There's no shortage of news about the 30-odd ridings affected from the MAINSTREAM media of ALL stripes, including some rather die-hard Conservative supporting papers.
With all their money in the bank, Apple couldn't afford to produce market-specific ads for different countries?
I hope they get their asses sued into the ground for penny-pinching in such a fashion. Given the profitability of the damned things, they sure as hell can afford to use regional advertising!
Absolutely true. They could make it illegal for Google to continue operations serving the UK if they so choose. But how that differs from banning or blocking Google, I don't understand...
It depends what you're downloading. I've successfully downloaded ONE piece of software via TPB torrents that wasn't infected. I stopped even trying several years ago, because it was obvious the only reason people were posting "cracks" was to spread botnet infections to the unwary.
So, no, unlike other media, I don't download and "try out" games like I do music and movies. I'm forced to go to a store to play around with a demo if I want a preview of a game.
But that's ok. The reflexes aren't what they used to be, so I pretty much quit the twitch FPS and sports games. And once you eliminate those from your gaming sessions, you realize that the vast majority of the remaining games are free or dirt cheap if you buy them online or as apps.
The search engines from Google and elsewhere already flag sites that are "spam" or which host "malicious content."
Maybe they need to add a "gossip" flag as well.
Unfortunately there would be no shortage of lawsuits from "entertainment magazines" if they did so.
And that's really the crux of the problem. If Google capitulates to people who want their search results censored, it's just a matter of time before the censored sites sue Google for the censorship.
So really Google has a choice between being sued by the censors for not complying, or sued by the censored for complying. Either way, someone expects to be paid for doing nothing useful to society, as is always the case when there is a "big money" company or business involved in the equation.
The UK is free to block Google entirely if they so choose. And good riddance to them, the Chinese, and every other nation that thinks their censorship laws trump the free access of an international resource.
Actually, it is illegal in Canada, and given the similarity between clause 8 of the Charter of Rights and the American Constitution's clause on "search and seizure", it should be illegal in the US as well.
The difference is that in Canada, companies and people asked the government and legislators for an interpretation to confirm that it's illegal.
In the US, companies went ahead without legal advice and are waiting to be sued so the courts can clarify their position -- in 5-10 years, and after a few million has been spent on a class action law suit.
The peanut farmers successfully lobbied management.
Then when peanuts were proven to be fatal to those with allergies, and banned after the government was lobbied, the potato chip lobbyists stepped in, and the premade-sandwich-maker's union had a few things to say as well.
In the meantime, the people kept demanding cheaper and cheaper air fares, until the airlines finally gave up on subsidized meals and just started gouging people the same as a sports arena with a game on. Captive audience, extortionate prices. It's an obvious way to boost profits, right?
But in all seriousness, I never found airline food to be any worse than any other steamer-tray/precooked meals I've had elsewhere. But I am annoyed that so many airlines have dropped food from their services entirely. I've even had a couple short-haul flights where they didn't even try to serve beverages, so you were effectively treated even worse than cattle: you have to provide water and food to cattle or be charged with animal abuse.
Were Oracle's claims that the regression test suite was illegally used/incorporated by Google dropped?
I'd actually thought those were the only claims Oracle had any legal standing with. If they've been knocked down, I foresee a good result for Google and Android.
Fortunately this past week has seen many groups and legislators in Canada confirming that asking for Facebook passwords is illegal here. It's an invasion of privacy, what would be in American terms an "unwarranted search and seizure" by someone who not only has no warrant, but isn't even law enforcement.
While some might dream of a return to "America First" and "Made In Canada" policies and tarrifs, I can't imagine us ever returning to such systems.
First and foremost, the consumer won't stand for it. The consumer now expects computers at under $1000 instead of the $2000 plus it used to cost to manufacture them onshore.
A recent article I read pegged the "Made in America" price of an iPad at roughly $1400 -- more than double the market price. At such prices, people simply would stop buying them, because it's pretty damned hard to justify toys over $1000 in most people's minds.
