I work with a fair number of ngc.com; I'm a contractor myself. At one point, I had a few interviews for Northrop and I'm so glad they over looked my talents because they seem to abuse the talent they have.
Now, this may not be for every department or division, but almost every NGC employee I know is basically well familiar with furlough. Whether good or bad, NGC is left with the ability to place entire departments on furlough to reduce overhead costs in the event a contract dries up. Now perhaps it's their size, perhaps they simply don't care about their workers, but this sort of thing seems to happen often. I'd guess that no NGC employee with a tenure more than 2 years hasn't been out of work for up to a month or so. But this is how things are run there.
See, government contracting works like this. You create a company, hire some folk to work on a contract. Whatever their salary is, you charge the government +50% or more, so essentially the government is not only flat out paying your salary but also the company for your services. If the contract ends, so does your job as the company may not want to charge overhead. In contrast to other business sectors, employment typically isn't grounded so harshly on the existence of a contract, which is where cost of business and business management can keep workers afloat even during down times (think department store).
I only point out Northrop because while all government contracting is essentially this contract+play model, Northrop has a reputation of placing people on furlough much more often than other companies such as CACI, Raytheon, General Atomics etc. Some Northrop employees seem to live the lives similar to actors and actresses in Hollywood, and I'm not talking about Tom Hanks acting, but maybe those actors that get little spots from time to time on your sitcoms. They literally live in apartments, and wait for the phone to ring day after day. Northrop employees seem to wake up in the morning, wondering if they'll still have a job at the end of the day.
What does this observation have to do with the op? Well, it seems that moral and motivation might be a bit low on a large scale at Northrop, so such blunders are no surprise to me.
Nope, they all use FFMPEG, which is based in France. France does not recognise software patents, so they are not required to pay anything. Using them in the USA without a patent license, however, is illegal.
Wow, learn something new everyday.
France doesn't recognize software patents? Man, I almost feel bad disliking the French for so long. I only wonder how much worse it might get in America before I decide to look into immigrating to France.
A lot of technology in Avionics, for decades, has been stagnant. It might not seem so when we grovel over a F22 Raptor or the Russian PAK FA fighter. Not to belittle the development of these crafts, really it's the vector thrust that primarily puts them in their league. Much of the planes are the same as much older planes going as far back as the 60s. For example, MIL-STD 1553B is on that F22 Raptor and it probably has TADIL support and maybe even JTIDS if it's really 'bleeding edge'. MIL-STD 1553B is 1978, and despite it's problems and the fact it's a bus architecture, it's not going away and will be in use for decades to come in the field of avionics. Yes, there's 1553C and 1773 (1553 over fiber), but the only people using those are test labs; problem is, none of the terminals support anything but 1553B. Serial communications on those planes are far better than consumer serial, but they are too old and really just inconvenient for the consumer as to why they never took off (RS-539, RS-422 real RS-232 25pin Synchronous and Async when able). This is just the tactical communications technologies for the planes; airframe requirements pretty much lock those down to mere allowances for aesthetics more than anything else.
Why is this? Well, all the old technologies given to us by the forefathers of avionics works. Every piece of that plane is certified, making changes or deviations from those requirements astronomically expensive. For example, most terminals used in avionics are unique and rare items which also make them very expensive... 20 million USD for one that is operational; despite it's age. For any avionics system coming onto the market that claims to support any of the standards, a government program office has to allocate millions of dollars just in routine test procedures to be sure your component does nothing more or nothing less than what is precisely expected for any given scenario (this also means your machine has to mimic known bugs; if it doesn't then someone might develop a component that crutches it self against your "fix" and the end result a 747 crashes killing 243 people on board).
And that is the main reason technology in avionics moves so slow, just as it does slowly in every other critical field like medicine or cryptography (Lots of hospitals still rely heavily on old obsolete HP PA-RISC VME technology). (Yeah I know, your iPhone can crunch keys better than those ugly government doodads; but the iPhone isn't certified to handle it, and it's uncertain it will work every time in all conditions. That ugly government device will work, and provide the exact result, every time; rain or shine.)
Then we have people who have no idea what it's like to clean up passenger plane wreck, who think their simple uncertified and untested.99 cent iPhone locator software may some how locate a blackbox underneath a mile of water... no emitter can transmit through that much mass; there is no GPS locator that can locate a blackbox in the ocean that deep. That much salt water density, you'd have to be touching it with RFID. GPS locator technology is from the avionics industry... decades later... mind you. There's no technology the consumer uses that would help them find these black boxes more. Most of consumer technology is scraps from government/military technology after it's been used and abused, the private sector isn't creating anything fundamentally new. I know that hurts, but it's the truth, virtually all the R&D is on the governments dime.
Ultimately, when we find said machines the question then would be 'who built them'?
He's arguing, in real life, the old philosophical questions regarding divinity. On one hand, how can we mere mortals possibly understand what an all-powerful being is thinking... easy, "God works in mysterious ways" pretty much sums this up. The "all-powerful" is an extreme, but this predicament exists in everyday life, today. While our upper 1% struggle and argue over the words of our most acclaimed thinkers like Steven Hawkins, the fact is the vast majority of the common man will never be able to comprehend many of the concepts he's engulfed in.
Now, Steven Hawkings isn't a super powerful alien capable of interstellar travel. The societies, civilization, beings we are trying to detect, in fact are.
If a being is capable of interstellar travel, then a 13 year lag seems unreasonable (our closest star is Alpha Centari right? 13 light years away?). I would venture to guess, they have found a faster than light ability to transmit information, well, we thought of quantum entanglement, is there a way to detect that? Point is, we are looking for only civilizations that are about the exact same level of technology that we are, and this is a point I think Seth Shostak is trying to get at. We aren't likely to find another intelligent life, so easily, who just so happens to have been where we are, using the technology we are, a few billion years ago.
He's arguing, that we should come up with ways to detect technology itself, mechanics and machinery, computers or application of some of our most cutting edge theories of information and travel.
Really? Since I'm certain that you read the application as I did, then you will see that this is a feature that a lot of people would like to have, including myself. I want them to be able to figure out who douche bag is who stole my phone, where they are and brick the device
So if you're so authoritarian enough to want such drastic measures taken in the event you forgot your expensive overpriced iPhone on the counter at some dive-bar, packed on a Friday night, while in a drunken stupor then it's OK that a mega international corporation is also as irrational? You don't want the iPhone bricked, you just want to get back at the person who might have innocently picked it up.
I've found cell phones before. I've found them in my car, months after the fact. Juice it up, turn it on flip through the address book pick someone and text message them, "hey I found this phone, can you tell them I have it? Have them call." Even if it's a cheap phone, the address book and text messaging history is always nice.
Besides, broadcast satellite corporations were doing this for years. Attempting to destroy washed smart cards via a special signal received. There was even a network up to notify all the DSS/Satellite hackers when and how long to turn off their receivers. So, prior art regardless of reading the article, whether it's for legit purposes or for battling evil hackers.
Now, don't try to take a moral high-ground by rationalizing and agreeing with someone who's obviously doing something stupid. It's like two criminals saying "hey, the ethics square is here where we are standing!". OMG I lost my iPhone... no some douche must have stole it! BRICK IT NOW! Screw that douche!
Xenophobic as a negative term is only used by foreigners trying to get into or stay within a richer country.
Sometimes I wish America wasn't as well-off so you idiots would shut the hell up. This is my country, not yours; so piss off if you don't like the way we do things or how we treat you.
If Indians from India weren't so insistent they know how to speak English, when they obviously do not, then perhaps their mangled verbiage wouldn't be such a stereotype.
BTW, that's still not the site for government military job postings. Most importantly, it's not indicative to a lack of American expertise as the op suggested.
Which would be an Indian stereotype of Americans, but I notice your hypocritical ass didn't point that out did you?
Stereotype, aka pattern recognition. So stuff it with your PC crap.
In my field and in many hard sciences there are no qualified americans to do the job. The Department of State actually has a webpage where they list the type of skills that are scarce in the country and the types that aren't. Here is the page for computer and mathematical types of jobs [onetcenter.org]. The outlook doesn't look bad. On the other hand, if you're a skilled auto-industry worker, I don't think the outlook is the same. And believe it or not, I have a pretty good idea of what skills set most H1Bs have...
You quote Department of State, but your web link is to '.org'. Give me.gov or.mil and then perhaps you might not come off as stupid; someone lied to you if you think that.org site is a Department of State website, I know the real Department of State website for jobs and a.org isn't it. On your website, they list "Network Designers", "Statisticians" and "Video Game Designers". Just a few, but are you really going to sit there and suggest there are no qualified American "Statisticians"? No "Network Designers"? Oh, "Computer Support Specialists" is a real cute one.
The only thing that makes Indian H1-B attractive is the low-pay and the hope that maybe what they create will "be good enough". It's a game of chance wealthy greedy people play from time to time; because mediocrity often sells, WalMart is a perfect example of this fact. You people actually think you're being hired because you are "good".
As a person who has had to repair broken H1-B code for some American corporations. I'll tell you, the programmers who worked on those projects didn't know the first thing about programming or even English. The code was garbage and needed to be redesigned from the ground up, costing the corporation a lot of cash. Not to mention, finding a few IP violations within the code, but since the project had been outsourced the company figured they could point the finger at someone else should someone find out.
They paid a high-powered American to draw out on paper what is needed for 200 dollars an hour on contract. Then they had their own well paid professionals break down the work flow further and act as integrators sending off job-components to outsourced monkey programmers. But had monkeys actually done the jobs perhaps their plan would have worked, instead of chimpanzee's from the San Diego Zoo, they had H1-Bs from India do it.
The only outsourcing that produced admirable work that I had to work with, was outsourcing to other G7 countries like France. It's only I don't like France being an American so that adds a bit of animosity to the equation but it was good work. Anything from the Germans are very good, and Russians are very well capable of providing ground-breaking work (probably more so than anyone else), just have to make sure they aren't skirting you by putting Igor the total newb on the job. British always have a sense of humor and it's worth it just to listen to them talk and joke around; oh and they do very good work too.
