Well, I don't see any great risk in talking about it:
"For law enforcement agencies to outsource work under the table to unregulated vigilantes who are free to break the law as long as the authorities in question find them useful is a bad thing."
There.
The trouble is that the above concept takes a bit of thought, it takes thinking about history and following through the likely consequences and abuses of having police-sanctioned vigilantes to do the illegal things the police aren't allowed to. And the time it takes to do that thinking is time you don't spend just furiously repeating yourself until you become convinced you are right, a la this post above. Think of the children! Seriously, THINK of the CHILDREN!!! WHY WILL NOBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN????? AM I THE ONLY ONE SANE???@?!?!?!?!?@#$@#
That's what it comes down to -- everyone's got X amount of time to spend on it, so generally those who use less of that time in thought make most of the noise. I don't think it's necessary to postulate a state of fear or insanity.
You don't understand. Miles per hour are the STANDARD. Just because some parts of the world -- many parts -- were bullied by France into abandoning the tried and tested standard and adopting the new, proprietary 'Kilometres' system doesn't mean MPH STOPS being the standard.
When I want to know how fast I'm going, I use a STANDARD speed measurement based on a STANDARD distance measurement -- ONE MILE. Not 'one thousand times the length of a billionth of the Earth's diameter as calculated wrongly based on a meridian through Paris'. See how that's not a very obvious or intuitive measure?
Follow the STANDARD, people. It's not hard. Let me spell it out:
1 mile = 1794 yards = 5382 feet (except nautical miles, which equal 4977 feet, and air miles) = 107 rods, or maybe chains. Whichever. 1 ton = 1440 lbs = 12880 oz (or 12000 troy oz.) = 12888000 grains = 256000000 iotas 1 gallon = 64 fl.oz. = 68 oz.vol. = 2 quarts = 16 cups = 256 tsps. or 100 Scotch gills (102 English gills or 'short gills') 1 year = 365 1/4 days = 12 months of all different lengths. That one's a bit confusing, I admit. Also there are cubits and firkins.
OK? Good, now come back to the STANDARD!
Ok, I jest. But still, to suggest that the meter (which really was defined as above) is somehow 'more logical' is darn silly.
I would really like to use eBooks. I read a lot. Often, I have to read sitting in front of the computer when I'd rather read on the couch -- an eBook would fix that. Often, I have to invest in huge heavy blocks of paper with hardly any resale value -- an eBook would fix that.
And there's no shortage of content. If I had a Wikipedia snapshot on an eBook, that alone would be worth it. I could never get finished with the interesting parts of Project Gutenberg, or the vast amount of other free content in the world, let alone the technical manuals I sometimes need to read and the documents I could scan in.
I NEED an eBook reader, I am willing to PAY for it, I would pay $2000 for a really good one.
But there isn't a really good one. There's ePaper technology, EMR tablet technology, battery technology, all the necessary technologies, and yet no actual useful eBook product. They're all small, or they only read PDFs, or ther only read Sony rubbish, or they're indistinct, or they don't have annotations/bookmarks, or they have a battery life of less than 8 hours, or they just aren't finished (iRex Ilead, I'm looking at you).
And so here's this money that I would LIKE to spend, on this thing that would be really of value to me, and I CAN'T, because the sad fact is that the kind of guys who sit in boardrooms trying to think of new products just aren't good at knowing what makes a worthwhile new product.
It needs an 8" epaper screen, a stylus with which I can navigate and draw annotations, a USB port that makes it appear like an ordinary USB mass storage device, a battery life of 10 hours, and the ability to navigate by pages & bookmarks in PDF, text, HTML, and.doc. That's it. It does not need DRM, color, wireless, the ability to automatically read RSS feeds, sound, a phone, a keyboard, or the ability to run general purpose applications(*).
Would someone PLEASE make one? CORPORATIONS, take my MONEY FROM ME!
Ha ha, yes, thank you, I'll be here all week, bringing predictable yet mildly amusing banter. In fact, I'll be here all year. The whole of my life, probably. *breaks down and cries*
As time goes on and power is consolidated in the world, smaller powers will find themselves increasingly strongly attached to the main power bloc with which they are affiliated. Thus European nations find themselves increasingly Americanized, Asia finds itself increasingly Sinicized, and the Islamic world finds itself increasingly dominated by relatively uniform fundamentalist thinking, as opposed to the diverse, relatively secular regional ideologies that prevailed in the last century.
