When you can get your hands on it, it's worth researching if you want to buy it, not before.
When you research it, you need to find someone who's used it under a similar benchmark to your intended use (and, here, I do NOT mean benchmarks themselves - you need to test under similar usage, e.g. a particular game with certain settings, etc.).
When you go to buy it, you need to test it before your right to return it runs out.
Believing anything on a spec-sheet, on a review, advert, promotion, hype, rumour or anything else is just silly until you have it in your hands doing what you want.
If you do not draw the line, people will pull their kids out of school entirely and never educate them.
However, there is ALWAYS a choice of being able to send your kids elsewhere, to a school that supports your ideals. That place, however, is not the free state-provided schools that are legally required to teach any and all that come along without payment.
In that place, you are taught a curriculum compliant with the nation's interests. If you want to pull your kids out and home-educate them, you can. If you want to send your kids to a religious school, you can. It may cost, it may not. But you're asking "the state" to teach your kids AND ALL THE OTHERS IN THE CLASS something which most of them do not believe, and which the vast global consensus of science does not believe, forcibly, in a lesson about science.
It's not fair on anyone to be without choice. But in the same way that literal freedom can only equate with anarchy ("I'm free to nick all your stuff for my purposes"), literal choice means no curriculum.
However, we live in the real world (most of us anyway). In that world you have to proscribe a curriculum for compulsory education. Having that curriculum teach creationism IN SCIENCE LESSONS is like having someone teach pro-Nazism in your Maths lessons. It has no place there. Teach it in RS, because it's a religion. Nobody says you CAN'T teach it, we're saying teach it where it is suitable to be taught.
The state already decided centuries ago that you don't get complete freedom of choice - that's why you can't NOT send your children to school. However, you should be able to NOT send your children to a school that teaches creationism in a science lesson.
In my country (and continent), it's ILLEGAL to do what the creationist schools are doing. Specifically. Completely. Absolutely. There is a legal opt-out of any and all religious things that you do not want your children taught - whether mainstream religions or lack-of-religion. You have to mark it on school databases of pupil information. You have to ensure that they don't suffer by not having it (i.e. make up the time doing something else worthwhile with them). You have to ensure they aren't exposed to it unwittingly (e.g. singing hymns in an assembly). You have to ask about it and record it and keep religion strictly in RS lessons.
Because it has no place outside a RS lesson in the same way the political affiliation of the school's principal has no place in a Latin lesson.
When freedoms impinge on one another, you get a choice. I have the freedom to not have my daughter exposed to that shit by others without my knowledge, and others have the right to not have their children lectured by me about their religious affiliations. What creationists want is EVERYONE to be taught creationism no matter what, under the state education system. Without opt-out or alternative. That's a freedom being removed. That's illegal in many countries.
Valuing personal choice is important. However it does not supercede the rights of others. It's your CHOICE to educate YOUR child how you like, and to believe what you want. It does not supercede MY choice to not do so. And when a state school has to deal with both children, that means compartmentalising the curriculum and providing opt-out. Both of which, it's the ABSENCE of that anti-creationists are angry about.
Teach your child about the magical dinosaur bones that popped out of nowhere. But don't instruct teachers who have degrees in subjects like archaeology that they have to teach that, and certainly not to my child who will only hear about that in the context of "Yes, darling, some stupid people believe that..."
There's a way to distinguish between forcing a personal view and allowing a personal view to be arrived at.
NOBODY is running into schools and telling kids there is no God and they must be taught that, and they must write that down in their books, and they must read only textbooks that say there is no God. Nobody. Not even in the science lessons.
But creationists are doing exactly that for their belief, and far outside the scope of religious studies (science is science, maths is maths, geography is geography, religious studies is where you study religions).
Atheists probably value personal choice more than ANY other group of people. Nobody says "You cannot teach that religion" except other religions. Atheists say "You can teach all religions - including atheism and agnosticism and pastafarianism - fairly, inside a religious studies class".
It's like saying that pacifists aren't choosing a side in the war and promoting their countries military. Of course they're not. But neither are FORCING you / your kids to be pacifists too.
Depending on which report you read, oil, coal, gas etc. may have at least 100 years left. It depends on fracking and shale gas and all kinds of things that we aren't using at the moment but about 100 years isn't seen as a major obstacle - it'll be harder and go up in price and then no doubt it will be the end of it not long after, but it'll still be around until then.
We've found an awful lot of deposits that weren't viable 50 years ago to be viable now, based on the cost of the oil they'll give, and the technology now available to reach it.
However, that said, fossil fuels will be the first major category of fuels to disappear, beyond all certainty. Uranium etc., however, is destined to give us several hundred years more (if not nearer 1000 years) if we use that in current-day processes. Fact is, we're running scared of it because it's not politically-compatible, not because it's not viable.
The bigger problem is not use as fuel, but as a resource. Plastics, etc. are going to suffer before we can't burn the stuff. There are synthetic alternatives but they aren't used en-masse (or require a lot of energy, other precious resources like crops, etc.). If you can't get the plastics and the oils and the various things we use to keep machines operational, then it's a struggle to maintain hardware with in-specification materials. That's the real big problem, and one not solved by the wind-farm / solar crowd.
Energy is one part. Use of the oil itself is much more important. We'll lose a lot of materials that make up our modern world due to rising costs before we can't afford a tank of petrol.
And though we can find energy in other ways, and in abundance it has to be said, we can't find materials that can replace everything we currently use.
