Apparently "sport" means everybody is doing the same thing, under the same set of rules.
This is why bridge could be a "demonstration sport" at the Olympics, because everybody is playing according to a known set of rules.
So, apparently there are athletic sports, and non-athletic sports... and athletic games and non-athletic games. When I play golf it's a game, when Tiger Woods does it it's a sport -- because I ignore most of the rules.
But, apparently, it is NOT TRUE that sports require athletic abilities... which confuses the heck out of me. But nonetheless, bridge and chess are technically "sports".
Why is that kind of information on the bar code at all?
Your subject says it all... bad design.
This stuff isn't designed to be secure, or protect your privacy, it's designed to make the process easier for airlines and the idiots who run the security theater.
There's a lot of products which are absolutely terribly designed like this... apparently with a bar code reader and a hotel key card, you can extract a tremendous amount of information which has no business being encoded on that.
As long as there are no data privacy laws, and companies have no penalties for incompetently making use of it, this will continue.
You should pretty much assume that all companies who want your data are either incompetent, or have other motives to misuse your data -- you'll be less surprised when it proves to be true. It won't help you, but you'll be less surprised.
Personally, I think he's mistaken or lying. I just wanted to make sure that we considered the reasonable alternatives.
I'm pretty sure in reading TFA there is little chance he could be "mistaken":
The secret sauce seems to be ultra-dense deuterium, "D(0)" whatever that means. Looking through the author's other papers, it looks like he's claiming to have made metallic hydrogen, which would be a Nobel Prize right there. And it's starting to look a little bit suspicious that no other labs have replicated the work in the intervening eight or ten years.
While metallic hydrogen probably exists inside the core of Jupiter, no lab on Earth has succeeded in making metallic hydrogen repeatably, although it's been postulated to be possible since 1935 and many have tried. Teams at Cornell and the French Atomic Commission have both given it a shot, and failed with pressures as high as 3.2 million atmospheres.
Well, no labs except [Holmlid]'s. It must be true, though, because it's on Wikipedia! It says right there that the [Holmlid] lab made metallic hydrogen using "Rydberg Matter". We'd never heard of this stuff, so we followed that Wikipedia link down the rabbit hole, only to find some mumbo-jumbo that we didn't understand and citations of papers nearly exclusively by, you guessed it, [Leif Holmlid].
If he can demonstrate this, then fine... he's a super genius.
But I'm sticking with my "if he can't demonstrate that it works in such a way as to be repeatable by someone else, then he must be a lying, attention-seeking media whore."
It isn't up to the world to validate his outrageous claims. Put up or shut up.
Spectrum seems a bit over regulated at the moment, there's barely any room for entities that aren't massive corporations with billions of dollars to do anything.
Welcome to your oligarchy... if it isn't designed to benefit massive corporations with billions of dollars, it isn't happening.
They're the ones who have the elected people on the payroll.
The problem with BBT is the lazy writing and shoddy two dimensional characters. They lean on so many tropes it's like watching a drunk man trying to escort a paraplegic through an obstacle course.
Which is pretty much how I define all forms of sitcom -- at their core, it's the same 50 year old jokes and gags, and just minor variations on the theme.
The characters and situations change, but if you watch most sitcoms you can pretty much see the setup for the same old jokes happen all the time. Over and over and over. I stopped watching sitcoms years ago because of this... I tried to watch BBT a few times, but other than the context, you still see a lot of the same stuff you would have seen in the 70s and 80s.
I probably watched too many when I was a kid. Now I can't watch any of them. Sitcoms just automatically generate a very loud "next" in my brain.
Simply keeping the data in the EU won't fix anything so long as that data is still being held by US controlled entities, as those entities will still be forced to hand over the data regardless of where it is (lets face it, Microsofts battle against that particular issue is destined to fail).
And then those entities will be in violation of EU law, and will end up paying massive fines or other penalties... which would hopefully be severe. So severe as to cripple the companies.
See, no matter what the US believes, they can't trump the EU law. So if Microsoft's battle to not hand over this data fails, Microsoft in Europe will fail. It really is that simple.
And at the end of the day, the corporations are going go realize they can't jeopardize their revenue by pulling out of those markets.
