Personally, the idea of someone in charge of a country having to need a nutritionist follow him around and tell him what to eat just harks back to the Victorian eras where the Queen was told what was wrong with her because she had a pile of lackey doctors following her about.
I don't think I'd trust someone who needed a nutritionist to eat healthily. It suggests incompetence, ignorance, and a lack of personal will.
And, personally, stick me in charge of a country and I'd not change my diet if the entire cabinet was asking me too.
Seriously, this is like saying that Winston Churchill shouldn't have smoked cigars. I can just imagine what his response would have been to that.
Get a president with some balls, who lives his life how he pleases (notice: but NOT necessarily his job) and who doesn't surround themselves with sycophants.
P.S. I drink 2+ litres of Coke a day. It's yet to have a significant health effect after nearly 15 years and, if it does, I have only myself to blame after doing it through choice, as an informed adult - not on the advice of a expensive and unnecessary nutritionist.
According to my research I risk tooth decay (but who doesn't?) and if I drink the Diet version, a leeching of calcium leading to a weakening of the bones. Compared to the effects of, say, a mouthful of sports "energy" drink, it's positively inert.
Do you really think that a "do no evil" bit on your connections really makes any difference at all, that's the question?
If *US* advertisers are required to be bound by it, it doesn't mean anyone else is. So advertising will just move overseas where such silly laws wouldn't exist. And if US law says one thing about it and EU law says another, it's pointless and wasteful.
DNT was doomed to die the second someone thought of it. It's just a matter of how many contracting hours people can make out of trying to make it work. It's a ridiculous idea, that will do precisely zip that isn't legally required in the territory you're in anyway, and just acts as a smokescreen to make it look like you're tackling the problem.
I don't really care WHAT MS do about this. I hope it does die quickly. Because I've honestly not seen anything so daft since certain "evil bit" RFC's were published.
PayPal is a bank, in some countries (i.e. the EU), and regulated by appropriate financial services watchdogs. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be allowed to trade in those countries for very long as it would be nothing but an unregulated money laundering outfit.
That said, wire transfers are traceable, but that doesn't mean you get your money back. Credit cards, etc. have automatic, legally-backed payout when you mark a transaction as fraud, even if the fraudster has already withdrawn that money.
So there are honestly people out there who read reviews from people who may not have even bought the product and consider them true?
Personally, if I were TripAdvisor, Amazon, or whatever equivalent, it would be a requirement to have actually purchased the goods you're reviewing before being allowed to post a review.
One of the websites I use for hotels does just that - unless you've booked the hotel through them and stayed there you can't post a review. I don't think a reputation-destroying service would be a viable business model (even excluding legal complications) if you had to pay your competitors in order to post a bad review on them.
And, I pay no attention to the reviews. I pay attention to the responses, if any. If a site lists your hotel (presumably WITH your permission, or you'd ask for it to be removed) and you get a bad response, you should reply to it. Like on eBay, or in real life shops, it's not what the negative comments say, it's how you deal with those complaints that matters.
Nobody runs a hotel that has never received a complaint in its entire history. But there are lots of places that receive complaints and ignore them because they just don't care.
More like, AMD haven't been making enough of a difference for long enough to justify buying them over Intel.
Back in the 486/Pentium days I saved a LOT of money by buying AMD - I got better performance for less money, and virtually perfect compatibility.
Nowadays? There's so little difference between the specs of processors that I might as well just buy Intel. There's no compelling reason to go AMD any more, so nobody's buying them.
Sure, they get an "advantage" for a few months on their top-of-the-line gaming processors of a few percent, but by the time those chips are available in any pre-fab computer you might pick up in a shop, that difference means nothing at all and the price difference isn't worth straying.
Not to mention that since buying ATI (which was an absolute DOG for hardware compatibility and drivers), AMD seemed to have followed suit and there are problems reported with certain games and AMD processors / chipsets / ATI cards that aren't present in similar Intel / nVidia setups.
Honestly, it's nothing to do with people lacking upgrades. It's everything to do with there just being no compelling reason to go with one or the other, except that everyone's HEARD of Intel and they've been making x86 chips before AMD even existed.
They asked if I'd ever insulted, hit, beaten or murdered someone. I said Yes and told them that I'd called a man an idiot last week.
There was no followup.
Unfortunately, I would EQUALLY as guilty for not mentioning it as he was for not mentioning a patent-related lawsuit with a Samsung-based firm while being a jury member on a patent-related Samsung court case.