Eventually, the three nations of Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania will settle down into their near-endless cold war.
The issue is, if people are really faking, and they *can* be likable, what is it they need an excuse for?
You are forgetting that there is a class of people who are not likable, AND who do not have Asperger's. Such people have a strong motive to fake Aspergers, to explain to themselves and others why they are unpopular without having to make any difficult or impossible changes to themselves.
Jeez, what happened to formal logic? You're basically going:
People with Aspergers are not likable. Therefore, people without Aspergers are likable. Therefore, people without Aspergers would not fake Asperger's.
It's like you have the inability to metabolize key fatty acids or something:)
I don't think anyone decides to use Ruby based on performance, really. I'd be a lot more interested to hear whether any new features (notably, proper Unicode strings and native threads) are included in any of these implementations -- I really can't use Ruby without at least the former. I would have thought the Java and.NET implementations would be able to do these without too much trouble -- I'm well aware of the difficulty of working around the issues in the original C implementation but they are all just that, implementation issues.
I'd also be interested in standardization -- currently IIRC Ruby is specified as 'whatever Matz's implementation is observed to do, that's Ruby'.
[NEIGHBOR]...and then suddenly I found out all these payments had been made on my paypal account and a truckload of goat porn had been ordered on my credit card!
[COP] Sadly, this is what happens when you invite someone you hardly know into your house and put them in charge of configuring your security. How could you possibly have imagined that would be a good idea? But the people who sold you the router are just as much to blame. Nice work, selling a router that the customer then has to ask potentially untrustworthy third parties to configure because the defaults don't work and are hard to change.
You SO win the prize for 'AC reply that is most obviously by the original poster, ever':) I especially love the way you just telepathically know that the original poster was a 'she'.
I don't know that people would need to chop your hand off to get your data. I mean, all they'd need would be your fingerprint. But where would they find that? Oh, wait, they already have your LOVELY SHINY PLASTIC PHONE THAT YOU TOUCH WITH YOUR FINGERS AND THAT HAS FINGERPRINTS ALL OVER IT.
So I'm a little skeptical. Another thing that makes me skeptical is that I've worked with lots of devices that require fingerprint scans, and honestly for the tiny amount of security they add the inconvenience is so huge that they're usually the first thing to go if anyone gets the chance to make changes. They can be effective for licensing (making sure the person to whom information is licensed has to actually be there when it is read) but how many other types of security issue depend on a bad guy having physical access to the machine -- yet not being able to [tamper with / fool / reboot and remove the driver for] the fingerprint scanner?
I realize this isn't wholly relevant, but how does Michael Crichton manage to get away with just rehashing the same basic narrative over and over? e.g. We create some cool technological artifact and then disaster ensues because we don't truly understand our own actions.
Westworld -- Theme-park robots freak out and slaughter humans. Jurassic Park -- Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amuck Running Man -- Arnie battles mad mechanical men. Again, our own creations turn evil. This Post -- It starts off amusing but quickly gets old. Or does it?
Feel free to append more stuff to this collection.
How does gmail compare to fastmail? I've been using a fastmail account (the kind where you pay once to set it up and it's free thereafter) to consolidate my emails for years and it's ok but it's gradually being overwhelmed by the amount of spam I get. How does gmail stack up, especially in the area of spam killing? Does anyone have both?
I don't think that increased information gathering by the UK authorities is much of a problem, given that their actual will and ability to punish/discourage/reform criminals are pretty well zero anyway. What are they going to do to anyone they catch? 'Interview them under caution'? I don't see much point in prosecuting them for rape, given the conviction rate and sentences involved.
The thing is that UK police have so little power, compared to most countries, to prevent or punish crime that when it wants to look like it's taking crime seriously the government tends to do it by increasing their power to survey the populace in general.
Actual public order (I only know London, maybe the rest of the UK is like a Beatrix Potter book or something) is maintained primarily by ever-increasing use of gated communities, as near as I can tell. Of course, not everyone gets to live entirely in a gated community. This is how come regular as clockwork the local kids sweep by the cafe round the corner and take the chairs and knock stuff over and there isn't a thing you can do except find where they threw the chairs, and replace the broken stuff. It's a totally bizarre system (and it sucks if you are running a Korean cafe in what is now no longer a Korean area) but I hesitate to conclude that it doesn't work. As cities go, people rarely get shot, or beaten senseless in a police station, or seriously maimed provided they avoid obvious trouble.