The US doesn't get to pass laws which trump local laws any more than Iran does. And the US can't exempt those entities from local laws, which means this will come down to corporate self interest versus a government who feels it is entitled to collect this information.
So the bottom line is: too damned bad for the US, because once Microsoft in Europe starts getting fined billions of dollars and people start getting thrown in jail, they're very quickly going to realize they can't do it.
It really is about time the world tells the US that our privacy and legally protected rights don't take a back seat to US security interests. We don't give a shit what the US wants.
You know, if in my place work work I had to put up with "You're being a fuckwad. Don't do this." my response is going to come down to "why do I have to listen to whiny little children not capable of communicating like adults?" I'm sorry, but in the real world there is an expectation people will act like grown ups. In fact, there's probably an HR department and some labor laws which say you are required to act like grownups. Your ass will be out on the street if you act like this.
This whole bullshit of women should just suck it up because that's how the world works? Guess what, in the real world... like corporations where people have jobs... there isn't this anywhere but self entitled assholes on the internet.
The Linux developers might think they live in a microcosm where acting like a childish asshole is commonplace. But it's important to realize this has NOTHING to do with pretty much anything else. That the internet is full of assholes doesn't mean in real corporations with real people with real jobs get away with acting like this.
Trash talk is NOT how things happen in the real world. And a bunch of self entitled idiots claiming acting like self entitled idiots is normal doesn't make it true.
The fact that there's no adult supervision and people keep believing they can act like out of control high school students is the problem here.
If you haven't already learned to interact with people in a civil manner, the get out of your mother's basement, and learn that shit like this will get you fired from a real job. Working on the Linux kernel is not free license to be a major asshole and a social halfwit.
So maybe the problem is the idiots who think this is a problem with women. Because you sure as hell wouldn't expect to get away with this in any corporate setting; not even a little bit.
Seriously, people, grow the hell up. You likely already have people enforcing some degree of civility on you, because pretty much no organization is going to put up with this shit.
Well if it means we're going from small devices with small apps and small amounts of resources to suddenly making them full on desktop machines, I just don't see the point.
You can put anything you want on your device, me, I'm looking at this and thinking if Android starts to need as much resources as a full-on Windows machine it has a very good chance of wrecking the whole platform.
Tablets aren't laptops. If you want a laptop, get one. But please don't screw up the whole platform as suddenly there' needs to be tens of gigs of space to install crap like this.
Small, lightweight apps on lower resource devices is what mobile has been doing. This just seems to reverse all of that.
For the better part of three years there has been talk about running Wine on Android to bring Windows x86 programs to Android phones/tablets, and it's going to become a reality. CodeWeavers is planning to release CrossOver For Android before the end of the year.
You know, if you want all this stuff... then why the hell not buy a Windows laptop and get on with it?
At no point in my owning of a tablet or any other portable device have I ever said "wow, I would like to run the full bloated pile of crap which is legacy Windows"... quite the contrary, I've found myself thinking "gee, isn't it great this now only takes 20 MB like it should?"
I'm just having a hard time thinking people really want this, or that we should be forced to buy Android devices with the specs of a desktop machine.
This just seems like it's taking everything which was good about starting from scratch on mobile platforms, and saying "oh, the heck with it, let's just turn it into a Wintel platform".
I figure this just leads to overly bloated installations of software which people don't really need on tablets in the first place.
What percentage of Android owners even remotely want any of this?
People with a life, not dottering neckbeards, are twitter's target demographic.
LOL... yeah, whatever.
Twitter's target demographic is people who believe their tweets are actually of any value.
I'm betting an absolutely huge majority of traffic on Twitter is completely pointless and inane... "I'm going to the bathroom", "the poop is coming out", "meeting Bill and Larry for drinks". That's not "people with a life", that's inane and pointless drivel.
Questioning the value of this isn't about dottering neckbeards, it's about if the platform has much in the way of any real value for most of what it is used for, and also makes us ask "WTF is Twitter valued in the billions for again".
So, maybe all that's really happening is an overvalued company is looking to monetize and leverage synergies, and people who have created products around selling this stuff are getting burned... the rest of it? Well, I suspect it's at least 22% crap about what those moronic Kardashians are doing now.
"People who have lives" my lily white ass. People who think tweeting means you have a life have no clue.
