I mean I'm not a show vendor and I even know that doing such things is not ok with hotel management.
A lot of the vendors claim they had informal conversations with management who said it was okay:
I think the mention of them claiming to have had informal conversations is not really relevant to it - if anyone renting a hotel room asks are there any limitations - is the person they're talking to expected to mind-read that you would like to turn it into a sales-stand?...or should he, to be safe, simply respond:
You must not destroy any fittings and furniture, you may not repaint the room, take out and/or put in new carpeting/flooring,... You must not murder anyone in the room, rape anyone in the room,...., kidnap, take hostages,... (insert-endless-list-of-things-that you should NOT do - simply based on them either being illegal, or simply not being seen as desirable by management).
The simple question are there any limitations is most likely seen as 'obvious/unexpected limitations'. Most hotels rent out separate conference rooms for sales pitches and the like, and therefore would not - by default - expect anyone asking about limitations in using the room to use the normal room for sales pitches...
So, unless they explicitly asked management "are you fine with us using our room for displaying some of our goods to potential clients, and possibly trying to close deals with said clients?", I do not think that the management was out of line in saying there weren't any (unusual) limitations.
If you think the behaviour of the hotel was wrong here, expect your life to get an awful lot of more small print for anything from grocery shopping to using a public toilet, just so that the 'vendor' can introduce you to all possible limitations to your stay...
'rally America to defend the most creative economy in the world, where music, film, TV and video games help to account for nearly 4 percent of gross domestic'
He does mean the music industry as an integral part of the most creative economy?
Did the music or movie industry CREATE the internet?
Did it CREATE file-sharing protocols?
Did it manage to CREATE a solution to the piracy problem?
I see three big NOs there... Would the music industry please step forward and enlighten me as to the creativeness involved here?
So far, the most notable positive thing in the music industry in the last decade seems to have been Amy Winehouse, who the music industry did not manage to protect from her own drug problems.
But - did the music industry CREATE Amy Winehouse? Do they really want to say that the mindless shagging around of music stars in the past few decades counts as 'the industry creating new talent'?
Well, without having read to much about Tibetan history - but what gives one nation the right to 'force' another nation into the 21st century?
How well would it wash with the American public, if the US government tried to force electricity and the Internet down the Amish people's throats?
It's all nice and well for US companies to demand that other countries accept free markets, but at the same time, they do not grant those nations the 'right' to live however they want -- when did you last see an electronic billboard advertising Coke in an Amish town?
I believe Microsoft anytime that they would not build back doors into the system... If they tried, the backdoor would probably have enough bugs to be unusable.
Besides - doesn't it already state it in the story:
"Microsoft has not and will not put "backdoors" into Windows"
"the agency had worked on the operating system."
Seems pretty clear, MS did NOT put a backdoor into it...;-)
Same thought here - sounds a lot like Heston Blumenthal's approach to cooking......and in a true Microsoft way, Nathan Myhrvold will now 'innovate' this as the new way, long after others have 'paved the way'...;-)
Though, I doubt Myhrvold will pick up 3 Michelin stars along the way, like Blumenthal has.
* a library is a place where you find books 'by chance', standing near the book you are looking for, but it may still catch your eye. A google search only gives you whatever your search terms give you, anything 'like' the stuff you're looking for will not be there, if it doesn't match the keywords you're looking for.
* thanks to SEO guys, looking up '-insertrandomarticle- specs' finds *loads* of pages saying 'reviews, specs, infos about -insertrandomarticle-', the page you're actually looking for is not even on the first page, because guys peddling the product made sure their 'search-ratings' make them appear higher up. (Yes, to me, google's search results are beginning to fail me -- but not to fret, if another search engine should ever 'upstage' them, it will only be a matter of time before SEO will make it *less* usable, too... (Note, before the flames come back - I'm saying it's becoming more difficult to find relevant pages for everyday items because of excessive SEO optimised pages -- I'm not saying it would be 'unusable').
