Not only is it mostly speculation, but even the times when people claim it is being used for trade, like the Silk Road, it really isn't, it is being used to launder money. It wasn't actually being used because it is an amazing currency, but rather because people believed it was a way to anonymously buy illicit goods, ie launder money to pay for them.
They only legit trade uses I've seen quoted have been totally worthless: Sites that will exchange bitcoins for gift cards at places like Amazon, with a 10% or more markup (when those same sites sell gift cards with a 0% markup using standard currency).
As you say, the speculation has to go from the market if it is ever to be considered a currency. While currencies do fluctuate, they don't move as much in a year as bitcoin does in a day.
The Xbox 360's RROD made some sense, since they really were pushing things. It was a lot of hardware, quite high end, in a little box. Cooling all that was problematic. This generation of consoles, not so much. Their hardware is decidedly mid-range compared to what you see today, and is single chip. That is much easier to deal with, and shouldn't have nearly as much room for defects. That isn't to say there won't be some, there are always issues, but one wouldn't expect it to be widespread.
So I could buy that it is due to a manufacturing error, and I could buy that error was on purpose.
While they in theory test your problem solving and experience in a field, in fact they tend to be filled with memorization of minutia and lots of "gotcha" questions. Hence a calculator that can store notes in memory isn't allowed. Some don't allow calculators period because the ability to do base-2 math in your head is somehow important by their logic.
What it comes down to is that writing a good skills test is hard, and doing a computerized one is nearly impossible. So instead they make it hard through other means, namely memorization and trick questions.
It is counterproductive. If everything is the fault of some guy in the past, long gone from politics, then that lets the current guys get away with whatever they like. We can only hope to improve the decisions politicians make by holding them accountable. If they have an automatic out of "Oh the bad guys in the past did it!" then nothing gets better.
This is Slashdot, where it is trendy to hate on anything America does. Also there's the risk that the DoE might succeed (the DoE has some top research labs, Ames, Argonne, Fermi, Livermore, Los Alamos, NREL, Oak Ridge, Sandia, to name a few). In this case Argonne is leading the battery project, working with Berkley, PNNL, Sandia, and SLAC. There are also some public universities participating as well. So gotta get that hate in now!
As you say, the reality is that all this battery research is beneficial. Doesn't matter where it is developed, it'll be sold to the world. Nobody is going to drop millions or billions in the tech and say "Ya, that was neat, no reason to sell it though!"
This "Oh the system is insecure so I should be allowed to hack it!" Really? Is that ok with your house too? Because it is insecure. You have shitty physical security, everyone does. Good physical security is expensive and a pain in the butt, and perfect physical security is impossible.
So I can break in to your house, without much trouble. Your lock is no good. Unless you have a high security lock (which costs like $200 per lock), I can just get a bump key and get in. You have an alarm? That's cute, it is just a circuit board in a metal box, a hammer will disable it permanently in short order. You have a "Neighbourhood watch association," that'll notice? No problem, I'll be there in a delivery truck, wearing a smart looking uniform, with an ID, paperwork, etc. You have a dog? A McDonalds hamburger will be sufficient to buy its life-long affection, and if not a 9mm round will be sufficient to deal with it.
But that's all ok, right? After all it is your fault your house is insecure, that is what's dangerous, not the criminal that breaks in and steals your shit... Ya, somehow, I don't think you'd see it that way.
So, unless you want to start to spend a lot of time, money, and inconvenience on upgraded physical security, and even then it is still imperfect and not that hard to bypass, then maybe you need to accept what the parent says: That people who break in are criminals. It is NOT ok.
This really goes back to basic kindergarten rules: "Don't take things that aren't yours," "Ask permission before playing with someone else's toys," and so on. The law aside, it really is just common courtesy/morals.
When I say "properly made gun" I mean "Basically every commercial firearm made today." I am certainly not going to claim that no gun could ever have problems, particularly something knocked together by amateurs in their basement (like printed guns) but it turns out that the kind of guns you go and buy in a gun store and pretty damn reliable. That is what is in demand, not just with private shooters but more importantly with police agencies and governments, who like to buy a lot of guns.
There are plenty of regulations and tests in that regard. They see what happens if you jam a round in the barrel, then fire another in to it, They are required to fire a proof load (a deliberately overpressure load) without any problems, and so on. If you are interested, go check out the SAAMI standards (they do cost some money).
I don't think you appreciate what goes in to building a gun. They are made to be pretty robust. The barrels are made of thick, strong steel, often hammer forged (not meaning with a blacksmith's hammer, but a massive pneumatic device) and can take some real abuse.
If you have a properly made gun, it takes a pretty bad malfunction to explode, and then usually they don't actually explode in any normal sense of the word, they just distend and crack. Guns are made to be reliable, since the agencies that buy them tend to value that.