But you know the thing is? G7 outsourcing is expensive, very expensive. India outsourcing is cheap, very cheap. So, perhaps the old adage of "you get what you pay for" applies to labor interests.
I think the author of the post forgot about the FTC investigation into Oracle purchasing Sun Microsystems, because of the Open Source interests that would be acquired specifically MySQL.
This says one thing, the FTC recognizes FSF/FOSS as a market force.
Should Oracle, or any other company for that matter attempt to buy up any commercial support for FOSS, I believe the FTC and Governments around the globe would have them in court before the transaction could take place. Their 70 billion will be drained from their coffers into the bonus checks of all those law firms.
Oracle is an IT company, who has had the luxury if evading almost every 'war' this industry has seen. It's what makes them so scary in a way, but it also allows them to maneuver under the guise that there's no historical reasons to over react. They realize, I'm sure, that all their monies come from *us*. Who else is going to recommend Oracle? Expensive, Oracle? They aren't in the position of Microsoft, who can disregard the industries brightest minds because stupid people keep buying computers with Windows installed. Oracle made their zillions, in part, from actually appealing to the people who know a good database when they see it.
Oracle and the world witnessed this community eat our own, SCO. So I hope they recognize we really do believe in what we preach and will refrain from anything stupid. I think we are a tad apathetic towards Oracle's new toys, but we are watching and a little cautious and so are other people. Had Microsoft tried to buy Sun, we would have drawn guns cocked and loaded, Oracle... we checked to see if we had ammo and sat down to see what happens.
SSDs are too expensive. Retarded even, have you priced one yet? When the cost difference is that great, between the same HDD of the same data capacity, then the performance issues are irrelevant (yes, even if they could transfer information twice as fast as they do now, they are worthless due to scant storage space and price.) Actually, when it comes to HDs, I doubt performance is the most important factor over storage, cost and reliability. Oh, and let's not ignore the reliability either. SSDs will eventually die, and predictions are rather accurate making them less desirable, considering the fact I have 25 year old hard drives from database servers that still work fine today.
SSDs have to drop in cost, a lot. They should be cheaper than SATA drives largely because they always have less storage space. The justification for their price is the read performance, as many of the current SSDs don't even have comparable write advantages over say UltraSCSI 320 or SATA II. What they seem to be banking on, is public acceptance that the drives are "fast" because their computer boots up faster, or maybe a game loads faster, fair enough... but does that justify the cost? I don't think so.
I just recently got an iPhone. Took a look at the app store, saw a cool gun application. It allows you to disassemble the weapons, fire them even has an Uzi with a setting that resembles x-ray so you can see the internal parts moving. I thought it was a cool app, bought it.
It only comes with one crappy gun. The other guns, cost another dollar each. I felt cheated, had this been a physical product from WalMart, I would have immediately drove to the store and returned it and got my money back (IT industry needs to do something about this, products need to be refunded if the customer is not satisfied.). I bought one or two extra guns, but I won't anymore... mostly curious about my new iPhone, mostly curious about this new environment is the only reason I did it... the new guns were nothing "new".
I recently stopped playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. The game sucks, even if it were "k-rad", I still wouldn't be playing it. They want to charge me for a handful of new maps. I already bought the game, it's their business to keep me playing and recommending it to my friends. I'm not going to foot the bill of keeping their game on the top of the charts... not only do they want me to play more, they want me to pay more to do so? Seems underhanded to me, the audacity of those guys. It works like this, I'll buy the game initially but it's your expense to encourage me to continue playing it, or buying sequels. Because they wanted to charge me for those new maps (two of them weren't even new but ported from old CoD releases), I promptly uninstalled the game and threw the discs in the trash.
Now, subscription games are different. There's continuity, longevity and immersion justifying perpetuity with most subscription games to date, MMORPGs for all I'm aware of. Most importantly, it's understood that the game is in continuity and so we agree to pay a subscription fee to participate in the virtual reality. There is no continuity or longevity in most First Person Shooter games, specifically Call of Duty MW2 which is a classic FPS game. Most importantly, it's understood that we buy the game and that's it, the clock starts ticking before boredom sets in. First day I installed Call of Duty MW2, I beat the single player part... the multi-player part got boring less than a month later because the maps are few, and no one seemed to be customizing anything like in the days of Unreal Tournament and Quake. I didn't like the network architecture but that's a different thread.
So initial conditions of agreement and what I expect plays a major role in whether I will "purchase" additional content for a peace of software.
At least in the 90s, some musicians were paid via plastic. Just like a corporate credit card... here's the gimmick.
Suppose your boss said, "sure, you'll be making about 120k per year salary. Instead of you mucking with the all the accounting yourself, take the corporate credit card and just charge it whenever you want to buy goods and services. Permitted use of this card, is your pay." Any over charge gets tacked on as an recouping expense of said "loan" described in the article... but here's the money maker.
Most people don't spend 120k (hypothetical value) per year, especially if they were poor before; even if they binge and purge and party as hard as they vision rich people doing. Talking of binging and purging, you get the artist high, so he cares more about high quality cocaine than a money market account, or a 30k dollar Rolex. Due to the agreements of pay, what he doesn't spend ends right back in the pockets of the record labels. What he does spend? That too, because the reality is, if anyone in Hollywood gets busted for drugs or prostitution and it gets put on the news; what we are seeing is the result of someone pissing off someone in the entertainment industry. They control a lot of those channels and adult entertainment industries (which should be obvious, the porn industry is part of the entertainment industry), the cost of a plate full of cocaine and a up-and-coming porn actress gets tacked on for living the rockstar/rapstar life style at market price. When, the girl works for the same people, two doors down the hall... walk from one set riding some guy, to this trailer riding that guy who thinks he's got girls crawling all over him because he's famous. (for the record, I would love for some of them to crawl on me... but the point is, he gets charged and the record company was in full control the whole time.) I bet Lindsey Lohan didn't want to have sex with some record exec... and now she's again crying before a judge.
So some of those record labels only needed to pay the artist, the exact amount of money to keep him incapacitated and distracted; it turns out, it doesn't cost a whole lot at all. (Hollywood does this too, with actors and actresses).
I can't say this added perk was extensively used throughout the recording industry, but it was used. It might still be used. But it's just one more underhanded way of getting one more dime from the artist.
It is a disgusting industry. It should be made illegal and everyone within it making more than 50K a year should go directly to jail for the rest of their life; no courts, no jury, no plea... just the clink of a jail cell.
Considering the average foxcon worker makes $200 a month, or $2400 a year, and the average US high school drop out makes $20,000 a year. So you need roughly 8 chinese users to equal one high school dropout in terms of buying power. So yes, china has the most number of internet users, however, they are quite literally worthless.
Apparently, this guy has never visited another country other than America.
That 2400 dollars a year won't work in America, because all of the exorbitant prices we have because we have people making 20,000 a year.
I was in Thailand in May of 2010. I just got back from Taiwan, three days ago. A double quarter pounder meal in America, specifically California will run you about 10 USD easy (oh and taxes). Do you know how much that exact same meal, at Mc Donalds in Thailand cost? The exchange rate is about 32 to 1, so a Thai national would come to America and 320 baht price tag and think "my god"; you see, in Thailand, that meal (including imported American beef patties) costs maybe 20 baht... less than an American dollar. Oh, did I mention, that's expensive for eating at a restaurant in Thailand too? Food and services is very cheap there, as they are in Taiwan too. Taiwan has a similar exchange rate, Thai Baht is almost 1 to 1.
Housing? Cost of living? Not so much in Taiwan, but food costs seem regulated to keep them down and affordable in Thailand. So those people only making 2000 baht a year, are still eating far better than upper middle class American families, yes upper middle class. Thai nationals literally can have lobster tail and top sirloin steak every meal every day. How many Americans do you know can afford to eat a 30 dollar Lobster meal every day for every meal?
Clothes, Thailand and Taiwan both have extensive textile industries... something America used to have but no longer. Clothes are very cheap in these areas, knock-offs or the real thing. The only time things get expensive are in high-class malls (which do not exist in America at all, the Paragon Mall in Thailand has a Lamborghini, Maserati, BMW, Porsche, Lotus and Bentley car dealerships INSIDE the mall... complete with multiple show cars, on the fourth level... you never seen anything that up scale in America) for their own and global wealthy elite. The Taipei 101 mall in Taiwan is absolutely ridiculous that can rival any stupid little American show on high-rollers in Las Vegas; these malls have watch stores that make Cartier look like a cheap Timex watch on the shelf at Wal-Mart.
So we aren't that high class. We aren't making that much money. Our numbers are very big... but it's akin to a Thai national to brag to you about how much money he drops at the club with his exchange rate being 31 to one... and calling you skimpy. Not fair is it. Nor is it fair for you to use raw numbers to think we have more purchasing power than the chinese who only make 2400 a year. Because, they have PS3s just like you. They have flat screen HDTVs just like you. They have cars, one or two per house hold just like you. Their girls sport Louis Vuitton items, just like the American girl who saves up three or four paychecks to get one herself. They go to clubs, parks and museums, rock concerts and other outings just like you.
If you think the average Chinese population doesn't have purchasing power... you obviously have not been there and looked around. They have night markets galore. They have their own multi-billion dollar companies that you never heard of. They have more expansion and construction building cities up than you have ever witnessed in America at any point in it's history.