* In a library, the librarians build the index and order the books accordingly, so you will find information grouped, and noone interferes with this index on a regular basis (excepting the occasional idiot putting a book back in the wrong place).
* In a library, you're not constantly staring at your email inbox or other distractions. Your phone is turned off / silent, and if you need to talk to someone go out so you're not distracting anyone else -- a library is a place where distractions are being minimised, and people violating the 'quiet'/'undistracted' nature of a library are generally 'frowned upon', to say the least.
* On the internet, distractions are ever present - being that emails, twitter messages, IM, or constant links from one document to the next and to the next and to the next, each ever less to do with what you started off with, but still entertaining enough to make you click them anyway. In a library, there are 'links' between books - usually the 'bibliography' part of a book, but sometimes mentioned in footnotes -- but since it requires you to put down your book and go and find the 'linked' book yourself, you think twice about whether the look up that reference, or try without it first. On the internet, more often than not, the easy temptation to click on a link and looking at the resulting page interrupts your workflow.
Personally, I'm quite fond of the internet, was never much of a library-person, but I can see where Bradbury is coming from. And, personally, I'm cutting down on some of the stuff I did follow up on 'too much' for my own good - e.g. rss2email, which is nice if you want to stay on top of the current news, but in most cases, I can wait for the evening news on the telly; or look at some newspage when I'm on a break -- I no longer want my work interrupted with those constant news updates...
Of course, I can turn them off - but it also feels wrong doing it, as my own curiousity is now constantly hunting for whatever else is new, whatever else happened,...
While 12-13 years ago, I totally loved finding a job where we had internet access on our workstations, now I'd rather like one where I wouldn't have it, I'm sure it would boost my overall productivity.
Hmmm - to make the wearer escape the shot, the shocks would basically have to be admitted from one side only, to make the wearer move away from that side...
I wonder whether it could be used differently - e.g. make the wearer move in front of a moving car (ouch); or better, aid kidnappers by sending out a signal which actually makes the wearer jump / move towards the kidnappers getaway car - it would make kidnapping so much easier, if the victim would actually help you...;-)
The question then would obviously be, can the armor be tricked into believing that WAS an incoming shot that would require this particular movement to evade 'the shot'...?
How do you really beat the locations of the Regent Street store in London, or the 5th Ave New York?
Couple the few maybe marginally better locations together with the immense sex-appeal of 'MS Office' or 'Zune' compared to 'iMacs, 'iPods', or 'iPhones'? (Especially, remember that in the few more upmarket locations that might exist, you would be located next to even more fashionable/trendy stores)......nothing that sounds even remotely like Microsoft, if you ask me...
I agree that keeping track of memory cards isn't that difficult (I even actually use a card wallet for some of them - they work fine), especially if you label the cards....
On the other hand - the rest of your argument is fairly meaningless given the basic question as you don't know the usage patterns of the person asking the question (and which unfortunately wasn't supplied) - and just assume things.
For one thing - 'on 8 2-gig cards' kind of warrants the question on the best way to organise them as you are talking about sizable number of cards. On the other side - you just say '800 20 megapixel RAW images on 16GB(8*2GB)' sounds like an 'impressive' number, but it really isn't - for one thing the size of the raw images depends on more than just 20megapixel - I get ~1000 12megapixel RAW images on 2 8GB cards (at 14bpp). And while even a 1000 images sounds an impressive number - my 5 8GB cards weren't quite enough for a week in Istanbul (in total there I took about 55GB worth of photos). How much you can fit on what cards really depends on the actual usage pattern. Just that I shoot almost exclusively in RAW doesn't mean everyone else does...
The only good tip I could give someone who juggles around with many cards - apart from labelling them, is to use card wallets and place cards depending on whether they are ready to use (empty) or full: simply put them with the label facing towards you if the cards are empty, and with the label facing away from you if they're full. That way it's easy to keep track of which cards in your wallet you can still use to take more images, and which cards are already full...
Two issues here - looking for water is a good thing because we KNOW that water is important for a whole lot of lifeforms that we happen to know (i.e. all life on earth).