Many Americans and Europeans may have trouble with the idea of "official" and "real" exchange rates. You can go in to any bank and purchase or sell currency, you can trade larger amounts on foreign exchange markets. You find the price never varies much place to place at a given time, because you can always go elsewhere. If Citibank wants more for Euros than Deutsche Bank, well you can buy them from Deutsche Bank even if you are in America. The currencies truly float, their value against each other varying all the time based on trading.
This is not the case in a place with a fixed currency like Venezuela. The government says "You can buy X amount of our currency for Y amount of foreign currency," with the foreign currency usually being US Dollars. Ok, easy enough to understand, and generally the government is happy to sell you as much of their currency as you want at that rate. The problem is when you try to go the other way. The government won't buy their currency back and give you dollars. In and of itself that makes sense, governments generally sell their currency to other people, they don't buy it back, since they are the ones who generate and control it.
So you say ok, well I'll sell that currency on the foreign exchange markets. Ahh well here's where your problem comes in: Those markets don't value the currency the same as the government that sold it does. You have to give them a whole lot more of it to get the same amount of dollars (or other currency). So you have two rates: The real one and the official one. The real one being the rate things actually trade for on markets.
Well government who implement currency controls don't like this. That is why they are implementing currency controls, to try and fix prices (it doesn't work, but they are still trying). Hence they usually restrict or ban trading like this. That then of course leads to a black market, where things are even higher, since the people involved are skirting the law.
This is just the kind of thing that happens with fixed currencies/price controls. While it might seem to be workable internally, it doesn't work on a global scale since other countries don't value your currency the same and they don't sell goods directly in your currency.
Amazon is offering an option. Don't like it? Don't play. However Amazon isn't going away, they aren't going to stop selling eBooks (or physical books). So plan accordingly. If you think not partnering with them is best do that, if you think it is best, do that. But don't assume you can cry and they'll go away. You WILL have to deal with their competition.
Another big problem with all the different taxes is that you have to remit them all separately as well. If the states were organized well enough to be able to collect all the taxes for all the various organizations in the state, I guess that isn't horrible only 50 places to pay it to. However let's be realistic you are going to need to end up remitting taxes to individual counties and cities as well and that becomes a complete nightmare. You not only need to know how much tax to collect at each level, you need to know where it goes and then to make those payments and it isn't as though you get to do it just once, or even once per year.
Zombie games are not "massive outpouring of new creativity" by and large. Rather it is "uncreative developers attempting to jump on a popular bandwagon." There are some good ones, but most are poorly done and very uncreative in design.
I'm a big fan of indy (aka self published) games but I can't think of any zombie ones that have caught my eye as good.
Something I've noticed is that in a number of Asian and European countries, you see ISPs that operate and sell lines line giant WANs. You get a really fast connection to them, but it is way oversubscribed on the backhaul and you don't see that off-network.
For example a few years ago I remember a gentleman from Japan here on Slashdot who was talking about his fast 100mbit Internet connection and how he could download a CD in like 8 minutes. I had to point out that is the kind of speed you get form 10mbit, not 100mbit, and indeed my 12mbit Internet downloaded it faster.
So you do need to make sure you are doing real apples to apples comparisons on speeds. A lot of the amazing Speedtest results I see are people testing to a server on their own ISP which is fine for internal testing, but says nothing about overall speed. When I test my link, I always test to an ISP in another state, about 500 miles away, to verify that indeed I am getting my bandwidth to the larger Internet, not just to things near me.
I'm not trying to say that this means the US is great, but it is a complex issue. I can offer you really cheap "gigabit" Internet... just so long as I don't have to have the backhaul to support it. I can build a gigbat WAN pretty cheap, and even have a local Speedtest server you can use, but it'll cost me a lot more if I want the backhaul to really support those kind of speeds.
Both our KVM and NAS at work use Java as their interface. In both cases the reason is the same: to support management from arbitrary clients running any OS. They don't want to require you to install a program just to manage them and they want to easily support Windows, Linux, Mac, and so on. However the interface needs to be highly interactive to be useful. In the case of the KVM it actually has to stream video that it compresses from various sources. So Java it is.
These are some outdated devices from yesteryear, they are both current products on sale right now. The KVM is a Minicom Smart 216IP Switch, and NAS is a Dell Equallogic. While these may not be the world's highest end products, they are real enterprise products and they are both on sale right now.
While I don't like Java, particularly its insecurity, trying to pretend like it's some relic of a bygone era that we no longer need is silly. If you do systems administration, Java is something that you are going to run into quite a bit. I don't have the choice of "just don't use it" or something like that.
That right there should be reason enough not to buy them. Never mind government ties, evil backdoors, etc, these things are just not secure and well designed. They are classic "You get what you pay for."