Do they have poverty? Oh hell yes. So does America. But, then again. In America poverty equals high-crime and ignoble activities... in China, it's mostly just poverty (you don't stand the chance you do in getting mugged, raped or killed there as you do in American ghettos). Most Americans avoid poor areas of their cities... like the plague. So they get online and talk about how poo
E=mc^2 is probably the only one recognizable to most people. Most of those people will more associate that equation to "Einstein" than to math or physics. Most of the remaining will associate the equation to being the main equation in General Relativity rather than simply a part of Special Relativity. Fewer people ever took a physics class that actually had them use the equation, most of these people will associate the equation to the Nuclear Bomb. Almost all of these people won't realize Einsteins Nobel Prize lends more to his work with photosynthesis and photoelectric (how light can be converted into energy, how plants do it); they think he got it because of this simple equation only. Most people can regurgitate "Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared" with a great deal of undeserved confidence; though even many who hold degrees in physics might still have some issues actually understanding what the equation means and entails; the entire set of concepts that surround this equation, from General and Special Relativity to quantum sciences.
So, you see. If you understand E=mc^2, one of the most famous equations of the modern age. So few actually knows anything about it; though everyone will have an opinion or belief of what it might mean. A theoretical physicist might appreciate and understand your message, but the every day person will just see it as a synonym for genius and might think you are thinking a bit high of yourself.
Oh, and if you get more complicated, good luck finding a tattoo artist that knows this stuff. Take a look at all the bad tattooes out there with blatant misspellings. Now think of how tedious some of these math equations get. You better make damn sure they get it right, make damn sure YOU have it right. Otherwise, you'll come of really stupid with a tattoo of the Pythagorean theorem that's ultimately incorrect and every high school kid is going to know it.
Exactly what has a portable ever replaced from a desktop? Nothing I can find.
To this day, any portable that can deliver, "near" desktop power is pretty much a desktop effectively. This laptops are ridiculously expensive (so the portable factor is more from this desk to that desk; and not much for playing Crysis in the woods on a rotting tree stump while hunting deer), fans everywhere so you have to find a decent surface to place them (again, no rotting tree stump, or dusty hood of a truck at a construction site). They get too hot for your lap even if you ignore it's needs for air flow (not a good choice for the flight). Then, we connect gaming mice to them... requiring more accommodations and making them that much more semi-permanent once settled (again, the table at your seat on an airplane just won't do for this).
At this point, your laptop may not be "chained" but it is glued to your desk. At least we accept the "chained" aspect of the desktop. I've had a number of "bad ass desktop power" laptops... and the "glue" factor really becomes a massive annoyance and deterrence to portability. Even the mediocre laptops sometimes have these stupid little maintenance issues that "glue" it to a desktop or table top... heck, even finding a power outlet and having to heave that adapter around with it everywhere is a major pain. My laptops are desktops virtually. They never move, too much of a hassle to move them, they weigh too much, the brick adds a few more pounds, it's just too much to hassle at Starbucks. I'll keep my iPad for mobile movie watching and checking email and I'll keep my desktop for playing games, CAD or everything else that requires a lot of computing power.
If you think this doesn't happen in America, you're naive.
From the start, the system guides the child down certain paths. (Disputes against IQ tests, particularly one group having better education is self-reflecting of the IQ studies as those IQ tests are given before education starts... mainly, upon entry or before enrolling into the 1st grade). I remember the testing myself, I started the first grade at around age three to four years old (I turned four during the year) and I never went to kindergarten.
As you progress in the American education system, you get encouraged to take certain classes. A child of an IQ score of 90 or below will never pass a Calculus class; probably will never pass the prerequisite classes to get to Calculus honestly; they'll probably never get out of remedial general math... adding and subtracting. *Cue the folk who for the sake of argument claim they had IQ scores of 80 yet ended up acing AP Calculus in high-school, I guess we should give the morons hope so say what you will. I know you're a liar.*
Thousands of years of education systems, this system is down to a science and highly accurate. "Look at me boy... I see it in your eyes, you go to that room there. You'll hear words like 'goods', 'merchants', 'business', 'theory and postulates' and 'degrees/diplomas'. " "Look at me boy... look at me! Nothing. You go into that room, you'll hear words like 'craftsman', 'journeyman', 'master', 'apprentice', 'vocation'." I had to fight the school to let me take a woodshop class, they were correct in assuming I was just looking for an easy 'A' but also a friend was taking the class and I just wanted to hang out with him. By that time, the deed had already been done. In my classes, eyes lit up to the sounds of Bachelors and Masters degrees... and what is needed to get them. In wood shop class eyes lit up with the prospect of success as a Master of a vocational trade. Those kids struggled just as my peers struggled in our classes... they wouldn't have a chance in hell with trigonometry.
Part of all of this, is to set each child into a relative reality proportional to their own capabilities. On the down side, this reinforces the illusion of equality, on the up side they are generally happy as their scale of success is supposedly within their grasp. A kid with an IQ of 90 will simply never become a neuro-surgeon no matter how much of his little mind he puts forth towards the effort; so don't even take him down a path where he might catch wind of such absurd goals given his limitations.
In Russia, they do the same thing--limited people get sent to PTU instead of Universities. In America, it's cleverly masked into the system from the start so it's not as obvious. Plus, in America there are opportunities all the way through that are put in place to catch all those that might slip through the cracks. (A genius might get sent down the wrong path from the start, but given cross roads throughout the system, odds are he's going to take one of them, odds are he'll get noticed... even if it's, college transfer studies at a community college after dropping out.) This might make us feel good about the American system, but there's a dark side too. It only goes to magnify the sheer fact of mental limitations for someone who misses every cross road; reasons for missing them by this time are largely irrelevant.
They do this in every education system... this "streaming" you speak of.
It's bad enough, the realization that I am mortal, that I'm inevitably going to die. Historically, most succumb to this reality and hope they die with dignity, honor or respect and admiration but technically most have always hoped they simply die in their sleep at an old age. No one wants to think about being horribly maimed in a car accident only to die slow and painfully. No one wants to think about dieing of Alzheimer's, or leprosy or any horrible condition perhaps lung cancer. The truth is, dieing in your sleep at a ripe old age is like winning the lottery, few do. So after accepting this reality, one begs the question; do you really want to know how you will go? I think it's best ignorance addresses and governs this question; careless pursuit of such truths could only do more harm than good. Genetic predisposition is becoming well understood, more so the actual understanding of the genetic code (so then it won't be a predisposition but a geneticist can say for a fact "if you live long enough, you will develop cancer, in fact by looking at your code, you have around 9,934,485,343 more permutations before this code activates). To add insult to injury, the man will charge you for this information. This isn't far fetched, the more we understand genetics it may come to light that it's nothing more than an algorithm just like every other machine or functioning system. Some things can catalyze progression of a trait such as smoking might speed up lung cancer but in the end, we all have a death gene somewhere that regardless if we smoke or swallow radioactive materials should we live long enough the same cancer will activate.
I don't want to know myself. I'd rather the doctor tell me upon diagnosis that way I lived my life rich in hope and expectation with the show only getting serious near the end; as expected anyways.
Good uses for this technology would be for... say, part of Special Forces training... testing for congenital heart problems... you don't want a SEAL going into sudden cardiac arrest during a mission ten or so years later. Or a large crane operator to just go into a massive epileptic seizure with several tons on the line 80 stories up.
I think this is good technology. But there should be some heavy arguments about divulging this information in fine detail to just anyone. Perhaps a doctor might know I am prone to have prostate cancer, he can consider that when prescribing medicine or undergoing medical procedures... but I don't want to know that 20 years in advance. I want to live my life free of this dire burden of knowledge. It will be a heavy burden believe me, ever see how people in California go into a fit because someone is smoking, as if it's some life threatening issue... like say, maybe walking around with milk jug full of sarin gas... how ridiculous people get over their "beliefs". Now, tell them something like what's written in stone for them... jesus christ will the shit hit the fan.
I can see it now, "I'm going to sue MTV because they are promoting a beach life style putting social pressures on me, my genetic doctor at Wal-Mart told me I have a rare gene for a type of skin cancer that'll make me die looking like Freddy Kruger and I want my equal rights... even though... genetically, I'm not equal... um... yeah I'll let the lawyer deal with that problem...." Poor McDonalds... they already got sued for having hot coffee... what are they going to do against someone destined for diabetes or maybe if they have the "fat bastard" gene that makes them weigh over 300lbs?
A large part of the legal system is to simply solve disputes. An almost certainty in any dispute is deceit, lying or other forms of ill will for which it's the duty of the courts to make a decision and hopefully the lies and ill wills will surface and justice will be served. Of course, in this fantasy world, unicorns run wild too but it's nice to think about but even harder to ignore that this is exactly what the legal system hopes to do.
If a device can systematically and scientifically determine if a person is lying... what use is a jury for? Why have a judge for that matter? Perhaps to represent authority and lay down consequences or compensation? Such a device wouldn't do away with the entire legal system, but it could certainly drastically change the face and foundation of that practice. For instance, a murder suspect is plugged into this device and it says that he's guilty? Suppose we have common understanding of how it works, making it very difficult to question it's reliability making it indisputably trustworthy (unlike current lie detecting machines that measure subtle electrical impulses, and demonstrated methods of circumvention).
It's my understanding that certain things like truth serums are illegal as evidence in some courts... perhaps this is because they are too effective? Lawyers want to keep the current legal landscape instead of foreseeing a future where they can no longer justify their outrageous retainer fees? The way by which truth serums work, you can even get a feel for the subjects intents and purposes without playing 20-Questions, which would really throw a switch and render cross examination worthless effort. There would be no Criminal Law... as any suspect would spill all beans effortlessly... and I imagine that's a huge revenue source for lawyers and legislatures. These serums are still used, for the most sensitive subjects. But as for the public eye, it's better to dredge through debates and word play, with the serum the truth might get in the way of an agenda. As long as there can be doubt, the people are at the mercy of word play and random decisions; the effect makes it possible for corrupt powerful men to insist on a fabricated truth or present a scapegoat, but it can also permit a clever criminal in getting off the hook.
I think fMRI in combination with truth serums should replace all criminal prosecution. Have a verdict as fast as you can prepare the injection and fMRI device; and be 100% sure of it.