What we do NOT know is whether a planet with water will automatically 'produce' life in some form or other.
Separately, we do not know, whether other chemical compounds can also give rise to life - but in that case, life that isn't based on water and light - both of which are important to the human existence.
Your 'science-wankery' aside - up to a few years back, we thought we 'knew' that life needs both light and water - because all life on earth that we knew about needed both. We also 'knew' that a temperate climate is important for life...
Strangely enough, since then, mankind has found life near hydrothermal vents in deep sea that defy our picture of what's needed - there's still water around, but it's very very sulfurous - too much so for our tastes (or even our survival) and these are too deep to get any light at all.
The fact these creatures are just 'worms' and 'crabs' doesn't automatically preclude evolution to sentient beings further down the line either, because we simply do not know when and how sentience forms...
Science can help us explain certain things that we observe, and can help us speculate about things we have not (yet) observed - but simply saying 'anything but light and ph-neutral water and a limit temperature span precludes life' isn't more than unfounded rants against SF either - science fiction can't prove the existence of say 'silicon' based creatures or gas based creatures, but science can't 'prove' they're absolutely impossible either. The only thing it can do is rule out that certain combinations of it aren't 'alive' (e.g. just a block of pure iron with nothing else, isn't alive - I would tend to think that is likely a universal truth; but, heck, depending on what combinations of materials will come together in whatever circumstances that we just haven't witnessed in our solar system)
Agreed - especially given the current economic climate, the price issue will be an even bigger factor than normal... All those people who don't know whether their jobs will still be there at the end of 2009 won't be too likely to spend an extra US$100 or more on something like a smaller SSD over a larger harddrive...
So, the question is:
Will 2009 Be the Turning Point For SSDs -- or will we, 12 months from now, see the new post 'Will 2010 Be the Turning Point For SSDs?'...?;-)
Well, you're also stealing from the publisher - though indirectly. The price and availability of used copies of books may spark re-prints (i.e. if a book is becoming more and more popular again, the publisher is becoming more likely to issue a new print run). With pirated copies, it's less obvious how popular a book actually is.
Water can't penetrate it - that means, rain stays outside... Good idea...
But it also means, all your sweat stays INSIDE... BAD idea... I don't even want to know how soaked I'd feel after cycling for half an hour wearing a 'rain-coat' like that to keep me 'dry'!
Hmm - do you think it was CS driven advances (say, production automation; or the easy ability to offshore call-centres) that cost more jobs, or advances in other areas?
I would think that CS directly or indirectly cost more unskilled jobs than any other higher skilled area -- though, I'd love to be proven wrong. So, if you know another higher skilled area of jobs that contributed more to losses in the lower skilled work sector, please post here...
Yes, it's one of the earliest (if not the earliest) -- but it's also one of the countless sites on computer ethics that doesn't deal with the number of unemployed people our profession creates.
Sure, it creates (or created) lots of jobs in IT, but there are lots of people for which IT is not a viable future - nor is nuclear physics, brain surgery, biochemistry,...
These are very highly skilled jobs, and not suitable for everyone.
Somehow we should also put our mind to looking at the other side of the medal - how do we create jobs for low skilled workers? Or - do we want to run for a society where anyone not fit for IT is simply designated unemployed for the rest of their lives?
Also, unfortunately, thanks TO the internet we all love and cherish, the better paid IT jobs are going away to lower paid countries...
Yet, no CS ethics class talks about the responsibility we're loading up on ourselves.
When I started with computers (about 24 years ago), computers were just fun things to play with and that could help people - now they're also obsoleting a lot of low-skilled jobs for all those grew up with us, but didn't quite make it into some high-flying IT/tech/ career...
Is there anything in the computer ethics arena that talks about jobs being destroyed by our work?
No - I don't have a solution/answer to this question either...
Hmm - apart from the implied conversation going the wrong way round - AIG was saved AFTER the White House showed how tough they are by letting Lehman's go to the wall...