In terms of big stuff Juniper and Cisco are the kings. When you look at enterprise networks, they comprise the most by far. Well, neither of them use Linux. Juniper uses FreeBSD as the basis for JUNOS. Cisco's IOS, that most of their devices still run, it really is their own operating system. It is slightly POSIX-based, I suppose, but not really related to anything else. IOS XR is based on QNX a real-time operating system. That accounts for most of the high-end and even more midrange network gear out there. Dell is another big supplier and there's no Linux they are as of yet. Their power connect devices use VxWorks as the fundamental OS underneath. Their force 10 devices use net BSD as the fundamental OS.
At the consumer level it varies, the little routers that you buy in your house when varying OSes. Linux is not uncommon, but VxWorks is also quite popular.
Very few network devices actually run Linux currently. There are a few, both consumer and enterprise, but they are not all that common. When you look at the big boys most of the underlying operating systems are either BSD or VxWorks. Juniper is BSD, Dell is VxWorks for power connect and BSD for force 10, Cisco is QNX for their new high-end stuff, and so on. Linux is in there and is growing, but is not a huge player at this time. Most routers and switches run something else. This is particularly true given Cisco's dominance and their use of IOS.
That aside, the underlying kernel really isn't very interesting in terms of a networking device. Most of the actual work is being done by various ASICs and network processors such as IBM's Power NP. The OS is just used to load basic things, and tie it altogether. So just because a given switch runs Linux doesn't mean that anything it does would be useful on a larger scale. We achieve the speed we do in routing and switching to hardware acceleration, not by simply having everything running software on a general-purpose machine.
Slashdot needs to stop with the hero worship. Any time there is a person who does something people on Slashdot deem good and beneficial, it seems they go in to full on hero-worship mode, where said person can do NO WRONG, and whatever they say must be true and so on. We saw it with Hans Reiser. Tons of people whining and bitching about him being arrested and then convicted of murder. How he was set up, how the government was laying, etc, etc. Of course then he confessed and led police to the body.
Look guys, everyone, including heroes, are human, and can have flaws. You can view Snowden as a hero for what we did. However that does not mean he is above reproach, it does not mean that he never lies, it does not mean that he can do no wrong. People can do both right and wrong, even good people.
For example, here's another possibility (not saying it is the truth, or even that likely): Snowden brought classified documents to Russia. That is why they chose to give him asylum and put him under state protection. After all, this is a nation with a pretty poor human rights and transparency record, not a shining bastion of freedom. So he gave them these to buy his way in. However the Russians don't want the US to know that, and Snowden doesn't want to tarnish his reputation admitting he sold out, so he makes these claims.
The parent is very valid is saying that Snowden's statements shouldn't have any relevance to the validity of the claims that he gave data to the Russians. The reason is that a person's claims generally aren't useful. If you are innocent of what you are accused of, you of course say you didn't do it since you in fact didn't. However if you are guilty of what you are accused of, you also very often say you didn't do it since you don't want to be saddled with that.
I mean look at athletes and steroids: How many of the athletes busted doping straight up came out and immediately said "Yep, I doped, I probably shouldn't have but everyone else was doing it, what choice did I have?" and how many said "No, I never doped, these accusations are false, etc, etc."
You can't take Snowden's denial as evidence for or against anything. It is what it is. People need to stop acting as though the guy is above reproach, as though he can do no wrong. That he did something heroic does not mean he doesn't have flaws and couldn't do something else non-heroic.
In part, this is because Intel has a compiler for it. On commodity hardware (as in desktop, laptop), you will generally get the best performance running an Intel CPU and using an Intel compiler. That means C/C++ or FORTRAN, as they are the only languages for which Intel makes compilers. C++ is easy to see, since so much is written in it but why would they make a FORTRAN compiler? Because as you say, serious science research uses it.
When you want fast numerical computation on a desktop, FORTRAN is a good choice. We have a few researchers here who use it, and they all use the Intel Fortran Compiler because they want fast computation, but they don't have the money to buy bigass systems for every grad student. What they get out of the IFC and a regular Intel desktop chip is pretty impressive.
Compilers matter, and Intel makes some damn good ones. So if your research calls for lots of performance on little budget, that can influence language choices. Heck same thing on supercomputers. That is not my area of expertise, but it isn't as though all compilers for a given supercomptuer will be equally good. If I were to bet, I'd say the FORTRAN compilers are some of the better ones.
If Apple's issue really was that micro USB was too fragile, well they could have introduced a new, standard, connector to fix that. Design a "mobile USB" standard, that is durable, orients either way, integrates pins for HDMI, etc. Get it all nice n' designed and tested, then hand the design over to the USB Group, royalty free (like all USB standards). Particularly if it was going to be part of new Apple phones I don't imagine that there'd be a lot of resistance to adoption.
The EU's mandate doesn't come from a love of micro-USB, but rather the need for a standard, whatever that is. Micro-USB is the best we've got and the most prevalent, so that is what they are going for. If there was a better one out there, particularly if you could show how increased durability could lead to longer life and less waste, I think it'd have a good chance of being the standard.