There's ALWAYS the fallback of not stating a just reason. Just because they didn't ask if he'd ever taken any backhander from Apple before today, doesn't mean he shouldn't have explicitly stated it (either then, or in private to the judge) if that's what had happened.
Mistrial. Instantaneous mistrial. At least in most civilised countries.
The actual court transcript says that the question was
"The next question is, have you or a family member or someone very close to you ever been involved in a lawsuit, either as a plaintiff, a defendant, or as a witness?"
Serves you right for buying a phone and expecting to take high-end digital-camera-quality images with it.
As a bit of an Apple-hater, I'd love to jump on the bandwagon here, but this is really just a quirk of a particular lens on a device NOT primarily designed to take photos. If a DSLR was doing this, then yeah. But an iPhone? Who cares?
Stop taking pictures with your phone, is the answer.
As centuries of relying on Newtonian physics demonstrate:
It doesn't need to be accurate. It just needs to be close enough when looking at the parts you're interested in.
Nobody claims to be simulating a universe down to the sub-atomic level. They are just claiming that: the best they can simulate their own ideas of how it formed correlate with roughly what we see when we peek at the sky.
It's like saying that there's no point in simulating a rocket launch if you can't model every atom. There is. And it saves us a lot of work and tells us when something is (probably) wrong with our design.
Newtonian physics was THE most accurate method for centuries, correlated to millions of independent experiments to be correct. The fact that it's nowhere NEAR the full story of how things operate is neither here nor there, and we still teach it in schools because it's still accurate ENOUGH.
How does the US know the actual nationality of the hackers and not just their end-proxy?
The US have been trying to insinuate a cyber-war for years now, and never said how they know who's behind it (if you said the *ATTACK* came from China, fair enough - to say it ORIGINATED there is more of a stretch, and to say it was Chinese hackers is just ludicrous).
Of course we have suspicions and think we might know who's behind it and who owns the net-blocks, but what a wonderful way to discredit a nation and put the blame on someone else when you want to cyber-attack the US - just proxy through China and start WW3 when the US relatiates.
Really, US? How do you *KNOW*? On the scale that you can confidently state the Chinese "attacked" you (and coupled with your statements that cyber-attacks could be considered acts of war?)? You're REALLY that sure it was China that did it? That you can announce on the news that it was the country itself?
Or do you just want to start a war with China for some reason?
Nobody, not one person, initiated complaints in the "plain text editor", "basic bitmap editor", "calculator" software categories that were proven in a court of law to be a monopolistic misuse of power to ensure that ONLY their calculator/whatever dominated the market for years.
And the "real" Office suite is an entirely separate (and therefore optional) product.
Which is lucky because if MS were sued by every software manufacturer whose market they had manipulated contrary to anti-monopoly laws, there'd be an awful lot of these "You owe us $0.5bn" messages on some executive's desk. AV/spyware is probably the next major category, but I'm not aware of them doing dirty tricks like paying their end distributors NOT to put McAffee/Norton on machines that already have Windows Defender etc.
It's not a case of what they did. It's a case of what was brought to, and can be proven in, a court of law as deliberate monopolistic manipulation of the relevant market. Either they don't do it in other markets, or they haven't been brought to court for it (yet?).
Multiple-convicted monopolist company with assets on a par with the entire EU annual budget, seeks to avoid legal redress by failing to implement agreed-to legal measures (or only implementing them half-assedly) and claim they didn't know, nor bother to check, they were working for several YEARS, after already being fined half a billion Euros and made to implement those measures in the first place (after ANY NUMBER of appeals and legal arguments failed because the evidence was just so overwhelming).
It's all in the spin, really, and it's hard to have sympathy for the convicted monopolist worth more than a lot of EU countries combined, when they are basically here because they can't be bothered to instruct one person within their company to keep an eye on their half-a-billion-pound + expenses mistake and the complementary obligation they were legally required to implement over several years.
If you wanna do business in the EU, you have to stick by EU law, no matter how ridiculous you think it is or how much you disagree with its application. If that's a problem, don't do business with it. And if you don't want a repeat of your half-a-billion-dollar-plus-expenses blatant disregard for that law, maybe you should have one of the many very expensive lawyers, or even just someone involved in implementing the solution, keep an eye on it once a month, say, for the duration of your punishment.
Powers of 10. Over copper or fibre. At copper distances of 100m.