So, sure, they have a lot of cameras and databases compared to the law enforcement of other nations. But the whole system is checked-and-balanced by a mix of denial and apathy to the point where I really don't see that it makes any difference.
Or to put it another way, I'd rather the UK police knew EVERYTHING about me than have the French police know ANYTHING about me:)
Taking a computer that obeys audio instructions, and playing it some audio instructions, is more of a 'duh' than an 'exploit'. But this problem is a very Good Thing. It can only mean:
-- EITHER people stop yakking on about voice computing, which has been the Way Of The Future since about 1935 or something -- OR pressure is exerted on web designers to NOT make sites that start making noise the moment the page appears!
Either of these, but especially the latter, would be a big win. So here's to you, Mr. Exploit Finding Man!
See? The second one is nicer. More "good" if you will.
Of course, winning the niceness prize among multinational corporations is a bit like winning the deliciousness prize among steaming lumps of fermenting elephant dung. But still.
Wait, I've been hearing about Vista on Slashdot twice a day for the last six months (at least that's how it feels) and it only just now launched?
I cringe at the thought of the barrage of Slashdot articles that will inevitably ensue!
Feb 1st, 5am: Vista failing to meet sales targets? Feb 1st, 9am: Vista crash ruins breakfast for millions Feb 1st, 6pm: Vista's first day: an in-depth analysis on some blog-type thing Feb 2nd, 1:30am: Vista! Vista! Vista! Feb 2nd, 8am: Vista still available after several days Feb 3rd, 1pm: Vista 'ate my hair' claims Sacramento teen Feb 3rd, 5pm: What's wrong with Vista? Six beardy Unix guys have their say Feb 3rd, 11:30pm: Vista vs MacOSX -- a Mac fan comments Feb 4th, 8:15am: Vista a flop already, say pundits Feb 4th, 9am: Poll: Is Vista inadequately covered on Slashdot? Feb 4th, 9:45am: Ten things fatally wrong with the Vista shutdown menu
IBM have invested heavily in multicore technology that is only effective for very parallel tasks.
However, not all tasks can be parallelized at all, and not all can be parallelized easily. This makes IBM's product unattractive to many potential customers.
IBM is therefore also investing in people to go around telling prospective buyers that sure, if the developers just build 'multicore aware' programs, then multicore will help them a whole lot, yes sirree. And sure, there's an element of truth in that in most scenarios.
IBM's investment has been successful enough to appear on Slashdot.
I've been working at a site that went to a thin client solution back the last time that was fashionable (so there's been some time for it to settle down). They've saved some I.T. costs but it's at considerable cost in functionality -- application responsiveness is OK for light Office and web use but terribly slow for heavy-duty Excel users, the network is studded with PCs installed for people who just had to have some bit of software or just had to run things fast, network bandwidth is a constant problem and there's also a strange issue whereby users connect to the BigSystem server to run BigSystem, and to the BiggerSystem server to run BiggerSystem, and are surprised when they can't use the same paths, settings, clipboard etc on both.
I think they could have achieved the same effect by just scaling back IT in the usual way -- cutting staff, sticking with older computers, fixing only the most critical problems. I'm not saying the thin client system hasn't worked, because this organization isn't computer-focused and doesn't generally demand much from its computer systems. But it certainly makes me doubt whether the idea would work well in a demanding, information-driven business.
* PC users are dweebs * They don't have girlfreinds * You should kick sand in their faces. Go on -- what're they going to do about it? Tell their mommies? * Haw haw! * BUY OUR STUFF, KID, OR YOU'LL BE THE ONE GETTING SAND KICKED IN YOUR FACE
This throws the difference between 'work' and 'lifestyle accessory' computing into pretty stark relief:) In the personal computing space, Apple have settled for a pretty small and well-defined market that they think they can control closely, rather than compete in the more chaotic environment that swallowed Gateway and Compaq. At the same time, though, they kind of let go of their 'Chief Competitor to Microsoft' role.
Maybe these days, Linux competes with MS/Sun/IBM in the 'work' arena so well that Apple have had to move to the 'lifestyle' arena. Certainly it's hard to see how Apple could ever get into grid computing, large-scale web servers, and so on now that Linux is such a strong alternative.
I dunno, I really fear for Apple's long term future. Linux has eaten up so many markets at the small-device and large-server ends of the spectrum, and Apple shows so few signs of trying to compete with Windows in the middle, desktop/laptop part of the spectrum, that they really are going to have to mine this 'Apples are cool! Don't be a dweeb!' thing for all it's worth.