However Apple has no interest in that at all. Their new connector wasn't made because micro-USB is so bad, it was made because Apple desires to be the only place you buy Apple accessories.
Also those for whom the vaccination does not work. It turns out that vaccinations are NOT 100% effective. In some people, the vaccination will not provide immunity for whatever reason. Well, there's not really any good way to test this. It's not like we can go in infect people with potentially deadly diseases, just to see if they in fact are immune to those diseases. However, when a large percentage of the population has been vaccinated, the herd immunity acts such that basically nobody gets it since the disease can't find hosts to spread from.
However as the term "herd immunity" implies, it requires a large part of the "herd" to be vaccinated. When too few people are vaccinated, diseases can find enough vectors to spread.
As you note, this isn't just an individual issue this affect society as a whole. There are people who cannot be vaccinated, for various reasons, and there are people who will choose to be vaccinated but the vaccination won't work for, and they don't know. As such is important for as many people as possible to be vaccinated against disease to make sure that it does not spread.
Hell I'm 33 and I don't want shots now. I don't know that anybody actually likes getting shots, it's just that when we get older most of us at least understand that it's worth the trade-off.
It's fairly ridiculous to list what the kids want in this article. Kids are not good at making long-term decisions, because they don't really have a long frame of reference, nor fully developed logical reasoning skills. To me, this seems like someone attempting to give weight to the anti-vaccination argument. "Oh the children don't want it, we should think about what they want." No, we shouldn't. They don't want to shot because getting a shot is not a fun thing to do at best, and slightly painful at worst. They are not capable of understanding the consequences that could happen of not getting the shot. As such their opinion on the matter really isn't very relevant.
That might be what happens in some cases, but probably not that many. In some cases, it can be due to a bad experience with a needle. That's part of the reason why I still hate needles to this day. When I was a teenager, I had plantar warts. Regular treatments failed to remove or control them, so I had to get them removed by electrolysis. The doctor that did it was "not very skilled" to put it mildly. Having the Novocain putting my feet was the sole most painful thing I've ever had happen. I was literally screaming at the top of my lungs it hurt so much. This is part of the reason why I don't like needles even now. I've never had another experience like that, in fact all my more recent experiences with needles have been incredibly non-painful. However, that still sticks with me and I still hate needles and have to look away.
In other cases it's a simple phobia, something that doesn't really have a logical reason but you're afraid of it anyway. It probably starts with the fact that having something poked into your skin is normally not a good thing, so you have a natural aversion to it. From that you can develop a full-blown phobia. It isn't based on anything logical, it isn't based on anything that happened to you, that's what a phobia is an irrational fear. You even know it's irrational, but that doesn't make you any less afraid of it. It's like other phobias such as fear of spiders, public speaking, that sort of thing.
I'm not saying it's useful to lie to kids about the fact that getting a shot might hurt a little, but I don't think that's where it comes from at least not in most cases.
Notice it is from 2009. Things have changed a lot in that time. Back then, the Seattle-Tacoma airport charged for WiFi, now it is free there, as a simple example.
However it is also region/country dependent to an extent and also in certain ranges of hotels. The really nice places don't tend to charge. Their guests expect that dropping a couple hundred for a room means you don't get nailed with piddly shit and will get mad. Also the budget places don't tend to charge, as it costs them very little and it is something that will drive customers somewhere else. If someone is worried about paying $40 for a room, they'll sure as hell worry about paying $10 for Internet.
The places that still most often charge (though they are coming around) are the middle ground hotels. The three star business types. Places where it is expensive enough that people who stay there have cash and aren't too price sensitive, but not luxury such that an addon could be seen as an insult.
Smartphones have also had an impact. Getting much more common to have a phone you can tether and thus use that if the hotel tries to screw you. So a chain will find that basically nobody is paying their exorbitant fee, thus they are making nothing, but they ARE driving away some customers by charging, so they decide to make it free.
It'd be pretty easy for a terrorist type to make something you could use from the ground. If the very small amount of EMF generated by electronic devices on the plane was a problem, well someone could make something that emits a lot more, but not a ton, down a fairly narrow beam from the ground and it would have the same effect.
Planes are shielded, it just isn't an issue. This is just the FAA refusing to admit they've been being stupid. The FCC has told them they are being stupid, but they won't back down. It was one of those rules that made sense in the beginning: This is something new and it could cause problems, so let's prohibit it until we've time to test it. Well, it has been tested, extensively, and that's no issue. So remove the rule. But they didn't, and they kept not doing it, and kept on and kept on way past any kind of sense, so now they keep on doing it because they don't want to look stupid (which just makes them look worse).
My cousin is a military pilot and has no fucks to give about electronics being on when he's flying. As he says, if his (military issued) iPad is dangerous to his aircraft then he is completely fucked when he flys by an Aegis radar.
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Not only is it mostly speculation, but even the times when people claim it is being used for trade, like the Silk Road, it really isn't, it is being used to launder money. It wasn't actually being used because it is an amazing currency, but rather because people believed it was a way to anonymously buy illicit goods, ie launder money to pay for them.