The only problems I ever see are that they don't hold charge as well so they are useless for clocks and similar low-draw, long-duration items. I've yet to see a product refuse to work with them.
And, I mean, seriously - hundreds of devices, everything from electronics kits as a youngster (where I discovered that NiCD short-circuit quite beautifully to become tiny heaters), every toy for my daughter, every gadget I own (Wii remotes, TV remotes, obscure handheld consoles, etc.).
Yet to find something that doesn't like a rechargeable. No, you don't get the same longevity out of them necessarily, but they work. I mean, honestly, I always laugh at the "do not use rechargeable batteries" warnings on some devices that I see. Have yet to see it make any difference.
Shall we have an argument about what makes art or not now?
Faffing about over the context of a word (which all evolve anyway) which millions of people use to refer to recorded music in the same way as live music is really just pontificating.
Music is the thing. Whether you saw it live or recorded it, it was music. It's pretentious to pretend that you can change a definition of a word based on digging up a quote to suit your personal use of it.
And to suggest there's something otherwise undetectable or irreproducible in the air to distinguish between live music and a sufficiently good recording of that music played back to you, it's gold-plated oxygen-free cable territory.
Sure, you probably enjoy the live one more. It's the difference between going to a theatre to see a play or watching it on TV. There's nothing quite like people coughing throughout, treading on your toes, rustling their pockets behind your ear, clapping too early or too vigorously or trying to join in from the seat next to you.
But to suggest that ONLY live music can be music is... just silly in this day and age.
Reverse-engineering is often allowed anyway if it's for the purposes of integration and compatibility.
Hence Samba can happily reverse-engineer things, no matter what the Windows licence says. They can't TAKE CODE (i.e. you can have been tainted by seeing the Windows source) but reverse-engineering from a binary is another matter entirely.
And just because a contract says something's not allowed, it doesn't mean anything unless a court agrees. 99.9% of the time, it would never even get that far. Yes, it's a pain. Yes, nobody wants the expense or the risk. But just because the Facebook EULA says you have to hand over your first-born does NOT make it legally binding, even if you provide to the court notarised proof that you specifically agreed to it for that exact clause alone.
Contracts are the bottom of the pile when it comes to law. The rest of the law takes precedence over them.
You have always been able to hide as many devices as you like behind NAT or similar, whether IPv4 or IPv6. Thus it's impossible to enforce and if you do, it will just encourage NAT propagation for IPv6 as heavily as it was for IPv4.
Some blinkered people still suggest that IPv6 transition requires you to immediately renumber every machine and device you have with its own globally-routable address immediately and fail to see that what will actually happen is that people will replace their gateway with a dual-homed machine (effectively turning it into a 6to4 gateway) and thus want to preserve NAT functionality for a while.
Only the gateway is on the globally-addressable net at the moment, only the gateway is seen by the outside world, only the gateway NEEDS to change. The rest is one of those things that won't happen because - once the gateway is changed - the rest don't need to change for the rest of their lifetime.
The fight against NAT is actually, from my point of view, the thing holding people back. Sure the IoT is cool and your firewalling should be in place, etc. but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with NAT because just about every device on the net today is using it, and it doesn't cause enough problems to care about for the most part. However it solves an enormous number of problems, including quite what to do about an IPv4->IPv6 transition where you don't want to have to find and renumber every damn device with a MAC that's on your premises (or that probably don't support IPv6 anyway).
If people dropped the attitude and let people transition, maybe ISP's would start using it.
However, I'm implementing my rule here - you can talk about IPv6 when your website and email servers are offering AAAA records. So that kills any discussion on Slashdot or The Register or any number of "tech" sites about it, despite nearly a decade of promises that they are "testing" it.
My site does. My email server does. I regularly pass a lot of email via IPv6 to GMail and other IPv6-ready services. Until then, Slashdot is just a news site, not a tech site.
I worry about using any large project - especially web browsers and network tools - that actually hosts things off-site anyway.
Sure, a mirror used to be handy to combat huge download amounts, but the core of the codebase like git trees, and the like? And with today's cloudiness?
I'm not sure what either github or sourceforce or freshmeat/whatever it's called now actually offer any more. Put a listing up, sure, linking to your page with your software, your licence details, etc. but actual downloads or git-trees? No.
Google Code and this kind of incident just show you why.
The EU has similar rules. Data cannot leave or be processed outside the country without SOMEONE in the EU taking the fall for allowing it to happen should something go wrong.
EU data protection is pretty hard. Google, Microsoft etc. provide guarantees to EU governments that school data on their apps (e.g. Google Apps for Education/Government etc.) are never stored nor transmitted to non-EU datacentres. I know, because as part of my job, I have a legal duty to check that this is the case of any company I hand our pupil's data off to.
Just because we don't want US noses in our data doesn't mean we're being malicious. It just means we have a set of rules and if you're not prepared to follow those rules, you can't have our data. Rules like "We have a right to see the data stored on ourselves", "We have the right to correct that information if it's incorrect", "We have a right to know what's happening to our data and who processes it and for what purpose" and so on.
There's a reason that I cannot allow use of Apple iCloud on-site. Apple refuse to provide such guarantees. Therefore their cloud service is dead to us (for many other reasons as well, but that's just Apple). There's a reason that I cannot use a software supplier from Sri Lanka who wants our business - because they can't provide the correct guarantees of our data and thus I personally, can be held *LEGALLY* liable if they take our data and some of it leaks out (for the purposes of the EU data protection laws, leak of any personally-identifiable information can result in fines and prosecution with personal liability - personally-identifiable information might be, say, one name with, say, one date-of-birth. Game over).