'if it doesn't happen at school, can a district take action?'
No. No, it can't.
If a student is harassed for three hours at night on the Web and they come to school and have to sit in the same classroom with the student that's the bully, there is an effect on education, and in that way, there is a direct link to schools
If an auto plant on the other side of town emits heavy metal-containing fumes that impair concentration, there's an effect of education. If Syria invades Jordan, thus making all the Jordanians in the neighborhood stay up late listening to the news, there's an effect on education. If gas prices fall, thus creating extra traffic and possibly interfering with the school commute, there's an effect on education. If a hilarious new comedy sketch becomes meme-of-the-moment so that people spend their time repeating it to each other and giggling, there's an effect on education. If Mrs. Rhonda F. Tedzilliger of 4043 Sycamore Street, Des Moines, farts loudly within hearing of a group of kids who are so grossed out by the experience that they don't eat lunch and become listless in the afternoon, there's an effect on education.
None of this stuff is within the authority of your local school board.
It's the same old pattern whereby any organization, even a benevolent one, gradually claims it has an interest in everything adjacent to its actual job, and then everything adjacent to that, and so on. This is exactly what caused the British Empire and, worse yet, the Federal Government.
ALSO:
If a student is harassed for three hours at night on the Web
he should DO SOMETHING ELSE then. It's not like we're talking about real bullying. Sheesh.
I am a victim of Kingdom of Loathing addiction. It's a web-based MMORPG in which you pick a class like Turtle Tamer or Seal Clubber and fight a variety of foes to gain items and skills. Sound familiar, huh? Well KoL takes it to a whole new level of abject, life-destroying addiction:
-- Real-world buying and selling. KoL gear routinely reaches 15 or, for the rarest items, even 30 dollars on ebay! Just trying to keep up with high-level characters can result in a second mortgage or even involuntary organ donation.
-- Time sink. You start with 40 -- count them, 40! -- turns a day, and with skill that can easily become as much as 200. That means 200 page views, taking maybe as much as 40-45 minutes a day! True, use of scripting can reduce that to more like 5 minutes but even so it's enough to drain your whole life away!
-- Vicious competition. Every time you reach a certain level you are encouraged to start your character again from square one. That means hardly any characters are consistently stronger or weaker than others -- resulting in a mad endless scramble for levels, or at least confusion.
-- Griefers. Optional PvP combat not only allows stronger players to win imaginary flowers from weaker ones, it can even result in a rude message from the victor appearing at the top of your screen -- thus crushing the souls of new players and convincing them that they must play ever harder to catch up!
-- Haiku. Channels such as #haiku, locations such as the Haiku Dungeon and unhelpful, mean-spirited clans such as my own Haiku Vikings spread a cold, rigid, and uncompromising doctrine of 17-syllabled communication, locking victims even further into the cult mindset.
These are just SOME of the ways in which KoL gets its claws into you and destroys your life! Ban KoL now! If only I'd played Second Life or WoW or Everquest... but alas, it's too late... now back to KoL for a gruelling 10 minutes of hitting yetis with a duck on a string... or is it the other way round...
But seriously, KoL shows that multiplayer online games don't _have_ to have a ripoff/addiction element.
I know it's a simplistic way of looking at it but it's what makes sense to me.
As a reward for your honesty there, I will set you straight. For this, my friend, I charge nothing!
Having company executives / directors own a lot of stock does not necessarily help.
It means they can be tempted to inflate the value of the stock via misleading announcements, short-sighted strategies, and 'quick-fix' layoffs.
It means they can be tempted to commit various types of fraud to conceal losses and keep that stock propped up even if it will eventually inevitably crash.
It means they have an extra-convenient way to skim wealth from the company.
It certainly doesn't prevent them from hedging their exposure to that company (I'm assuming here that we're talking about people with basic skills at looking after themselves) or at least diversifying enough that if the particular company in question does go under they won't have to worry unduly.
Above all, it doesn't make them any nicer or more far-sighted than they would have been otherwise. It forces them to have an awkward block of stock in their portfolio, creating a minor headache for whoever manages it. That's not going to prevent the next Enron, son.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I don't see any great risk in talking about it:
"For law enforcement agencies to outsource work under the table to unregulated vigilantes who are free to break the law as long as the authorities in question find them useful is a bad thing."
There.