I don't think it's a good situation for the "First World" at all, but I can't see any of the companies involved in offshoring being willing to return to North American manufacturing and assembly when it would make their products completely uncompetitive in the rest of the world markets. Quite frankly, companies like Apple make far more from their foreign sales than they do from North American sales. As a result, if you returned to a nationalistic policy on manufacturing, they'd simply pull up the remainder of their North American roots, officially become a foreign company, and keep on with business as usual. With the US one jewel less in the globalization crown.
And the same goes for all the other big multinationals. The only thing keeping their head offices in the US or Canada is tradition. Globalization has become an unstoppable behemoth; no one with real influence over the government through lobbyists would tolerate stepping back from globalization.
Let's face it -- the corporations sold out the people by lobbying the government for years or decades, and the people were too engrossed by their television sets and Big Macs to notice until it was too late.
I find it refreshing to see them creating new technology instead of just implementing standards.
Plus it just confirms my comments yesterday about even engineering and design talent moving overseas; that no job is "safe" any more from the risk of being offshored. Given Huawei's market share in the telco industry, this particular bit of engineering should make anyone still working for the formerly big names in telecommunications some serious pause when they think about their job security.
It isn't that long ago that people thought a job with Northern Telecom would last a life time, and we know how that turned out for those who believed in that dream.
Most of the posts I see on my Facebook news feed are news articles and music videos shared by friends, not their own personal experiences and doings.
So, yeah, I'd love to be able to "dislike" news articles that I find upsetting but not worth writing an actual reply to. I'd like to easily "dislike" a track that churns my stomach (Google/YouTube could implement that too, but in their case it would provide data for populating a "suggestion" list that I might actually want to check out.)
Plus if the likes and dislikes are added up like they are at other sites I visit, you can get a real quick feel for what other people think about comments people have made. You know someone has made a good discussion point when you see things like +140/-130 and a total of ten -- that's a post that pushed buttons!
All of my personal data is in my home directory and easily backed up to non-volatile media (which I do a few times a year, but not as often as I should.)
All of the project data is on SourceForge or company project servers, so there are duplicate copies of that.
I hardly think of my music or movies as "personal" data nor as irreplaceable. Were I still playing video games, I don't think I'd bother backing up game data, either.
When people talk about needing entire drives for their personal data backups, I have to wonder: WTF have you got ON there?
Didn't Word Perfect used to have an edit window for the markup at the bottom of the screen, while the top of the screen displayed the formatted text?
I've always thought that was a good idea compared to tools like Eclipse which flip between rendered and raw views (display both on the same tab, people!), but it's definitely not a new idea.
I fail to see how whether a map scrolls is going to affect whether it displays "unlabelled" streets.
All the article talks about is removing the scrolling of the maps. It doesn't say anything about disabling the audio cues as to where to turn, nor does it say anything about disabling the locator functions of a GPS unit.
So back to my key point: even without scrolling, a GPS is a hell of a lot more convenient than a paper map. But without the scrolling, you'll be encouraged to plan ahead. And I firmly believe that's something a lot of people don't do any more.
Case in point: My friend got lost on the way to his brother's place because his GPS died. He's been living there for over a decade. My friend has driven there many, many times. But he relies on his GPS so much nowadays that he didn't even know how to get there without it!
Myself, I usually remember how to get to a place after I've driven there 2-3 times. I can't imagine ever using a GPS to tell me how to get to some place I visit frequently. And I contend that this makes me a better driver than my lost friend, because if you don't know your own local streets and byways for getting to someplace you visit on a weekly basis after nearly a decade of driving there, you're a wandering, lost, road hazard.
Some posters seem to think I'm just posting an "I remember when" comment. Apparently I do have to spell out everything a comment implies instead of leaving it up to the reader to do some thinking for themselves about what I've said, because they're too busy looking for something to slam instead of something to think about. What a sad state of affairs when the goal of life becomes making a slam instead of educating yourself.
