And before that, they were tasked primarily with exploitation (rather than a mix of exploitation and protection) of resources, so there was really no question of any sort of bribery or corruption, unless you counted your Uncle Willy giving you preferential hiring as a park ranger because you were a good party member and his nephew. If you were an industry back then, you just signed a lease at the going price (which was even more ridiculously small than today's lease prices), and you got what was on/under the land.
I would imagine that one of two things happened to cause this suit:
(1) The estate of the 87-year old got hit with a buttload of medical charges unpaid by Medicare and, as such, no assets in the estate were left for bereaved; or (2) The parents whose four year-old ran into the old lady laughed it off at some point.
I think it's probably case (1), unless the old lady had been bitching about the kid flying around the neighborhood inadequately supervised (get off my lawn, notwithstanding) for a year beforehand. Even so, it's all about the money - when in doubt, always follow the money. Most sane people do not sue six year-olds, even in this country.
To be fair, it keeps the lawyers busy from doing something even more nefarious, so the user (and society) will gain indirectly. Besides, I think the corporate powers that be need a good, strong kick in the teeth about privacy issues anyway. The fact that it will be delivered by some scum-sucking bottom feeder doesn't bother me in the least.
Call me back in a week when you've finished loading that 400TB dataset into S3. And after you've taken an eon to crunch it all, you'll need another week to dump the results back out.
To be fair, if you're going to (have had to) wait for an eon for the processing, a week to (un-)load the data doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
Sure...give the government an internet kill switch. What could possibly go wrong?
Probably nothing worse than giving them control of nuclear weapons. Get some perspective, people. If you distrust the government this much, focus on the big things.
And, don't give me bullshit about "inadequate controls". Do you really think a President is going to do something that will probably cripple corporate operations for the period of time that this "kill switch" is engaged just to knock some dumb ass blogger off the net? If you really do, you have more issues then you are aware of...
Well, from most indications by people who work at MSFT want to get good products out, it sure seems to. Plus, it seems to be sucking to be a shareholder, too, as the stock price hasn't done more than tracked the general market for the past ten years. In the same time period, GOOG has gone up 500% and AAPL has gone up 3000%.
Yeah, you're right. It does suck to be part of a company in decline like MSFT (or even be associated with it)...
A few months of actual free market capitalism would destroy most of the big corporations.
I think you underestimate the power of a fully funded and functional multi-national corporation. Trying to cut back the network effects can take decades, by which time your puny competitors will be bankrupt. If you doubt this, see how many companies still use IBM mainframes. And that which survives in one realm can leverage its existing power into another realm without regulation. See again, e.g., IBM.
Want to get money and influence peddling out of the hands of feds?
Yeah - and put it right back into the hands of corrupt state and local business owners where it belongs. If I were going to waste my time on Constitutional Amendments that wouldn't pass, I think I'd either go with requirements for proportional voting or public financing of campaigns. Both would have a better impact on elections.
So Android is going to be big. Who cares - it's just an OS with a UI and comm stack on it. It's a utility.
Besides, it's all the crap that's built around it that's the issue. I can put a locked down proprietary stack on any OS. And anyone who thinks that the OS and comm stack aren't going to be locked down when these things are sold with hardware is really naive. The fact is that support costs will kill anyone that tries to put a non-locked-down product. Margins in hardware devices are already slim enough that no one is going to go through the added cost of letting people install random X software on their hardware device. It will be a phone, or a TV, or a combo phone-TV w/browser. Use it for what it is and stop expecting it to be a full-purpose computer. If you want a computer, buy a computer.
Just because the OS is open doesn't mean that a hardware vendor needs to let you muck with it easily (or at all). If you don't like this, don't buy the device.
Imagine if Mozilla decided tomorrow to build an office suite.
Oh yeah!!! Because the first set of programmers I think of doing an office suite are ones that have no experience with the domain area!
Seriously... what was this guy smoking? Or is this just Slashdot's daily troll for pageviews story because it's such an obviously stupid idea that everyone will comment?