Call it a standard, if you like. Each time you have to upgrade, look to the next power of ten at that specification.
Because although 40Gb/s exists, it's not popular and you won't find it in your average computer supplier, ever. Sure, it's expensive to jump like that, but every technology boost is expensive and I'd rather we skipped the proprietary-data-center-only junk and leave them to their own devices and specify real-world, millions-of-businesses standards at jumps big enough to a) make a difference, b) be expensive at first but mass-market after (rather than sharing the market with half-assed solutions), c) run on the same specs at the previous generation (if not the same cables exactly, at least I can replace 100m runs with 100m runs and not worry).
As someone who has, quite literally, had to tear the sofa apart to find enough pennies for the cheapest loaf of bread in the shop so my girlfriend and I could eat that week, ONLY IDIOTS.
I've been in very undesirable financial positions both through faults of my own and not, and I tell you that I never once rented an appliance or gadget. Lots of companies have the same kind of "penalty" for not having money, starting with banks for instance. That's not the problem here - the problem is IDIOTS who rent an unnecessary gadget.
Firstly, they are among the FIRST things you give up on and sell off. Honestly. They are not a necessity, and if you can afford the money to keep a broadband connection going, you're not desperate enough to rent a machine to run on it. TV, PC, phone. Get rid of them. If you haven't, you're not "in trouble", you're just temporarily "skint/broke" which is another thing entirely.
Secondly, if you have to rent one, you have to work out how much it costs and it ALWAYS costs you more to rent rather than buy outright (like any of those "pay weekly" catalogues and anything else of that nature). Hell, from some places, it's cheaper to get a loan on an item of jewellery (and even just one of those pay-day) and pay back the loan+interest than it is to rent or even lease a PC.
Thirdly, if you're in that position, and you do think you NEED to RENT a LAPTOP for whatever reason, you're an idiot. You can save money by going to the library and using theirs.
If you can't do that, take up an old PC from a boot sale or ask companies/schools that are throwing them out. Hell, you'll learn Linux rather than pay £200 Windows tax on a machine if it actually mattered. But, again, you don't really need a PC and if you do, you "need" an Internet connection much more for half the reasons those type of people state (e.g. "saving money on energy suppliers", etc. - you will NOT save enough money to buy a laptop and always-on connection, so don't give me that crap).
But a laptop, especially, is not required - if your job requires you to have roaming access from anywhere, they will pay for it. The only reason to have a laptop over a PC is absolute necessity for the task at hand (and thus will be provided), or complete narcissism. They are more expensive, less durable, less powerful and more expensive to repair.
I have little sympathy for those who rent such things, or even those who rent basic appliances. What sympathy I have is only for their intrusion of privacy, not for their situation.
My mum rented a TV for 30 years (different models, but basically the same rental) until one broke once and the company gave us hassle, and my brother and I worked out how much we'd spent on it. It was enough to re-buy a new TV every two years over that period and still have money left over. We'd quite literally have had 15-20 fully-working TV's (even after accidents, breakages, etc.) somewhere in the house if we'd put the same money into a box and bought a TV whenever it was enough.
The TV went back and we bought a new TV the same day, which last 5 years until dad changed it for another one for the price of what would have been 1 years rental (and there was nothing wrong with the 5-year-old one either and went to my brother's house).
Renting appliances is stupid. Even renting houses is stupid but that's an order of magnitude more expensive and buying a house requires a credit history and, thus, you can see that not everyone will ever be able to buy rather than rent. But renting, you are just pissing your money away and paying off someone else's mortgage for them, plus 10%. And, yes, I rented for many years.
Renting cars? You're insane. Renting appliances? God, shoot me now.
Everybody: If you find yourself renting objects because you "can't afford it", if you find yourself paying into Christmas clubs because "you can't afford it", if you find yourself signing contracts for monthly payments because "you can't afford to buy it" and then try to
To be honest, if you wanted to make a "home brew" version of this (which wouldn't matter so long as you used a readable medium and data structure), then one of those kits that engraves 3D images into blocks of plastic would work just as well.
I don't know how expensive they are, but they're not prohibitive, run from common power supplies, engrave on cheap plastic (whose internal structure is unlikely to decompose much in 10,000 years), and customisable (i.e. you can get them to engrave any image, so it's just a question of software).
The data density might not be up there with this particular invention, but the cheapness, durability and simple hardware (and, even better, the EXTREME simplicity of reading them back) might go some way to making them a worthy time-capsule-esque data store. And then it's only a matter of time before we all have a permanent-recorder capable of engraving a Gigabyte or so.