Fonts are often taken for granted. People don't seem to realize how expensive fonts can get.
http://www.adobe.com/type/ - have a look around, some font sets are around 100 dollars a font, a bunch are pushing 400 and some of the most elegant script fonts hit well above 1,000 USD per font family... easy. Either way, when you tally them all up (who can live with just one or two), it's possible the most expensive treasure of print shops aren't their expensive Heidelberg presses but their vast fonts collection they are licensed to use in print and publication.
The numbers of fonts needed... by artists and professionals? Well, to gain a perspective... how many of them for free do you have on your computer? Printing departments have thousands of full font collections (condensed, bold, italic etc).
So when new fonts are made available for cheap/free, especially a full family of a given typeface, I am grateful even if the font is so-so. The Open Source community could benefit largely by being nice to budding typographers, this is for sure.
Your iPad/PlayStation/XBOX costs MORE than you are currently paying for it. Apple/Sony/Microsoft is selling it to you more cheaply because they want to make up the difference by selling you software.
I'm calling BS here. I heard the claims of how the XBox business model is based on selling software in some way, but to think Microsoft isn't pulling a profit from selling just the hardware is pure stupidity. Lemme guess, some of us math wizards have been playing with numbers in their SEC reports? Well, those numbers really only go to show how little regulation there is.
Whether it's the game console industry, or movies this sort of number shuffling exists in all industries. May I direct you to a book called 'Sex Stupidity and Greed' (ISBN: 0965104273). The fact is, internal costs are overhead. How much does it cost for Microsoft to maintain Office? It's a bit tricky to say, it's not as simple as tallying up all the paychecks of the software engineers. In Sex Stupidity and Greed, the author gives a grim view of how the movie industry comes up with the numbers to say how much a movie cost them to make. They don't come up with a 100 million dollar value by erroneously tallying up paychecks... they go even one step further. MGM might say... "How much money would we have charged a third party to make this exact movie for them?", and that's what they present to the public.
Not only does it disregard the fact that internal costs of production diminish the total value of the product (most of it can't be directly associated to cost of manufacturing the product due to salaries being part of the expenses of running the business itself.) But the Movie industry goes even a step further, and especially in the IT sector we know damn good and well how the cost inflates a ridiculous amount for each contract position for xyz task. If you're company is paying you 10 dollars an hour, and your boss contracted you out to someone he's charging them 25 dollars an hour. So when they say Avatar cost around 230 million dollars to make, that's total bullshit (it's in house production, it doesn't cost them anything past business expenses). It would have cost *you* 230 million dollars to contract 20th Century Fox to make the movie for you. For the time being, this sort of accounting is perfectly legal for the movie industry.... and for all others too, because only a fool would believe only the movie industry shuffles numbers like this.
Microsoft spends a few billion dollars on xbox development (excuse me, integration actually), only to bank that on hoping a bunch of third party people decide to make games for them? There's an awful lot of 'if's there. Microsoft isn't known for taking chances like that (look at DOJ cases). Especially when there's some power houses in the way, like Sony Playstation preventing Microsoft from essentially doing the same thing to game consoles as they did with home PCs (where distributors had no choice but to pre-install Windows on everything out the door.). So for Microsoft, the Xbox had to be a more realistic business endeavor with the realization that they didn't hold a monopoly but had to penetrate one. And that's hard to do, takes time. Microsoft pulls a profit on that xbox, they make money. They may not make as much money, but if you believe that it cost Microsoft anywhere near 150-300 dollars to put that xbox on the shelf at Best Buy, or if it cost Ford anywhere near 60 thousand dollars to put that Shelby GT500 at the Ford dealership... then you deserve to be economically raped. Fact is, Microsofts business model could have provided leway for a manager to be granted a bonus, raise and assignment to shuffle internal resources around and boom we have an XBOX division... Microsoft is in bed with tons of hardware makers... how much do you really think it costs MS to put that on the shelf? With the reality of business in America, I garuntee that box isn't worth one dime more than 30 dollars.
Speaking of cars, it's even worse for cars. The main reason that Sh
Much respect, but those training items are really smoke screen passed on to the individual workers (as if they had any economic power to bribe a foreign official). They do not apply to upper management or board of directors (who can make those decisions of bribery), never have and probably won't any time soon. However, because you have to take those courses, the board of directors can present on demand an active company practice and policy to appease any would-be investigators, and ultimately provide spin and diversion for public relations statements/responses.
If anything, take a look at all the top CEOs. I wonder how many people from managers to salesman to janitors at Apple are dressed in running shoes and stone washed jeans and a simple shirt like Steve Jobs. Over at Microsoft, I wonder how many people are running around with scruffy hair, no tie top button unbuttoned and half the shirt untucked from a pair of general slacks/khakis. This is just dress code... anything more serious is more than likely far more apparent.
Nature versus Nurture is only a debate for those who so desperately wish they could change their own misfortunes. Nature or genetics, people understand to be final and concrete but believing your social problems are fluid and dynamic (aka, Nurture)... well maybe you can change just by moving the lamp from the nightstand on the left to the nightstand on the right. Maybe we can change ourselves... maybe we can do something about it... but at the end of the day, because you are genetically ugly, you never actually leave the club with the hot chick do you? So we come up with Nurture come backs... (despite all the evidence showing beauty is nothing more than precise proportion and those proportions are natures way of making it visually apparent you have better genes than someone whose proportions aren't so precise, some of us like to believe 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder'). As if, maybe, we can change reality, as if nature is so clumsy as for all it's indicators and years of perfection, they are ultimately meaningless? Face it, 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder' is only something ugly people believe.
Nurture is 90% bullshit. A genetic predisposition to crime born from royalty will simply render a wealthy privileged criminal with political ties. A person that is very smart, regardless of his surroundings will utilize his mind in varying ways... even if his surroundings are nil, he'll make discoveries and write them down... just like it's been done years past. Put a large amount of wealth into an idiots hands, and he'll lose it; regardless if he is born into wealth or if he won the lottery while in his mid-40s. Nurture might askew your opinions, but nothing changes facts.
I think where people get confused is their inability to associate the differences between the two topics of their beliefs. Let's take the following example.
A gene that might make a person able to kill another human being.
That gene exists in a gang banger and he kills someone. He goes to jail, gets "rehabilitated", gets out joins the Army and goes off to war, kills a few more people and gets awarded a medal.
A war veteran is a noble achievement. We change our opinions.. it's a success story, he went from thug to someone respectable... hurray for Nurture. See! Nurture has effect!
He still has that killing gene... if that gene was the ugly gene, he'd still be ugly. That's something, you can't change, no matter what you do.
If your opinion or judgment of those actions are the only mechanism to govern or permit the concept of "Nurture" and you are so willing to perceive the realities of the world around you through those opinions and judgments... well that's schizophrenia, seeing and believing in stuff that doesn't exist.
First, I am a fan of AMD and I'm glad they are being creative with how they might approach the market in the future.
But, this "lottery core" concept, if legal, is a very dangerous precedent pawned off to the consumer. Like atm transaction fees, or any financial transaction fees whatsoever, the only reason they persist is because no one has decided to sue for the practice; all those who might afford the lawsuit in some way benefit from the practice or the short changing effect has negligible effect on them to care.
Anyways, bottom line, is this seems to be an attempt to circumvent all consumer merchandise laws, lemon laws and all other business codes of transaction of goods and services with the justification that it's a "lottery system".
AMD get's away with selling defective products, with refusal of refund, what's to change anyone else from doing so? How would you like for to tell you that you either continue chasing the repair costs or buy another one of their cars? Who is going to regulate AMD to make sure they don't pump defective cores to encourage increased sales volumes (thus profit)? Real lotteries, licensed gambling establishments... even financial services like the stock exchange and investment ventures are all HEAVILY regulated, by organizations that are state/government sanctioned and have real teeth and have in the past used their teeth. AMD is simply a business... who is going to regulate them? Is the Nevada Gaming Commission going to govern all the gaming machines that determine which chips are lotto winners? Are they going to come in and close production lines indefinitely until the algorithms are fixed? Are they going to make sure there are no back-doors? Are they going to prosecute whoever if fraud is found? What about all the merchantability laws that protect consumers purchasing goods?
This concept is not new... real lotteries exist. What is new more or less is to expand this as a means justify pawning defective goods off on the consumer as a 'lottery system' based purchase.
I strongly condemn this proposal and I hope to god this is an April Fools joke.
My family, my kind, my countrymen... as for you? Out of sight, out of mind. I make laws to handle disputes among me and my countrymen, not you. I make laws in my own interest, not yours. My laws apply to me, by me, for me, as follows so do the Rights I have on account of those laws; if you want something similar, write up your own laws. My currency better have recognizable faces, those faces must be iconic to some fundamental aspect of my being or allegiance; a founding father of my own country is very fundamental, neutral and allows for social dynamics. You have your own founding fathers; my money is for my country. My country, given the variables, has developed it's own cultures and beliefs, practices, patterns of behavior and propensities. Those propensities and the like, govern severity of consequences, if there shall be consequences for any given act we deem to be illegal. Punishment must be relative to general lifestyles; so don't make a fuss about public executions in Saudi Arabia while a Saudi would be appalled by your ridiculous crime rates. When in Rome, so when you get here, leave your opinions, beliefs and preconceptions at the border because you're nothing but a tourist, a guest holding a hall pass, a permission slip, a perishable visa. A vagabond of sorts, a long ways from home. It's best to be on your best behavior, till you return home, anything good for you depends on our willful hospitality.
Nationalism is self identity. Nationalism is self dignity. Nationalism is self respect. Nationalism is self pride. Nationalism is brotherhood. Nationalism is family scaled to society.
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I work with a fair number of ngc.com; I'm a contractor myself. At one point, I had a few interviews for Northrop and I'm so glad they over looked my talents because they seem to abuse the talent they have.