... the lesson learned is that whenever you are planning on building something technical, be sure to go wayyyy overboard on the size and scope of the projected requirements in order to future-proof the technology.
Yeah! That's why we should be building CPUs with 1024-bit addresses!
... a slightly less crazy ruler, but he is a religious idealogue. If he thinks god told him to nuke someone, it could very well happen. Or worse, he might have to live up to his hyperbole or risk the rath of his own people.
Hmmm... Sounds like the last US President, if by "his own people" you meant the Republican base.
If anyone gives a crap the application that comes to mind is bitmap compression & maybe some steganography applications.
And FEA and electronic circuit simulation and molecular simulations (with and without solvation) and a whole lot o'analog crap that gets simulated every day. Very sparse matrix algebra. Although I still wonder how well the numerics hold up under stiffness, ill-conditioning, etc.
So are income taxes. There is no tax-free situation for the poor with income tax in place. Assume 30% average tax rate. Poor person pays zero. Then buys a service, such as plumbing. Plumber pays 30%. Poor person pays $100; Plumber gets $70, government takes $30; poor person gets (maybe) $70 worth of plumbing. Effective tax rate for poor person: 30%. Of course, it's higher if you're middle class: You earn $142; taxed at 30%, you keep $100; you pay plumber $100; government takes $30; you get $70 worth of plumbing. Effective tax rate for middle class: 50%. Whereas if you're Google, you pay 2.4%, so you earn $102.45, keep $100, pay the plumber $100, govt gets $30, Google gets $70 worth of plumbing. Effective tax rate for Google: 31.6%
And this is why we charge higher income tax rates for higher levels of income (i.e., make taxes progressive) - because we want to do our best to avoid what you are showing here. But it worked a lot better back in the 50's when the rate for people who earned above $1M per annum (probably somewhere in the $10-20M range today, adjusted for inflation) were taxed at a 90% rate and ratcheted down pretty much linearly. You know - before government "cut our taxes" by flattening the tax structure in the eighties and made it more regressive.
What replaces it, if anything, the market will decide.
Sadly, you're probably right. And what will replace it will be paid advertisement, government propaganda, and ignorance. Hooray! The free market works again!
For those who love the free market, just remember three limit points that it always devolves to: If an individual has no immediate incentive to pay for it, no one gets it - even if it is in everybody's best long-term interest - because humans are social only up to a point; The market provides inexpensive, shoddy, low-margin goods or expensive, well-made, high-margin goods - there will eventually be no in-between; Because money=goods and goods can buy power, a "free market" always devolves towards a plutocracy. There are corollaries to these items, but I figure that the peasantry for most implied by the third item is good enough for anybody.
Customers are fickle, ask for things they want, but aren't willing to implement. I had to unwind the changes even though they made the database much more functional and saved time, all because the primary user didn't want to type two extra characters, it was easier compiling the notices by hand.
So why couldn't you put a hack in the UI that checked if the date was in MM/DD format and default to the current year (or next, if you were storing the expiration)? Some odd notion of "the UI data format must exactly match the data format" purity? It seems like a fairly reasonable user request. And, it would have been three extra characters, as they'd had to have entered the separator character, as well. Force yourself to type three extra spaces at the end of each line of code for a year and tell me how much you like it. It seems like you had a "stupid user meme" in your head that you were unwilling to get rid of. It doesn't speak well of either your development or personal interaction skills.
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And before that, they were tasked primarily with exploitation (rather than a mix of exploitation and protection) of resources, so there was really no question of any sort of bribery or corruption, unless you counted your Uncle Willy giving you preferential hiring as a park ranger because you were a good party member and his nephew. If you were an industry back then, you just signed a lease at the going price (which was even more ridiculously small than today's lease prices), and you got what was on/under the land.
I would imagine that one of two things happened to cause this suit:
(1) The estate of the 87-year old got hit with a buttload of medical charges unpaid by Medicare and, as such, no assets in the estate were left for bereaved;
or
(2) The parents whose four year-old ran into the old lady laughed it off at some point.
