Oh that's just doubly scummy. I truly hope that the parents don't leave it at that, but fight to get their money back, and compensation on top. It'll probably cost the better part of a quarter of a billion to the taxpayers of the state to set this all right. That should be factored into the sentencing for the judges, and the business owners involved. Hopefully all the fees for the wrongfully imprisoned will be extracted from these businesses because they were illicit earnings.
All of the money they received in kickbacks should go towards a compensation scheme.
Then we can start talking about applying fines, on what they have left afterwards.
Imagine if they had only done it for half of the cases they actually did it for. They might never have been found. Greed made them take risks, instead of sending down 1 in 8 (a small fraction more than usual), they sent down 1 in 4, an astounding fraction that should have been noted far far earlier and acted upon.
The iPhone will auto-correct for fat fingering, but it takes a while to get used to it (i.e., to stop the reflex delete action). You only actually need to type in the close vicinity of the correct key, and this is not difficult unless you lost your hands in an industrial accident and now have to type with the stub of your arm.
Other solutions involve plastic surgery to create pointier nubs on your thumbs.
Surely the best way would be to download a torrent from The Pirate Bay in front of the Judge, leave it downloading during the trial (no intervention), and then once it was complete, show that you downloaded a copyrighted piece of material.
I suggest they go to "Porn -> Movies" for the in-trial example usage of the website.
To be honest, I would like to see how they can defend against the "assisting making available" argument, apart from the fact that this charge seems so ridiculous. They're not committing copyright infringement. They're not making the copyrighted files available. Nooo, they're just allowing people to make available themselves.
Is it two now? Arse. I get tired of Firefox turning grey when I visit Slashdot. I'm waiting for the new JS system to be integrated for the next version. I can see the changelog: "Added new JavaScript implementation with JIT and Godlike Optimisation to make Slashdot work."
And I do love to see these wacky skyscraper / farm of the future / etc ideas and concepts, but many of them are way out from reality. However if they're done, the knowledge gained will be important for future space based hydroponics and aeroponics.
Core i5 will be out soon, and yes, it has a new socket, but the motherboards will be cheaper.
I find it odd that when CPUs are reviewed against each other, the motherboard cost is very rarely factored in, so they'll pit the Intel CPU against the AMD CPU of the same price, and then declare the Intel the winner, without factoring in the $300 Intel motherboard price (for the i7) when the AMD is on a $100 board.
Still, AMD aren't executing very well, and haven't for a couple of years now. Core 2 knocked them back a lot. AMD could have spent some resources last year on developing a 45nm single-core CPU with built-in graphics and chipset and they could be winning the netbook war, but no, the company has no vision. Just roadmaps.
Oh, and the article sucked. PowerPC failed? What about Cell? 360? Wii? POWER servers? Hundreds of millions of embedded devices like set top boxes? It only failed as a viable desktop CPU because it didn't get the investment that x86 has over the past ten years.
I can only imagine that these people are hoping that their great grand-children will reap the benefits of their hard life now.
Not that they'll be living in hellish megalopolises along the yellow river and similar in a world made catastrophic by the ravages of overpopulation and global climate change (or super-volcanoes, or whatever your personal favourite disaster is), whilst the elite rich elope to a "diamond belt" of space habitats orbiting the Earth. Corporates will own all the arable land, and most people on Earth will subsist on charity. Etc etc your favourite doom of humanity.
I wonder how many of us who had ancestors living in (pre-)industrial cities didn't have a working girl as one of those ancestors? Or people who worked 12+ hours a day for fuck all. Victorian workhouses weren't fun, but they were fed well (healthily) and housed. Some Chinese companies house and feed their workers in a similar way, but instead of working with dangerous industrial machinery they pop electronics together. They will retire to the countryside with a relative fortune - poor for the city, rich for the country. They'll die young too of course, overworked, stressed.
I imagine the victims of war and strife in Africa, the raped women, etc, would give a lot to be a paid fed housed paid light-industry worker. Will our lives in the west drop to such a level as a result of globalism/minimisation-capitalism that our grand-children will be in similar situations?