Now, this may not be for every department or division, but almost every NGC employee I know is basically well familiar with furlough. Whether good or bad, NGC is left with the ability to place entire departments on furlough to reduce overhead costs in the event a contract dries up. Now perhaps it's their size, perhaps they simply don't care about their workers, but this sort of thing seems to happen often. I'd guess that no NGC employee with a tenure more than 2 years hasn't been out of work for up to a month or so. But this is how things are run there.
See, government contracting works like this. You create a company, hire some folk to work on a contract. Whatever their salary is, you charge the government +50% or more, so essentially the government is not only flat out paying your salary but also the company for your services. If the contract ends, so does your job as the company may not want to charge overhead. In contrast to other business sectors, employment typically isn't grounded so harshly on the existence of a contract, which is where cost of business and business management can keep workers afloat even during down times (think department store).
I only point out Northrop because while all government contracting is essentially this contract+play model, Northrop has a reputation of placing people on furlough much more often than other companies such as CACI, Raytheon, General Atomics etc. Some Northrop employees seem to live the lives similar to actors and actresses in Hollywood, and I'm not talking about Tom Hanks acting, but maybe those actors that get little spots from time to time on your sitcoms. They literally live in apartments, and wait for the phone to ring day after day. Northrop employees seem to wake up in the morning, wondering if they'll still have a job at the end of the day.
What does this observation have to do with the op? Well, it seems that moral and motivation might be a bit low on a large scale at Northrop, so such blunders are no surprise to me.
What happens if an ISP says... "We don't have the logs."?
Nope, they all use FFMPEG, which is based in France. France does not recognise software patents, so they are not required to pay anything. Using them in the USA without a patent license, however, is illegal.
Wow, learn something new everyday.
France doesn't recognize software patents? Man, I almost feel bad disliking the French for so long. I only wonder how much worse it might get in America before I decide to look into immigrating to France.
A lot of technology in Avionics, for decades, has been stagnant. It might not seem so when we grovel over a F22 Raptor or the Russian PAK FA fighter. Not to belittle the development of these crafts, really it's the vector thrust that primarily puts them in their league. Much of the planes are the same as much older planes going as far back as the 60s. For example, MIL-STD 1553B is on that F22 Raptor and it probably has TADIL support and maybe even JTIDS if it's really 'bleeding edge'. MIL-STD 1553B is 1978, and despite it's problems and the fact it's a bus architecture, it's not going away and will be in use for decades to come in the field of avionics. Yes, there's 1553C and 1773 (1553 over fiber), but the only people using those are test labs; problem is, none of the terminals support anything but 1553B. Serial communications on those planes are far better than consumer serial, but they are too old and really just inconvenient for the consumer as to why they never took off (RS-539, RS-422 real RS-232 25pin Synchronous and Async when able). This is just the tactical communications technologies for the planes; airframe requirements pretty much lock those down to mere allowances for aesthetics more than anything else.
Why is this? Well, all the old technologies given to us by the forefathers of avionics works. Every piece of that plane is certified, making changes or deviations from those requirements astronomically expensive. For example, most terminals used in avionics are unique and rare items which also make them very expensive... 20 million USD for one that is operational; despite it's age. For any avionics system coming onto the market that claims to support any of the standards, a government program office has to allocate millions of dollars just in routine test procedures to be sure your component does nothing more or nothing less than what is precisely expected for any given scenario (this also means your machine has to mimic known bugs; if it doesn't then someone might develop a component that crutches it self against your "fix" and the end result a 747 crashes killing 243 people on board).
And that is the main reason technology in avionics moves so slow, just as it does slowly in every other critical field like medicine or cryptography (Lots of hospitals still rely heavily on old obsolete HP PA-RISC VME technology). (Yeah I know, your iPhone can crunch keys better than those ugly government doodads; but the iPhone isn't certified to handle it, and it's uncertain it will work every time in all conditions. That ugly government device will work, and provide the exact result, every time; rain or shine.)
Then we have people who have no idea what it's like to clean up passenger plane wreck, who think their simple uncertified and untested .99 cent iPhone locator software may some how locate a blackbox underneath a mile of water... no emitter can transmit through that much mass; there is no GPS locator that can locate a blackbox in the ocean that deep. That much salt water density, you'd have to be touching it with RFID. GPS locator technology is from the avionics industry... decades later... mind you. There's no technology the consumer uses that would help them find these black boxes more. Most of consumer technology is scraps from government/military technology after it's been used and abused, the private sector isn't creating anything fundamentally new. I know that hurts, but it's the truth, virtually all the R&D is on the governments dime.
Ultimately, when we find said machines the question then would be 'who built them'?
He's arguing, in real life, the old philosophical questions regarding divinity. On one hand, how can we mere mortals possibly understand what an all-powerful being is thinking... easy, "God works in mysterious ways" pretty much sums this up. The "all-powerful" is an extreme, but this predicament exists in everyday life, today. While our upper 1% struggle and argue over the words of our most acclaimed thinkers like Steven Hawkins, the fact is the vast majority of the common man will never be able to comprehend many of the concepts he's engulfed in.
Now, Steven Hawkings isn't a super powerful alien capable of interstellar travel. The societies, civilization, beings we are trying to detect, in fact are.
If a being is capable of interstellar travel, then a 13 year lag seems unreasonable (our closest star is Alpha Centari right? 13 light years away?). I would venture to guess, they have found a faster than light ability to transmit information, well, we thought of quantum entanglement, is there a way to detect that? Point is, we are looking for only civilizations that are about the exact same level of technology that we are, and this is a point I think Seth Shostak is trying to get at. We aren't likely to find another intelligent life, so easily, who just so happens to have been where we are, using the technology we are, a few billion years ago.
He's arguing, that we should come up with ways to detect technology itself, mechanics and machinery, computers or application of some of our most cutting edge theories of information and travel.
I can hardly disagree.
Really? Since I'm certain that you read the application as I did, then you will see that this is a feature that a lot of people would like to have, including myself. I want them to be able to figure out who douche bag is who stole my phone, where they are and brick the device
So if you're so authoritarian enough to want such drastic measures taken in the event you forgot your expensive overpriced iPhone on the counter at some dive-bar, packed on a Friday night, while in a drunken stupor then it's OK that a mega international corporation is also as irrational? You don't want the iPhone bricked, you just want to get back at the person who might have innocently picked it up.
I've found cell phones before. I've found them in my car, months after the fact. Juice it up, turn it on flip through the address book pick someone and text message them, "hey I found this phone, can you tell them I have it? Have them call." Even if it's a cheap phone, the address book and text messaging history is always nice.
Besides, broadcast satellite corporations were doing this for years. Attempting to destroy washed smart cards via a special signal received. There was even a network up to notify all the DSS/Satellite hackers when and how long to turn off their receivers. So, prior art regardless of reading the article, whether it's for legit purposes or for battling evil hackers.
Now, don't try to take a moral high-ground by rationalizing and agreeing with someone who's obviously doing something stupid. It's like two criminals saying "hey, the ethics square is here where we are standing!". OMG I lost my iPhone... no some douche must have stole it! BRICK IT NOW! Screw that douche!
My hemorrhoid flare up is visible every night!
Xenophobic as a negative term is only used by foreigners trying to get into or stay within a richer country.
Sometimes I wish America wasn't as well-off so you idiots would shut the hell up. This is my country, not yours; so piss off if you don't like the way we do things or how we treat you.
If Indians from India weren't so insistent they know how to speak English, when they obviously do not, then perhaps their mangled verbiage wouldn't be such a stereotype.
BTW, that's still not the site for government military job postings. Most importantly, it's not indicative to a lack of American expertise as the op suggested.
Which would be an Indian stereotype of Americans, but I notice your hypocritical ass didn't point that out did you?
Stereotype, aka pattern recognition. So stuff it with your PC crap.
In my field and in many hard sciences there are no qualified americans to do the job. The Department of State actually has a webpage where they list the type of skills that are scarce in the country and the types that aren't. Here is the page for computer and mathematical types of jobs [onetcenter.org]. The outlook doesn't look bad. On the other hand, if you're a skilled auto-industry worker, I don't think the outlook is the same. And believe it or not, I have a pretty good idea of what skills set most H1Bs have...
You quote Department of State, but your web link is to '.org'. Give me .gov or .mil and then perhaps you might not come off as stupid; someone lied to you if you think that .org site is a Department of State website, I know the real Department of State website for jobs and a .org isn't it. On your website, they list "Network Designers", "Statisticians" and "Video Game Designers". Just a few, but are you really going to sit there and suggest there are no qualified American "Statisticians"? No "Network Designers"? Oh, "Computer Support Specialists" is a real cute one.
The only thing that makes Indian H1-B attractive is the low-pay and the hope that maybe what they create will "be good enough". It's a game of chance wealthy greedy people play from time to time; because mediocrity often sells, WalMart is a perfect example of this fact. You people actually think you're being hired because you are "good".
As a person who has had to repair broken H1-B code for some American corporations. I'll tell you, the programmers who worked on those projects didn't know the first thing about programming or even English. The code was garbage and needed to be redesigned from the ground up, costing the corporation a lot of cash. Not to mention, finding a few IP violations within the code, but since the project had been outsourced the company figured they could point the finger at someone else should someone find out.
They paid a high-powered American to draw out on paper what is needed for 200 dollars an hour on contract. Then they had their own well paid professionals break down the work flow further and act as integrators sending off job-components to outsourced monkey programmers. But had monkeys actually done the jobs perhaps their plan would have worked, instead of chimpanzee's from the San Diego Zoo, they had H1-Bs from India do it.
The only outsourcing that produced admirable work that I had to work with, was outsourcing to other G7 countries like France. It's only I don't like France being an American so that adds a bit of animosity to the equation but it was good work. Anything from the Germans are very good, and Russians are very well capable of providing ground-breaking work (probably more so than anyone else), just have to make sure they aren't skirting you by putting Igor the total newb on the job. British always have a sense of humor and it's worth it just to listen to them talk and joke around; oh and they do very good work too.