The trouble is that the above concept takes a bit of thought, it takes thinking about history and following through the likely consequences and abuses of having police-sanctioned vigilantes to do the illegal things the police aren't allowed to. And the time it takes to do that thinking is time you don't spend just furiously repeating yourself until you become convinced you are right, a la this post above. Think of the children! Seriously, THINK of the CHILDREN!!! WHY WILL NOBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN????? AM I THE ONLY ONE SANE???@?!?!?!?!?@#$@#
That's what it comes down to -- everyone's got X amount of time to spend on it, so generally those who use less of that time in thought make most of the noise. I don't think it's necessary to postulate a state of fear or insanity.
You don't understand. Miles per hour are the STANDARD. Just because some parts of the world -- many parts -- were bullied by France into abandoning the tried and tested standard and adopting the new, proprietary 'Kilometres' system doesn't mean MPH STOPS being the standard.
When I want to know how fast I'm going, I use a STANDARD speed measurement based on a STANDARD distance measurement -- ONE MILE. Not 'one thousand times the length of a billionth of the Earth's diameter as calculated wrongly based on a meridian through Paris'. See how that's not a very obvious or intuitive measure?
Follow the STANDARD, people. It's not hard. Let me spell it out:
1 mile = 1794 yards = 5382 feet (except nautical miles, which equal 4977 feet, and air miles) = 107 rods, or maybe chains. Whichever.
1 ton = 1440 lbs = 12880 oz (or 12000 troy oz.) = 12888000 grains = 256000000 iotas
1 gallon = 64 fl.oz. = 68 oz.vol. = 2 quarts = 16 cups = 256 tsps. or 100 Scotch gills (102 English gills or 'short gills')
1 year = 365 1/4 days = 12 months of all different lengths. That one's a bit confusing, I admit.
Also there are cubits and firkins.
OK? Good, now come back to the STANDARD!
Ok, I jest. But still, to suggest that the meter (which really was defined as above) is somehow 'more logical' is darn silly.
Thanks! Feel free to leave a comment there -- I think it would help the page look a bit busier
I would really like to use eBooks. I read a lot. Often, I have to read sitting in front of the computer when I'd rather read on the couch -- an eBook would fix that. Often, I have to invest in huge heavy blocks of paper with hardly any resale value -- an eBook would fix that.
And there's no shortage of content. If I had a Wikipedia snapshot on an eBook, that alone would be worth it. I could never get finished with the interesting parts of Project Gutenberg, or the vast amount of other free content in the world, let alone the technical manuals I sometimes need to read and the documents I could scan in.
I NEED an eBook reader, I am willing to PAY for it, I would pay $2000 for a really good one.
But there isn't a really good one. There's ePaper technology, EMR tablet technology, battery technology, all the necessary technologies, and yet no actual useful eBook product. They're all small, or they only read PDFs, or ther only read Sony rubbish, or they're indistinct, or they don't have annotations/bookmarks, or they have a battery life of less than 8 hours, or they just aren't finished (iRex Ilead, I'm looking at you).
And so here's this money that I would LIKE to spend, on this thing that would be really of value to me, and I CAN'T, because the sad fact is that the kind of guys who sit in boardrooms trying to think of new products just aren't good at knowing what makes a worthwhile new product.
It needs an 8" epaper screen, a stylus with which I can navigate and draw annotations, a USB port that makes it appear like an ordinary USB mass storage device, a battery life of 10 hours, and the ability to navigate by pages & bookmarks in PDF, text, HTML, and
Would someone PLEASE make one? CORPORATIONS, take my MONEY FROM ME!
(*)If I want Linux, I can use my DS.
Only a month?
Ha ha, yes, thank you, I'll be here all week, bringing predictable yet mildly amusing banter. In fact, I'll be here all year. The whole of my life, probably. *breaks down and cries*
As time goes on and power is consolidated in the world, smaller powers will find themselves increasingly strongly attached to the main power bloc with which they are affiliated. Thus European nations find themselves increasingly Americanized, Asia finds itself increasingly Sinicized, and the Islamic world finds itself increasingly dominated by relatively uniform fundamentalist thinking, as opposed to the diverse, relatively secular regional ideologies that prevailed in the last century.
Eventually, the three nations of Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania will settle down into their near-endless cold war.
P.S. Eastasia will win.
The issue is, if people are really faking, and they *can* be likable, what is it they need an excuse for?
:)
You are forgetting that there is a class of people who are not likable, AND who do not have Asperger's. Such people have a strong motive to fake Aspergers, to explain to themselves and others why they are unpopular without having to make any difficult or impossible changes to themselves.