But they should have a decent life outside of work. Hard work, yes, that's their doom for their life, but not in the conditions that this article writes about. We have power, we can campaign against this, we can choose not to buy the cheap slave-labour goods, etc. If we have a means to know what is good and what is bad.
You would have thought that the billing/payment system in use would manage the bank account details separately. I.e., a bill comes in, it gets added to the accounting system, and a payment is flagged as due to the university, which then gets paid using the University's details stored on the system already. And any "change of details" letter would of course involve a double check with the institution.
I can't believe that a system would exist whereby they would manually transfer the money to the details on the invoice, in 2008/9. That is so trivially open to abuse of the exact kind that happened in this case. I only believe that it didn't happen before because nobody thought that any place set up to be paying millions of dollar invoices would actually have such a system. Maybe for $1000 bills, but anything higher should be restricted to transferring money to bank details that are set up in the system at the time the account is first opened.
So the blame for all of this does not fall on the IT guys (indeed how are they culpable for a fraud that involves physical invoices and the finance team) but the people that researched, bought and set up the current bill paying infrastructure - i.e., the finance team.
* Dire roads generating lots of shock for these to absorb. * No sunlight for solar panels anyway. * Too many lorries at all hours on the roads, this generates power whenever the vehicle is moving, not just during the day.
It's always good to see new technology come that improves efficiency.
So what we're talking about here is a Linux running on a decent ARM SoC most of the time... which I agree with, it's enough for the common case.
If we need performance for any reason we switch on an attached x86 and run that performance application (which of course is an x86 binary).
Or we run a VM on the x86 into which we put Windows, for compatibility.
Or we create a Mac OS X like fat binary system for Linux that includes both ARM and x86 variants, but imagine the pain in switching between the two! I think it's far far easier to make a quad-core ARM Cortex chip to get some performance for the ARM binaries than to switch them to x86 with all that pain if they need performance.
Of course eventually you drop the x86, connect the x86-attached GPU to the ARM and move on from there.
Um, that's a page about Darwin, surely he would be mentioned a lot. The BBC had a "Darwin Week" because of the 150th anniversary. In addition the BBC aren't evolutionists, they're a broadcasting corporation.
Ah, the "carbon dating is only accurate for 5,000 years argument".
Sadly for them it's accurate for 60,000 years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dating#cite_note-0). Even so, it's not the dating method used for things like dinosaurs, or even pre-homo-sapiens times. There are other elements that decay slower and are thus far more useful as a metric - Potassium-Argon and Uranium-Lead are some I believe, but don't quote me, and I'm at work so can't keep on hunting down references.
In relation to (2), names are actually very important. In this case don't use "Darwinism", it allows the ID proponents and creationists to attack him and change the argument into something they know how to attack. Use "classical evolution" to show how outdated their attacks are.
Additionally, you might want to move your bed against the other wall, so you get out on the other side in the mornings.:)
The fact that you call it "Darwinism" shows which side you are arguing from. Also that you are stuck in the past and arguing against what Darwin wrote, conveniently ignoring all of the work done since to refine, fix, answer, expand, understand, the basic groundwork that Darwin laid.
The other responder to your post told you that Popper had already fixed "Darwinism". So you attacked him and called him a 'cretin'. This is the typical work of the pro-ID or pro-Creationist crowd. Vile, base attacks that their God would send them down to their Hell for.
If you aren't in that crowd, don't call it Darwinism.
Newtonian Physics / Mechanics is descriptive - it describes the stuff the Newton worked out and wrote down at the time. It's not as correct as modern Physics, but it's good enough for teenagers to learn first because it's correct for life on Earth.
I would hope that one day evolution would be taught like that - in general the basics that Darwin wrote down are fine, it's just that since them evolution has come a long long way and you can't call it "Darwinism" or "Darwinian Evolution" any more, because it isn't his, much like Einstein's discoveries aren't collected under "Newtonism".