I think it's probably case (1), unless the old lady had been bitching about the kid flying around the neighborhood inadequately supervised (get off my lawn, notwithstanding) for a year beforehand. Even so, it's all about the money - when in doubt, always follow the money. Most sane people do not sue six year-olds, even in this country.
To be fair, it keeps the lawyers busy from doing something even more nefarious, so the user (and society) will gain indirectly. Besides, I think the corporate powers that be need a good, strong kick in the teeth about privacy issues anyway. The fact that it will be delivered by some scum-sucking bottom feeder doesn't bother me in the least.
We leave it to the judgment of history whether Feinstein is qualified to do so. Myself? I DON'T KNOW.
And the beauty of the system is that your trust will never be shattered because YOU NEVER WILL KNOW. What a wonderfully circular logic you use.
Call me back in a week when you've finished loading that 400TB dataset into S3. And after you've taken an eon to crunch it all, you'll need another week to dump the results back out.
To be fair, if you're going to (have had to) wait for an eon for the processing, a week to (un-)load the data doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
Sure...give the government an internet kill switch. What could possibly go wrong?
Probably nothing worse than giving them control of nuclear weapons. Get some perspective, people. If you distrust the government this much, focus on the big things.
And, don't give me bullshit about "inadequate controls". Do you really think a President is going to do something that will probably cripple corporate operations for the period of time that this "kill switch" is engaged just to knock some dumb ass blogger off the net? If you really do, you have more issues then you are aware of...
How is that any different that Americans claiming that Budweiser is beer?
Because even Australians know that isn't true?
I only wish you could customize the voice.
Why? Did they use Balmer's? I'm surprised they could record him over the sound of crashing chairs.
It must suck to be part of a company in decline.
Well, from most indications by people who work at MSFT want to get good products out, it sure seems to. Plus, it seems to be sucking to be a shareholder, too, as the stock price hasn't done more than tracked the general market for the past ten years. In the same time period, GOOG has gone up 500% and AAPL has gone up 3000%.
Yeah, you're right. It does suck to be part of a company in decline like MSFT (or even be associated with it)...
A few months of actual free market capitalism would destroy most of the big corporations.
I think you underestimate the power of a fully funded and functional multi-national corporation. Trying to cut back the network effects can take decades, by which time your puny competitors will be bankrupt. If you doubt this, see how many companies still use IBM mainframes. And that which survives in one realm can leverage its existing power into another realm without regulation. See again, e.g., IBM.
Want to get money and influence peddling out of the hands of feds?
Yeah - and put it right back into the hands of corrupt state and local business owners where it belongs. If I were going to waste my time on Constitutional Amendments that wouldn't pass, I think I'd either go with requirements for proportional voting or public financing of campaigns. Both would have a better impact on elections.
No one but Ralph Nader leans LEFT in the usa ANYWAYS!
You forgot Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich.
You forgot to mention that Fox News didn't tell you about this either... although that goes without saying, doesn't it?
So Android is going to be big. Who cares - it's just an OS with a UI and comm stack on it. It's a utility.
Besides, it's all the crap that's built around it that's the issue. I can put a locked down proprietary stack on any OS. And anyone who thinks that the OS and comm stack aren't going to be locked down when these things are sold with hardware is really naive. The fact is that support costs will kill anyone that tries to put a non-locked-down product. Margins in hardware devices are already slim enough that no one is going to go through the added cost of letting people install random X software on their hardware device. It will be a phone, or a TV, or a combo phone-TV w/browser. Use it for what it is and stop expecting it to be a full-purpose computer. If you want a computer, buy a computer.
Just because the OS is open doesn't mean that a hardware vendor needs to let you muck with it easily (or at all). If you don't like this, don't buy the device.
Imagine if Mozilla decided tomorrow to build an office suite.
Oh yeah!!! Because the first set of programmers I think of doing an office suite are ones that have no experience with the domain area!