But you know the thing is? G7 outsourcing is expensive, very expensive. India outsourcing is cheap, very cheap. So, perhaps the old adage of "you get what you pay for" applies to labor interests.
I think the author of the post forgot about the FTC investigation into Oracle purchasing Sun Microsystems, because of the Open Source interests that would be acquired specifically MySQL.
This says one thing, the FTC recognizes FSF/FOSS as a market force.
Should Oracle, or any other company for that matter attempt to buy up any commercial support for FOSS, I believe the FTC and Governments around the globe would have them in court before the transaction could take place. Their 70 billion will be drained from their coffers into the bonus checks of all those law firms.
Oracle is an IT company, who has had the luxury if evading almost every 'war' this industry has seen. It's what makes them so scary in a way, but it also allows them to maneuver under the guise that there's no historical reasons to over react. They realize, I'm sure, that all their monies come from *us*. Who else is going to recommend Oracle? Expensive, Oracle? They aren't in the position of Microsoft, who can disregard the industries brightest minds because stupid people keep buying computers with Windows installed. Oracle made their zillions, in part, from actually appealing to the people who know a good database when they see it.
Oracle and the world witnessed this community eat our own, SCO. So I hope they recognize we really do believe in what we preach and will refrain from anything stupid. I think we are a tad apathetic towards Oracle's new toys, but we are watching and a little cautious and so are other people. Had Microsoft tried to buy Sun, we would have drawn guns cocked and loaded, Oracle... we checked to see if we had ammo and sat down to see what happens.
SSDs are too expensive. Retarded even, have you priced one yet? When the cost difference is that great, between the same HDD of the same data capacity, then the performance issues are irrelevant (yes, even if they could transfer information twice as fast as they do now, they are worthless due to scant storage space and price.) Actually, when it comes to HDs, I doubt performance is the most important factor over storage, cost and reliability. Oh, and let's not ignore the reliability either. SSDs will eventually die, and predictions are rather accurate making them less desirable, considering the fact I have 25 year old hard drives from database servers that still work fine today.
SSDs have to drop in cost, a lot. They should be cheaper than SATA drives largely because they always have less storage space. The justification for their price is the read performance, as many of the current SSDs don't even have comparable write advantages over say UltraSCSI 320 or SATA II. What they seem to be banking on, is public acceptance that the drives are "fast" because their computer boots up faster, or maybe a game loads faster, fair enough... but does that justify the cost? I don't think so.
I just recently got an iPhone. Took a look at the app store, saw a cool gun application. It allows you to disassemble the weapons, fire them even has an Uzi with a setting that resembles x-ray so you can see the internal parts moving. I thought it was a cool app, bought it.
It only comes with one crappy gun. The other guns, cost another dollar each. I felt cheated, had this been a physical product from WalMart, I would have immediately drove to the store and returned it and got my money back (IT industry needs to do something about this, products need to be refunded if the customer is not satisfied.). I bought one or two extra guns, but I won't anymore... mostly curious about my new iPhone, mostly curious about this new environment is the only reason I did it... the new guns were nothing "new".
I recently stopped playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. The game sucks, even if it were "k-rad", I still wouldn't be playing it. They want to charge me for a handful of new maps. I already bought the game, it's their business to keep me playing and recommending it to my friends. I'm not going to foot the bill of keeping their game on the top of the charts... not only do they want me to play more, they want me to pay more to do so? Seems underhanded to me, the audacity of those guys. It works like this, I'll buy the game initially but it's your expense to encourage me to continue playing it, or buying sequels. Because they wanted to charge me for those new maps (two of them weren't even new but ported from old CoD releases), I promptly uninstalled the game and threw the discs in the trash.
Now, subscription games are different. There's continuity, longevity and immersion justifying perpetuity with most subscription games to date, MMORPGs for all I'm aware of. Most importantly, it's understood that the game is in continuity and so we agree to pay a subscription fee to participate in the virtual reality. There is no continuity or longevity in most First Person Shooter games, specifically Call of Duty MW2 which is a classic FPS game. Most importantly, it's understood that we buy the game and that's it, the clock starts ticking before boredom sets in. First day I installed Call of Duty MW2, I beat the single player part... the multi-player part got boring less than a month later because the maps are few, and no one seemed to be customizing anything like in the days of Unreal Tournament and Quake. I didn't like the network architecture but that's a different thread.
So initial conditions of agreement and what I expect plays a major role in whether I will "purchase" additional content for a peace of software.
At least in the 90s, some musicians were paid via plastic. Just like a corporate credit card... here's the gimmick.
Suppose your boss said, "sure, you'll be making about 120k per year salary. Instead of you mucking with the all the accounting yourself, take the corporate credit card and just charge it whenever you want to buy goods and services. Permitted use of this card, is your pay." Any over charge gets tacked on as an recouping expense of said "loan" described in the article... but here's the money maker.
Most people don't spend 120k (hypothetical value) per year, especially if they were poor before; even if they binge and purge and party as hard as they vision rich people doing. Talking of binging and purging, you get the artist high, so he cares more about high quality cocaine than a money market account, or a 30k dollar Rolex. Due to the agreements of pay, what he doesn't spend ends right back in the pockets of the record labels. What he does spend? That too, because the reality is, if anyone in Hollywood gets busted for drugs or prostitution and it gets put on the news; what we are seeing is the result of someone pissing off someone in the entertainment industry. They control a lot of those channels and adult entertainment industries (which should be obvious, the porn industry is part of the entertainment industry), the cost of a plate full of cocaine and a up-and-coming porn actress gets tacked on for living the rockstar/rapstar life style at market price. When, the girl works for the same people, two doors down the hall... walk from one set riding some guy, to this trailer riding that guy who thinks he's got girls crawling all over him because he's famous. (for the record, I would love for some of them to crawl on me... but the point is, he gets charged and the record company was in full control the whole time.) I bet Lindsey Lohan didn't want to have sex with some record exec... and now she's again crying before a judge.
So some of those record labels only needed to pay the artist, the exact amount of money to keep him incapacitated and distracted; it turns out, it doesn't cost a whole lot at all. (Hollywood does this too, with actors and actresses).
I can't say this added perk was extensively used throughout the recording industry, but it was used. It might still be used. But it's just one more underhanded way of getting one more dime from the artist.
It is a disgusting industry. It should be made illegal and everyone within it making more than 50K a year should go directly to jail for the rest of their life; no courts, no jury, no plea... just the clink of a jail cell.
Considering the average foxcon worker makes $200 a month, or $2400 a year, and the average US high school drop out makes $20,000 a year. So you need roughly 8 chinese users to equal one high school dropout in terms of buying power. So yes, china has the most number of internet users, however, they are quite literally worthless.
Apparently, this guy has never visited another country other than America.
That 2400 dollars a year won't work in America, because all of the exorbitant prices we have because we have people making 20,000 a year.
I was in Thailand in May of 2010. I just got back from Taiwan, three days ago. A double quarter pounder meal in America, specifically California will run you about 10 USD easy (oh and taxes). Do you know how much that exact same meal, at Mc Donalds in Thailand cost? The exchange rate is about 32 to 1, so a Thai national would come to America and 320 baht price tag and think "my god"; you see, in Thailand, that meal (including imported American beef patties) costs maybe 20 baht... less than an American dollar. Oh, did I mention, that's expensive for eating at a restaurant in Thailand too? Food and services is very cheap there, as they are in Taiwan too. Taiwan has a similar exchange rate, Thai Baht is almost 1 to 1.
Housing? Cost of living? Not so much in Taiwan, but food costs seem regulated to keep them down and affordable in Thailand. So those people only making 2000 baht a year, are still eating far better than upper middle class American families, yes upper middle class. Thai nationals literally can have lobster tail and top sirloin steak every meal every day. How many Americans do you know can afford to eat a 30 dollar Lobster meal every day for every meal?
Clothes, Thailand and Taiwan both have extensive textile industries... something America used to have but no longer. Clothes are very cheap in these areas, knock-offs or the real thing. The only time things get expensive are in high-class malls (which do not exist in America at all, the Paragon Mall in Thailand has a Lamborghini, Maserati, BMW, Porsche, Lotus and Bentley car dealerships INSIDE the mall... complete with multiple show cars, on the fourth level... you never seen anything that up scale in America) for their own and global wealthy elite. The Taipei 101 mall in Taiwan is absolutely ridiculous that can rival any stupid little American show on high-rollers in Las Vegas; these malls have watch stores that make Cartier look like a cheap Timex watch on the shelf at Wal-Mart.
So we aren't that high class. We aren't making that much money. Our numbers are very big... but it's akin to a Thai national to brag to you about how much money he drops at the club with his exchange rate being 31 to one... and calling you skimpy. Not fair is it. Nor is it fair for you to use raw numbers to think we have more purchasing power than the chinese who only make 2400 a year. Because, they have PS3s just like you. They have flat screen HDTVs just like you. They have cars, one or two per house hold just like you. Their girls sport Louis Vuitton items, just like the American girl who saves up three or four paychecks to get one herself. They go to clubs, parks and museums, rock concerts and other outings just like you.
If you think the average Chinese population doesn't have purchasing power... you obviously have not been there and looked around. They have night markets galore. They have their own multi-billion dollar companies that you never heard of. They have more expansion and construction building cities up than you have ever witnessed in America at any point in it's history.
