving something this awesome away for free. Maybe I'll buy something some day - some of the in-game content looks really visually impressive and it gives your character a unique flavour - I can see why people like doing it, although it seems like playing dress up with virtual dolls.
Some games are more obnoxious about it - I play a bit of Tapped Out, the Simpsons game. It is much more in your face trying to get you to buy stuff. I love the game because I love the Simpsons, but it's just idle pleasure for me and I have no plans to drop money in it either.
(plug: I did a review of Dota 2 which outlines the game for noobs. I encourage people to play it because it's F2P done right, it's extremely well engineered and well featured - and it's great fun.)
Broke the rules? Overstepped its legal authority?
Is that the euphemism we're using now for "broke the law"?
Here in Australia, I have heard tell that giving people a bad reference is grounds for a defamation lawsuit. As a result many companies (including mine now) refuse to give a bad reference and will instead only confirm the person was employed there and politely decline to answer any further questions.
Positive references are not a problem. So typically, if you ask for a reference and the person only is prepared to confirm they worked there, I think it's safe to assume bad reference.
How someone could say that with a straight face after 10 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq is beyond me. Instead of being used to export high explosive to the Middle East, maybe some of those delicious tax dollars could have done some good to the actual citizens of the United States?
Maybe instead of the random errant 'nuts' that you describe we should all take a personal responsibility and march on Washington and force our elected officials out of office for not working as agents of the people and therefore violating the entire purpose of their postings.
Do you need to force them? Every four years there's a great opportunity to really change things, and that's just at a head-of-government level - I don't know anything about how Senators or Congressmen are voted in (I'm Australian), but it seems like the ballot box is a good place to start.
It seems (from reading /. and other sites) that even seriously committed Democrats aren't happy with how the last "Change" you were promised worked out. The two party option seems to be killing you guys. Get some independents in there.
To an outsider it just looks like there's no difference at all between the parties, and that everything is set up to try to force people to think "well if I don't vote [Republican|Democrat], then those damn [Democrats|Republicans] will get in!"
Fwiw I know heaps of people here in Australia that have never bought from Amazon; as you speculate the shipping costs remove a lot of the benefits for the casual item. Because of often hyperinflated costs here though it's still sometimes cheaper to pay the huge shipping costs, but most people I know don't bother or end up shopping an an alternative store.
I buy all my books from Book Depository (which iirc is now owned by Amazon, so that may count :) because they she from the UK and somehow have no shipping charges.
If you actually care about this stuff though, you basically have to vote Greens - they (thanks to Senator Ludlam) have a good track record in fighting this sort of thing. The two main parties have shown not only that they're on board, but there's basically no room for compromise.
(Though really, buying them through Amazon instead of direct from Baen is silly - Baen gives you your books in Kindle's .mobi, Nook/everyone else's epub, EBookwise, Microsoft .LIT, Sony Digital Reader, HTML, and as a .rtf file.)
I've bought a bunch of books from Baen - Baen are the only place I've found that I can access easily from Australia that simply will just sell me a .epub file that I download and put wherever I want.
I would love to buy more, but they simply don't have the range.
Citation? I'm not sure that Spain and Italy were accused, but I know that at least so far Portugal and France have not denied the accusations. They refuse to comment on the matter.
The BBC are reporting that "Bolivia accused France, Italy, Spain and Portugal", and that the French foreign ministry has now issued a statement.
Surely that's what legislation like this provides - a useful indicator that your state is prepared to preserve the status quo to protect businesses at the expense of the citizens, so that ultimately cars will just end up costing more in your state because of the extra layer of overhead?
I'd just fly to another state, buy a car and drive it back home. Well, once they finish rolling out their charger station network, anyway :)
Yep. Let's rein in their stupid actions first - then we can go after their stupid beliefs.
Apropos of absolutely nothing, here's some open source alternatives that also offer encryption (YMMV on how robust the encryption is).
- Jitsi (formerly SIP Communicator) is an audio/video and chat communicator that supports protocols such as SIP, XMPP/Jabber as well as a bunch of other protocols. Set up an XMPP server wherever you want and you're done. (I tried to set up Jabber to use with it on a Linux box on the weekend though and hit a few roadblocks, but more tech savvy people can probably power through them.)
- Mumble - voice communications, intended primarily for gaming but will work with anything. Run your own voice servers and clients connect in, a la TeamSpeak/Ventrilo.
- RetroShare - decentralised p2p file sharing and messaging system.
In comparison, an Apple TV box has a much simpler user interface. However, the main problem with Apple TV is that it won't receive cable channels. If I could purchase a set top box that simply displayed a few key channels - then it would be game over.
Fortunately for them (if Canada is anything like Australia and the US), the utter stranglehold control the cable companies seem to have on all the content will ensure that they can continue to peddle their crappy wares and not have to deal with competition.
Our main cable provider here in Australia recently was able to stop iTunes from carrying Season 4 of Game of Thrones. They have some exclusive license to HBO content and are leveraging their weight (I assume by throwing giant bags of money at HBO) to stop anyone getting it unless they sign up for an expensive cable service.
Needless to say, not many people are interested in paying $60-90 a month (the first package I can see with GoT included is $75/mo, but there might be slightly cheaper options) for a bunch of channels that they're not really interested in just to get access to one show. And Australia has the highest rate of GoT piracy in the world.
The difference though (at least from my point of view) is that the tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy brigade never had any actual real evidence to justify their complaints that the government was listening in on everything.
Snowden has flipped that around. It's no longer a suspected conspiracy theory, because it has been proven to exist (... assuming his evidence pans out to be real, which I have no reason to doubt at the moment).