The term "Darwinism" only exists so that creationists can change the vectors of their frothy rabid attacks from being against evolution - a battle they can never win - to being against a person (how despicable! yet far far easier) and very early writings on evolution, thus conveniently missing out the masses of work since. We should not let them do this, we must not let them portray evolutionary science as a religion (or cult, etc), because it is not, has never been, and never will be.
I thought that "Darwinism" was a term thought up by the religious anti-evolution side.
Why? I suspect that it is because they associate their beliefs with an entity, God in this case, and thus cannot see how other people don't need to also do that. Thus they ultimately project this viewpoint that people who believe in evolution are actually believing in a false God as part of their propaganda against evolution.
Darwin, of course, studied theology at Cambridge University. He was also a depressive, presumably because of how stupid (and stubbornly-so) most people were. I think he would be depressed today. Especially if he saw the creationism museum.
Btw, there was a pretty good David Attenborough programme on BBC TV last week about Darwin and Evolution that showed many of the subsequent discoveries. I forget the title, but it must be available on popular video sharing sites.
I wonder whether a monochrome OLED display, set to white-on-black display, with a photo-sensor to adjust power used according to ambient light, would be an adequate replacement for the eInk screen?
Sure, I know that as an active, non-reflective display it would eat battery a lot faster, but it wouldn't be burning a backlight, and hopefully the white-on-black would use less power than black-on-white.
If they can get a 12 hour display life out of it, that's enough. Hell, stick a row of solar cells on top if need be.
Either ePaper / eInk displays are horrendously expensive, or this is a total rip-off, apart from maybe the software development costs being spread over a limited amount of sales.
Okay, it includes free 3G, where you can buy overpriced DRM-encrusted eBooks that you can't share with your family or friends. Or you can buy eSubscriptions to eThings like the eNewYorkTimes. So is the cost included in the device, or in the purchases you make with it? Can I choose a device that I can sync with my computer and not use 3G facilities?
The rest of the device is no more exciting than the hardware in your bog standard mobile phone. Not a $300 one, a $100 one.
I'll give it a couple of years to see if they can get it right as a package, I can't justify this, it's just too esoteric despite being a technical bit of wizardly.
Because the bundled application is being anti-competitive by being bundled.
Also because it's probably not up to the task because it doesn't meet web standards. The last thing we need is IE market share creeping up once W7 is released, even if IE8 is better at CSS than its ancestors, because it is still going to be a joke of a web browser compared to the others in terms of Javascript execution speed and web standards.
IE6 and IE7 being so poor has forced people to look for an alternative. IE8 could be just enough to never trigger that effort.
Why should it be mandatory to include MySQL. What's wrong with PostgreSQL? Let's not have more people choose to use something crappy just because it is included with the base install.
SQLite is adequate for desktop database storage. It is what Mac OS X uses, and it's good enough for the iPhone.
I agree that there could be a "Developer" variant of a distro that would offer you install-time options for various databases, web servers, IDEs, and so on, on top of the basic "Desktop" variant's offerings.
I would also like to not install some of the stuff that Ubuntu installs by default. Evolution comes to mind - why not let me pick which email client I want to use. There's also all the games, which I never play.
To be honest, I will give KDE 4 a try when it hits 4.3, but am not expecting anything better in regards to not including the kitchen sink.
One thing I wish that Gnome didn't load on-demand was the Gnome menu (the single-icon variant that people end up configuring to save screen space, not the stupid default one at the top of the screen with several menus [being confused about being a Mac] with the clumsy quick launch icons to the right).
Log In. Click on Menu Icon. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Ah, there it is!
Seriously, on a fast desktop machine you might not notice it, but on a netbook it seriously sucks, and is an immediate thing you notice.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh that's just doubly scummy. I truly hope that the parents don't leave it at that, but fight to get their money back, and compensation on top. It'll probably cost the better part of a quarter of a billion to the taxpayers of the state to set this all right. That should be factored into the sentencing for the judges, and the business owners involved. Hopefully all the fees for the wrongfully imprisoned will be extracted from these businesses because they were illicit earnings.
It seems that they will lose their pensions.