Do they have poverty? Oh hell yes. So does America. But, then again. In America poverty equals high-crime and ignoble activities... in China, it's mostly just poverty (you don't stand the chance you do in getting mugged, raped or killed there as you do in American ghettos). Most Americans avoid poor areas of their cities... like the plague. So they get online and talk about how poo
E=mc^2 is probably the only one recognizable to most people. Most of those people will more associate that equation to "Einstein" than to math or physics. Most of the remaining will associate the equation to being the main equation in General Relativity rather than simply a part of Special Relativity. Fewer people ever took a physics class that actually had them use the equation, most of these people will associate the equation to the Nuclear Bomb. Almost all of these people won't realize Einsteins Nobel Prize lends more to his work with photosynthesis and photoelectric (how light can be converted into energy, how plants do it); they think he got it because of this simple equation only. Most people can regurgitate "Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared" with a great deal of undeserved confidence; though even many who hold degrees in physics might still have some issues actually understanding what the equation means and entails; the entire set of concepts that surround this equation, from General and Special Relativity to quantum sciences.
So, you see. If you understand E=mc^2, one of the most famous equations of the modern age. So few actually knows anything about it; though everyone will have an opinion or belief of what it might mean. A theoretical physicist might appreciate and understand your message, but the every day person will just see it as a synonym for genius and might think you are thinking a bit high of yourself.
Oh, and if you get more complicated, good luck finding a tattoo artist that knows this stuff. Take a look at all the bad tattooes out there with blatant misspellings. Now think of how tedious some of these math equations get. You better make damn sure they get it right, make damn sure YOU have it right. Otherwise, you'll come of really stupid with a tattoo of the Pythagorean theorem that's ultimately incorrect and every high school kid is going to know it.
Exactly what has a portable ever replaced from a desktop? Nothing I can find.
To this day, any portable that can deliver, "near" desktop power is pretty much a desktop effectively. This laptops are ridiculously expensive (so the portable factor is more from this desk to that desk; and not much for playing Crysis in the woods on a rotting tree stump while hunting deer), fans everywhere so you have to find a decent surface to place them (again, no rotting tree stump, or dusty hood of a truck at a construction site). They get too hot for your lap even if you ignore it's needs for air flow (not a good choice for the flight). Then, we connect gaming mice to them... requiring more accommodations and making them that much more semi-permanent once settled (again, the table at your seat on an airplane just won't do for this).
At this point, your laptop may not be "chained" but it is glued to your desk. At least we accept the "chained" aspect of the desktop. I've had a number of "bad ass desktop power" laptops... and the "glue" factor really becomes a massive annoyance and deterrence to portability. Even the mediocre laptops sometimes have these stupid little maintenance issues that "glue" it to a desktop or table top... heck, even finding a power outlet and having to heave that adapter around with it everywhere is a major pain. My laptops are desktops virtually. They never move, too much of a hassle to move them, they weigh too much, the brick adds a few more pounds, it's just too much to hassle at Starbucks. I'll keep my iPad for mobile movie watching and checking email and I'll keep my desktop for playing games, CAD or everything else that requires a lot of computing power.
The laptop will disappear, not the desktop.
If you think this doesn't happen in America, you're naive.
From the start, the system guides the child down certain paths. (Disputes against IQ tests, particularly one group having better education is self-reflecting of the IQ studies as those IQ tests are given before education starts... mainly, upon entry or before enrolling into the 1st grade). I remember the testing myself, I started the first grade at around age three to four years old (I turned four during the year) and I never went to kindergarten.
As you progress in the American education system, you get encouraged to take certain classes. A child of an IQ score of 90 or below will never pass a Calculus class; probably will never pass the prerequisite classes to get to Calculus honestly; they'll probably never get out of remedial general math... adding and subtracting. *Cue the folk who for the sake of argument claim they had IQ scores of 80 yet ended up acing AP Calculus in high-school, I guess we should give the morons hope so say what you will. I know you're a liar.*
Thousands of years of education systems, this system is down to a science and highly accurate. "Look at me boy... I see it in your eyes, you go to that room there. You'll hear words like 'goods', 'merchants', 'business', 'theory and postulates' and 'degrees/diplomas'. " "Look at me boy... look at me! Nothing. You go into that room, you'll hear words like 'craftsman', 'journeyman', 'master', 'apprentice', 'vocation'." I had to fight the school to let me take a woodshop class, they were correct in assuming I was just looking for an easy 'A' but also a friend was taking the class and I just wanted to hang out with him. By that time, the deed had already been done. In my classes, eyes lit up to the sounds of Bachelors and Masters degrees... and what is needed to get them. In wood shop class eyes lit up with the prospect of success as a Master of a vocational trade. Those kids struggled just as my peers struggled in our classes... they wouldn't have a chance in hell with trigonometry.
Part of all of this, is to set each child into a relative reality proportional to their own capabilities. On the down side, this reinforces the illusion of equality, on the up side they are generally happy as their scale of success is supposedly within their grasp. A kid with an IQ of 90 will simply never become a neuro-surgeon no matter how much of his little mind he puts forth towards the effort; so don't even take him down a path where he might catch wind of such absurd goals given his limitations.
In Russia, they do the same thing--limited people get sent to PTU instead of Universities. In America, it's cleverly masked into the system from the start so it's not as obvious. Plus, in America there are opportunities all the way through that are put in place to catch all those that might slip through the cracks. (A genius might get sent down the wrong path from the start, but given cross roads throughout the system, odds are he's going to take one of them, odds are he'll get noticed... even if it's, college transfer studies at a community college after dropping out.) This might make us feel good about the American system, but there's a dark side too. It only goes to magnify the sheer fact of mental limitations for someone who misses every cross road; reasons for missing them by this time are largely irrelevant.
They do this in every education system... this "streaming" you speak of.
It's bad enough, the realization that I am mortal, that I'm inevitably going to die. Historically, most succumb to this reality and hope they die with dignity, honor or respect and admiration but technically most have always hoped they simply die in their sleep at an old age. No one wants to think about being horribly maimed in a car accident only to die slow and painfully. No one wants to think about dieing of Alzheimer's, or leprosy or any horrible condition perhaps lung cancer. The truth is, dieing in your sleep at a ripe old age is like winning the lottery, few do. So after accepting this reality, one begs the question; do you really want to know how you will go? I think it's best ignorance addresses and governs this question; careless pursuit of such truths could only do more harm than good. Genetic predisposition is becoming well understood, more so the actual understanding of the genetic code (so then it won't be a predisposition but a geneticist can say for a fact "if you live long enough, you will develop cancer, in fact by looking at your code, you have around 9,934,485,343 more permutations before this code activates). To add insult to injury, the man will charge you for this information. This isn't far fetched, the more we understand genetics it may come to light that it's nothing more than an algorithm just like every other machine or functioning system. Some things can catalyze progression of a trait such as smoking might speed up lung cancer but in the end, we all have a death gene somewhere that regardless if we smoke or swallow radioactive materials should we live long enough the same cancer will activate.
I don't want to know myself. I'd rather the doctor tell me upon diagnosis that way I lived my life rich in hope and expectation with the show only getting serious near the end; as expected anyways.
Good uses for this technology would be for... say, part of Special Forces training... testing for congenital heart problems... you don't want a SEAL going into sudden cardiac arrest during a mission ten or so years later. Or a large crane operator to just go into a massive epileptic seizure with several tons on the line 80 stories up.
I think this is good technology. But there should be some heavy arguments about divulging this information in fine detail to just anyone. Perhaps a doctor might know I am prone to have prostate cancer, he can consider that when prescribing medicine or undergoing medical procedures... but I don't want to know that 20 years in advance. I want to live my life free of this dire burden of knowledge. It will be a heavy burden believe me, ever see how people in California go into a fit because someone is smoking, as if it's some life threatening issue... like say, maybe walking around with milk jug full of sarin gas... how ridiculous people get over their "beliefs". Now, tell them something like what's written in stone for them... jesus christ will the shit hit the fan.
I can see it now, "I'm going to sue MTV because they are promoting a beach life style putting social pressures on me, my genetic doctor at Wal-Mart told me I have a rare gene for a type of skin cancer that'll make me die looking like Freddy Kruger and I want my equal rights... even though... genetically, I'm not equal... um... yeah I'll let the lawyer deal with that problem...." Poor McDonalds... they already got sued for having hot coffee... what are they going to do against someone destined for diabetes or maybe if they have the "fat bastard" gene that makes them weigh over 300lbs?
A large part of the legal system is to simply solve disputes. An almost certainty in any dispute is deceit, lying or other forms of ill will for which it's the duty of the courts to make a decision and hopefully the lies and ill wills will surface and justice will be served. Of course, in this fantasy world, unicorns run wild too but it's nice to think about but even harder to ignore that this is exactly what the legal system hopes to do.
If a device can systematically and scientifically determine if a person is lying... what use is a jury for? Why have a judge for that matter? Perhaps to represent authority and lay down consequences or compensation? Such a device wouldn't do away with the entire legal system, but it could certainly drastically change the face and foundation of that practice. For instance, a murder suspect is plugged into this device and it says that he's guilty? Suppose we have common understanding of how it works, making it very difficult to question it's reliability making it indisputably trustworthy (unlike current lie detecting machines that measure subtle electrical impulses, and demonstrated methods of circumvention).
It's my understanding that certain things like truth serums are illegal as evidence in some courts... perhaps this is because they are too effective? Lawyers want to keep the current legal landscape instead of foreseeing a future where they can no longer justify their outrageous retainer fees? The way by which truth serums work, you can even get a feel for the subjects intents and purposes without playing 20-Questions, which would really throw a switch and render cross examination worthless effort. There would be no Criminal Law... as any suspect would spill all beans effortlessly... and I imagine that's a huge revenue source for lawyers and legislatures. These serums are still used, for the most sensitive subjects. But as for the public eye, it's better to dredge through debates and word play, with the serum the truth might get in the way of an agenda. As long as there can be doubt, the people are at the mercy of word play and random decisions; the effect makes it possible for corrupt powerful men to insist on a fabricated truth or present a scapegoat, but it can also permit a clever criminal in getting off the hook.