Sorry, but there's a reason that Dropbox, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and everyone else has an Irish datacenter - they have to control and process UK and EU user's data within the EU, according to strict laws, or risk enormous fines. The US divisions "demanding" access to the EU data is the impetus of the last year to separate the companies geographically so they can legally comply with EU regulations and not have to give data to the overbearing demands of the US court system that has no such jurisdiction.
We protect our data. Just because you don't, that doesn't make us terrorists or police states. In fact, it skews towards the exact opposite.
Require an external driver (network, RAID controller, etc.)? Stick a USB key in (USB keys have been supported in Windows setup for a long time now). Hell, most of the drivers are larger than 1.44Mb, especially for anything vaguely complex.
However, as someone who's pushed out two ENTIRE SCHOOLS worth of PC's from a single Windows 8 PXE-booting image, on PC's from 6-years-old to brand-new, I have been required to install precisely one driver, and that was non-boot-critical (a touchscreen). I literally have one image, with the base setup program straight off a Windows 8 CD, and it boots everything I plug it into - whether from PXE, CD or USB, to the point where I can install it.
Servers may be a slightly different matter but you're on your own then anyway, and most server manufacturer's have driver CD's and / or boot CD's that slipstream the driver into a Windows install for you (e.g. IBM Bladecenter Boot Manager disks etc.).
The bigger question is really why you think you still need floppy? They were dead before ISA cards were, and I don't see people crowing about native support for ISA cards beyond the NE2000 any more. There's a reason - they're dead.
If you want a USB floppy disk driver, stick it on a USB stick (ironically, it will work!). Or slipstream it into your install. Or even put it on a CD.
But the last time I *needed* a floppy to install windows was for Server 2003 with an ancient RAID card, and even then I could have done it in much easier ways but just happened to have a floppy with the drivers and a USB floppy that the BIOS recognised.
The steam update specifically says that they do not.
And having VS installed won't give you a VAC ban, or almost every developer would be VAC banned from their own games. There may have been a glitch at one point but every instance I've seen of that gets reverted.
Rather than continuingly being forced to report on your own humiliations, why don't you just have a word with someone at DICE and show them what kind of response their actions are getting?
Because when the Data Protection people jump on you for having something opt-out rather than opt-in, even with warning, then you'll realise what they do all day (i.e. fine companies that do this).
Just because the US authorities are toothless in this regard, doesn't mean the rest of the world is.
Go on. Send me a text or robocall that I didn't specifically authorise (and, no, agreeing to the new "forced" terms and conditions isn't the same). The absolute worst scenario? I tell you that I'm opting-out of them all. You EVER phone after that, you're going to end up having to answer to data protection lawsuits and - in my country at least - things like the Telephone Preference Service.
I didn't give you explicit permission to do this, therefore you have no permission to do this. We can argue about the definition of "explicit" in court if you like, but the case law is pretty clear in this regard.
1) If bombers "find out" that they have a 95% chance of not being caught going through security (the scariest "barrier" after you've obtained the explosives or whatever), then they won't be all that rare. This is the problem here - knowing how CRAP this security is will actually encourage MORE attacks. The truth of it is so pathetic that people's misconceptions are turned on their head.
2) Bombers have training, knowledge and resources too. And strapping a bomb to your back and it being ENTIRELY missed in even a pat-down doesn't need any of the above.
If someone is able to talk directly to your computer's network ports without your permission, you have bigger problems than a VNC-like option in your BIOS that you can turn off.
Seriously.
Similarly for uploads, etc. There's a reason that we have things like authenticating proxies, firewalls and all that other jazz that people moan about.
If you're vaguely techy and think this means it's beyond your control, you really shouldn't be on this website.
1) Absolutely. Documentation saves your life. 2) Crap. Speak out when it's wrong or forever be a lackey yes man who does whatever is asked of you. If it means you get walked out, that's what you WANT. You don't want to work for an arsehole who sacks you just because he disagrees. You are hired for a job. If, in doing that job, you disagree with an approach, you NEED to air that view. You can still do the "I think it's stupid, but that's what I'll do for you" line and wait for the "I told you so" moment, of course, but... fuck. And this especially applies if what you're being asked to do is stupid, illegal or just plain against your will (You're a professional who's been hired - if you have ANY say at you, you're a professional they should be listening too). 3) Fuck off. Of course it is. But it's ALSO your job to do as told. See above. "Absolutely... but you know I disagree, because X, Y, Z will happen - right?" 4) Close, but I'd say even less. Be prepared to walk at any point - I've stayed in jobs for YEARS but still, always ready to walk when it all goes wrong (i.e. the job is wrong for me, not the other way around, but that would apply if I thought that too). 5) Yuck. Make it clear that you are there, professional, and things are working because of your systems, yes, but fuck the ego. Just do it. Drop it in when you plan works against everyone's expectations, but bragging is... uncouth. How vulgar. Just an "I told you so", but more subtle is all you need. Blowing your own trumpet will make people hate you - you may or may not care, but it's unnecessary. 6) Crap. See above. I have told my direct boss (who's more often than not the company director) that their idea is stupid and I disagree several times. I either get proven right, or they know I'm doing it against my better judgement (and, often, they have had it decreed to them by outside factors even if they are directors!). 7) Wrong. I'm right, and employed, and especially right when I disagree with everyone else - because I don't disagree vehemently unless I'm SURE I'm right. 8) Nope. Don't play politics at all. Find allies, yes, but don't play people off against each other. 9) Possibly. I don't really care because the only people who decide my job / title / promotion know what I do and what I'm bringing to them. If they fail to promote (without just cause - I'm happy for them to say "We don't think you've managed this or that or the other very well" and I agree, that's fair enough), I move on. 10) Absolutely.