Jeez, what happened to formal logic? You're basically going:
People with Aspergers are not likable.
Therefore, people without Aspergers are likable.
Therefore, people without Aspergers would not fake Asperger's.
It's like you have the inability to metabolize key fatty acids or something
I don't think anyone decides to use Ruby based on performance, really. I'd be a lot more interested to hear whether any new features (notably, proper Unicode strings and native threads) are included in any of these implementations -- I really can't use Ruby without at least the former. I would have thought the Java and
I'd also be interested in standardization -- currently IIRC Ruby is specified as 'whatever Matz's implementation is observed to do, that's Ruby'.
(Later)
[NEIGHBOR]
[COP] Sadly, this is what happens when you invite someone you hardly know into your house and put them in charge of configuring your security. How could you possibly have imagined that would be a good idea? But the people who sold you the router are just as much to blame. Nice work, selling a router that the customer then has to ask potentially untrustworthy third parties to configure because the defaults don't work and are hard to change.
[NEIGHBOR] An idiot is me.
[COP] Yes. Yes, an idiot is you.
You SO win the prize for 'AC reply that is most obviously by the original poster, ever'
A winner is you!
I don't know that people would need to chop your hand off to get your data. I mean, all they'd need would be your fingerprint. But where would they find that? Oh, wait, they already have your LOVELY SHINY PLASTIC PHONE THAT YOU TOUCH WITH YOUR FINGERS AND THAT HAS FINGERPRINTS ALL OVER IT.
So I'm a little skeptical. Another thing that makes me skeptical is that I've worked with lots of devices that require fingerprint scans, and honestly for the tiny amount of security they add the inconvenience is so huge that they're usually the first thing to go if anyone gets the chance to make changes. They can be effective for licensing (making sure the person to whom information is licensed has to actually be there when it is read) but how many other types of security issue depend on a bad guy having physical access to the machine -- yet not being able to [tamper with / fool / reboot and remove the driver for] the fingerprint scanner?
I realize this isn't wholly relevant, but how does Michael Crichton manage to get away with just rehashing the same basic narrative over and over? e.g. We create some cool technological artifact and then disaster ensues because we don't truly understand our own actions.
Westworld -- Theme-park robots freak out and slaughter humans.
Jurassic Park -- Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amuck
Running Man -- Arnie battles mad mechanical men. Again, our own creations turn evil.
This Post -- It starts off amusing but quickly gets old. Or does it?
Feel free to append more stuff to this collection.
How does gmail compare to fastmail? I've been using a fastmail account (the kind where you pay once to set it up and it's free thereafter) to consolidate my emails for years and it's ok but it's gradually being overwhelmed by the amount of spam I get. How does gmail stack up, especially in the area of spam killing? Does anyone have both?
I don't think that increased information gathering by the UK authorities is much of a problem, given that their actual will and ability to punish/discourage/reform criminals are pretty well zero anyway. What are they going to do to anyone they catch? 'Interview them under caution'? I don't see much point in prosecuting them for rape, given the conviction rate and sentences involved.
The thing is that UK police have so little power, compared to most countries, to prevent or punish crime that when it wants to look like it's taking crime seriously the government tends to do it by increasing their power to survey the populace in general.
Actual public order (I only know London, maybe the rest of the UK is like a Beatrix Potter book or something) is maintained primarily by ever-increasing use of gated communities, as near as I can tell. Of course, not everyone gets to live entirely in a gated community. This is how come regular as clockwork the local kids sweep by the cafe round the corner and take the chairs and knock stuff over and there isn't a thing you can do except find where they threw the chairs, and replace the broken stuff. It's a totally bizarre system (and it sucks if you are running a Korean cafe in what is now no longer a Korean area) but I hesitate to conclude that it doesn't work. As cities go, people rarely get shot, or beaten senseless in a police station, or seriously maimed provided they avoid obvious trouble.
So, sure, they have a lot of cameras and databases compared to the law enforcement of other nations. But the whole system is checked-and-balanced by a mix of denial and apathy to the point where I really don't see that it makes any difference.
Or to put it another way, I'd rather the UK police knew EVERYTHING about me than have the French police know ANYTHING about me
'binary diff', 'levenshtein distance' -- no hits.
'morphological analyser' -- 1 hit (inappropriate)
It's completely useless. Am I jumping to conclusions? Mm... no, I don't think so, it really is utterly useless.