All of the money they received in kickbacks should go towards a compensation scheme.
Then we can start talking about applying fines, on what they have left afterwards.
Imagine if they had only done it for half of the cases they actually did it for. They might never have been found. Greed made them take risks, instead of sending down 1 in 8 (a small fraction more than usual), they sent down 1 in 4, an astounding fraction that should have been noted far far earlier and acted upon.
The iPhone will auto-correct for fat fingering, but it takes a while to get used to it (i.e., to stop the reflex delete action). You only actually need to type in the close vicinity of the correct key, and this is not difficult unless you lost your hands in an industrial accident and now have to type with the stub of your arm.
Other solutions involve plastic surgery to create pointier nubs on your thumbs.
Surely the best way would be to download a torrent from The Pirate Bay in front of the Judge, leave it downloading during the trial (no intervention), and then once it was complete, show that you downloaded a copyrighted piece of material.
I suggest they go to "Porn -> Movies" for the in-trial example usage of the website.
To be honest, I would like to see how they can defend against the "assisting making available" argument, apart from the fact that this charge seems so ridiculous. They're not committing copyright infringement. They're not making the copyrighted files available. Nooo, they're just allowing people to make available themselves.
Is it two now? Arse. I get tired of Firefox turning grey when I visit Slashdot. I'm waiting for the new JS system to be integrated for the next version. I can see the changelog: "Added new JavaScript implementation with JIT and Godlike Optimisation to make Slashdot work."
And I do love to see these wacky skyscraper / farm of the future / etc ideas and concepts, but many of them are way out from reality. However if they're done, the knowledge gained will be important for future space based hydroponics and aeroponics.
Core i7 is enthusiast high end though.
Core i5 will be out soon, and yes, it has a new socket, but the motherboards will be cheaper.
I find it odd that when CPUs are reviewed against each other, the motherboard cost is very rarely factored in, so they'll pit the Intel CPU against the AMD CPU of the same price, and then declare the Intel the winner, without factoring in the $300 Intel motherboard price (for the i7) when the AMD is on a $100 board.
Still, AMD aren't executing very well, and haven't for a couple of years now. Core 2 knocked them back a lot. AMD could have spent some resources last year on developing a 45nm single-core CPU with built-in graphics and chipset and they could be winning the netbook war, but no, the company has no vision. Just roadmaps.
Oh, and the article sucked. PowerPC failed? What about Cell? 360? Wii? POWER servers? Hundreds of millions of embedded devices like set top boxes? It only failed as a viable desktop CPU because it didn't get the investment that x86 has over the past ten years.
I can only imagine that these people are hoping that their great grand-children will reap the benefits of their hard life now.
Not that they'll be living in hellish megalopolises along the yellow river and similar in a world made catastrophic by the ravages of overpopulation and global climate change (or super-volcanoes, or whatever your personal favourite disaster is), whilst the elite rich elope to a "diamond belt" of space habitats orbiting the Earth. Corporates will own all the arable land, and most people on Earth will subsist on charity. Etc etc your favourite doom of humanity.
I wonder how many of us who had ancestors living in (pre-)industrial cities didn't have a working girl as one of those ancestors? Or people who worked 12+ hours a day for fuck all. Victorian workhouses weren't fun, but they were fed well (healthily) and housed. Some Chinese companies house and feed their workers in a similar way, but instead of working with dangerous industrial machinery they pop electronics together. They will retire to the countryside with a relative fortune - poor for the city, rich for the country. They'll die young too of course, overworked, stressed.
I imagine the victims of war and strife in Africa, the raped women, etc, would give a lot to be a paid fed housed paid light-industry worker. Will our lives in the west drop to such a level as a result of globalism/minimisation-capitalism that our grand-children will be in similar situations?
But they should have a decent life outside of work. Hard work, yes, that's their doom for their life, but not in the conditions that this article writes about. We have power, we can campaign against this, we can choose not to buy the cheap slave-labour goods, etc. If we have a means to know what is good and what is bad.