If you employ people, pay them. They are your biggest expense, your biggest burden, the most important part of your business AND the source of ALL your income.
That said, if you employ people, you know that the cost of employing them goes FAR beyond anything to do with their salary. That's half of it, if you're lucky. You have legal, financial, and other obligations that all cost to have taken care of when you have employees. Anything from severance pay, health-and-safety training, pensions, paperwork, legal work on their contract, compliance work, etc.
That you didn't budget for that correctly, or failed to employ properly, is your own problem.
I often find myself explaining quite how far away we are from even the basics of this.
People say "Ah, but Siri", "Oh, but look at Deep Blue", "What about this clever bit of programming", etc. and they miss the point. Without human-handholding throughout it's entire creation and use, it's useless.
We have heuristics, that's it. Programmed, adjusted and honed by human minds to accomplish a particular task and - in general - useless for anything outside that scope. We can do very clever things, but we can't make a device that can learn.
All the stuff we have is programmed heuristics. Even if they're heuristics which then hone some other program, the heuristics are still limited, fixed, unchangeable and can't "learn" anything new.
AI is decades, if not centuries, away in even the smallest of capacities. Much more dangerous is simple automation and progress - when it takes seconds to guess every possible combination (brute-force passwords etc.), when huge amounts of data can be naively processed by a malicious human, etc. that's much more of an impact than anything that an AI can do.
Greece ran out of money before any of those options ever arose.
To demand that, in order to get BILLIONS of Euros, they implement some kinds of measures to ensure the money isn't pissed away isn't unreasonable. Did you see how much waste and unnecessary payments were made to their own local politicians, etc. before? There's no point lending people that amount of money only to fill THEIR own coffers at the expense of Greece in general.
It's not in any creditor's interest to bankrupt a country that owes them money, nor is it in their interest to implement a measure that means they cannot repay the loan. Not on this scale. You can't just slap a tiny fine on the interest for failure to repay when you're talking about an entire country, and hope they'll have to pay back a bit more.
What they're trying to do is make sure Greece can afford the next payment. Sure, the country is absolutely in the shit - this is no surprise. But to push it further in the shit for a backhander when there are BILLIONS owed to you already that you'll never see if you piss about is conspiracy-theory-gone-mad territory.
The country is in the shit. If it doesn't implement austerity measures, it will be deeper in the shit. The first payment missed means no more money will be forthcoming. At all. You won't be able to pay the police, or the army, or anyone else. And that's the death of a country. That's quite literally anarchy.
To pay that, they have NO MONEY except these loans - that they AGREED to. To continue to get that money, they have to make the payments, and abide by the creditor's terms (which are focused in the interest of paying the creditors back - by avoiding bankruptcy and anarchy as part of that).
Greece are stupid to not realise this. They are quite literally on the brink of complete nationwide dissolution. Who's going to care about the security of the country when nobody is being paid? High unemployment? Wait until it's 90-100% unemployment and those people decide to riot or take the country over for themselves.
Greece are in deep shit. Always will be for the next decade at least. But not complying, and not paying, just puts them in MUCH DEEPER shit. When the creditors just say "No", Greece is dead. Any other country can walk in and take it. The populous will flee. It becomes an empty country with no value. And that all those things that they hold dearer than having to cut back on services and raise taxes? They're gone. Forever.
Starbucks UK would send all its profits to a European arm, and then claim that the amount of licensing paid to that European company to "use the trademarks", etc. was EXACTLY the same as their profit each year.
It's hard to legislate against that without another such scheme popping up almost instantly.
The blanket tax/law is designed to be a catch-all - we don't care how you did it or what clever workaround you find... if you think you're still doing this, we'll charge you more tax that ordinary corporate tax. This stops people finding clever loopholes, stops the government wasting time legislating over those loopholes (and that costs a LOT, takes a long time and means you're still losing that money in the meantime), and means that if you're in any doubt you can charge them 25% and then they can argue in court later - but you have their money FIRST and then they have to argue later to get it back if they find a loophole that allows them to.
Given that Amazon et al were collectively making BILLIONS of tax fly out of the country, this law has already paid for itself, and more, and any hassle they might get if the law is challenged. It's such a seriously huge amount of money for the country as a whole that this law is going to affect the way these companies do business in the UK almost instantly and people were actually scared that many such businesses would disappear entirely.
But, then, if we're not seeing tax from them, that's not a big deal - putting any similar-sized company in their place paying even 1% tax is an improvement over the current situation where they're paying almost zero tax. The odd lawsuit can easily be funded and put off for decades with those billions of pounds owed.
Honestly, they are taking the piss and fighting the 25% tax law against just paying 20% tax legally? One of those is so much easier a option that companies with BILLIONS of pounds of lawyers available will cave and pay the tax legally, especially in the face of public opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this general of all things in life?
When you can get your hands on it, it's worth researching if you want to buy it, not before.
When you research it, you need to find someone who's used it under a similar benchmark to your intended use (and, here, I do NOT mean benchmarks themselves - you need to test under similar usage, e.g. a particular game with certain settings, etc.).