Hard-code some hex values into your C code (e.g. microprocessor-fixed defines, or memory locations, bit-shifting constants, etc.)
See how long it takes you to spot that one is 1 character shorter than the others because of a typo, and the mess it causes.
Proportional fonts are pretty for printing out your code or showing it on a website. Monospaced fonts have a utility value that you can't substitute while actually working on it.
Opened it, stuck it into Eclipse's main C++ code font, size 10 (the size that Eclipse was using by default with the default font in Windows 7). Looked okay until I scrolled around a bit.
A hex string with E in it looked atrocious and the left-bar of the E was at least three times thicker than any other line anywhere and just drew your eyes to the E.
Not what you want when you need to transcribe some hexadecimal number correctly and have your eye drawn to the E all the time.
Other than that... well, it's just a font. It does the job if you want to avoid proprietary fonts. But the E thing made it look like every other "free/open" font used to 20 years ago.
Especially when nature has things like volcanos (whose dust cover can easily drop sunlight strength in whole regions by orders of magnitude), vegetation (anyone with an interest can find out that were they lived used to be either a) uninhabitable, b) huge forests that were burning dying off and regrowing for millennia before we ever lit a match) and all sorts of other nasties (not to mention things like solar storms and external factors - hell the dust from a meteorite is believed to be what blocked out so much of the sun that the dinosaurs died off from lack of vegetation and changes in atmosphere).
We just don't know. That was the answer in the 50's when climate science was a bunch of crackpots with flowers in their hair eating from hempen bowls, and it's the answer now. The fact that not much has changed despite HUGE advances in understanding and detection means that we still have much, much further to go before we can even stab a guess at whether we're doing anything bad and/or what effect that has and/or what effect not doing those bad things would have on us.
Pick any three. Calculate the impact. Is that better or worse than (potentially, possibly, a while from now) seas rising slightly?
Because things like vehicle replacement and stopping cutting down trees have huge, global impacts on lots of things (not least, trying to convince people to throw away their old car and buy a new, less-efficient one).
And you can't just do this a little at a time, we're talking international co-operation. And thus international-impact. And then you better hope that you were right in what was causing the problem and that is wasn't just a natural cycle that a) gets worse, b) goes back to normal without us doing anything anyway.
This is the point - we can all posit crazy ideas, but without some sort of plan of where we can go and what the impact of going there is, it's all pie-in-the-sky stuff (like replacing coal with photo-voltaics, for example, which is laughable).
We can't explain how an atom works, only what we can observe.
We can't predict weather without more than handful of days and still not with any accuracy (tell me what temperature it will be to the nearest degree a fortnight Tuesday).
To then suggest we actually have a clue what's going on even on the surface of a 6x10^24 kg mass of crap and that we're responsible for some quite minor change (if it was major, we'd be dead already, even a handful of degrees could be major) is pretty far-fetched for even the best scientists and climate models.
Sure, science can tell you that a black hole will suck up a neighbour with X km of itself because it's close enough and has enough gravity, but it can't describe how it's going to happen in any detail. What we deal with in our climate is trying to extrapolate accurate records of fine detail from a huge system that we have no idea of, no "plan" of the end-result, no rough approximation of prior years and so little previous accurate data that it's laughable.
Unfortunately, some people then want to use this to forward their private agendas NO MATTER the impact on us by either a) the climate or b) our solution to fix the climate (which would be equally as drastic, if not worse).
I'm assuming he's a guy with good credentials, held in high-regard, data and conclusions backed up by peer-review, etc.
Great.
So what do we do? Because we haven't been able to answer that question for decades and now we NEED to know the answer before we continue, if that's the case.
As fabulous as all this detective work is, what are we supposed to do about it and what effect does that work have? If it means we have to forgo electricity (say), then maybe we're better off just letting the climate rise and the icecaps melt (for instance). Maybe not. Who knows?
Because for DECADES people have been shouting doom with no reasonable, practical explanation for it, solution of it, or analysis of the impact of said solutions.
Let's work from the assumption that I believe you and you're 100% correct. What do we do now?
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, the idea of someone in charge of a country having to need a nutritionist follow him around and tell him what to eat just harks back to the Victorian eras where the Queen was told what was wrong with her because she had a pile of lackey doctors following her about.