For those of you bleating about how this idea will make GPS "unusable", I have one question:
Have you ever used a paper map?
Remember the "bad old days" of folding out the map at the side of the road, looking at it, and planning the next leg of your trip?
That's right: figuring out where and when you have to turn BEFORE you reach the turn. Actually KNOWING where you're going instead of letting a machine do the "thinking".
This change would not cause the world to come to a sudden end, but it might well force people to think and plan for themselves again. And if that means some brain-dead loser suddenly can't get where they're going, I say "good riddance -- you were a road hazard anyhow, careening around the streets with no idea where you are going."
News flash: Management gets paid
on
Open Source Payday
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's rather tough to predict the impact of room temperature semi-conductors without knowing a lot more about the specifics of the technology.
For example, is the material suitable for long-haul power lines? Does it have the tensile strength to be deployed as multi-kilometer wiring? If it is, we can expect to see a dramatic improvement in the efficiency of power distribution, resulting in delays in the deployment of new power plants because the old ones would suddenly be delivering 10-20% more power to the home/business instead of losing it in the wiring.
Is the material suitable for fine wiring? If so, we may see some marginal improvements in the power drain of general electrical and electronic equipment.
No matter what happens in this field, we can expect that the military will be the first to apply the technology. They're really the only ones with the budget to become "early adopters" of such a shift in technology, other than research prototypes coming out of the likes of IBM.
All in all, though, I really wouldn't expect a very dramatic shift in power systems, though. Efficiency is great, but it rarely is an earth-shattering improvement.
Improving the efficiency of transmission doesn't change the speed of transmission, so it really wouldn't affect the raw computing horsepower of machines, just their power consumption. It's not like anyone has been talking about any superconductors that could replace the metal wiring layers on VLSI chips -- having a material and being able to vapour deposit or lithograph the material are two dramatically different technologies, and it could be decades after the discovery of the material before someone comes up with a practical way to use it on the microscopic scale of chips.
Personally I'm more interested in some of the "light switch" technologies that are being experimented with, because those technologies could change the fundamental physics of computing far more dramatically than reducing power consumption would.
We also used to pay around $1500-2000 for American and Canadian built computers that we now buy for $500-600 from overseas manufacturers.
Do you think those low prices and overseas production didn't come at a price?
If the work wasn't offshored to save money and avoid environmental regulations, why was it? Just to be "nice" to foreign economies?
The economies of the US and Canada survived decades of union and environmental laws because we didn't condone offshoring production. There used to be policies like "Made in America" and stickers that said "Made In Canada".
Those days are gone, and so are the jobs, with more to follow where those went.
If you think "design" jobs are safe, you need to take another look at how many companies are starting to offshore their design and research work. The only job that's "safe" nowadays is slinging processed meat substitute patties at a fast food restaurant, and once everyone is working at such low paying jobs save the 0.001% (which is the REAL statistical number of people who control industry), you won't even be able to keep the job slinging meat patties.
Because no one will be able to afford to buy them.
You don't need billion dollar foreign subsidies to destroy North American markets.
Our unions and environmental regulations are quite effective at that.
I've said it before, I'm saying it again: When a company offshores operations, they should be required to follow their home nation's environmental and labour laws as WELL as those of the foreign country. Otherwise the entire world will eventually be dragged down to lowest common denominator status, or the only people working will be in the worst shitholes on the planet.
why not harmonize with their [European] laws in America?
Because they're socialists and communists over there! They can't have any good ideas that don't need to be manipulated, edited, changed, and regurgitated in an "American" version before they can be any good.
What's next? Looking to those damned Canadian socialists for guidance on federal cannabis policy that could lead to a federal medical cannabis regulation?:P
Slashdot Mirror
What "independent media"?
There's no shortage of news about the 30-odd ridings affected from the MAINSTREAM media of ALL stripes, including some rather die-hard Conservative supporting papers.
With all their money in the bank, Apple couldn't afford to produce market-specific ads for different countries?