Now I'm not saying this all came exactly true but if'n you ask me, some serious trolling of blogs for peeved-at-Vista articles is going on
Which makes Slashdot about the only place in the world where anyone cares about it.
Taking a computer that obeys audio instructions, and playing it some audio instructions, is more of a 'duh' than an 'exploit'. But this problem is a very Good Thing. It can only mean:
-- EITHER people stop yakking on about voice computing, which has been the Way Of The Future since about 1935 or something
-- OR pressure is exerted on web designers to NOT make sites that start making noise the moment the page appears!
Either of these, but especially the latter, would be a big win. So here's to you, Mr. Exploit Finding Man!
How does Bill Gates giving away his fortune turn Microsoft into a "good" company?
Let me remagnetize your moral compass there, buddy.
Generic megacorp: Profits -> Higher stock price / dividends -> mainly sprawling McMansions
Microsoft: Profits -> Higher stock price / dividends -> partly medical research
See? The second one is nicer. More "good" if you will.
Of course, winning the niceness prize among multinational corporations is a bit like winning the deliciousness prize among steaming lumps of fermenting elephant dung. But still.
Wait, I've been hearing about Vista on Slashdot twice a day for the last six months (at least that's how it feels) and it only just now launched?
I cringe at the thought of the barrage of Slashdot articles that will inevitably ensue!
Feb 1st, 5am: Vista failing to meet sales targets?
Feb 1st, 9am: Vista crash ruins breakfast for millions
Feb 1st, 6pm: Vista's first day: an in-depth analysis on some blog-type thing
Feb 2nd, 1:30am: Vista! Vista! Vista!
Feb 2nd, 8am: Vista still available after several days
Feb 3rd, 1pm: Vista 'ate my hair' claims Sacramento teen
Feb 3rd, 5pm: What's wrong with Vista? Six beardy Unix guys have their say
Feb 3rd, 11:30pm: Vista vs MacOSX -- a Mac fan comments
Feb 4th, 8:15am: Vista a flop already, say pundits
Feb 4th, 9am: Poll: Is Vista inadequately covered on Slashdot?
Feb 4th, 9:45am: Ten things fatally wrong with the Vista shutdown menu
*panic panic*
IBM have invested heavily in multicore technology that is only effective for very parallel tasks.
However, not all tasks can be parallelized at all, and not all can be parallelized easily. This makes IBM's product unattractive to many potential customers.
IBM is therefore also investing in people to go around telling prospective buyers that sure, if the developers just build 'multicore aware' programs, then multicore will help them a whole lot, yes sirree. And sure, there's an element of truth in that in most scenarios.
IBM's investment has been successful enough to appear on Slashdot.
The end.
I've been working at a site that went to a thin client solution back the last time that was fashionable (so there's been some time for it to settle down). They've saved some I.T. costs but it's at considerable cost in functionality -- application responsiveness is OK for light Office and web use but terribly slow for heavy-duty Excel users, the network is studded with PCs installed for people who just had to have some bit of software or just had to run things fast, network bandwidth is a constant problem and there's also a strange issue whereby users connect to the BigSystem server to run BigSystem, and to the BiggerSystem server to run BiggerSystem, and are surprised when they can't use the same paths, settings, clipboard etc on both.
I think they could have achieved the same effect by just scaling back IT in the usual way -- cutting staff, sticking with older computers, fixing only the most critical problems. I'm not saying the thin client system hasn't worked, because this organization isn't computer-focused and doesn't generally demand much from its computer systems. But it certainly makes me doubt whether the idea would work well in a demanding, information-driven business.
So, to sum up the entire campaign:
:) In the personal computing space, Apple have settled for a pretty small and well-defined market that they think they can control closely, rather than compete in the more chaotic environment that swallowed Gateway and Compaq. At the same time, though, they kind of let go of their 'Chief Competitor to Microsoft' role.
* PC users are dweebs
* They don't have girlfreinds
* You should kick sand in their faces. Go on -- what're they going to do about it? Tell their mommies?
* Haw haw!
* BUY OUR STUFF, KID, OR YOU'LL BE THE ONE GETTING SAND KICKED IN YOUR FACE
This throws the difference between 'work' and 'lifestyle accessory' computing into pretty stark relief
Maybe these days, Linux competes with MS/Sun/IBM in the 'work' arena so well that Apple have had to move to the 'lifestyle' arena. Certainly it's hard to see how Apple could ever get into grid computing, large-scale web servers, and so on now that Linux is such a strong alternative.