I don't think I'd trust someone who needed a nutritionist to eat healthily. It suggests incompetence, ignorance, and a lack of personal will.
And, personally, stick me in charge of a country and I'd not change my diet if the entire cabinet was asking me too.
Seriously, this is like saying that Winston Churchill shouldn't have smoked cigars. I can just imagine what his response would have been to that.
Get a president with some balls, who lives his life how he pleases (notice: but NOT necessarily his job) and who doesn't surround themselves with sycophants.
P.S. I drink 2+ litres of Coke a day. It's yet to have a significant health effect after nearly 15 years and, if it does, I have only myself to blame after doing it through choice, as an informed adult - not on the advice of a expensive and unnecessary nutritionist.
According to my research I risk tooth decay (but who doesn't?) and if I drink the Diet version, a leeching of calcium leading to a weakening of the bones. Compared to the effects of, say, a mouthful of sports "energy" drink, it's positively inert.
Do you really think that a "do no evil" bit on your connections really makes any difference at all, that's the question?
If *US* advertisers are required to be bound by it, it doesn't mean anyone else is. So advertising will just move overseas where such silly laws wouldn't exist. And if US law says one thing about it and EU law says another, it's pointless and wasteful.
DNT was doomed to die the second someone thought of it. It's just a matter of how many contracting hours people can make out of trying to make it work. It's a ridiculous idea, that will do precisely zip that isn't legally required in the territory you're in anyway, and just acts as a smokescreen to make it look like you're tackling the problem.
I don't really care WHAT MS do about this. I hope it does die quickly. Because I've honestly not seen anything so daft since certain "evil bit" RFC's were published.
PayPal is a bank, in some countries (i.e. the EU), and regulated by appropriate financial services watchdogs. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be allowed to trade in those countries for very long as it would be nothing but an unregulated money laundering outfit.
That said, wire transfers are traceable, but that doesn't mean you get your money back. Credit cards, etc. have automatic, legally-backed payout when you mark a transaction as fraud, even if the fraudster has already withdrawn that money.
So there are honestly people out there who read reviews from people who may not have even bought the product and consider them true?
Personally, if I were TripAdvisor, Amazon, or whatever equivalent, it would be a requirement to have actually purchased the goods you're reviewing before being allowed to post a review.
One of the websites I use for hotels does just that - unless you've booked the hotel through them and stayed there you can't post a review. I don't think a reputation-destroying service would be a viable business model (even excluding legal complications) if you had to pay your competitors in order to post a bad review on them.
And, I pay no attention to the reviews. I pay attention to the responses, if any. If a site lists your hotel (presumably WITH your permission, or you'd ask for it to be removed) and you get a bad response, you should reply to it. Like on eBay, or in real life shops, it's not what the negative comments say, it's how you deal with those complaints that matters.
Nobody runs a hotel that has never received a complaint in its entire history. But there are lots of places that receive complaints and ignore them because they just don't care.
More like, AMD haven't been making enough of a difference for long enough to justify buying them over Intel.
Back in the 486/Pentium days I saved a LOT of money by buying AMD - I got better performance for less money, and virtually perfect compatibility.
Nowadays? There's so little difference between the specs of processors that I might as well just buy Intel. There's no compelling reason to go AMD any more, so nobody's buying them.
Sure, they get an "advantage" for a few months on their top-of-the-line gaming processors of a few percent, but by the time those chips are available in any pre-fab computer you might pick up in a shop, that difference means nothing at all and the price difference isn't worth straying.
Not to mention that since buying ATI (which was an absolute DOG for hardware compatibility and drivers), AMD seemed to have followed suit and there are problems reported with certain games and AMD processors / chipsets / ATI cards that aren't present in similar Intel / nVidia setups.
Honestly, it's nothing to do with people lacking upgrades. It's everything to do with there just being no compelling reason to go with one or the other, except that everyone's HEARD of Intel and they've been making x86 chips before AMD even existed.
They asked if I'd ever insulted, hit, beaten or murdered someone. I said Yes and told them that I'd called a man an idiot last week.
There was no followup.
Unfortunately, I would EQUALLY as guilty for not mentioning it as he was for not mentioning a patent-related lawsuit with a Samsung-based firm while being a jury member on a patent-related Samsung court case.
There's ALWAYS the fallback of not stating a just reason. Just because they didn't ask if he'd ever taken any backhander from Apple before today, doesn't mean he shouldn't have explicitly stated it (either then, or in private to the judge) if that's what had happened.