I hope they get their asses sued into the ground for penny-pinching in such a fashion. Given the profitability of the damned things, they sure as hell can afford to use regional advertising!
Absolutely true. They could make it illegal for Google to continue operations serving the UK if they so choose. But how that differs from banning or blocking Google, I don't understand...
It's pretty obvious why Google opts not to do the censorship. There's only one person or company to sue them in that case.
But if they comply with the censorship demands, they're open to dozens or hundreds of lawsuits from everyone who has been censored.
It's simple math in the end: The potential expense of one lawsuit is always less than the potential expense of hundreds of lawsuits.
It depends what you're downloading. I've successfully downloaded ONE piece of software via TPB torrents that wasn't infected. I stopped even trying several years ago, because it was obvious the only reason people were posting "cracks" was to spread botnet infections to the unwary.
So, no, unlike other media, I don't download and "try out" games like I do music and movies. I'm forced to go to a store to play around with a demo if I want a preview of a game.
But that's ok. The reflexes aren't what they used to be, so I pretty much quit the twitch FPS and sports games. And once you eliminate those from your gaming sessions, you realize that the vast majority of the remaining games are free or dirt cheap if you buy them online or as apps.
The search engines from Google and elsewhere already flag sites that are "spam" or which host "malicious content."
Maybe they need to add a "gossip" flag as well.
Unfortunately there would be no shortage of lawsuits from "entertainment magazines" if they did so.
And that's really the crux of the problem. If Google capitulates to people who want their search results censored, it's just a matter of time before the censored sites sue Google for the censorship.
So really Google has a choice between being sued by the censors for not complying, or sued by the censored for complying. Either way, someone expects to be paid for doing nothing useful to society, as is always the case when there is a "big money" company or business involved in the equation.
The UK is free to block Google entirely if they so choose. And good riddance to them, the Chinese, and every other nation that thinks their censorship laws trump the free access of an international resource.
Actually, it is illegal in Canada, and given the similarity between clause 8 of the Charter of Rights and the American Constitution's clause on "search and seizure", it should be illegal in the US as well.
The difference is that in Canada, companies and people asked the government and legislators for an interpretation to confirm that it's illegal.
In the US, companies went ahead without legal advice and are waiting to be sued so the courts can clarify their position -- in 5-10 years, and after a few million has been spent on a class action law suit.
The peanut farmers successfully lobbied management.
Then when peanuts were proven to be fatal to those with allergies, and banned after the government was lobbied, the potato chip lobbyists stepped in, and the premade-sandwich-maker's union had a few things to say as well.
In the meantime, the people kept demanding cheaper and cheaper air fares, until the airlines finally gave up on subsidized meals and just started gouging people the same as a sports arena with a game on. Captive audience, extortionate prices. It's an obvious way to boost profits, right?
But in all seriousness, I never found airline food to be any worse than any other steamer-tray/precooked meals I've had elsewhere. But I am annoyed that so many airlines have dropped food from their services entirely. I've even had a couple short-haul flights where they didn't even try to serve beverages, so you were effectively treated even worse than cattle: you have to provide water and food to cattle or be charged with animal abuse.
Were Oracle's claims that the regression test suite was illegally used/incorporated by Google dropped?
I'd actually thought those were the only claims Oracle had any legal standing with. If they've been knocked down, I foresee a good result for Google and Android.
The relevant clause of our Charter of Rights in Canada:
Fortunately this past week has seen many groups and legislators in Canada confirming that asking for Facebook passwords is illegal here. It's an invasion of privacy, what would be in American terms an "unwarranted search and seizure" by someone who not only has no warrant, but isn't even law enforcement.
While some might dream of a return to "America First" and "Made In Canada" policies and tarrifs, I can't imagine us ever returning to such systems.
First and foremost, the consumer won't stand for it. The consumer now expects computers at under $1000 instead of the $2000 plus it used to cost to manufacture them onshore.
A recent article I read pegged the "Made in America" price of an iPad at roughly $1400 -- more than double the market price. At such prices, people simply would stop buying them, because it's pretty damned hard to justify toys over $1000 in most people's minds.