At least our anti-science hystericals aren't succeeding that wildly at anti-science legislation. Our successes are much more "pork for me, not for you" style victories.
Two things: there's been mounting evidence Monsanto has been outright lying about the evidence they have on the toxicity of their crap, which means trusting them is idiotic. The evidence we have that their crap is safe is them saying so... which means it's self-serving stuff which as like as not hides any information they had to the contrary.
And, hey, if the 'market' speaks and says it doesn't want this shit, Monsanto doesn't have the "right" to sell product to countries which don't want it. Monsanto has the right to piss off an go away.
So, boo fucking hoo... countries tell Monsanto to piss off. That's Monsanto's problem. Nobody is under any obligation to allow Monsanto to sell their product, as much as the assholes who run that corporation think otherwise.
So if "the market" is sending a big fuck you to Monsanto... too damned bad for Monsanto. They may have hoodwinked Americans into believing their crap, but that doesn't mean that countries shouldn't be able to say "we don't want your shit".
Because when all of agriculture is beholden to Monsanto, we'll all be pretty much fucked.
This isn't "anti science", this is anti Monsanto, and people simply not buying the notion that GMO is safe until proven otherwise. Sorry, but how about we put the burden of proof on Monsanto, instead of just taking them at their word?
Do you know the value of a "free" platform nobody can integrate into their own product without their product becoming GPL, and whose reference implementation can't be used?
Not a damned thing.
So people can use it, but they need to write their own. They can't reference the reference implementation without tainting their own.
So, what exactly is the incentive to give a damn about the format?
Because I'm reading this as "look at our super awesome new format... want a lick? Psyche!".
So, something already GPLd will integrate this. And pretty much everyone else will wonder what they can do with it.
Yes, well, I think first America is going to have to come to terms with what the meaning of their "influence" was besides as effectively an occupying colonial power. It's now 50 years later, and if they think they're going back to controlling a benign dictator who was happy to fuck over the Cubans in exchange for Americans being able to profit... well, I don't see that happening.
Though, as usual, America is already planning on how to carve up the land and the profits.
Which tells me what Americans think will happen is as cluelessly out of touch as when they were planning on how Iraq was going to pay them billions in oil money for liberating them. An awful lot of elected officials in the US were practically counting that money before they went in.
You say "keep", I say "operating under the delusion they ever had any legitimacy there or that Cubans want that again".
By "keep" you mean propping up a ruthless self appointed dictator to act as a puppet for US interests... only to find a new, ruthless self appointed dictator acting not in US interests.
Stop pretending that "influence" is your natural right, and start listening. The Cubans don't hate Americans.. but they sure as hell don't want to be told by Americans what to do next.
You know, sometimes the problem is getting upper management to admit it was they who got their dumb asses swindled, and no matter how much they complain, they can't hire back the competent people for the same price as the incompetent people they themselves chose.
I've seen more cases of this being the management who chose this stuff in the first place and then being unable to fix it than I have of middle management doing it and realizing they chose poorly.
The guy loudly saying "we can save 25%" is seldom on the hook if that savings turns into shitty outcomes... they just say "well, we saved you 25%, if you can't make use of them that's your fault".
Of course, in large companies, those people are often either no longer around (but got their massive payout), or are no longer in that role and can escape any responsibility.
I've lost track of how many people in management I've seen who have a knack for making bad policy decisions and then making sure the shit doesn't stick to them.
LOL... you know, at least people playing the lottery generally know it's gambling.
When people get told they need to be investing in speculative IPOs because that's how you get rich, I question if they realize how terrible that advice is for most people, and how it's just people in the financial industry selling products?
All those poor schmucks who got stuck holding.com era stocks... either they went loopy and thought they'd be gazillionaires (and should have know they were essentially placing a bet), or their stock brokers went loopy and told them they'd be gazillionaires.
I consider it a good rule of thumb if your financial guy has gone loopy and is giving you advise which boils down to "zomg we're gonna be rich", you should run like hell. Because he's either incompetent, or scamming you.
This is what happens when management becomes penny wise and pound foolish.
They say "hey, we can save 20% here". They don't factor in the other costs, like increased downtime, longer times to get stuff done, or the sheer amount of time wasted "helping" them do their jobs.