Mistrial. Instantaneous mistrial. At least in most civilised countries.
Read the F article.
The actual court transcript says that the question was
"The next question is, have you or a family member or someone very close to you ever been involved in a lawsuit, either as a plaintiff, a defendant, or as a witness?"
The answer given by Mr Hogan refers to 2008 only.
Serves you right for buying a phone and expecting to take high-end digital-camera-quality images with it.
As a bit of an Apple-hater, I'd love to jump on the bandwagon here, but this is really just a quirk of a particular lens on a device NOT primarily designed to take photos. If a DSLR was doing this, then yeah. But an iPhone? Who cares?
Stop taking pictures with your phone, is the answer.
As centuries of relying on Newtonian physics demonstrate:
It doesn't need to be accurate. It just needs to be close enough when looking at the parts you're interested in.
Nobody claims to be simulating a universe down to the sub-atomic level. They are just claiming that: the best they can simulate their own ideas of how it formed correlate with roughly what we see when we peek at the sky.
It's like saying that there's no point in simulating a rocket launch if you can't model every atom. There is. And it saves us a lot of work and tells us when something is (probably) wrong with our design.
Newtonian physics was THE most accurate method for centuries, correlated to millions of independent experiments to be correct. The fact that it's nowhere NEAR the full story of how things operate is neither here nor there, and we still teach it in schools because it's still accurate ENOUGH.
Embrace
Extend --- You are here.
Extinguish
Backing up my suspicions for the last 2+ years:
How does the US know the actual nationality of the hackers and not just their end-proxy?
The US have been trying to insinuate a cyber-war for years now, and never said how they know who's behind it (if you said the *ATTACK* came from China, fair enough - to say it ORIGINATED there is more of a stretch, and to say it was Chinese hackers is just ludicrous).
Of course we have suspicions and think we might know who's behind it and who owns the net-blocks, but what a wonderful way to discredit a nation and put the blame on someone else when you want to cyber-attack the US - just proxy through China and start WW3 when the US relatiates.
Really, US? How do you *KNOW*? On the scale that you can confidently state the Chinese "attacked" you (and coupled with your statements that cyber-attacks could be considered acts of war?)? You're REALLY that sure it was China that did it? That you can announce on the news that it was the country itself?
Or do you just want to start a war with China for some reason?
Except MS makes more money out of the EU, even after fines, than it does from the US.
"Let's tell an entire continent to fuck off" isn't sensible business in ANY form.
Nobody, not one person, initiated complaints in the "plain text editor", "basic bitmap editor", "calculator" software categories that were proven in a court of law to be a monopolistic misuse of power to ensure that ONLY their calculator/whatever dominated the market for years.
And the "real" Office suite is an entirely separate (and therefore optional) product.
Which is lucky because if MS were sued by every software manufacturer whose market they had manipulated contrary to anti-monopoly laws, there'd be an awful lot of these "You owe us $0.5bn" messages on some executive's desk. AV/spyware is probably the next major category, but I'm not aware of them doing dirty tricks like paying their end distributors NOT to put McAffee/Norton on machines that already have Windows Defender etc.
It's not a case of what they did. It's a case of what was brought to, and can be proven in, a court of law as deliberate monopolistic manipulation of the relevant market. Either they don't do it in other markets, or they haven't been brought to court for it (yet?).
Or:
Multiple-convicted monopolist company with assets on a par with the entire EU annual budget, seeks to avoid legal redress by failing to implement agreed-to legal measures (or only implementing them half-assedly) and claim they didn't know, nor bother to check, they were working for several YEARS, after already being fined half a billion Euros and made to implement those measures in the first place (after ANY NUMBER of appeals and legal arguments failed because the evidence was just so overwhelming).
It's all in the spin, really, and it's hard to have sympathy for the convicted monopolist worth more than a lot of EU countries combined, when they are basically here because they can't be bothered to instruct one person within their company to keep an eye on their half-a-billion-pound + expenses mistake and the complementary obligation they were legally required to implement over several years.
If you wanna do business in the EU, you have to stick by EU law, no matter how ridiculous you think it is or how much you disagree with its application. If that's a problem, don't do business with it. And if you don't want a repeat of your half-a-billion-dollar-plus-expenses blatant disregard for that law, maybe you should have one of the many very expensive lawyers, or even just someone involved in implementing the solution, keep an eye on it once a month, say, for the duration of your punishment.
