No, the dev can't spam anyone. It's only for getting access to your contacts list, in case you wish to share an achievement in the game with them.
If that is the case, it should be made a lot clearer. And, I should be prompted to grant such permission at the point where I've decided to "share an achievement" (which would be never), not before I've even played the game. From a programmer's point of view, if I grant permission when the action is to be performed, it is at least reasonable to believe that that permission is confined to the specific action I tried to take (sharing an achievement). If I grant permission at the beginning of the game, why would I expect the app to be unable to share an ad behind my back if it is able to share an achievement?
Every game I tried to play greeted me with a pop-up saying:
[Game] is requesting permission to... View a list of people from your circles, ordered based on your interactions with them across Google
What are the implications of that (if I click the "More info" link it just gives me an email address for the developer)? Does that give the game developer a way to spam the people in my circles? Admittedly, they do provide a link to a privacy policy (which is different for each game), but if they think I'm going to read all of that to figure out what they plan to do with my list of contacts, well, they're wrong. I just ended up playing none of them.
how is raising taxes to make it prohibitively expensive to drive at all any different from using the government to just mandate better mileage from the auto makers?
A gas tax aligns the cost/incentive with the amount of damage you are doing to the environment (not to mention the precarious position the country is put into by its reliance on foreign oil). If you drive a lot of miles, you have a large incentive to choose a fuel-efficient car. If you drive very few miles, the gas tax has little impact on you, which is appropriate because the car a low-mileage driver chooses to drive has very little impact on the the environment.
...better than being immediately screwed by gas prices doubling. Especially right now...we're in a recession
I don't think anyone is advocating an immediate doubling. The goal for a gas tax is to incentivize people to take fuel-efficiency into account the next time they buy a car. Hitting everyone with a high tax immediately serves no purpose. You could, for example, announce that there will be a $3/gallon gas tax starting in 2020. Most people will replace their cars over the next 9 years, and they'll be incentivized to buy fuel-efficient cars when they do (and car makers will be incentivized to produce them because of the demand) because they know that tax will hit during the lifetime of their next car.
I got a text message from T-Mobile a few weeks ago saying their price for text messages will go up to $0.10/message on August 13th. They might not be waiting for the AT&T takeover to do their learning.
Sorry to be pedantic, but battery lifetime would be 2.04 times the original value, or a 104% increase. When you double something, you increase it by 100%, not 200%.
Slight improvement: Decide what you want to do with it, then buy something a little better than what you think you need.
Because there is a significant probability that you'll underestimate what you need, and having to buy a second item to meet your needs is a lot more expensive than paying a little more for something better the first time around.
I ended up retraining as an accountant but I then realized I was incredibly bored after six months
That's where you made a wrong turn. People that leave physics to do "finance" aren't doing anything remotely like accounting. Most are doing derivative securities, which requires serious math, numerical methods, and logical thinking (and probably a PhD). If you're looking to go from physics to finance and don't have someone to point you in the right direction, you can wind up being very bored and in the wrong niche. Your starting point should be the book "Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives" by John C. Hull, or something comparable. That will give you an introduction to the simpler stuff.
If there will be no "decent wage" in financial scams, productive jobs will be paid decently.
Wow, and you accuse me of being a moron? If your current job pays you $30k/year, and another company across town offers you $80k/year, you can go to your current employer and say "You have to pay me more, or I'm going to leave." If there is no $80k job across town, if you have no other options, you have absolutely no leverage to demand higher pay. Why should anyone pay you more if you have no better prospects available to you?
To put it differently, if you eliminate all of the jobs that math/science people are doing on Wall Street, you've increased the supply of math/science people chasing jobs in academia or industrial labs, while the number of such jobs is basically fixed. That drives wages down, not up. If an industrial lab doesn't have to compete with Wall Street to hire the best and the brightest, they don't have to pay as much.
Why should people get rich for taking a number from one account, transferring part of that number to another account and taking a few bits as a fee along the way?
Wow. Is that seriously what you think they do? Take even the most pedestrian banking function performed by your local community bank -- borrowing money from depositors and lending it out to people buying houses or cars. They need to model the probability of getting the loan repaid in order to charge an interest rate where they'll be able to pay their depositors back. They need find the right deposit/loan ratio to make sure they have enough cash on hand to satisfy depositors who want to make withdrawals while not leaving too much money idle (which means they wouldn't be able to pay as much interest to depositors). That is dead simple stuff compared to what math/science people do in finance. Most of the quants are working with derivative securities, which require sophisticated math (look up "stochastic calculus") and numerical methods to price and hedge. On a deal with hundreds of millions of dollars of notional value, you might expect a $50k profit, so the tiniest error means that you lose a ton of money instead of making money (hence the demand for the best and brightest to do such calculations). Blow the hedge and you can lose millions of dollars. It's hard work that requires a good understanding of math, numerical methods, and logical thinking (steel testicles also help). And, it allows massive amounts of risk to be shifted around to those most willing/able to bear it. If you don't think finance is necessary, consider paying cash for the next car/home you buy.