Still, there is a flaw in the thinking underneath - continuance of our current model still relies on one important factor - and that is advertising revenue. If the economy cools down, and there are less sales - there will be less spent on advertising. (Overall, the amount of advertising will be the same, maybe even increase, but the amount paid for advertisement space will come down because less money is being spent on advertising. Advertising companies will pretty much have no choice but to lower advertising pricing, once demand for it at current pricing begins to dwindle).
As for people charging for their services - that will be a minority. While some site like wikipedia might get away with some amount of charging (though - not too much, if they don't want to incur the wrath of all the voluntary editors that aren't getting anything out of it), many others won't. If the economic belt tightens, many will not splurge out money for very small things that don't have much benefit for them.
But where does that leave open source? I think, open source will continue - if I am out of work and have no paid work, the chance that I can whip something up for which enough people will pay something in the economic climate, is fairly thin. So open source again becomes a straw to clutch to as well - if only to show potential employers that my skillset is still 'current' and 'active' - and that I haven't let it gone to waste......but, still, there might be some changes on the landscape, though I am not quite sure how wideranging they will be, so I wouldn't go as far as dismissing the entire report out of hand. Still I disagree with some of it...;-)
Not quite - PJ and others suggested that MS should get behind ODFs acceptance as an ISO standard.
Right now we have MS basically screwed official ISO standardisation by providing a document format they can't do properly themselves - and now they're trying to control the other format, which then they could change and disrupt however they wanted without ISO having any say in it -- after all, ODF isn't ISO...
I am a bit weary of scientists telling us that 'life' wouldn't be able to form if certain things were slightly different...
I think life could potentially evolve in a lot of completely different universes with completely different values for the 'constants of nature'. Maybe stars wouldn't form - but if there is matter, maybe something else might form out of it.
It just wouldn't look like anything you might have seen in Star Trek, Star Wars, or any other SciFi movie, series, or story...
Similarly to a creature living in a (hypothetical) two dimensional space couldn't imagine would it would be like if there were 3 - similarly, we just can't imagine what life would be like without a rocky planet at the right distance of a star with the right set of other outside factors.
Yet, nevertheless, if we find a possible world in which human life can't form - we 'naturally' assume that 'no life can form'... Strange notion, given how complex creatures we are, that nothing should be able to form if things were 'a little different'...
In all - I would say, if the constants of nature were different, I just couldn't *imagine* what life might form...
True - in my case, when I discussed it with the provider in question - we agreed (in the first instance) that the second server would be housed in a different server room from the first. That would still keep it within the same provider, but in separate power-loops / fire protection areas/...
It's a first step......the second step was to go for a third machine with a different provider...;-)
Sure, it will - but that problem you will have with a provider-based backup as well. If your data gets corrupted without you noticing, your backup will 'save' corrupt data...
What you can do to at least partially save yourself is to at least make sure the rsync users are jailed and can only rsync to the target directory, not being able to access anything else.
Similarly, I'm not using DVDs etc. for my server backup. A few years back, seeing how much my provider would charge me for a decent amount of backup space, I opted to get an additional server instead; the second server now provides secondary DNS, secondary MX to my regular system, but also has all data for a cold-standby ( I would still need to change addresses in DNS manually in case of a disaster, and bring up services, but pretty much all the data is in place).
The data is synchronised between both servers several times a day - first backed up locally to a second disk on the same machine, then rsynced between the two...
The solution was cheaper than the cost of the backup, and gives me extra flexibility in terms of what I can do. The only 'cost' is that both machines sacrificed disk space to be back-up for the other (since both machines have >400GB in disk space, giving up even half the disk space of each machine isn't a big limitation - at least, not for *my* needs. YMMV).
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I mean I'm not a show vendor and I even know that doing such things is not ok with hotel management.