Powers of 10.
Over copper or fibre.
At copper distances of 100m.
Call it a standard, if you like. Each time you have to upgrade, look to the next power of ten at that specification.
Because although 40Gb/s exists, it's not popular and you won't find it in your average computer supplier, ever. Sure, it's expensive to jump like that, but every technology boost is expensive and I'd rather we skipped the proprietary-data-center-only junk and leave them to their own devices and specify real-world, millions-of-businesses standards at jumps big enough to a) make a difference, b) be expensive at first but mass-market after (rather than sharing the market with half-assed solutions), c) run on the same specs at the previous generation (if not the same cables exactly, at least I can replace 100m runs with 100m runs and not worry).
Someone broke it off and it landed up over here:
http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/
As someone who has, quite literally, had to tear the sofa apart to find enough pennies for the cheapest loaf of bread in the shop so my girlfriend and I could eat that week, ONLY IDIOTS.
I've been in very undesirable financial positions both through faults of my own and not, and I tell you that I never once rented an appliance or gadget. Lots of companies have the same kind of "penalty" for not having money, starting with banks for instance. That's not the problem here - the problem is IDIOTS who rent an unnecessary gadget.
Firstly, they are among the FIRST things you give up on and sell off. Honestly. They are not a necessity, and if you can afford the money to keep a broadband connection going, you're not desperate enough to rent a machine to run on it. TV, PC, phone. Get rid of them. If you haven't, you're not "in trouble", you're just temporarily "skint/broke" which is another thing entirely.
Secondly, if you have to rent one, you have to work out how much it costs and it ALWAYS costs you more to rent rather than buy outright (like any of those "pay weekly" catalogues and anything else of that nature). Hell, from some places, it's cheaper to get a loan on an item of jewellery (and even just one of those pay-day) and pay back the loan+interest than it is to rent or even lease a PC.
Thirdly, if you're in that position, and you do think you NEED to RENT a LAPTOP for whatever reason, you're an idiot. You can save money by going to the library and using theirs.
If you can't do that, take up an old PC from a boot sale or ask companies/schools that are throwing them out. Hell, you'll learn Linux rather than pay £200 Windows tax on a machine if it actually mattered. But, again, you don't really need a PC and if you do, you "need" an Internet connection much more for half the reasons those type of people state (e.g. "saving money on energy suppliers", etc. - you will NOT save enough money to buy a laptop and always-on connection, so don't give me that crap).
But a laptop, especially, is not required - if your job requires you to have roaming access from anywhere, they will pay for it. The only reason to have a laptop over a PC is absolute necessity for the task at hand (and thus will be provided), or complete narcissism. They are more expensive, less durable, less powerful and more expensive to repair.
I have little sympathy for those who rent such things, or even those who rent basic appliances. What sympathy I have is only for their intrusion of privacy, not for their situation.
My mum rented a TV for 30 years (different models, but basically the same rental) until one broke once and the company gave us hassle, and my brother and I worked out how much we'd spent on it. It was enough to re-buy a new TV every two years over that period and still have money left over. We'd quite literally have had 15-20 fully-working TV's (even after accidents, breakages, etc.) somewhere in the house if we'd put the same money into a box and bought a TV whenever it was enough.
The TV went back and we bought a new TV the same day, which last 5 years until dad changed it for another one for the price of what would have been 1 years rental (and there was nothing wrong with the 5-year-old one either and went to my brother's house).
Renting appliances is stupid. Even renting houses is stupid but that's an order of magnitude more expensive and buying a house requires a credit history and, thus, you can see that not everyone will ever be able to buy rather than rent. But renting, you are just pissing your money away and paying off someone else's mortgage for them, plus 10%. And, yes, I rented for many years.
Renting cars? You're insane. Renting appliances? God, shoot me now.
Everybody: If you find yourself renting objects because you "can't afford it", if you find yourself paying into Christmas clubs because "you can't afford it", if you find yourself signing contracts for monthly payments because "you can't afford to buy it" and then try to
To be honest, if you wanted to make a "home brew" version of this (which wouldn't matter so long as you used a readable medium and data structure), then one of those kits that engraves 3D images into blocks of plastic would work just as well.
I don't know how expensive they are, but they're not prohibitive, run from common power supplies, engrave on cheap plastic (whose internal structure is unlikely to decompose much in 10,000 years), and customisable (i.e. you can get them to engrave any image, so it's just a question of software).