I was in a situation not long ago in which an out-sourcing company was being brought in. In my opinion, they were largely incompetent.
You'd submit a request to get something installed on 4 machines... they'd make a hash of it on one machine, and then send you the instructions to install it on your remaining 3 machines and ask you to do it. Sorry, your job is to do all of this, we don't own it. If you can't do it and you expect me to do it, what value do you bring? Once people started refusing to pick up their slack it became apparent they really couldn't do the job.
The problem is the people who make these decisions do not have visibility into how much the associated costs go up as people have to do their own job and the job of the outsourced people.
To then come back after several years and say "we're getting shitty service, can you do this as cheap as the people giving us shitty service" says they have no idea of how they caused their own problems. If you want shitty service, pay the shitty service rates.
The decision makers and accountants are removed from the actual ramifications of their own decisions. Which means they evaluate their own decisions on faulty and incomplete information, pat themselves on the back, and give themselves bonuses for saving money.
In fact what they've really done is fuck up things which worked, make the system work terribly, failed to account for all of the new problems, and then they act as if they've saved the world.
If your expensive staff all have to devote 35% more time to make up for the slack of the cheaper workers.. what the hell are you saving?
If you can't measure your own productivity and effectiveness, and the other costs created by hiring the incompetent out-sourcing people, you have no way of evaluating your own decision. The problem is management frequently has no way of evaluating their own decisions -- and I often suspect that is by design.
And the shortsightedness of this says people are incapable of realizing if you are sacking the cheaper company because they gave terrible service and poor results, you can't go back to the original vendor and expect them to give you good service for the new lower price.
That kind of stuff is at best wishful thinking, and at worst completely delusional.
But then again, many of us think that's what management is for.
Not exactly. The dot com era was your grandmother and her cats investing in the latest tech stock tip that inflated the bubble.
Worse than that. During the.com era your grandmother and her cats knew not a damned thing about tech.
The problem was every idiot in the financial sector telling clients they should be investing in.com stuff because it was the way of the future and they had to get in on the ground floor.
The industry itself created the stock bubble.. in no small part to they could sell their shares to the unsuspecting public.
I remember when Red Hat went IPO, along with every other.com era company -- in the morning, the big institutional investors get first crack, and scoop up the shares; then they pawn it off on the other suckers (using the hype they themselves helped to build by telling your granny to buy)... and by the end of the day the stock is even more overvalued that it was at the beginning of the day, and institutional investors have transferred other people's money to their own accounts.
An IPO is a giant ponzi scheme. The company along with the financial industry first set up a grossly overvalued IPO, convince everybody else they need to buy this, and then leave the individual investors holding the bag at the end of the day.
Oh, wait, the entire stock market is a giant ponzi scheme, the IPO is just in miniature.
The bubble in the.com era was also created with too much money coming from the VCs in the manic hope that it would turn into a bazillion dollars. But you still have to swindle grandma into buying the stock so it isn't just the big investors... someone needs to get fleeced.
I'd be willing to bet the $2 billion valuation of github is based on complete fictions, and represents about 3 decades of revenue which will never materialize.
It's just more funny money in the tech industry. I don't understand why people keep taking this crap seriously.
and how the company is trying to live up to its $2 billion valuation
Sooner or later people will realize just how horribly overvalued we actually are, and we are desperately trying to do stupid things like turning everybody into a programmer so we can continue to prop up our overvalued company and continue to reap such awesome executive bonuses.
Honestly, WTF revenue do they have? I see so damned many companies being valued in the billions, and for what seems like no justifiable reason.
It's the.com era all over again... "zomg, we have teh social" or whatever the daily buzzword is.
It's a great way to separate investors from their money. But I remain unconvinced any of these companies are actually worth anything in the billions.
GP talks about Android, story is about Android... and you spout off about iOS.
Sorry, thanks for playing... here's a lovely parting gift.
Look, I have both Android and iOS devices. But, honestly, randomly saying "yarg, use teh Apple" is kind of pointless here.
And, quite frankly, having had Apple upgrade my original iPad to the point of uselessness and then abandon it, I'm not willing to update my iPod touch... because I no longer trust Apple to not fuck up my device and then tell me I'm not supported.