I don't think it's a good situation for the "First World" at all, but I can't see any of the companies involved in offshoring being willing to return to North American manufacturing and assembly when it would make their products completely uncompetitive in the rest of the world markets. Quite frankly, companies like Apple make far more from their foreign sales than they do from North American sales. As a result, if you returned to a nationalistic policy on manufacturing, they'd simply pull up the remainder of their North American roots, officially become a foreign company, and keep on with business as usual. With the US one jewel less in the globalization crown.
And the same goes for all the other big multinationals. The only thing keeping their head offices in the US or Canada is tradition. Globalization has become an unstoppable behemoth; no one with real influence over the government through lobbyists would tolerate stepping back from globalization.
Let's face it -- the corporations sold out the people by lobbying the government for years or decades, and the people were too engrossed by their television sets and Big Macs to notice until it was too late.
I find it refreshing to see them creating new technology instead of just implementing standards.
Plus it just confirms my comments yesterday about even engineering and design talent moving overseas; that no job is "safe" any more from the risk of being offshored. Given Huawei's market share in the telco industry, this particular bit of engineering should make anyone still working for the formerly big names in telecommunications some serious pause when they think about their job security.
It isn't that long ago that people thought a job with Northern Telecom would last a life time, and we know how that turned out for those who believed in that dream.
Most of the posts I see on my Facebook news feed are news articles and music videos shared by friends, not their own personal experiences and doings.
So, yeah, I'd love to be able to "dislike" news articles that I find upsetting but not worth writing an actual reply to. I'd like to easily "dislike" a track that churns my stomach (Google/YouTube could implement that too, but in their case it would provide data for populating a "suggestion" list that I might actually want to check out.)
Plus if the likes and dislikes are added up like they are at other sites I visit, you can get a real quick feel for what other people think about comments people have made. You know someone has made a good discussion point when you see things like +140/-130 and a total of ten -- that's a post that pushed buttons!
All of my personal data is in my home directory and easily backed up to non-volatile media (which I do a few times a year, but not as often as I should.)
All of the project data is on SourceForge or company project servers, so there are duplicate copies of that.
I hardly think of my music or movies as "personal" data nor as irreplaceable. Were I still playing video games, I don't think I'd bother backing up game data, either.
When people talk about needing entire drives for their personal data backups, I have to wonder: WTF have you got ON there?
How many iPads equal the weight of an Osbourne 1?
Just curious... both are "portable", and advertised the fact heavily. But society's definition of "portable" sure has changed!
Didn't Word Perfect used to have an edit window for the markup at the bottom of the screen, while the top of the screen displayed the formatted text?
I've always thought that was a good idea compared to tools like Eclipse which flip between rendered and raw views (display both on the same tab, people!), but it's definitely not a new idea.
I fail to see how whether a map scrolls is going to affect whether it displays "unlabelled" streets.
All the article talks about is removing the scrolling of the maps. It doesn't say anything about disabling the audio cues as to where to turn, nor does it say anything about disabling the locator functions of a GPS unit.
So back to my key point: even without scrolling, a GPS is a hell of a lot more convenient than a paper map. But without the scrolling, you'll be encouraged to plan ahead. And I firmly believe that's something a lot of people don't do any more.
Case in point: My friend got lost on the way to his brother's place because his GPS died. He's been living there for over a decade. My friend has driven there many, many times. But he relies on his GPS so much nowadays that he didn't even know how to get there without it!
Myself, I usually remember how to get to a place after I've driven there 2-3 times. I can't imagine ever using a GPS to tell me how to get to some place I visit frequently. And I contend that this makes me a better driver than my lost friend, because if you don't know your own local streets and byways for getting to someplace you visit on a weekly basis after nearly a decade of driving there, you're a wandering, lost, road hazard.