The data density might not be up there with this particular invention, but the cheapness, durability and simple hardware (and, even better, the EXTREME simplicity of reading them back) might go some way to making them a worthy time-capsule-esque data store. And then it's only a matter of time before we all have a permanent-recorder capable of engraving a Gigabyte or so.
Hard-code some hex values into your C code (e.g. microprocessor-fixed defines, or memory locations, bit-shifting constants, etc.)
See how long it takes you to spot that one is 1 character shorter than the others because of a typo, and the mess it causes.
Proportional fonts are pretty for printing out your code or showing it on a website. Monospaced fonts have a utility value that you can't substitute while actually working on it.
Opened it, stuck it into Eclipse's main C++ code font, size 10 (the size that Eclipse was using by default with the default font in Windows 7). Looked okay until I scrolled around a bit.
A hex string with E in it looked atrocious and the left-bar of the E was at least three times thicker than any other line anywhere and just drew your eyes to the E.
Not what you want when you need to transcribe some hexadecimal number correctly and have your eye drawn to the E all the time.
Other than that... well, it's just a font. It does the job if you want to avoid proprietary fonts. But the E thing made it look like every other "free/open" font used to 20 years ago.
Especially when nature has things like volcanos (whose dust cover can easily drop sunlight strength in whole regions by orders of magnitude), vegetation (anyone with an interest can find out that were they lived used to be either a) uninhabitable, b) huge forests that were burning dying off and regrowing for millennia before we ever lit a match) and all sorts of other nasties (not to mention things like solar storms and external factors - hell the dust from a meteorite is believed to be what blocked out so much of the sun that the dinosaurs died off from lack of vegetation and changes in atmosphere).
We just don't know. That was the answer in the 50's when climate science was a bunch of crackpots with flowers in their hair eating from hempen bowls, and it's the answer now. The fact that not much has changed despite HUGE advances in understanding and detection means that we still have much, much further to go before we can even stab a guess at whether we're doing anything bad and/or what effect that has and/or what effect not doing those bad things would have on us.
Nice post.
Pick any three. Calculate the impact. Is that better or worse than (potentially, possibly, a while from now) seas rising slightly?
Because things like vehicle replacement and stopping cutting down trees have huge, global impacts on lots of things (not least, trying to convince people to throw away their old car and buy a new, less-efficient one).
And you can't just do this a little at a time, we're talking international co-operation. And thus international-impact. And then you better hope that you were right in what was causing the problem and that is wasn't just a natural cycle that a) gets worse, b) goes back to normal without us doing anything anyway.
This is the point - we can all posit crazy ideas, but without some sort of plan of where we can go and what the impact of going there is, it's all pie-in-the-sky stuff (like replacing coal with photo-voltaics, for example, which is laughable).
We can't explain how an atom works, only what we can observe.
We can't predict weather without more than handful of days and still not with any accuracy (tell me what temperature it will be to the nearest degree a fortnight Tuesday).
To then suggest we actually have a clue what's going on even on the surface of a 6x10^24 kg mass of crap and that we're responsible for some quite minor change (if it was major, we'd be dead already, even a handful of degrees could be major) is pretty far-fetched for even the best scientists and climate models.
Sure, science can tell you that a black hole will suck up a neighbour with X km of itself because it's close enough and has enough gravity, but it can't describe how it's going to happen in any detail. What we deal with in our climate is trying to extrapolate accurate records of fine detail from a huge system that we have no idea of, no "plan" of the end-result, no rough approximation of prior years and so little previous accurate data that it's laughable.
Unfortunately, some people then want to use this to forward their private agendas NO MATTER the impact on us by either a) the climate or b) our solution to fix the climate (which would be equally as drastic, if not worse).
Great. Where are you going to get enough oil and metal to do that on any significantly achievable timescale?
I'm assuming he's a guy with good credentials, held in high-regard, data and conclusions backed up by peer-review, etc.
Great.
So what do we do? Because we haven't been able to answer that question for decades and now we NEED to know the answer before we continue, if that's the case.
As fabulous as all this detective work is, what are we supposed to do about it and what effect does that work have? If it means we have to forgo electricity (say), then maybe we're better off just letting the climate rise and the icecaps melt (for instance). Maybe not. Who knows?
Because for DECADES people have been shouting doom with no reasonable, practical explanation for it, solution of it, or analysis of the impact of said solutions.
Let's work from the assumption that I believe you and you're 100% correct. What do we do now?