They only legit trade uses I've seen quoted have been totally worthless: Sites that will exchange bitcoins for gift cards at places like Amazon, with a 10% or more markup (when those same sites sell gift cards with a 0% markup using standard currency).
As you say, the speculation has to go from the market if it is ever to be considered a currency. While currencies do fluctuate, they don't move as much in a year as bitcoin does in a day.
The Xbox 360's RROD made some sense, since they really were pushing things. It was a lot of hardware, quite high end, in a little box. Cooling all that was problematic. This generation of consoles, not so much. Their hardware is decidedly mid-range compared to what you see today, and is single chip. That is much easier to deal with, and shouldn't have nearly as much room for defects. That isn't to say there won't be some, there are always issues, but one wouldn't expect it to be widespread.
So I could buy that it is due to a manufacturing error, and I could buy that error was on purpose.
While they in theory test your problem solving and experience in a field, in fact they tend to be filled with memorization of minutia and lots of "gotcha" questions. Hence a calculator that can store notes in memory isn't allowed. Some don't allow calculators period because the ability to do base-2 math in your head is somehow important by their logic.
What it comes down to is that writing a good skills test is hard, and doing a computerized one is nearly impossible. So instead they make it hard through other means, namely memorization and trick questions.
It is counterproductive. If everything is the fault of some guy in the past, long gone from politics, then that lets the current guys get away with whatever they like. We can only hope to improve the decisions politicians make by holding them accountable. If they have an automatic out of "Oh the bad guys in the past did it!" then nothing gets better.
This is Slashdot, where it is trendy to hate on anything America does. Also there's the risk that the DoE might succeed (the DoE has some top research labs, Ames, Argonne, Fermi, Livermore, Los Alamos, NREL, Oak Ridge, Sandia, to name a few). In this case Argonne is leading the battery project, working with Berkley, PNNL, Sandia, and SLAC. There are also some public universities participating as well. So gotta get that hate in now!
As you say, the reality is that all this battery research is beneficial. Doesn't matter where it is developed, it'll be sold to the world. Nobody is going to drop millions or billions in the tech and say "Ya, that was neat, no reason to sell it though!"
This "Oh the system is insecure so I should be allowed to hack it!" Really? Is that ok with your house too? Because it is insecure. You have shitty physical security, everyone does. Good physical security is expensive and a pain in the butt, and perfect physical security is impossible.
So I can break in to your house, without much trouble. Your lock is no good. Unless you have a high security lock (which costs like $200 per lock), I can just get a bump key and get in. You have an alarm? That's cute, it is just a circuit board in a metal box, a hammer will disable it permanently in short order. You have a "Neighbourhood watch association," that'll notice? No problem, I'll be there in a delivery truck, wearing a smart looking uniform, with an ID, paperwork, etc. You have a dog? A McDonalds hamburger will be sufficient to buy its life-long affection, and if not a 9mm round will be sufficient to deal with it.
But that's all ok, right? After all it is your fault your house is insecure, that is what's dangerous, not the criminal that breaks in and steals your shit... Ya, somehow, I don't think you'd see it that way.
So, unless you want to start to spend a lot of time, money, and inconvenience on upgraded physical security, and even then it is still imperfect and not that hard to bypass, then maybe you need to accept what the parent says: That people who break in are criminals. It is NOT ok.
This really goes back to basic kindergarten rules: "Don't take things that aren't yours," "Ask permission before playing with someone else's toys," and so on. The law aside, it really is just common courtesy/morals.
When I say "properly made gun" I mean "Basically every commercial firearm made today." I am certainly not going to claim that no gun could ever have problems, particularly something knocked together by amateurs in their basement (like printed guns) but it turns out that the kind of guns you go and buy in a gun store and pretty damn reliable. That is what is in demand, not just with private shooters but more importantly with police agencies and governments, who like to buy a lot of guns.
There are plenty of regulations and tests in that regard. They see what happens if you jam a round in the barrel, then fire another in to it, They are required to fire a proof load (a deliberately overpressure load) without any problems, and so on. If you are interested, go check out the SAAMI standards (they do cost some money).
I don't think you appreciate what goes in to building a gun. They are made to be pretty robust. The barrels are made of thick, strong steel, often hammer forged (not meaning with a blacksmith's hammer, but a massive pneumatic device) and can take some real abuse.
If you have a properly made gun, it takes a pretty bad malfunction to explode, and then usually they don't actually explode in any normal sense of the word, they just distend and crack. Guns are made to be reliable, since the agencies that buy them tend to value that.
Many Americans and Europeans may have trouble with the idea of "official" and "real" exchange rates. You can go in to any bank and purchase or sell currency, you can trade larger amounts on foreign exchange markets. You find the price never varies much place to place at a given time, because you can always go elsewhere. If Citibank wants more for Euros than Deutsche Bank, well you can buy them from Deutsche Bank even if you are in America. The currencies truly float, their value against each other varying all the time based on trading.