I think fMRI in combination with truth serums should replace all criminal prosecution. Have a verdict as fast as you can prepare the injection and fMRI device; and be 100% sure of it.
Fonts are often taken for granted. People don't seem to realize how expensive fonts can get.
http://www.adobe.com/type/ - have a look around, some font sets are around 100 dollars a font, a bunch are pushing 400 and some of the most elegant script fonts hit well above 1,000 USD per font family... easy. Either way, when you tally them all up (who can live with just one or two), it's possible the most expensive treasure of print shops aren't their expensive Heidelberg presses but their vast fonts collection they are licensed to use in print and publication.
The numbers of fonts needed... by artists and professionals? Well, to gain a perspective... how many of them for free do you have on your computer? Printing departments have thousands of full font collections (condensed, bold, italic etc).
So when new fonts are made available for cheap/free, especially a full family of a given typeface, I am grateful even if the font is so-so. The Open Source community could benefit largely by being nice to budding typographers, this is for sure.
Your iPad/PlayStation/XBOX costs MORE than you are currently paying for it. Apple/Sony/Microsoft is selling it to you more cheaply because they want to make up the difference by selling you software.
I'm calling BS here. I heard the claims of how the XBox business model is based on selling software in some way, but to think Microsoft isn't pulling a profit from selling just the hardware is pure stupidity. Lemme guess, some of us math wizards have been playing with numbers in their SEC reports? Well, those numbers really only go to show how little regulation there is.
Whether it's the game console industry, or movies this sort of number shuffling exists in all industries. May I direct you to a book called 'Sex Stupidity and Greed' (ISBN: 0965104273). The fact is, internal costs are overhead. How much does it cost for Microsoft to maintain Office? It's a bit tricky to say, it's not as simple as tallying up all the paychecks of the software engineers. In Sex Stupidity and Greed, the author gives a grim view of how the movie industry comes up with the numbers to say how much a movie cost them to make. They don't come up with a 100 million dollar value by erroneously tallying up paychecks... they go even one step further. MGM might say... "How much money would we have charged a third party to make this exact movie for them?", and that's what they present to the public.
Not only does it disregard the fact that internal costs of production diminish the total value of the product (most of it can't be directly associated to cost of manufacturing the product due to salaries being part of the expenses of running the business itself.) But the Movie industry goes even a step further, and especially in the IT sector we know damn good and well how the cost inflates a ridiculous amount for each contract position for xyz task. If you're company is paying you 10 dollars an hour, and your boss contracted you out to someone he's charging them 25 dollars an hour. So when they say Avatar cost around 230 million dollars to make, that's total bullshit (it's in house production, it doesn't cost them anything past business expenses). It would have cost *you* 230 million dollars to contract 20th Century Fox to make the movie for you. For the time being, this sort of accounting is perfectly legal for the movie industry.... and for all others too, because only a fool would believe only the movie industry shuffles numbers like this.
Microsoft spends a few billion dollars on xbox development (excuse me, integration actually), only to bank that on hoping a bunch of third party people decide to make games for them? There's an awful lot of 'if's there. Microsoft isn't known for taking chances like that (look at DOJ cases). Especially when there's some power houses in the way, like Sony Playstation preventing Microsoft from essentially doing the same thing to game consoles as they did with home PCs (where distributors had no choice but to pre-install Windows on everything out the door.). So for Microsoft, the Xbox had to be a more realistic business endeavor with the realization that they didn't hold a monopoly but had to penetrate one. And that's hard to do, takes time. Microsoft pulls a profit on that xbox, they make money. They may not make as much money, but if you believe that it cost Microsoft anywhere near 150-300 dollars to put that xbox on the shelf at Best Buy, or if it cost Ford anywhere near 60 thousand dollars to put that Shelby GT500 at the Ford dealership... then you deserve to be economically raped. Fact is, Microsofts business model could have provided leway for a manager to be granted a bonus, raise and assignment to shuffle internal resources around and boom we have an XBOX division... Microsoft is in bed with tons of hardware makers... how much do you really think it costs MS to put that on the shelf? With the reality of business in America, I garuntee that box isn't worth one dime more than 30 dollars.
Speaking of cars, it's even worse for cars. The main reason that Sh
Much respect, but those training items are really smoke screen passed on to the individual workers (as if they had any economic power to bribe a foreign official). They do not apply to upper management or board of directors (who can make those decisions of bribery), never have and probably won't any time soon. However, because you have to take those courses, the board of directors can present on demand an active company practice and policy to appease any would-be investigators, and ultimately provide spin and diversion for public relations statements/responses.
If anything, take a look at all the top CEOs. I wonder how many people from managers to salesman to janitors at Apple are dressed in running shoes and stone washed jeans and a simple shirt like Steve Jobs. Over at Microsoft, I wonder how many people are running around with scruffy hair, no tie top button unbuttoned and half the shirt untucked from a pair of general slacks/khakis. This is just dress code... anything more serious is more than likely far more apparent.
Nature versus Nurture is only a debate for those who so desperately wish they could change their own misfortunes. Nature or genetics, people understand to be final and concrete but believing your social problems are fluid and dynamic (aka, Nurture)... well maybe you can change just by moving the lamp from the nightstand on the left to the nightstand on the right. Maybe we can change ourselves... maybe we can do something about it... but at the end of the day, because you are genetically ugly, you never actually leave the club with the hot chick do you? So we come up with Nurture come backs... (despite all the evidence showing beauty is nothing more than precise proportion and those proportions are natures way of making it visually apparent you have better genes than someone whose proportions aren't so precise, some of us like to believe 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder'). As if, maybe, we can change reality, as if nature is so clumsy as for all it's indicators and years of perfection, they are ultimately meaningless? Face it, 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder' is only something ugly people believe.
Nurture is 90% bullshit. A genetic predisposition to crime born from royalty will simply render a wealthy privileged criminal with political ties. A person that is very smart, regardless of his surroundings will utilize his mind in varying ways... even if his surroundings are nil, he'll make discoveries and write them down... just like it's been done years past. Put a large amount of wealth into an idiots hands, and he'll lose it; regardless if he is born into wealth or if he won the lottery while in his mid-40s. Nurture might askew your opinions, but nothing changes facts.
I think where people get confused is their inability to associate the differences between the two topics of their beliefs. Let's take the following example.
A gene that might make a person able to kill another human being.
That gene exists in a gang banger and he kills someone.
He goes to jail, gets "rehabilitated", gets out joins the Army and goes off to war, kills a few more people and gets awarded a medal.
A war veteran is a noble achievement. We change our opinions.. it's a success story, he went from thug to someone respectable... hurray for Nurture. See! Nurture has effect!
He still has that killing gene... if that gene was the ugly gene, he'd still be ugly. That's something, you can't change, no matter what you do.
If your opinion or judgment of those actions are the only mechanism to govern or permit the concept of "Nurture" and you are so willing to perceive the realities of the world around you through those opinions and judgments... well that's schizophrenia, seeing and believing in stuff that doesn't exist.
First, I am a fan of AMD and I'm glad they are being creative with how they might approach the market in the future.
But, this "lottery core" concept, if legal, is a very dangerous precedent pawned off to the consumer. Like atm transaction fees, or any financial transaction fees whatsoever, the only reason they persist is because no one has decided to sue for the practice; all those who might afford the lawsuit in some way benefit from the practice or the short changing effect has negligible effect on them to care.
Anyways, bottom line, is this seems to be an attempt to circumvent all consumer merchandise laws, lemon laws and all other business codes of transaction of goods and services with the justification that it's a "lottery system".
AMD get's away with selling defective products, with refusal of refund, what's to change anyone else from doing so? How would you like for to tell you that you either continue chasing the repair costs or buy another one of their cars? Who is going to regulate AMD to make sure they don't pump defective cores to encourage increased sales volumes (thus profit)? Real lotteries, licensed gambling establishments... even financial services like the stock exchange and investment ventures are all HEAVILY regulated, by organizations that are state/government sanctioned and have real teeth and have in the past used their teeth. AMD is simply a business... who is going to regulate them? Is the Nevada Gaming Commission going to govern all the gaming machines that determine which chips are lotto winners? Are they going to come in and close production lines indefinitely until the algorithms are fixed? Are they going to make sure there are no back-doors? Are they going to prosecute whoever if fraud is found? What about all the merchantability laws that protect consumers purchasing goods?
This concept is not new... real lotteries exist. What is new more or less is to expand this as a means justify pawning defective goods off on the consumer as a 'lottery system' based purchase.
I strongly condemn this proposal and I hope to god this is an April Fools joke.
There's nothing wrong with nationalism.
My family, my kind, my countrymen... as for you? Out of sight, out of mind. I make laws to handle disputes among me and my countrymen, not you. I make laws in my own interest, not yours. My laws apply to me, by me, for me, as follows so do the Rights I have on account of those laws; if you want something similar, write up your own laws. My currency better have recognizable faces, those faces must be iconic to some fundamental aspect of my being or allegiance; a founding father of my own country is very fundamental, neutral and allows for social dynamics. You have your own founding fathers; my money is for my country. My country, given the variables, has developed it's own cultures and beliefs, practices, patterns of behavior and propensities. Those propensities and the like, govern severity of consequences, if there shall be consequences for any given act we deem to be illegal. Punishment must be relative to general lifestyles; so don't make a fuss about public executions in Saudi Arabia while a Saudi would be appalled by your ridiculous crime rates. When in Rome, so when you get here, leave your opinions, beliefs and preconceptions at the border because you're nothing but a tourist, a guest holding a hall pass, a permission slip, a perishable visa. A vagabond of sorts, a long ways from home. It's best to be on your best behavior, till you return home, anything good for you depends on our willful hospitality.
Nationalism is self identity. Nationalism is self dignity. Nationalism is self respect. Nationalism is self pride. Nationalism is brotherhood. Nationalism is family scaled to society.
There's nothing wrong with Nationalism.