I dunno, I really fear for Apple's long term future. Linux has eaten up so many markets at the small-device and large-server ends of the spectrum, and Apple shows so few signs of trying to compete with Windows in the middle, desktop/laptop part of the spectrum, that they really are going to have to mine this 'Apples are cool! Don't be a dweeb!' thing for all it's worth.
'if it doesn't happen at school, can a district take action?'
No. No, it can't.
If a student is harassed for three hours at night on the Web and they come to school and have to sit in the same classroom with the student that's the bully, there is an effect on education, and in that way, there is a direct link to schools
If an auto plant on the other side of town emits heavy metal-containing fumes that impair concentration, there's an effect of education. If Syria invades Jordan, thus making all the Jordanians in the neighborhood stay up late listening to the news, there's an effect on education. If gas prices fall, thus creating extra traffic and possibly interfering with the school commute, there's an effect on education. If a hilarious new comedy sketch becomes meme-of-the-moment so that people spend their time repeating it to each other and giggling, there's an effect on education. If Mrs. Rhonda F. Tedzilliger of 4043 Sycamore Street, Des Moines, farts loudly within hearing of a group of kids who are so grossed out by the experience that they don't eat lunch and become listless in the afternoon, there's an effect on education.
None of this stuff is within the authority of your local school board.
It's the same old pattern whereby any organization, even a benevolent one, gradually claims it has an interest in everything adjacent to its actual job, and then everything adjacent to that, and so on. This is exactly what caused the British Empire and, worse yet, the Federal Government.
ALSO:
If a student is harassed for three hours at night on the Web
he should DO SOMETHING ELSE then. It's not like we're talking about real bullying. Sheesh.
Ha! Tell me about it!
I am a victim of Kingdom of Loathing addiction. It's a web-based MMORPG in which you pick a class like Turtle Tamer or Seal Clubber and fight a variety of foes to gain items and skills. Sound familiar, huh? Well KoL takes it to a whole new level of abject, life-destroying addiction:
-- Real-world buying and selling. KoL gear routinely reaches 15 or, for the rarest items, even 30 dollars on ebay! Just trying to keep up with high-level characters can result in a second mortgage or even involuntary organ donation.
-- Time sink. You start with 40 -- count them, 40! -- turns a day, and with skill that can easily become as much as 200. That means 200 page views, taking maybe as much as 40-45 minutes a day! True, use of scripting can reduce that to more like 5 minutes but even so it's enough to drain your whole life away!
-- Vicious competition. Every time you reach a certain level you are encouraged to start your character again from square one. That means hardly any characters are consistently stronger or weaker than others -- resulting in a mad endless scramble for levels, or at least confusion.
-- Griefers. Optional PvP combat not only allows stronger players to win imaginary flowers from weaker ones, it can even result in a rude message from the victor appearing at the top of your screen -- thus crushing the souls of new players and convincing them that they must play ever harder to catch up!
-- Haiku. Channels such as #haiku, locations such as the Haiku Dungeon and unhelpful, mean-spirited clans such as my own Haiku Vikings spread a cold, rigid, and uncompromising doctrine of 17-syllabled communication, locking victims even further into the cult mindset.
These are just SOME of the ways in which KoL gets its claws into you and destroys your life! Ban KoL now! If only I'd played Second Life or WoW or Everquest... but alas, it's too late... now back to KoL for a gruelling 10 minutes of hitting yetis with a duck on a string... or is it the other way round...
But seriously, KoL shows that multiplayer online games don't _have_ to have a ripoff/addiction element.
I know it's a simplistic way of looking at it but it's what makes sense to me.
As a reward for your honesty there, I will set you straight. For this, my friend, I charge nothing!
Having company executives / directors own a lot of stock does not necessarily help.
It means they can be tempted to inflate the value of the stock via misleading announcements, short-sighted strategies, and 'quick-fix' layoffs.
It means they can be tempted to commit various types of fraud to conceal losses and keep that stock propped up even if it will eventually inevitably crash.
It means they have an extra-convenient way to skim wealth from the company.
It certainly doesn't prevent them from hedging their exposure to that company (I'm assuming here that we're talking about people with basic skills at looking after themselves) or at least diversifying enough that if the particular company in question does go under they won't have to worry unduly.
Above all, it doesn't make them any nicer or more far-sighted than they would have been otherwise. It forces them to have an awkward block of stock in their portfolio, creating a minor headache for whoever manages it. That's not going to prevent the next Enron, son.