When you go to buy it, you need to test it before your right to return it runs out.
Believing anything on a spec-sheet, on a review, advert, promotion, hype, rumour or anything else is just silly until you have it in your hands doing what you want.
There is a line here.
If you do not draw the line, people will pull their kids out of school entirely and never educate them.
However, there is ALWAYS a choice of being able to send your kids elsewhere, to a school that supports your ideals. That place, however, is not the free state-provided schools that are legally required to teach any and all that come along without payment.
In that place, you are taught a curriculum compliant with the nation's interests. If you want to pull your kids out and home-educate them, you can. If you want to send your kids to a religious school, you can. It may cost, it may not. But you're asking "the state" to teach your kids AND ALL THE OTHERS IN THE CLASS something which most of them do not believe, and which the vast global consensus of science does not believe, forcibly, in a lesson about science.
It's not fair on anyone to be without choice. But in the same way that literal freedom can only equate with anarchy ("I'm free to nick all your stuff for my purposes"), literal choice means no curriculum.
However, we live in the real world (most of us anyway). In that world you have to proscribe a curriculum for compulsory education. Having that curriculum teach creationism IN SCIENCE LESSONS is like having someone teach pro-Nazism in your Maths lessons. It has no place there. Teach it in RS, because it's a religion. Nobody says you CAN'T teach it, we're saying teach it where it is suitable to be taught.
The state already decided centuries ago that you don't get complete freedom of choice - that's why you can't NOT send your children to school. However, you should be able to NOT send your children to a school that teaches creationism in a science lesson.
In my country (and continent), it's ILLEGAL to do what the creationist schools are doing. Specifically. Completely. Absolutely. There is a legal opt-out of any and all religious things that you do not want your children taught - whether mainstream religions or lack-of-religion. You have to mark it on school databases of pupil information. You have to ensure that they don't suffer by not having it (i.e. make up the time doing something else worthwhile with them). You have to ensure they aren't exposed to it unwittingly (e.g. singing hymns in an assembly). You have to ask about it and record it and keep religion strictly in RS lessons.
Because it has no place outside a RS lesson in the same way the political affiliation of the school's principal has no place in a Latin lesson.
When freedoms impinge on one another, you get a choice. I have the freedom to not have my daughter exposed to that shit by others without my knowledge, and others have the right to not have their children lectured by me about their religious affiliations. What creationists want is EVERYONE to be taught creationism no matter what, under the state education system. Without opt-out or alternative. That's a freedom being removed. That's illegal in many countries.
Valuing personal choice is important. However it does not supercede the rights of others. It's your CHOICE to educate YOUR child how you like, and to believe what you want. It does not supercede MY choice to not do so. And when a state school has to deal with both children, that means compartmentalising the curriculum and providing opt-out. Both of which, it's the ABSENCE of that anti-creationists are angry about.
Teach your child about the magical dinosaur bones that popped out of nowhere. But don't instruct teachers who have degrees in subjects like archaeology that they have to teach that, and certainly not to my child who will only hear about that in the context of "Yes, darling, some stupid people believe that..."
There's a way to distinguish between forcing a personal view and allowing a personal view to be arrived at.
NOBODY is running into schools and telling kids there is no God and they must be taught that, and they must write that down in their books, and they must read only textbooks that say there is no God. Nobody. Not even in the science lessons.
But creationists are doing exactly that for their belief, and far outside the scope of religious studies (science is science, maths is maths, geography is geography, religious studies is where you study religions).
Atheists probably value personal choice more than ANY other group of people. Nobody says "You cannot teach that religion" except other religions. Atheists say "You can teach all religions - including atheism and agnosticism and pastafarianism - fairly, inside a religious studies class".
It's like saying that pacifists aren't choosing a side in the war and promoting their countries military. Of course they're not. But neither are FORCING you / your kids to be pacifists too.
Yes.
Depending on which report you read, oil, coal, gas etc. may have at least 100 years left. It depends on fracking and shale gas and all kinds of things that we aren't using at the moment but about 100 years isn't seen as a major obstacle - it'll be harder and go up in price and then no doubt it will be the end of it not long after, but it'll still be around until then.
We've found an awful lot of deposits that weren't viable 50 years ago to be viable now, based on the cost of the oil they'll give, and the technology now available to reach it.
However, that said, fossil fuels will be the first major category of fuels to disappear, beyond all certainty. Uranium etc., however, is destined to give us several hundred years more (if not nearer 1000 years) if we use that in current-day processes. Fact is, we're running scared of it because it's not politically-compatible, not because it's not viable.
The bigger problem is not use as fuel, but as a resource. Plastics, etc. are going to suffer before we can't burn the stuff. There are synthetic alternatives but they aren't used en-masse (or require a lot of energy, other precious resources like crops, etc.). If you can't get the plastics and the oils and the various things we use to keep machines operational, then it's a struggle to maintain hardware with in-specification materials. That's the real big problem, and one not solved by the wind-farm / solar crowd.
Energy is one part. Use of the oil itself is much more important. We'll lose a lot of materials that make up our modern world due to rising costs before we can't afford a tank of petrol.
And though we can find energy in other ways, and in abundance it has to be said, we can't find materials that can replace everything we currently use.
Strange. I've used NiCD and NiMH for years.
The only problems I ever see are that they don't hold charge as well so they are useless for clocks and similar low-draw, long-duration items. I've yet to see a product refuse to work with them.