A lot of the vendors claim they had informal conversations with management who said it was okay:
I think the mention of them claiming to have had informal conversations is not really relevant to it - if anyone renting a hotel room asks are there any limitations - is the person they're talking to expected to mind-read that you would like to turn it into a sales-stand? ...or should he, to be safe, simply respond: ... You must not murder anyone in the room, rape anyone in the room, ...., kidnap, take hostages, ... (insert-endless-list-of-things-that you should NOT do - simply based on them either being illegal, or simply not being seen as desirable by management).
You must not destroy any fittings and furniture, you may not repaint the room, take out and/or put in new carpeting/flooring,
The simple question are there any limitations is most likely seen as 'obvious/unexpected limitations'. Most hotels rent out separate conference rooms for sales pitches and the like, and therefore would not - by default - expect anyone asking about limitations in using the room to use the normal room for sales pitches...
So, unless they explicitly asked management "are you fine with us using our room for displaying some of our goods to potential clients, and possibly trying to close deals with said clients?", I do not think that the management was out of line in saying there weren't any (unusual) limitations.
If you think the behaviour of the hotel was wrong here, expect your life to get an awful lot of more small print for anything from grocery shopping to using a public toilet, just so that the 'vendor' can introduce you to all possible limitations to your stay...
'rally America to defend the most creative economy in the world, where music, film, TV and video games help to account for nearly 4 percent of gross domestic'
He does mean the music industry as an integral part of the most creative economy?
Did the music or movie industry CREATE the internet?
Did it CREATE file-sharing protocols?
Did it manage to CREATE a solution to the piracy problem?
I see three big NOs there... Would the music industry please step forward and enlighten me as to the creativeness involved here?
So far, the most notable positive thing in the music industry in the last decade seems to have been Amy Winehouse, who the music industry did not manage to protect from her own drug problems.
But - did the music industry CREATE Amy Winehouse? Do they really want to say that the mindless shagging around of music stars in the past few decades counts as 'the industry creating new talent'?
Well, without having read to much about Tibetan history - but what gives one nation the right to 'force' another nation into the 21st century?
How well would it wash with the American public, if the US government tried to force electricity and the Internet down the Amish people's throats?
It's all nice and well for US companies to demand that other countries accept free markets, but at the same time, they do not grant those nations the 'right' to live however they want -- when did you last see an electronic billboard advertising Coke in an Amish town?
I believe Microsoft anytime that they would not build back doors into the system... If they tried, the backdoor would probably have enough bugs to be unusable.
Besides - doesn't it already state it in the story:
"Microsoft has not and will not put "backdoors" into Windows"
"the agency had worked on the operating system."
Seems pretty clear, MS did NOT put a backdoor into it... ;-)
No, It's been proven that 'do-what-I-want' leads to misunderstandings and bugs...
It's DWIM (Do-What-I-MEAN!) you're after...
Same thought here - sounds a lot like Heston Blumenthal's approach to cooking... ...and in a true Microsoft way, Nathan Myhrvold will now 'innovate' this as the new way, long after others have 'paved the way'... ;-)
Though, I doubt Myhrvold will pick up 3 Michelin stars along the way, like Blumenthal has.
I think I would agree with his point, though:
* a library is a place where you find books 'by chance', standing near the book you are looking for, but it may still catch your eye. A google search only gives you whatever your search terms give you, anything 'like' the stuff you're looking for will not be there, if it doesn't match the keywords you're looking for.
* thanks to SEO guys, looking up '-insertrandomarticle- specs' finds *loads* of pages saying 'reviews, specs, infos about -insertrandomarticle-', the page you're actually looking for is not even on the first page, because guys peddling the product made sure their 'search-ratings' make them appear higher up. (Yes, to me, google's search results are beginning to fail me -- but not to fret, if another search engine should ever 'upstage' them, it will only be a matter of time before SEO will make it *less* usable, too... (Note, before the flames come back - I'm saying it's becoming more difficult to find relevant pages for everyday items because of excessive SEO optimised pages -- I'm not saying it would be 'unusable').
* In a library, the librarians build the index and order the books accordingly, so you will find information grouped, and noone interferes with this index on a regular basis (excepting the occasional idiot putting a book back in the wrong place).