You would have thought that the billing/payment system in use would manage the bank account details separately. I.e., a bill comes in, it gets added to the accounting system, and a payment is flagged as due to the university, which then gets paid using the University's details stored on the system already. And any "change of details" letter would of course involve a double check with the institution.
I can't believe that a system would exist whereby they would manually transfer the money to the details on the invoice, in 2008/9. That is so trivially open to abuse of the exact kind that happened in this case. I only believe that it didn't happen before because nobody thought that any place set up to be paying millions of dollar invoices would actually have such a system. Maybe for $1000 bills, but anything higher should be restricted to transferring money to bank details that are set up in the system at the time the account is first opened.
So the blame for all of this does not fall on the IT guys (indeed how are they culpable for a fraud that involves physical invoices and the finance team) but the people that researched, bought and set up the current bill paying infrastructure - i.e., the finance team.
Mmm real ale. There's something that doesn't stall firefox itself. Maybe the ability to use firefox! :p
I'm glad to see that adventure in unusable front pages died quickly.
And yes, the Campaign for Usable Websites : CAMUW. First target: Slashdot.
What happened?
The front page is a pile of teal bricks!
I can't seem to expand the stories expect by going to the story / comments page. The "+" on the teal brick doesn't expand the story in-place.
Argh. WTF. UI Design Fail.
England is perfect for this.
* Dire roads generating lots of shock for these to absorb.
* No sunlight for solar panels anyway.
* Too many lorries at all hours on the roads, this generates power whenever the vehicle is moving, not just during the day.
It's always good to see new technology come that improves efficiency.
So what we're talking about here is a Linux running on a decent ARM SoC most of the time... which I agree with, it's enough for the common case.
If we need performance for any reason we switch on an attached x86 and run that performance application (which of course is an x86 binary).
Or we run a VM on the x86 into which we put Windows, for compatibility.
Or we create a Mac OS X like fat binary system for Linux that includes both ARM and x86 variants, but imagine the pain in switching between the two! I think it's far far easier to make a quad-core ARM Cortex chip to get some performance for the ARM binaries than to switch them to x86 with all that pain if they need performance.
Of course eventually you drop the x86, connect the x86-attached GPU to the ARM and move on from there.
Classical-Carbon-Dating? Or "Carbondatingism".
The old methods were surely less accurate than modern ones that use far more modern technologies.
Um, that's a page about Darwin, surely he would be mentioned a lot. The BBC had a "Darwin Week" because of the 150th anniversary. In addition the BBC aren't evolutionists, they're a broadcasting corporation.
Ah, the "carbon dating is only accurate for 5,000 years argument".
Sadly for them it's accurate for 60,000 years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dating#cite_note-0). Even so, it's not the dating method used for things like dinosaurs, or even pre-homo-sapiens times. There are other elements that decay slower and are thus far more useful as a metric - Potassium-Argon and Uranium-Lead are some I believe, but don't quote me, and I'm at work so can't keep on hunting down references.
It's too easy to get riled by gross stupidity.
Anyway, it's not a correction, it's a suggestion. I bet there are better terms as well.
In relation to (2), names are actually very important. In this case don't use "Darwinism", it allows the ID proponents and creationists to attack him and change the argument into something they know how to attack. Use "classical evolution" to show how outdated their attacks are.
Additionally, you might want to move your bed against the other wall, so you get out on the other side in the mornings. :)
The fact that you call it "Darwinism" shows which side you are arguing from. Also that you are stuck in the past and arguing against what Darwin wrote, conveniently ignoring all of the work done since to refine, fix, answer, expand, understand, the basic groundwork that Darwin laid.
The other responder to your post told you that Popper had already fixed "Darwinism". So you attacked him and called him a 'cretin'. This is the typical work of the pro-ID or pro-Creationist crowd. Vile, base attacks that their God would send them down to their Hell for.
If you aren't in that crowd, don't call it Darwinism.
Newtonian Physics / Mechanics is descriptive - it describes the stuff the Newton worked out and wrote down at the time. It's not as correct as modern Physics, but it's good enough for teenagers to learn first because it's correct for life on Earth.