Some posters seem to think I'm just posting an "I remember when" comment. Apparently I do have to spell out everything a comment implies instead of leaving it up to the reader to do some thinking for themselves about what I've said, because they're too busy looking for something to slam instead of something to think about. What a sad state of affairs when the goal of life becomes making a slam instead of educating yourself.
For those of you bleating about how this idea will make GPS "unusable", I have one question:
Have you ever used a paper map?
Remember the "bad old days" of folding out the map at the side of the road, looking at it, and planning the next leg of your trip?
That's right: figuring out where and when you have to turn BEFORE you reach the turn. Actually KNOWING where you're going instead of letting a machine do the "thinking".
This change would not cause the world to come to a sudden end, but it might well force people to think and plan for themselves again. And if that means some brain-dead loser suddenly can't get where they're going, I say "good riddance -- you were a road hazard anyhow, careening around the streets with no idea where you are going."
The people who do the real work don't.
It's rather tough to predict the impact of room temperature semi-conductors without knowing a lot more about the specifics of the technology.
For example, is the material suitable for long-haul power lines? Does it have the tensile strength to be deployed as multi-kilometer wiring? If it is, we can expect to see a dramatic improvement in the efficiency of power distribution, resulting in delays in the deployment of new power plants because the old ones would suddenly be delivering 10-20% more power to the home/business instead of losing it in the wiring.
Is the material suitable for fine wiring? If so, we may see some marginal improvements in the power drain of general electrical and electronic equipment.
No matter what happens in this field, we can expect that the military will be the first to apply the technology. They're really the only ones with the budget to become "early adopters" of such a shift in technology, other than research prototypes coming out of the likes of IBM.
All in all, though, I really wouldn't expect a very dramatic shift in power systems, though. Efficiency is great, but it rarely is an earth-shattering improvement.
Improving the efficiency of transmission doesn't change the speed of transmission, so it really wouldn't affect the raw computing horsepower of machines, just their power consumption. It's not like anyone has been talking about any superconductors that could replace the metal wiring layers on VLSI chips -- having a material and being able to vapour deposit or lithograph the material are two dramatically different technologies, and it could be decades after the discovery of the material before someone comes up with a practical way to use it on the microscopic scale of chips.
Personally I'm more interested in some of the "light switch" technologies that are being experimented with, because those technologies could change the fundamental physics of computing far more dramatically than reducing power consumption would.
We also used to pay around $1500-2000 for American and Canadian built computers that we now buy for $500-600 from overseas manufacturers.
Do you think those low prices and overseas production didn't come at a price?
If the work wasn't offshored to save money and avoid environmental regulations, why was it? Just to be "nice" to foreign economies?
The economies of the US and Canada survived decades of union and environmental laws because we didn't condone offshoring production. There used to be policies like "Made in America" and stickers that said "Made In Canada".
Those days are gone, and so are the jobs, with more to follow where those went.
If you think "design" jobs are safe, you need to take another look at how many companies are starting to offshore their design and research work. The only job that's "safe" nowadays is slinging processed meat substitute patties at a fast food restaurant, and once everyone is working at such low paying jobs save the 0.001% (which is the REAL statistical number of people who control industry), you won't even be able to keep the job slinging meat patties.
Because no one will be able to afford to buy them.
Fucking American meta-mods.
Say anything against the jackboot states of America policies and you're automatically a "troll."
Your whole fucking COUNTRY is a troll!
You don't need billion dollar foreign subsidies to destroy North American markets.
Our unions and environmental regulations are quite effective at that.
I've said it before, I'm saying it again: When a company offshores operations, they should be required to follow their home nation's environmental and labour laws as WELL as those of the foreign country. Otherwise the entire world will eventually be dragged down to lowest common denominator status, or the only people working will be in the worst shitholes on the planet.
Because they're socialists and communists over there! They can't have any good ideas that don't need to be manipulated, edited, changed, and regurgitated in an "American" version before they can be any good.
What's next? Looking to those damned Canadian socialists for guidance on federal cannabis policy that could lead to a federal medical cannabis regulation? :P