* In a library, you're not constantly staring at your email inbox or other distractions. Your phone is turned off / silent, and if you need to talk to someone go out so you're not distracting anyone else -- a library is a place where distractions are being minimised, and people violating the 'quiet'/'undistracted' nature of a library are generally 'frowned upon', to say the least.
* On the internet, distractions are ever present - being that emails, twitter messages, IM, or constant links from one document to the next and to the next and to the next, each ever less to do with what you started off with, but still entertaining enough to make you click them anyway. In a library, there are 'links' between books - usually the 'bibliography' part of a book, but sometimes mentioned in footnotes -- but since it requires you to put down your book and go and find the 'linked' book yourself, you think twice about whether the look up that reference, or try without it first. On the internet, more often than not, the easy temptation to click on a link and looking at the resulting page interrupts your workflow.
Personally, I'm quite fond of the internet, was never much of a library-person, but I can see where Bradbury is coming from. And, personally, I'm cutting down on some of the stuff I did follow up on 'too much' for my own good - e.g. rss2email, which is nice if you want to stay on top of the current news, but in most cases, I can wait for the evening news on the telly; or look at some newspage when I'm on a break -- I no longer want my work interrupted with those constant news updates...
Of course, I can turn them off - but it also feels wrong doing it, as my own curiousity is now constantly hunting for whatever else is new, whatever else happened, ...
While 12-13 years ago, I totally loved finding a job where we had internet access on our workstations, now I'd rather like one where I wouldn't have it, I'm sure it would boost my overall productivity.
Hmmm - to make the wearer escape the shot, the shocks would basically have to be admitted from one side only, to make the wearer move away from that side...
I wonder whether it could be used differently - e.g. make the wearer move in front of a moving car (ouch); or better, aid kidnappers by sending out a signal which actually makes the wearer jump / move towards the kidnappers getaway car - it would make kidnapping so much easier, if the victim would actually help you... ;-)
The question then would obviously be, can the armor be tricked into believing that WAS an incoming shot that would require this particular movement to evade 'the shot'...?
Better location???
How?
How do you really beat the locations of the Regent Street store in London, or the 5th Ave New York?
Couple the few maybe marginally better locations together with the immense sex-appeal of 'MS Office' or 'Zune' compared to 'iMacs, 'iPods', or 'iPhones'? (Especially, remember that in the few more upmarket locations that might exist, you would be located next to even more fashionable/trendy stores)... ...nothing that sounds even remotely like Microsoft, if you ask me...
I agree, 25 does seem a bit on the low side...
Just remember all the Internet-Years in between 1995-2000 alone! ;-)
I agree that keeping track of memory cards isn't that difficult (I even actually use a card wallet for some of them - they work fine), especially if you label the cards....
On the other hand - the rest of your argument is fairly meaningless given the basic question as you don't know the usage patterns of the person asking the question (and which unfortunately wasn't supplied) - and just assume things.
For one thing - 'on 8 2-gig cards' kind of warrants the question on the best way to organise them as you are talking about sizable number of cards.
On the other side - you just say '800 20 megapixel RAW images on 16GB(8*2GB)' sounds like an 'impressive' number, but it really isn't - for one thing the size of the raw images depends on more than just 20megapixel - I get ~1000 12megapixel RAW images on 2 8GB cards (at 14bpp). And while even a 1000 images sounds an impressive number - my 5 8GB cards weren't quite enough for a week in Istanbul (in total there I took about 55GB worth of photos). How much you can fit on what cards really depends on the actual usage pattern. Just that I shoot almost exclusively in RAW doesn't mean everyone else does...
The only good tip I could give someone who juggles around with many cards - apart from labelling them, is to use card wallets and place cards depending on whether they are ready to use (empty) or full: simply put them with the label facing towards you if the cards are empty, and with the label facing away from you if they're full. That way it's easy to keep track of which cards in your wallet you can still use to take more images, and which cards are already full...