And as long as they have no legal liability for keeping this stuff safe, an insincere "I'm sorry" is all you will ever get. If corporations can hold your private data and have no consequences for having shit security, they will continue to do so.
For a credit agency to store that much personally identifying information and be hacked tells me that agencies like this need to have some pretty severe penalties for shit like this... because they have pretty much everything required to steal your identify.
If we're going to entrust this data to these entities, we should sure as hell make certain we can actually trust them with it. And I would say that Experian has more or less demonstrated themselves to be incompetent to hold this information.
It really is time to stop letting companies treat this as "their" data, and realize they have an obligation to safeguard our data, and to be legally responsible when they fail to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite.
Apparently "sport" means everybody is doing the same thing, under the same set of rules.
This is why bridge could be a "demonstration sport" at the Olympics, because everybody is playing according to a known set of rules.
So, apparently there are athletic sports, and non-athletic sports ... and athletic games and non-athletic games. When I play golf it's a game, when Tiger Woods does it it's a sport -- because I ignore most of the rules.
But, apparently, it is NOT TRUE that sports require athletic abilities ... which confuses the heck out of me. But nonetheless, bridge and chess are technically "sports".
Your subject says it all ... bad design.
This stuff isn't designed to be secure, or protect your privacy, it's designed to make the process easier for airlines and the idiots who run the security theater.
There's a lot of products which are absolutely terribly designed like this ... apparently with a bar code reader and a hotel key card, you can extract a tremendous amount of information which has no business being encoded on that.
As long as there are no data privacy laws, and companies have no penalties for incompetently making use of it, this will continue.
You should pretty much assume that all companies who want your data are either incompetent, or have other motives to misuse your data -- you'll be less surprised when it proves to be true. It won't help you, but you'll be less surprised.
I'm pretty sure in reading TFA there is little chance he could be "mistaken":
If he can demonstrate this, then fine ... he's a super genius.
But I'm sticking with my "if he can't demonstrate that it works in such a way as to be repeatable by someone else, then he must be a lying, attention-seeking media whore."
It isn't up to the world to validate his outrageous claims. Put up or shut up.
So, either Leif Holmlid is a lying, attention-seeking media whore ... or he's really made a revolutionary breakthrough.
But if he can't demonstrate that it works in such a way as to be repeatable by someone else, then he must be a lying, attention-seeking media whore.
I know which one my money is on.
Welcome to your oligarchy ... if it isn't designed to benefit massive corporations with billions of dollars, it isn't happening.
They're the ones who have the elected people on the payroll.
Which is pretty much how I define all forms of sitcom -- at their core, it's the same 50 year old jokes and gags, and just minor variations on the theme.
The characters and situations change, but if you watch most sitcoms you can pretty much see the setup for the same old jokes happen all the time. Over and over and over. I stopped watching sitcoms years ago because of this ... I tried to watch BBT a few times, but other than the context, you still see a lot of the same stuff you would have seen in the 70s and 80s.
I probably watched too many when I was a kid. Now I can't watch any of them. Sitcoms just automatically generate a very loud "next" in my brain.
I wonder if posting this crap as AC you appreciate the hypocrisy and irony inherent in that?
Ah, the battle cry of idiots and fascists ... if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.
And then those entities will be in violation of EU law, and will end up paying massive fines or other penalties ... which would hopefully be severe. So severe as to cripple the companies.
See, no matter what the US believes, they can't trump the EU law. So if Microsoft's battle to not hand over this data fails, Microsoft in Europe will fail. It really is that simple.
And at the end of the day, the corporations are going go realize they can't jeopardize their revenue by pulling out of those markets.
The US doesn't get to pass laws which trump local laws any more than Iran does. And the US can't exempt those entities from local laws, which means this will come down to corporate self interest versus a government who feels it is entitled to collect this information.
So the bottom line is: too damned bad for the US, because once Microsoft in Europe starts getting fined billions of dollars and people start getting thrown in jail, they're very quickly going to realize they can't do it.
It really is about time the world tells the US that our privacy and legally protected rights don't take a back seat to US security interests. We don't give a shit what the US wants.
Look, here's the thing: Make up a plausible sounding name, create a gmail account with that name and link it to it.
Just how much do you think Facebook can actually check this shit? Does anybody believe there aren't already fake names?