or just that we have too many mediocre science grads
If that were the problem, you would expect the mediocre ones to be the ones leaving science due to not being able to get jobs, but that's not the case. If you look at the science people working in finance, they're mostly Ivy League. They aren't leaving science because they can't find jobs in science. They're leaving because they can have a much better life doing something else. Society benefits greatly from scientific discoveries, often for many decades after the scientists making the discoveries are dead, but society values scientists very little. Scientists that are flexible enough to do something else eventually figure this out and leave science.
I seem to remember that many years ago, before Sun bought MySQL AB, the license for the library needed to access the database from your own programs was GPL (not LGPL), and MySQL AB claimed you couldn't use it without open-sourcing your code, unless you paid them for a commercial-use license. Has that changed with Drizzle (i.e., have they written a new API so they can choose a different license)? Their license page says:
Drizzle is licensed under both the GPLv2 and BSD license. The core of Drizzle was forked from MySQL and thus is under GPLv2. Derived work from GPLv2 code will stay GPLv2, as the license states...
which doesn't give any detail about which parts are still GPL and which parts are now BSD.
If you are considering "upgrading" to Reader X for safety, be aware that the installer does not contain an IFilter for extracting text from PDF files, so desktop search products relying on the IFilter will no longer be able to search your PDF files. Actually, it's worse than that. Not only does it lack an IFilter, it will remove the IFilter installed by older versions. More details here.
I'm not surprised. The last time my Verizon DSL had problems (50% packet loss), I went to bed thinking it would be fixed when I got up in the morning. Not only was it still not working the next morning, but when I called them they had no idea there was a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the dev can't spam anyone. It's only for getting access to your contacts list, in case you wish to share an achievement in the game with them.
If that is the case, it should be made a lot clearer. And, I should be prompted to grant such permission at the point where I've decided to "share an achievement" (which would be never), not before I've even played the game. From a programmer's point of view, if I grant permission when the action is to be performed, it is at least reasonable to believe that that permission is confined to the specific action I tried to take (sharing an achievement). If I grant permission at the beginning of the game, why would I expect the app to be unable to share an ad behind my back if it is able to share an achievement?
Every game I tried to play greeted me with a pop-up saying:
[Game] is requesting permission to ... View a list of people from your circles, ordered based on your interactions with them across Google
What are the implications of that (if I click the "More info" link it just gives me an email address for the developer)? Does that give the game developer a way to spam the people in my circles? Admittedly, they do provide a link to a privacy policy (which is different for each game), but if they think I'm going to read all of that to figure out what they plan to do with my list of contacts, well, they're wrong. I just ended up playing none of them.
You now own the King family $120,128.
He owns them? I thought we had made more progress than that...
Relevant article - Congress siphons off patent fees instead of allowing the money to be spent by the USPTO to do it's job properly.
I don't think you got the joke.
area of a circle = pi * radius^2
-> radius = sqrt(area / pi)
so the radius is 61.8 miles
how is raising taxes to make it prohibitively expensive to drive at all any different from using the government to just mandate better mileage from the auto makers?
A gas tax aligns the cost/incentive with the amount of damage you are doing to the environment (not to mention the precarious position the country is put into by its reliance on foreign oil). If you drive a lot of miles, you have a large incentive to choose a fuel-efficient car. If you drive very few miles, the gas tax has little impact on you, which is appropriate because the car a low-mileage driver chooses to drive has very little impact on the the environment.
...better than being immediately screwed by gas prices doubling. Especially right now...we're in a recession
I don't think anyone is advocating an immediate doubling. The goal for a gas tax is to incentivize people to take fuel-efficiency into account the next time they buy a car. Hitting everyone with a high tax immediately serves no purpose. You could, for example, announce that there will be a $3/gallon gas tax starting in 2020. Most people will replace their cars over the next 9 years, and they'll be incentivized to buy fuel-efficient cars when they do (and car makers will be incentivized to produce them because of the demand) because they know that tax will hit during the lifetime of their next car.
I got a text message from T-Mobile a few weeks ago saying their price for text messages will go up to $0.10/message on August 13th. They might not be waiting for the AT&T takeover to do their learning.
What, exactly, does it meant to "Netflix raise" the price of something?
It means to increase it by such a large percentage that you need dental work when your jaw hits the floor.
Sorry to be pedantic, but battery lifetime would be 2.04 times the original value, or a 104% increase. When you double something, you increase it by 100%, not 200%.