Two issues here - looking for water is a good thing because we KNOW that water is important for a whole lot of lifeforms that we happen to know (i.e. all life on earth).
What we do NOT know is whether a planet with water will automatically 'produce' life in some form or other.
Separately, we do not know, whether other chemical compounds can also give rise to life - but in that case, life that isn't based on water and light - both of which are important to the human existence.
Your 'science-wankery' aside - up to a few years back, we thought we 'knew' that life needs both light and water - because all life on earth that we knew about needed both. We also 'knew' that a temperate climate is important for life...
Strangely enough, since then, mankind has found life near hydrothermal vents in deep sea that defy our picture of what's needed - there's still water around, but it's very very sulfurous - too much so for our tastes (or even our survival) and these are too deep to get any light at all.
The fact these creatures are just 'worms' and 'crabs' doesn't automatically preclude evolution to sentient beings further down the line either, because we simply do not know when and how sentience forms...
Science can help us explain certain things that we observe, and can help us speculate about things we have not (yet) observed - but simply saying 'anything but light and ph-neutral water and a limit temperature span precludes life' isn't more than unfounded rants against SF either - science fiction can't prove the existence of say 'silicon' based creatures or gas based creatures, but science can't 'prove' they're absolutely impossible either. The only thing it can do is rule out that certain combinations of it aren't 'alive' (e.g. just a block of pure iron with nothing else, isn't alive - I would tend to think that is likely a universal truth; but, heck, depending on what combinations of materials will come together in whatever circumstances that we just haven't witnessed in our solar system)
Agreed - especially given the current economic climate, the price issue will be an even bigger factor than normal... All those people who don't know whether their jobs will still be there at the end of 2009 won't be too likely to spend an extra US$100 or more on something like a smaller SSD over a larger harddrive...
So, the question is:
Will 2009 Be the Turning Point For SSDs -- or will we, 12 months from now, see the new post 'Will 2010 Be the Turning Point For SSDs?'...? ;-)
Well, you're also stealing from the publisher - though indirectly. The price and availability of used copies of books may spark re-prints (i.e. if a book is becoming more and more popular again, the publisher is becoming more likely to issue a new print run). With pirated copies, it's less obvious how popular a book actually is.
Water can't penetrate it - that means, rain stays outside... Good idea...
But it also means, all your sweat stays INSIDE... BAD idea...
I don't even want to know how soaked I'd feel after cycling for half an hour wearing a 'rain-coat' like that to keep me 'dry'!
Hmm - do you think it was CS driven advances (say, production automation; or the easy ability to offshore call-centres) that cost more jobs, or advances in other areas?
I would think that CS directly or indirectly cost more unskilled jobs than any other higher skilled area -- though, I'd love to be proven wrong. So, if you know another higher skilled area of jobs that contributed more to losses in the lower skilled work sector, please post here...
Yes, it's one of the earliest (if not the earliest) -- but it's also one of the countless sites on computer ethics that doesn't deal with the number of unemployed people our profession creates.
Sure, it creates (or created) lots of jobs in IT, but there are lots of people for which IT is not a viable future - nor is nuclear physics, brain surgery, biochemistry, ...
These are very highly skilled jobs, and not suitable for everyone.
Somehow we should also put our mind to looking at the other side of the medal - how do we create jobs for low skilled workers? Or - do we want to run for a society where anyone not fit for IT is simply designated unemployed for the rest of their lives?
Also, unfortunately, thanks TO the internet we all love and cherish, the better paid IT jobs are going away to lower paid countries...
Yet, no CS ethics class talks about the responsibility we're loading up on ourselves.
When I started with computers (about 24 years ago), computers were just fun things to play with and that could help people - now they're also obsoleting a lot of low-skilled jobs for all those grew up with us, but didn't quite make it into some high-flying IT/tech/ career...
Is there anything in the computer ethics arena that talks about jobs being destroyed by our work?
No - I don't have a solution/answer to this question either...
Hmm - apart from the implied conversation going the wrong way round - AIG was saved AFTER the White House showed how tough they are by letting Lehman's go to the wall...