Yes, it's a stupid policy ... so ignore it.
You know, if in my place work work I had to put up with "You're being a fuckwad. Don't do this." my response is going to come down to "why do I have to listen to whiny little children not capable of communicating like adults?" I'm sorry, but in the real world there is an expectation people will act like grown ups. In fact, there's probably an HR department and some labor laws which say you are required to act like grownups. Your ass will be out on the street if you act like this.
This whole bullshit of women should just suck it up because that's how the world works? Guess what, in the real world ... like corporations where people have jobs ... there isn't this anywhere but self entitled assholes on the internet.
The Linux developers might think they live in a microcosm where acting like a childish asshole is commonplace. But it's important to realize this has NOTHING to do with pretty much anything else. That the internet is full of assholes doesn't mean in real corporations with real people with real jobs get away with acting like this.
Trash talk is NOT how things happen in the real world. And a bunch of self entitled idiots claiming acting like self entitled idiots is normal doesn't make it true.
The fact that there's no adult supervision and people keep believing they can act like out of control high school students is the problem here.
If you haven't already learned to interact with people in a civil manner, the get out of your mother's basement, and learn that shit like this will get you fired from a real job. Working on the Linux kernel is not free license to be a major asshole and a social halfwit.
So maybe the problem is the idiots who think this is a problem with women. Because you sure as hell wouldn't expect to get away with this in any corporate setting; not even a little bit.
Seriously, people, grow the hell up. You likely already have people enforcing some degree of civility on you, because pretty much no organization is going to put up with this shit.
Well if it means we're going from small devices with small apps and small amounts of resources to suddenly making them full on desktop machines, I just don't see the point.
You can put anything you want on your device, me, I'm looking at this and thinking if Android starts to need as much resources as a full-on Windows machine it has a very good chance of wrecking the whole platform.
Tablets aren't laptops. If you want a laptop, get one. But please don't screw up the whole platform as suddenly there' needs to be tens of gigs of space to install crap like this.
Small, lightweight apps on lower resource devices is what mobile has been doing. This just seems to reverse all of that.
You know, if you want all this stuff ... then why the hell not buy a Windows laptop and get on with it?
At no point in my owning of a tablet or any other portable device have I ever said "wow, I would like to run the full bloated pile of crap which is legacy Windows" ... quite the contrary, I've found myself thinking "gee, isn't it great this now only takes 20 MB like it should?"
I'm just having a hard time thinking people really want this, or that we should be forced to buy Android devices with the specs of a desktop machine.
This just seems like it's taking everything which was good about starting from scratch on mobile platforms, and saying "oh, the heck with it, let's just turn it into a Wintel platform".
I figure this just leads to overly bloated installations of software which people don't really need on tablets in the first place.
What percentage of Android owners even remotely want any of this?
LOL ... yeah, whatever.
Twitter's target demographic is people who believe their tweets are actually of any value.
I'm betting an absolutely huge majority of traffic on Twitter is completely pointless and inane ... "I'm going to the bathroom", "the poop is coming out", "meeting Bill and Larry for drinks". That's not "people with a life", that's inane and pointless drivel.
Questioning the value of this isn't about dottering neckbeards, it's about if the platform has much in the way of any real value for most of what it is used for, and also makes us ask "WTF is Twitter valued in the billions for again".
So, maybe all that's really happening is an overvalued company is looking to monetize and leverage synergies, and people who have created products around selling this stuff are getting burned ... the rest of it? Well, I suspect it's at least 22% crap about what those moronic Kardashians are doing now.
"People who have lives" my lily white ass. People who think tweeting means you have a life have no clue.
Two things: there's been mounting evidence Monsanto has been outright lying about the evidence they have on the toxicity of their crap, which means trusting them is idiotic. The evidence we have that their crap is safe is them saying so ... which means it's self-serving stuff which as like as not hides any information they had to the contrary.
And, hey, if the 'market' speaks and says it doesn't want this shit, Monsanto doesn't have the "right" to sell product to countries which don't want it. Monsanto has the right to piss off an go away.
So, boo fucking hoo ... countries tell Monsanto to piss off. That's Monsanto's problem. Nobody is under any obligation to allow Monsanto to sell their product, as much as the assholes who run that corporation think otherwise.