And, I mean, seriously - hundreds of devices, everything from electronics kits as a youngster (where I discovered that NiCD short-circuit quite beautifully to become tiny heaters), every toy for my daughter, every gadget I own (Wii remotes, TV remotes, obscure handheld consoles, etc.).
Yet to find something that doesn't like a rechargeable. No, you don't get the same longevity out of them necessarily, but they work. I mean, honestly, I always laugh at the "do not use rechargeable batteries" warnings on some devices that I see. Have yet to see it make any difference.
Shall we have an argument about what makes art or not now?
Faffing about over the context of a word (which all evolve anyway) which millions of people use to refer to recorded music in the same way as live music is really just pontificating.
Music is the thing. Whether you saw it live or recorded it, it was music. It's pretentious to pretend that you can change a definition of a word based on digging up a quote to suit your personal use of it.
And to suggest there's something otherwise undetectable or irreproducible in the air to distinguish between live music and a sufficiently good recording of that music played back to you, it's gold-plated oxygen-free cable territory.
Sure, you probably enjoy the live one more. It's the difference between going to a theatre to see a play or watching it on TV. There's nothing quite like people coughing throughout, treading on your toes, rustling their pockets behind your ear, clapping too early or too vigorously or trying to join in from the seat next to you.
But to suggest that ONLY live music can be music is... just silly in this day and age.
Reverse-engineering is often allowed anyway if it's for the purposes of integration and compatibility.
Hence Samba can happily reverse-engineer things, no matter what the Windows licence says. They can't TAKE CODE (i.e. you can have been tainted by seeing the Windows source) but reverse-engineering from a binary is another matter entirely.
And just because a contract says something's not allowed, it doesn't mean anything unless a court agrees. 99.9% of the time, it would never even get that far. Yes, it's a pain. Yes, nobody wants the expense or the risk. But just because the Facebook EULA says you have to hand over your first-born does NOT make it legally binding, even if you provide to the court notarised proof that you specifically agreed to it for that exact clause alone.
Contracts are the bottom of the pile when it comes to law. The rest of the law takes precedence over them.
You have always been able to hide as many devices as you like behind NAT or similar, whether IPv4 or IPv6. Thus it's impossible to enforce and if you do, it will just encourage NAT propagation for IPv6 as heavily as it was for IPv4.
Some blinkered people still suggest that IPv6 transition requires you to immediately renumber every machine and device you have with its own globally-routable address immediately and fail to see that what will actually happen is that people will replace their gateway with a dual-homed machine (effectively turning it into a 6to4 gateway) and thus want to preserve NAT functionality for a while.
Only the gateway is on the globally-addressable net at the moment, only the gateway is seen by the outside world, only the gateway NEEDS to change. The rest is one of those things that won't happen because - once the gateway is changed - the rest don't need to change for the rest of their lifetime.
The fight against NAT is actually, from my point of view, the thing holding people back. Sure the IoT is cool and your firewalling should be in place, etc. but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with NAT because just about every device on the net today is using it, and it doesn't cause enough problems to care about for the most part. However it solves an enormous number of problems, including quite what to do about an IPv4->IPv6 transition where you don't want to have to find and renumber every damn device with a MAC that's on your premises (or that probably don't support IPv6 anyway).
If people dropped the attitude and let people transition, maybe ISP's would start using it.
However, I'm implementing my rule here - you can talk about IPv6 when your website and email servers are offering AAAA records. So that kills any discussion on Slashdot or The Register or any number of "tech" sites about it, despite nearly a decade of promises that they are "testing" it.
My site does. My email server does. I regularly pass a lot of email via IPv6 to GMail and other IPv6-ready services. Until then, Slashdot is just a news site, not a tech site.
I worry about using any large project - especially web browsers and network tools - that actually hosts things off-site anyway.
Sure, a mirror used to be handy to combat huge download amounts, but the core of the codebase like git trees, and the like? And with today's cloudiness?
I'm not sure what either github or sourceforce or freshmeat/whatever it's called now actually offer any more. Put a listing up, sure, linking to your page with your software, your licence details, etc. but actual downloads or git-trees? No.
Google Code and this kind of incident just show you why.
Not true.
The EU has similar rules. Data cannot leave or be processed outside the country without SOMEONE in the EU taking the fall for allowing it to happen should something go wrong.
EU data protection is pretty hard. Google, Microsoft etc. provide guarantees to EU governments that school data on their apps (e.g. Google Apps for Education/Government etc.) are never stored nor transmitted to non-EU datacentres. I know, because as part of my job, I have a legal duty to check that this is the case of any company I hand our pupil's data off to.
Just because we don't want US noses in our data doesn't mean we're being malicious. It just means we have a set of rules and if you're not prepared to follow those rules, you can't have our data. Rules like "We have a right to see the data stored on ourselves", "We have the right to correct that information if it's incorrect", "We have a right to know what's happening to our data and who processes it and for what purpose" and so on.
There's a reason that I cannot allow use of Apple iCloud on-site. Apple refuse to provide such guarantees. Therefore their cloud service is dead to us (for many other reasons as well, but that's just Apple). There's a reason that I cannot use a software supplier from Sri Lanka who wants our business - because they can't provide the correct guarantees of our data and thus I personally, can be held *LEGALLY* liable if they take our data and some of it leaks out (for the purposes of the EU data protection laws, leak of any personally-identifiable information can result in fines and prosecution with personal liability - personally-identifiable information might be, say, one name with, say, one date-of-birth. Game over).