This is not the case in a place with a fixed currency like Venezuela. The government says "You can buy X amount of our currency for Y amount of foreign currency," with the foreign currency usually being US Dollars. Ok, easy enough to understand, and generally the government is happy to sell you as much of their currency as you want at that rate. The problem is when you try to go the other way. The government won't buy their currency back and give you dollars. In and of itself that makes sense, governments generally sell their currency to other people, they don't buy it back, since they are the ones who generate and control it.
So you say ok, well I'll sell that currency on the foreign exchange markets. Ahh well here's where your problem comes in: Those markets don't value the currency the same as the government that sold it does. You have to give them a whole lot more of it to get the same amount of dollars (or other currency). So you have two rates: The real one and the official one. The real one being the rate things actually trade for on markets.
Well government who implement currency controls don't like this. That is why they are implementing currency controls, to try and fix prices (it doesn't work, but they are still trying). Hence they usually restrict or ban trading like this. That then of course leads to a black market, where things are even higher, since the people involved are skirting the law.
This is just the kind of thing that happens with fixed currencies/price controls. While it might seem to be workable internally, it doesn't work on a global scale since other countries don't value your currency the same and they don't sell goods directly in your currency.
Amazon is offering an option. Don't like it? Don't play. However Amazon isn't going away, they aren't going to stop selling eBooks (or physical books). So plan accordingly. If you think not partnering with them is best do that, if you think it is best, do that. But don't assume you can cry and they'll go away. You WILL have to deal with their competition.
Another big problem with all the different taxes is that you have to remit them all separately as well. If the states were organized well enough to be able to collect all the taxes for all the various organizations in the state, I guess that isn't horrible only 50 places to pay it to. However let's be realistic you are going to need to end up remitting taxes to individual counties and cities as well and that becomes a complete nightmare. You not only need to know how much tax to collect at each level, you need to know where it goes and then to make those payments and it isn't as though you get to do it just once, or even once per year.
It's just a nightmare on every level.
Zombie games are not "massive outpouring of new creativity" by and large. Rather it is "uncreative developers attempting to jump on a popular bandwagon." There are some good ones, but most are poorly done and very uncreative in design.
I'm a big fan of indy (aka self published) games but I can't think of any zombie ones that have caught my eye as good.
Something I've noticed is that in a number of Asian and European countries, you see ISPs that operate and sell lines line giant WANs. You get a really fast connection to them, but it is way oversubscribed on the backhaul and you don't see that off-network.
For example a few years ago I remember a gentleman from Japan here on Slashdot who was talking about his fast 100mbit Internet connection and how he could download a CD in like 8 minutes. I had to point out that is the kind of speed you get form 10mbit, not 100mbit, and indeed my 12mbit Internet downloaded it faster.
So you do need to make sure you are doing real apples to apples comparisons on speeds. A lot of the amazing Speedtest results I see are people testing to a server on their own ISP which is fine for internal testing, but says nothing about overall speed. When I test my link, I always test to an ISP in another state, about 500 miles away, to verify that indeed I am getting my bandwidth to the larger Internet, not just to things near me.
I'm not trying to say that this means the US is great, but it is a complex issue. I can offer you really cheap "gigabit" Internet... just so long as I don't have to have the backhaul to support it. I can build a gigbat WAN pretty cheap, and even have a local Speedtest server you can use, but it'll cost me a lot more if I want the backhaul to really support those kind of speeds.
Both our KVM and NAS at work use Java as their interface. In both cases the reason is the same: to support management from arbitrary clients running any OS. They don't want to require you to install a program just to manage them and they want to easily support Windows, Linux, Mac, and so on. However the interface needs to be highly interactive to be useful. In the case of the KVM it actually has to stream video that it compresses from various sources. So Java it is.
These are some outdated devices from yesteryear, they are both current products on sale right now. The KVM is a Minicom Smart 216IP Switch, and NAS is a Dell Equallogic. While these may not be the world's highest end products, they are real enterprise products and they are both on sale right now.
While I don't like Java, particularly its insecurity, trying to pretend like it's some relic of a bygone era that we no longer need is silly. If you do systems administration, Java is something that you are going to run into quite a bit. I don't have the choice of "just don't use it" or something like that.
Doesn't matter if Huawei has a backdoor in it, since the front door is wide open. FX has given a couple talks about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-K1YpJp07s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUC_FduwWxU. The long and the short of it is tons of security holes, pretty amateur coding mistakes, no vulnerability tracking, etc.
That right there should be reason enough not to buy them. Never mind government ties, evil backdoors, etc, these things are just not secure and well designed. They are classic "You get what you pay for."