So if "the market" is sending a big fuck you to Monsanto ... too damned bad for Monsanto. They may have hoodwinked Americans into believing their crap, but that doesn't mean that countries shouldn't be able to say "we don't want your shit".
Because when all of agriculture is beholden to Monsanto, we'll all be pretty much fucked.
This isn't "anti science", this is anti Monsanto, and people simply not buying the notion that GMO is safe until proven otherwise. Sorry, but how about we put the burden of proof on Monsanto, instead of just taking them at their word?
Do you know the value of a "free" platform nobody can integrate into their own product without their product becoming GPL, and whose reference implementation can't be used?
Not a damned thing.
So people can use it, but they need to write their own. They can't reference the reference implementation without tainting their own.
So, what exactly is the incentive to give a damn about the format?
Because I'm reading this as "look at our super awesome new format ... want a lick? Psyche!".
So, something already GPLd will integrate this. And pretty much everyone else will wonder what they can do with it.
Yes, well, I think first America is going to have to come to terms with what the meaning of their "influence" was besides as effectively an occupying colonial power. It's now 50 years later, and if they think they're going back to controlling a benign dictator who was happy to fuck over the Cubans in exchange for Americans being able to profit ... well, I don't see that happening.
Though, as usual, America is already planning on how to carve up the land and the profits.
Which tells me what Americans think will happen is as cluelessly out of touch as when they were planning on how Iraq was going to pay them billions in oil money for liberating them. An awful lot of elected officials in the US were practically counting that money before they went in.
You say "keep", I say "operating under the delusion they ever had any legitimacy there or that Cubans want that again".
By "keep" you mean propping up a ruthless self appointed dictator to act as a puppet for US interests ... only to find a new, ruthless self appointed dictator acting not in US interests.
Stop pretending that "influence" is your natural right, and start listening. The Cubans don't hate Americans .. but they sure as hell don't want to be told by Americans what to do next.
You know, sometimes the problem is getting upper management to admit it was they who got their dumb asses swindled, and no matter how much they complain, they can't hire back the competent people for the same price as the incompetent people they themselves chose.
I've seen more cases of this being the management who chose this stuff in the first place and then being unable to fix it than I have of middle management doing it and realizing they chose poorly.
The guy loudly saying "we can save 25%" is seldom on the hook if that savings turns into shitty outcomes ... they just say "well, we saved you 25%, if you can't make use of them that's your fault".
Of course, in large companies, those people are often either no longer around (but got their massive payout), or are no longer in that role and can escape any responsibility.
I've lost track of how many people in management I've seen who have a knack for making bad policy decisions and then making sure the shit doesn't stick to them.
LOL ... you know, at least people playing the lottery generally know it's gambling.
When people get told they need to be investing in speculative IPOs because that's how you get rich, I question if they realize how terrible that advice is for most people, and how it's just people in the financial industry selling products?
All those poor schmucks who got stuck holding .com era stocks ... either they went loopy and thought they'd be gazillionaires (and should have know they were essentially placing a bet), or their stock brokers went loopy and told them they'd be gazillionaires.
I consider it a good rule of thumb if your financial guy has gone loopy and is giving you advise which boils down to "zomg we're gonna be rich", you should run like hell. Because he's either incompetent, or scamming you.
This is what happens when management becomes penny wise and pound foolish.
They say "hey, we can save 20% here". They don't factor in the other costs, like increased downtime, longer times to get stuff done, or the sheer amount of time wasted "helping" them do their jobs.
I was in a situation not long ago in which an out-sourcing company was being brought in. In my opinion, they were largely incompetent.
You'd submit a request to get something installed on 4 machines ... they'd make a hash of it on one machine, and then send you the instructions to install it on your remaining 3 machines and ask you to do it. Sorry, your job is to do all of this, we don't own it. If you can't do it and you expect me to do it, what value do you bring? Once people started refusing to pick up their slack it became apparent they really couldn't do the job.
The problem is the people who make these decisions do not have visibility into how much the associated costs go up as people have to do their own job and the job of the outsourced people.
To then come back after several years and say "we're getting shitty service, can you do this as cheap as the people giving us shitty service" says they have no idea of how they caused their own problems. If you want shitty service, pay the shitty service rates.