Sorry, but there's a reason that Dropbox, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and everyone else has an Irish datacenter - they have to control and process UK and EU user's data within the EU, according to strict laws, or risk enormous fines. The US divisions "demanding" access to the EU data is the impetus of the last year to separate the companies geographically so they can legally comply with EU regulations and not have to give data to the overbearing demands of the US court system that has no such jurisdiction.
We protect our data. Just because you don't, that doesn't make us terrorists or police states. In fact, it skews towards the exact opposite.
There is no need.
Require an external driver (network, RAID controller, etc.)? Stick a USB key in (USB keys have been supported in Windows setup for a long time now). Hell, most of the drivers are larger than 1.44Mb, especially for anything vaguely complex.
However, as someone who's pushed out two ENTIRE SCHOOLS worth of PC's from a single Windows 8 PXE-booting image, on PC's from 6-years-old to brand-new, I have been required to install precisely one driver, and that was non-boot-critical (a touchscreen). I literally have one image, with the base setup program straight off a Windows 8 CD, and it boots everything I plug it into - whether from PXE, CD or USB, to the point where I can install it.
Servers may be a slightly different matter but you're on your own then anyway, and most server manufacturer's have driver CD's and / or boot CD's that slipstream the driver into a Windows install for you (e.g. IBM Bladecenter Boot Manager disks etc.).
The bigger question is really why you think you still need floppy? They were dead before ISA cards were, and I don't see people crowing about native support for ISA cards beyond the NE2000 any more. There's a reason - they're dead.
If you want a USB floppy disk driver, stick it on a USB stick (ironically, it will work!). Or slipstream it into your install. Or even put it on a CD.
But the last time I *needed* a floppy to install windows was for Server 2003 with an ancient RAID card, and even then I could have done it in much easier ways but just happened to have a floppy with the drivers and a USB floppy that the BIOS recognised.
It has a colon after it.
But, still, sanitise your damn inputs.
The steam update specifically says that they do not.
And having VS installed won't give you a VAC ban, or almost every developer would be VAC banned from their own games. There may have been a glitch at one point but every instance I've seen of that gets reverted.
Established law trumps contract.
You get an opt-out under EU law.
Rather than continuingly being forced to report on your own humiliations, why don't you just have a word with someone at DICE and show them what kind of response their actions are getting?
Go on, I dare you.
Because when the Data Protection people jump on you for having something opt-out rather than opt-in, even with warning, then you'll realise what they do all day (i.e. fine companies that do this).
Just because the US authorities are toothless in this regard, doesn't mean the rest of the world is.
Go on. Send me a text or robocall that I didn't specifically authorise (and, no, agreeing to the new "forced" terms and conditions isn't the same). The absolute worst scenario? I tell you that I'm opting-out of them all. You EVER phone after that, you're going to end up having to answer to data protection lawsuits and - in my country at least - things like the Telephone Preference Service.
I didn't give you explicit permission to do this, therefore you have no permission to do this. We can argue about the definition of "explicit" in court if you like, but the case law is pretty clear in this regard.
1) If bombers "find out" that they have a 95% chance of not being caught going through security (the scariest "barrier" after you've obtained the explosives or whatever), then they won't be all that rare. This is the problem here - knowing how CRAP this security is will actually encourage MORE attacks. The truth of it is so pathetic that people's misconceptions are turned on their head.
2) Bombers have training, knowledge and resources too. And strapping a bomb to your back and it being ENTIRELY missed in even a pat-down doesn't need any of the above.
If someone is able to talk directly to your computer's network ports without your permission, you have bigger problems than a VNC-like option in your BIOS that you can turn off.
Seriously.
Similarly for uploads, etc. There's a reason that we have things like authenticating proxies, firewalls and all that other jazz that people moan about.
If you're vaguely techy and think this means it's beyond your control, you really shouldn't be on this website.
Wow, some serious pessimism there.
1) Absolutely. Documentation saves your life.
2) Crap. Speak out when it's wrong or forever be a lackey yes man who does whatever is asked of you. If it means you get walked out, that's what you WANT. You don't want to work for an arsehole who sacks you just because he disagrees. You are hired for a job. If, in doing that job, you disagree with an approach, you NEED to air that view. You can still do the "I think it's stupid, but that's what I'll do for you" line and wait for the "I told you so" moment, of course, but... fuck. And this especially applies if what you're being asked to do is stupid, illegal or just plain against your will (You're a professional who's been hired - if you have ANY say at you, you're a professional they should be listening too).
3) Fuck off. Of course it is. But it's ALSO your job to do as told. See above. "Absolutely... but you know I disagree, because X, Y, Z will happen - right?"
4) Close, but I'd say even less. Be prepared to walk at any point - I've stayed in jobs for YEARS but still, always ready to walk when it all goes wrong (i.e. the job is wrong for me, not the other way around, but that would apply if I thought that too).
5) Yuck. Make it clear that you are there, professional, and things are working because of your systems, yes, but fuck the ego. Just do it. Drop it in when you plan works against everyone's expectations, but bragging is... uncouth. How vulgar. Just an "I told you so", but more subtle is all you need. Blowing your own trumpet will make people hate you - you may or may not care, but it's unnecessary.
6) Crap. See above. I have told my direct boss (who's more often than not the company director) that their idea is stupid and I disagree several times. I either get proven right, or they know I'm doing it against my better judgement (and, often, they have had it decreed to them by outside factors even if they are directors!).