I would hope that one day evolution would be taught like that - in general the basics that Darwin wrote down are fine, it's just that since them evolution has come a long long way and you can't call it "Darwinism" or "Darwinian Evolution" any more, because it isn't his, much like Einstein's discoveries aren't collected under "Newtonism".
The term "Darwinism" only exists so that creationists can change the vectors of their frothy rabid attacks from being against evolution - a battle they can never win - to being against a person (how despicable! yet far far easier) and very early writings on evolution, thus conveniently missing out the masses of work since. We should not let them do this, we must not let them portray evolutionary science as a religion (or cult, etc), because it is not, has never been, and never will be.
I thought that "Darwinism" was a term thought up by the religious anti-evolution side.
Why? I suspect that it is because they associate their beliefs with an entity, God in this case, and thus cannot see how other people don't need to also do that. Thus they ultimately project this viewpoint that people who believe in evolution are actually believing in a false God as part of their propaganda against evolution.
Darwin, of course, studied theology at Cambridge University. He was also a depressive, presumably because of how stupid (and stubbornly-so) most people were. I think he would be depressed today. Especially if he saw the creationism museum.
Btw, there was a pretty good David Attenborough programme on BBC TV last week about Darwin and Evolution that showed many of the subsequent discoveries. I forget the title, but it must be available on popular video sharing sites.
I wonder whether a monochrome OLED display, set to white-on-black display, with a photo-sensor to adjust power used according to ambient light, would be an adequate replacement for the eInk screen?
Sure, I know that as an active, non-reflective display it would eat battery a lot faster, but it wouldn't be burning a backlight, and hopefully the white-on-black would use less power than black-on-white.
If they can get a 12 hour display life out of it, that's enough. Hell, stick a row of solar cells on top if need be.
Either ePaper / eInk displays are horrendously expensive, or this is a total rip-off, apart from maybe the software development costs being spread over a limited amount of sales.
Okay, it includes free 3G, where you can buy overpriced DRM-encrusted eBooks that you can't share with your family or friends. Or you can buy eSubscriptions to eThings like the eNewYorkTimes. So is the cost included in the device, or in the purchases you make with it? Can I choose a device that I can sync with my computer and not use 3G facilities?
The rest of the device is no more exciting than the hardware in your bog standard mobile phone. Not a $300 one, a $100 one.
I'll give it a couple of years to see if they can get it right as a package, I can't justify this, it's just too esoteric despite being a technical bit of wizardly.
Because the bundled application is being anti-competitive by being bundled.
Also because it's probably not up to the task because it doesn't meet web standards. The last thing we need is IE market share creeping up once W7 is released, even if IE8 is better at CSS than its ancestors, because it is still going to be a joke of a web browser compared to the others in terms of Javascript execution speed and web standards.
IE6 and IE7 being so poor has forced people to look for an alternative. IE8 could be just enough to never trigger that effort.
Why should it be mandatory to include MySQL. What's wrong with PostgreSQL? Let's not have more people choose to use something crappy just because it is included with the base install.
SQLite is adequate for desktop database storage. It is what Mac OS X uses, and it's good enough for the iPhone.
I agree that there could be a "Developer" variant of a distro that would offer you install-time options for various databases, web servers, IDEs, and so on, on top of the basic "Desktop" variant's offerings.
I would also like to not install some of the stuff that Ubuntu installs by default. Evolution comes to mind - why not let me pick which email client I want to use. There's also all the games, which I never play.
To be honest, I will give KDE 4 a try when it hits 4.3, but am not expecting anything better in regards to not including the kitchen sink.
One thing I wish that Gnome didn't load on-demand was the Gnome menu (the single-icon variant that people end up configuring to save screen space, not the stupid default one at the top of the screen with several menus [being confused about being a Mac] with the clumsy quick launch icons to the right).
Log In. Click on Menu Icon. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Ah, there it is!
Seriously, on a fast desktop machine you might not notice it, but on a netbook it seriously sucks, and is an immediate thing you notice.