FCC Commissioner Leaves To Become Lobbyist
And they throw away half of what is put on their plates, so they are each served a 16oz steak every night.
Slight improvement: Decide what you want to do with it, then buy something a little better than what you think you need.
Because there is a significant probability that you'll underestimate what you need, and having to buy a second item to meet your needs is a lot more expensive than paying a little more for something better the first time around.
Wrong on two counts:
1) It was covered yesterday, not today.
2) It is not a new low for Slashdot. Slashdot reaches such lows with great regularity.
It reminds me of the advertisements saying "everything in the store is up to 70% off"
I ended up retraining as an accountant but I then realized I was incredibly bored after six months
That's where you made a wrong turn. People that leave physics to do "finance" aren't doing anything remotely like accounting. Most are doing derivative securities, which requires serious math, numerical methods, and logical thinking (and probably a PhD). If you're looking to go from physics to finance and don't have someone to point you in the right direction, you can wind up being very bored and in the wrong niche. Your starting point should be the book "Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives" by John C. Hull, or something comparable. That will give you an introduction to the simpler stuff.
Are you a moron?
No.
If there will be no "decent wage" in financial scams, productive jobs will be paid decently.
Wow, and you accuse me of being a moron? If your current job pays you $30k/year, and another company across town offers you $80k/year, you can go to your current employer and say "You have to pay me more, or I'm going to leave." If there is no $80k job across town, if you have no other options, you have absolutely no leverage to demand higher pay. Why should anyone pay you more if you have no better prospects available to you?
To put it differently, if you eliminate all of the jobs that math/science people are doing on Wall Street, you've increased the supply of math/science people chasing jobs in academia or industrial labs, while the number of such jobs is basically fixed. That drives wages down, not up. If an industrial lab doesn't have to compete with Wall Street to hire the best and the brightest, they don't have to pay as much.
Why should people get rich for taking a number from one account, transferring part of that number to another account and taking a few bits as a fee along the way?
Wow. Is that seriously what you think they do? Take even the most pedestrian banking function performed by your local community bank -- borrowing money from depositors and lending it out to people buying houses or cars. They need to model the probability of getting the loan repaid in order to charge an interest rate where they'll be able to pay their depositors back. They need find the right deposit/loan ratio to make sure they have enough cash on hand to satisfy depositors who want to make withdrawals while not leaving too much money idle (which means they wouldn't be able to pay as much interest to depositors). That is dead simple stuff compared to what math/science people do in finance. Most of the quants are working with derivative securities, which require sophisticated math (look up "stochastic calculus") and numerical methods to price and hedge. On a deal with hundreds of millions of dollars of notional value, you might expect a $50k profit, so the tiniest error means that you lose a ton of money instead of making money (hence the demand for the best and brightest to do such calculations). Blow the hedge and you can lose millions of dollars. It's hard work that requires a good understanding of math, numerical methods, and logical thinking (steel testicles also help). And, it allows massive amounts of risk to be shifted around to those most willing/able to bear it. If you don't think finance is necessary, consider paying cash for the next car/home you buy.
Yes, stomp out the only opportunity that math/science people have to make a decent wage, then they'll have to work for peanuts!
or just that we have too many mediocre science grads
If that were the problem, you would expect the mediocre ones to be the ones leaving science due to not being able to get jobs, but that's not the case. If you look at the science people working in finance, they're mostly Ivy League. They aren't leaving science because they can't find jobs in science. They're leaving because they can have a much better life doing something else. Society benefits greatly from scientific discoveries, often for many decades after the scientists making the discoveries are dead, but society values scientists very little. Scientists that are flexible enough to do something else eventually figure this out and leave science.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2061772&cid=35672358
Thanks for the reply. That's a significant feature.
I seem to remember that many years ago, before Sun bought MySQL AB, the license for the library needed to access the database from your own programs was GPL (not LGPL), and MySQL AB claimed you couldn't use it without open-sourcing your code, unless you paid them for a commercial-use license. Has that changed with Drizzle (i.e., have they written a new API so they can choose a different license)? Their license page says:
Drizzle is licensed under both the GPLv2 and BSD license. The core of Drizzle was forked from MySQL and thus is under GPLv2. Derived work from GPLv2 code will stay GPLv2, as the license states...
which doesn't give any detail about which parts are still GPL and which parts are now BSD.
If you are considering "upgrading" to Reader X for safety, be aware that the installer does not contain an IFilter for extracting text from PDF files, so desktop search products relying on the IFilter will no longer be able to search your PDF files. Actually, it's worse than that. Not only does it lack an IFilter, it will remove the IFilter installed by older versions. More details here.
I'm not surprised. The last time my Verizon DSL had problems (50% packet loss), I went to bed thinking it would be fixed when I got up in the morning. Not only was it still not working the next morning, but when I called them they had no idea there was a problem.