Seriously... what was this guy smoking? Or is this just Slashdot's daily troll for pageviews story because it's such an obviously stupid idea that everyone will comment?
That which is important, I remember. That which is not, I forget.
"2048". Like the letters 'k' and 'q', it just sounds funnier when used in a joke.
Nah, everyone knows that 8192 is the funniest. But, yeah, granted... a slip up on my part.
... the lesson learned is that whenever you are planning on building something technical, be sure to go wayyyy overboard on the size and scope of the projected requirements in order to future-proof the technology.
Yeah! That's why we should be building CPUs with 1024-bit addresses!
... a slightly less crazy ruler, but he is a religious idealogue. If he thinks god told him to nuke someone, it could very well happen. Or worse, he might have to live up to his hyperbole or risk the rath of his own people.
Hmmm... Sounds like the last US President, if by "his own people" you meant the Republican base.
If anyone gives a crap the application that comes to mind is bitmap compression & maybe some steganography applications.
And FEA and electronic circuit simulation and molecular simulations (with and without solvation) and a whole lot o'analog crap that gets simulated every day. Very sparse matrix algebra. Although I still wonder how well the numerics hold up under stiffness, ill-conditioning, etc.
The nice thing about this is that things like electrical circuit simulations, FEA matrices, etc. tend to be SDD. This may speed things up a bit.
So are income taxes.
There is no tax-free situation for the poor with income tax in place.
Assume 30% average tax rate. Poor person pays zero. Then buys a service, such as plumbing. Plumber pays 30%. Poor person pays $100; Plumber gets $70, government takes $30; poor person gets (maybe) $70 worth of plumbing. Effective tax rate for poor person: 30%.
Of course, it's higher if you're middle class: You earn $142; taxed at 30%, you keep $100; you pay plumber $100; government takes $30; you get $70 worth of plumbing. Effective tax rate for middle class: 50%.
Whereas if you're Google, you pay 2.4%, so you earn $102.45, keep $100, pay the plumber $100, govt gets $30, Google gets $70 worth of plumbing. Effective tax rate for Google: 31.6%
And this is why we charge higher income tax rates for higher levels of income (i.e., make taxes progressive) - because we want to do our best to avoid what you are showing here. But it worked a lot better back in the 50's when the rate for people who earned above $1M per annum (probably somewhere in the $10-20M range today, adjusted for inflation) were taxed at a 90% rate and ratcheted down pretty much linearly. You know - before government "cut our taxes" by flattening the tax structure in the eighties and made it more regressive.
Acer's processor is 1.8gHz, the Apple is 1.4. So the acer is faster.
It depends - is the Acer running Windows? Windows could slow this machine to a crawl.
What replaces it, if anything, the market will decide.
Sadly, you're probably right. And what will replace it will be paid advertisement, government propaganda, and ignorance. Hooray! The free market works again!
For those who love the free market, just remember three limit points that it always devolves to: If an individual has no immediate incentive to pay for it, no one gets it - even if it is in everybody's best long-term interest - because humans are social only up to a point; The market provides inexpensive, shoddy, low-margin goods or expensive, well-made, high-margin goods - there will eventually be no in-between; Because money=goods and goods can buy power, a "free market" always devolves towards a plutocracy. There are corollaries to these items, but I figure that the peasantry for most implied by the third item is good enough for anybody.
Customers are fickle, ask for things they want, but aren't willing to implement. I had to unwind the changes even though they made the database much more functional and saved time, all because the primary user didn't want to type two extra characters, it was easier compiling the notices by hand.
So why couldn't you put a hack in the UI that checked if the date was in MM/DD format and default to the current year (or next, if you were storing the expiration)? Some odd notion of "the UI data format must exactly match the data format" purity? It seems like a fairly reasonable user request. And, it would have been three extra characters, as they'd had to have entered the separator character, as well. Force yourself to type three extra spaces at the end of each line of code for a year and tell me how much you like it. It seems like you had a "stupid user meme" in your head that you were unwilling to get rid of. It doesn't speak well of either your development or personal interaction skills.