The decision makers and accountants are removed from the actual ramifications of their own decisions. Which means they evaluate their own decisions on faulty and incomplete information, pat themselves on the back, and give themselves bonuses for saving money.
In fact what they've really done is fuck up things which worked, make the system work terribly, failed to account for all of the new problems, and then they act as if they've saved the world.
If your expensive staff all have to devote 35% more time to make up for the slack of the cheaper workers .. what the hell are you saving?
If you can't measure your own productivity and effectiveness, and the other costs created by hiring the incompetent out-sourcing people, you have no way of evaluating your own decision. The problem is management frequently has no way of evaluating their own decisions -- and I often suspect that is by design.
And the shortsightedness of this says people are incapable of realizing if you are sacking the cheaper company because they gave terrible service and poor results, you can't go back to the original vendor and expect them to give you good service for the new lower price.
That kind of stuff is at best wishful thinking, and at worst completely delusional.
But then again, many of us think that's what management is for.
Worse than that. During the .com era your grandmother and her cats knew not a damned thing about tech.
The problem was every idiot in the financial sector telling clients they should be investing in .com stuff because it was the way of the future and they had to get in on the ground floor.
The industry itself created the stock bubble .. in no small part to they could sell their shares to the unsuspecting public.
I remember when Red Hat went IPO, along with every other .com era company -- in the morning, the big institutional investors get first crack, and scoop up the shares; then they pawn it off on the other suckers (using the hype they themselves helped to build by telling your granny to buy) ... and by the end of the day the stock is even more overvalued that it was at the beginning of the day, and institutional investors have transferred other people's money to their own accounts.
An IPO is a giant ponzi scheme. The company along with the financial industry first set up a grossly overvalued IPO, convince everybody else they need to buy this, and then leave the individual investors holding the bag at the end of the day.
Oh, wait, the entire stock market is a giant ponzi scheme, the IPO is just in miniature.
The bubble in the .com era was also created with too much money coming from the VCs in the manic hope that it would turn into a bazillion dollars. But you still have to swindle grandma into buying the stock so it isn't just the big investors ... someone needs to get fleeced.
I'd be willing to bet the $2 billion valuation of github is based on complete fictions, and represents about 3 decades of revenue which will never materialize.
It's just more funny money in the tech industry. I don't understand why people keep taking this crap seriously.
Sooner or later people will realize just how horribly overvalued we actually are, and we are desperately trying to do stupid things like turning everybody into a programmer so we can continue to prop up our overvalued company and continue to reap such awesome executive bonuses.
Honestly, WTF revenue do they have? I see so damned many companies being valued in the billions, and for what seems like no justifiable reason.
It's the .com era all over again ... "zomg, we have teh social" or whatever the daily buzzword is.
It's a great way to separate investors from their money. But I remain unconvinced any of these companies are actually worth anything in the billions.
GP talks about Android, story is about Android ... and you spout off about iOS.
Sorry, thanks for playing ... here's a lovely parting gift.
Look, I have both Android and iOS devices. But, honestly, randomly saying "yarg, use teh Apple" is kind of pointless here.
And, quite frankly, having had Apple upgrade my original iPad to the point of uselessness and then abandon it, I'm not willing to update my iPod touch ... because I no longer trust Apple to not fuck up my device and then tell me I'm not supported.
And as long as they have no legal liability for keeping this stuff safe, an insincere "I'm sorry" is all you will ever get. If corporations can hold your private data and have no consequences for having shit security, they will continue to do so.
For a credit agency to store that much personally identifying information and be hacked tells me that agencies like this need to have some pretty severe penalties for shit like this ... because they have pretty much everything required to steal your identify.
If we're going to entrust this data to these entities, we should sure as hell make certain we can actually trust them with it. And I would say that Experian has more or less demonstrated themselves to be incompetent to hold this information.
It really is time to stop letting companies treat this as "their" data, and realize they have an obligation to safeguard our data, and to be legally responsible when they fail to do so.
"Keep"? What the hell are you talking about?
By maintaining the embargo and having no diplomatic ties, Cuba hasn't been "under its sphere of influence" in decades.
And then what the hell do you do with a vat of acetone and dissolved polystyrene?
You've essentially turned it into a whole new kind of nasty waste. How do you plan on disposing of that?