In terms of big stuff Juniper and Cisco are the kings. When you look at enterprise networks, they comprise the most by far. Well, neither of them use Linux. Juniper uses FreeBSD as the basis for JUNOS. Cisco's IOS, that most of their devices still run, it really is their own operating system. It is slightly POSIX-based, I suppose, but not really related to anything else. IOS XR is based on QNX a real-time operating system. That accounts for most of the high-end and even more midrange network gear out there. Dell is another big supplier and there's no Linux they are as of yet. Their power connect devices use VxWorks as the fundamental OS underneath. Their force 10 devices use net BSD as the fundamental OS.
At the consumer level it varies, the little routers that you buy in your house when varying OSes. Linux is not uncommon, but VxWorks is also quite popular.
Very few network devices actually run Linux currently. There are a few, both consumer and enterprise, but they are not all that common. When you look at the big boys most of the underlying operating systems are either BSD or VxWorks. Juniper is BSD, Dell is VxWorks for power connect and BSD for force 10, Cisco is QNX for their new high-end stuff, and so on. Linux is in there and is growing, but is not a huge player at this time. Most routers and switches run something else. This is particularly true given Cisco's dominance and their use of IOS.
That aside, the underlying kernel really isn't very interesting in terms of a networking device. Most of the actual work is being done by various ASICs and network processors such as IBM's Power NP. The OS is just used to load basic things, and tie it altogether. So just because a given switch runs Linux doesn't mean that anything it does would be useful on a larger scale. We achieve the speed we do in routing and switching to hardware acceleration, not by simply having everything running software on a general-purpose machine.
Slashdot needs to stop with the hero worship. Any time there is a person who does something people on Slashdot deem good and beneficial, it seems they go in to full on hero-worship mode, where said person can do NO WRONG, and whatever they say must be true and so on. We saw it with Hans Reiser. Tons of people whining and bitching about him being arrested and then convicted of murder. How he was set up, how the government was laying, etc, etc. Of course then he confessed and led police to the body.
Look guys, everyone, including heroes, are human, and can have flaws. You can view Snowden as a hero for what we did. However that does not mean he is above reproach, it does not mean that he never lies, it does not mean that he can do no wrong. People can do both right and wrong, even good people.
For example, here's another possibility (not saying it is the truth, or even that likely): Snowden brought classified documents to Russia. That is why they chose to give him asylum and put him under state protection. After all, this is a nation with a pretty poor human rights and transparency record, not a shining bastion of freedom. So he gave them these to buy his way in. However the Russians don't want the US to know that, and Snowden doesn't want to tarnish his reputation admitting he sold out, so he makes these claims.
The parent is very valid is saying that Snowden's statements shouldn't have any relevance to the validity of the claims that he gave data to the Russians. The reason is that a person's claims generally aren't useful. If you are innocent of what you are accused of, you of course say you didn't do it since you in fact didn't. However if you are guilty of what you are accused of, you also very often say you didn't do it since you don't want to be saddled with that.
I mean look at athletes and steroids: How many of the athletes busted doping straight up came out and immediately said "Yep, I doped, I probably shouldn't have but everyone else was doing it, what choice did I have?" and how many said "No, I never doped, these accusations are false, etc, etc."
You can't take Snowden's denial as evidence for or against anything. It is what it is. People need to stop acting as though the guy is above reproach, as though he can do no wrong. That he did something heroic does not mean he doesn't have flaws and couldn't do something else non-heroic.
In part, this is because Intel has a compiler for it. On commodity hardware (as in desktop, laptop), you will generally get the best performance running an Intel CPU and using an Intel compiler. That means C/C++ or FORTRAN, as they are the only languages for which Intel makes compilers. C++ is easy to see, since so much is written in it but why would they make a FORTRAN compiler? Because as you say, serious science research uses it.
When you want fast numerical computation on a desktop, FORTRAN is a good choice. We have a few researchers here who use it, and they all use the Intel Fortran Compiler because they want fast computation, but they don't have the money to buy bigass systems for every grad student. What they get out of the IFC and a regular Intel desktop chip is pretty impressive.
Compilers matter, and Intel makes some damn good ones. So if your research calls for lots of performance on little budget, that can influence language choices. Heck same thing on supercomputers. That is not my area of expertise, but it isn't as though all compilers for a given supercomptuer will be equally good. If I were to bet, I'd say the FORTRAN compilers are some of the better ones.
If Apple's issue really was that micro USB was too fragile, well they could have introduced a new, standard, connector to fix that. Design a "mobile USB" standard, that is durable, orients either way, integrates pins for HDMI, etc. Get it all nice n' designed and tested, then hand the design over to the USB Group, royalty free (like all USB standards). Particularly if it was going to be part of new Apple phones I don't imagine that there'd be a lot of resistance to adoption.
The EU's mandate doesn't come from a love of micro-USB, but rather the need for a standard, whatever that is. Micro-USB is the best we've got and the most prevalent, so that is what they are going for. If there was a better one out there, particularly if you could show how increased durability could lead to longer life and less waste, I think it'd have a good chance of being the standard.