Still, there is a flaw in the thinking underneath - continuance of our current model still relies on one important factor - and that is advertising revenue. If the economy cools down, and there are less sales - there will be less spent on advertising. (Overall, the amount of advertising will be the same, maybe even increase, but the amount paid for advertisement space will come down because less money is being spent on advertising. Advertising companies will pretty much have no choice but to lower advertising pricing, once demand for it at current pricing begins to dwindle).
As for people charging for their services - that will be a minority. While some site like wikipedia might get away with some amount of charging (though - not too much, if they don't want to incur the wrath of all the voluntary editors that aren't getting anything out of it), many others won't. If the economic belt tightens, many will not splurge out money for very small things that don't have much benefit for them.
But where does that leave open source? I think, open source will continue - if I am out of work and have no paid work, the chance that I can whip something up for which enough people will pay something in the economic climate, is fairly thin. So open source again becomes a straw to clutch to as well - if only to show potential employers that my skillset is still 'current' and 'active' - and that I haven't let it gone to waste... ...but, still, there might be some changes on the landscape, though I am not quite sure how wideranging they will be, so I wouldn't go as far as dismissing the entire report out of hand. Still I disagree with some of it... ;-)
Not quite - PJ and others suggested that MS should get behind ODFs acceptance as an ISO standard.
Right now we have MS basically screwed official ISO standardisation by providing a document format they can't do properly themselves - and now they're trying to control the other format, which then they could change and disrupt however they wanted without ISO having any say in it -- after all, ODF isn't ISO...
I am a bit weary of scientists telling us that 'life' wouldn't be able to form if certain things were slightly different...
I think life could potentially evolve in a lot of completely different universes with completely different values for the 'constants of nature'. Maybe stars wouldn't form - but if there is matter, maybe something else might form out of it.
It just wouldn't look like anything you might have seen in Star Trek, Star Wars, or any other SciFi movie, series, or story...
Similarly to a creature living in a (hypothetical) two dimensional space couldn't imagine would it would be like if there were 3 - similarly, we just can't imagine what life would be like without a rocky planet at the right distance of a star with the right set of other outside factors.
Yet, nevertheless, if we find a possible world in which human life can't form - we 'naturally' assume that 'no life can form'... Strange notion, given how complex creatures we are, that nothing should be able to form if things were 'a little different'...
In all - I would say, if the constants of nature were different, I just couldn't *imagine* what life might form...
There's plenty he could be going after:
Indiana Jones and the Clump Of Dark Matter
Indiana Jones and the RIAA lawsuit about him touching the Ark Of The Covenant (without seeking prior license from the Vatican) ...?
True - in my case, when I discussed it with the provider in question - we agreed (in the first instance) that the second server would be housed in a different server room from the first. That would still keep it within the same provider, but in separate power-loops / fire protection areas /...
It's a first step... ...the second step was to go for a third machine with a different provider... ;-)
Sure, it will - but that problem you will have with a provider-based backup as well. If your data gets corrupted without you noticing, your backup will 'save' corrupt data...
What you can do to at least partially save yourself is to at least make sure the rsync users are jailed and can only rsync to the target directory, not being able to access anything else.
Similarly, I'm not using DVDs etc. for my server backup. A few years back, seeing how much my provider would charge me for a decent amount of backup space, I opted to get an additional server instead; the second server now provides
secondary DNS, secondary MX to my regular system, but also has all data for a cold-standby ( I would still need to change addresses in DNS manually in case of a disaster, and bring up services, but pretty much all the data is in place).
The data is synchronised between both servers several times a day - first backed up locally to a second disk on the same machine, then rsynced between the two...
The solution was cheaper than the cost of the backup, and gives me extra flexibility in terms of what I can do. The only 'cost' is that both machines sacrificed disk space to be back-up for the other (since both machines have >400GB in disk space, giving up even half the disk space of each machine isn't a big limitation - at least, not for *my* needs. YMMV).