7) Wrong. I'm right, and employed, and especially right when I disagree with everyone else - because I don't disagree vehemently unless I'm SURE I'm right.
8) Nope. Don't play politics at all. Find allies, yes, but don't play people off against each other.
9) Possibly. I don't really care because the only people who decide my job / title / promotion know what I do and what I'm bringing to them. If they fail to promote (without just cause - I'm happy for them to say "We don't think you've managed this or that or the other very well" and I agree, that's fair enough), I move on.
10) Absolutely.
Why the hell were you storing / manipulating a 64-bit key in a tree class as floating-point?
If you employ people, pay them. They are your biggest expense, your biggest burden, the most important part of your business AND the source of ALL your income.
That said, if you employ people, you know that the cost of employing them goes FAR beyond anything to do with their salary. That's half of it, if you're lucky. You have legal, financial, and other obligations that all cost to have taken care of when you have employees. Anything from severance pay, health-and-safety training, pensions, paperwork, legal work on their contract, compliance work, etc.
That you didn't budget for that correctly, or failed to employ properly, is your own problem.
Because when you accidentally delete the wrong photo on the phone, the first thing you'd hope is that you could go to your backup?
I often find myself explaining quite how far away we are from even the basics of this.
People say "Ah, but Siri", "Oh, but look at Deep Blue", "What about this clever bit of programming", etc. and they miss the point. Without human-handholding throughout it's entire creation and use, it's useless.
We have heuristics, that's it. Programmed, adjusted and honed by human minds to accomplish a particular task and - in general - useless for anything outside that scope. We can do very clever things, but we can't make a device that can learn.
All the stuff we have is programmed heuristics. Even if they're heuristics which then hone some other program, the heuristics are still limited, fixed, unchangeable and can't "learn" anything new.
AI is decades, if not centuries, away in even the smallest of capacities. Much more dangerous is simple automation and progress - when it takes seconds to guess every possible combination (brute-force passwords etc.), when huge amounts of data can be naively processed by a malicious human, etc. that's much more of an impact than anything that an AI can do.
Greece ran out of money before any of those options ever arose.
To demand that, in order to get BILLIONS of Euros, they implement some kinds of measures to ensure the money isn't pissed away isn't unreasonable. Did you see how much waste and unnecessary payments were made to their own local politicians, etc. before? There's no point lending people that amount of money only to fill THEIR own coffers at the expense of Greece in general.
It's not in any creditor's interest to bankrupt a country that owes them money, nor is it in their interest to implement a measure that means they cannot repay the loan. Not on this scale. You can't just slap a tiny fine on the interest for failure to repay when you're talking about an entire country, and hope they'll have to pay back a bit more.
What they're trying to do is make sure Greece can afford the next payment. Sure, the country is absolutely in the shit - this is no surprise. But to push it further in the shit for a backhander when there are BILLIONS owed to you already that you'll never see if you piss about is conspiracy-theory-gone-mad territory.
The country is in the shit. If it doesn't implement austerity measures, it will be deeper in the shit. The first payment missed means no more money will be forthcoming. At all. You won't be able to pay the police, or the army, or anyone else. And that's the death of a country. That's quite literally anarchy.
To pay that, they have NO MONEY except these loans - that they AGREED to. To continue to get that money, they have to make the payments, and abide by the creditor's terms (which are focused in the interest of paying the creditors back - by avoiding bankruptcy and anarchy as part of that).
Greece are stupid to not realise this. They are quite literally on the brink of complete nationwide dissolution. Who's going to care about the security of the country when nobody is being paid? High unemployment? Wait until it's 90-100% unemployment and those people decide to riot or take the country over for themselves.
Greece are in deep shit. Always will be for the next decade at least. But not complying, and not paying, just puts them in MUCH DEEPER shit. When the creditors just say "No", Greece is dead. Any other country can walk in and take it. The populous will flee. It becomes an empty country with no value. And that all those things that they hold dearer than having to cut back on services and raise taxes? They're gone. Forever.
Because a lot of it was profit-shifting.
Starbucks UK would send all its profits to a European arm, and then claim that the amount of licensing paid to that European company to "use the trademarks", etc. was EXACTLY the same as their profit each year.
It's hard to legislate against that without another such scheme popping up almost instantly.
The blanket tax/law is designed to be a catch-all - we don't care how you did it or what clever workaround you find... if you think you're still doing this, we'll charge you more tax that ordinary corporate tax. This stops people finding clever loopholes, stops the government wasting time legislating over those loopholes (and that costs a LOT, takes a long time and means you're still losing that money in the meantime), and means that if you're in any doubt you can charge them 25% and then they can argue in court later - but you have their money FIRST and then they have to argue later to get it back if they find a loophole that allows them to.
Given that Amazon et al were collectively making BILLIONS of tax fly out of the country, this law has already paid for itself, and more, and any hassle they might get if the law is challenged. It's such a seriously huge amount of money for the country as a whole that this law is going to affect the way these companies do business in the UK almost instantly and people were actually scared that many such businesses would disappear entirely.
But, then, if we're not seeing tax from them, that's not a big deal - putting any similar-sized company in their place paying even 1% tax is an improvement over the current situation where they're paying almost zero tax. The odd lawsuit can easily be funded and put off for decades with those billions of pounds owed.
Honestly, they are taking the piss and fighting the 25% tax law against just paying 20% tax legally? One of those is so much easier a option that companies with BILLIONS of pounds of lawyers available will cave and pay the tax legally, especially in the face of public opinion.