However Apple has no interest in that at all. Their new connector wasn't made because micro-USB is so bad, it was made because Apple desires to be the only place you buy Apple accessories.
Also those for whom the vaccination does not work. It turns out that vaccinations are NOT 100% effective. In some people, the vaccination will not provide immunity for whatever reason. Well, there's not really any good way to test this. It's not like we can go in infect people with potentially deadly diseases, just to see if they in fact are immune to those diseases. However, when a large percentage of the population has been vaccinated, the herd immunity acts such that basically nobody gets it since the disease can't find hosts to spread from.
However as the term "herd immunity" implies, it requires a large part of the "herd" to be vaccinated. When too few people are vaccinated, diseases can find enough vectors to spread.
As you note, this isn't just an individual issue this affect society as a whole. There are people who cannot be vaccinated, for various reasons, and there are people who will choose to be vaccinated but the vaccination won't work for, and they don't know. As such is important for as many people as possible to be vaccinated against disease to make sure that it does not spread.
Hell I'm 33 and I don't want shots now. I don't know that anybody actually likes getting shots, it's just that when we get older most of us at least understand that it's worth the trade-off.
It's fairly ridiculous to list what the kids want in this article. Kids are not good at making long-term decisions, because they don't really have a long frame of reference, nor fully developed logical reasoning skills. To me, this seems like someone attempting to give weight to the anti-vaccination argument. "Oh the children don't want it, we should think about what they want." No, we shouldn't. They don't want to shot because getting a shot is not a fun thing to do at best, and slightly painful at worst. They are not capable of understanding the consequences that could happen of not getting the shot. As such their opinion on the matter really isn't very relevant.
That might be what happens in some cases, but probably not that many. In some cases, it can be due to a bad experience with a needle. That's part of the reason why I still hate needles to this day. When I was a teenager, I had plantar warts. Regular treatments failed to remove or control them, so I had to get them removed by electrolysis. The doctor that did it was "not very skilled" to put it mildly. Having the Novocain putting my feet was the sole most painful thing I've ever had happen. I was literally screaming at the top of my lungs it hurt so much. This is part of the reason why I don't like needles even now. I've never had another experience like that, in fact all my more recent experiences with needles have been incredibly non-painful. However, that still sticks with me and I still hate needles and have to look away.
In other cases it's a simple phobia, something that doesn't really have a logical reason but you're afraid of it anyway. It probably starts with the fact that having something poked into your skin is normally not a good thing, so you have a natural aversion to it. From that you can develop a full-blown phobia. It isn't based on anything logical, it isn't based on anything that happened to you, that's what a phobia is an irrational fear. You even know it's irrational, but that doesn't make you any less afraid of it. It's like other phobias such as fear of spiders, public speaking, that sort of thing.
I'm not saying it's useful to lie to kids about the fact that getting a shot might hurt a little, but I don't think that's where it comes from at least not in most cases.
Notice it is from 2009. Things have changed a lot in that time. Back then, the Seattle-Tacoma airport charged for WiFi, now it is free there, as a simple example.
However it is also region/country dependent to an extent and also in certain ranges of hotels. The really nice places don't tend to charge. Their guests expect that dropping a couple hundred for a room means you don't get nailed with piddly shit and will get mad. Also the budget places don't tend to charge, as it costs them very little and it is something that will drive customers somewhere else. If someone is worried about paying $40 for a room, they'll sure as hell worry about paying $10 for Internet.
The places that still most often charge (though they are coming around) are the middle ground hotels. The three star business types. Places where it is expensive enough that people who stay there have cash and aren't too price sensitive, but not luxury such that an addon could be seen as an insult.
Smartphones have also had an impact. Getting much more common to have a phone you can tether and thus use that if the hotel tries to screw you. So a chain will find that basically nobody is paying their exorbitant fee, thus they are making nothing, but they ARE driving away some customers by charging, so they decide to make it free.
It'd be pretty easy for a terrorist type to make something you could use from the ground. If the very small amount of EMF generated by electronic devices on the plane was a problem, well someone could make something that emits a lot more, but not a ton, down a fairly narrow beam from the ground and it would have the same effect.
Planes are shielded, it just isn't an issue. This is just the FAA refusing to admit they've been being stupid. The FCC has told them they are being stupid, but they won't back down. It was one of those rules that made sense in the beginning: This is something new and it could cause problems, so let's prohibit it until we've time to test it. Well, it has been tested, extensively, and that's no issue. So remove the rule. But they didn't, and they kept not doing it, and kept on and kept on way past any kind of sense, so now they keep on doing it because they don't want to look stupid (which just makes them look worse).
My cousin is a military pilot and has no fucks to give about electronics being on when he's flying. As he says, if his (military issued) iPad is dangerous to his aircraft then he is completely fucked when he flys by an Aegis radar.