Don't forget the medical school loans if the doctor is under 40. Although to be fair, it would be quite an accomplishment to have a medical practice, two or three ex wives, a mistress and multiple children all before the age of 40.
You can probably count on one hand all the directly life critical software running as a regular app on XP
Not sure about XP, but didn't Microsoft put a clause in the old NT license specifically warning against use of Windows in applications where life and limb was at stake?
Sigh, it's definitely time to throw in the towel when the words start blurring together on your screen. That would be Australia for the double bogey to finish twenty over par. Thank you.
Correction. He was appointed as ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg, the European Union, and NATO by Austria and Austria does indeed have a consulate office in Los Angeles. From TFA he sounds like an intelligent and well educated man who's made a reasonable request. Saying things about someone online is one thing, but impersonating them is quite another. Perhaps after all of this Facebook can spare this gentlemen a few moments of their time. I especially liked his advice about dashing off messages while you're angry. I know that I've done it before, without much good coming of it, and so have many of us here on Slashdot. I suppose you learn a thing or two about polite conduct being a diplomat.
This guy isn't just anybody, he's a former Belgian ambassador. Not sure if Belgium has a consolate in Los Angeles, but surely he can convince the Belgian embassy in Washington DC to make a few phone calls or perhaps send them a certified letter on official letterhead asking them to kindly remove the offending pages. Facebook would do well not to ignore consular requests when made concerning such matters.
Facebook is located in California and here in California impersonating somebody online without their permission is now a crime punishable by a $1000 fine or up to a year in jail. It also creates an opportunity, independent of any other civil remedies which may also be available, to sue for injunctive relief (removal of Facebook page) and compensatory damages. At the very least this law could probably be used to get Facebook to remove the page for the price of a California attorney writing them a letter requesting that they do so and citing the statute.
The British already live in a society where public surveillance, paid for by the state, is pervasive with an inward focused intelligence agency to watch everyone and pry into their private affairs. Consider also the long history of state monitoring and nanny state paternalism and it would seem that the privacy horse has long since left the barn in the UK, yes?
It's difficult to imagine the circumstances under which Japan would ask China for help and even more difficult to imagine China actually giving any, even if Japan asked.
The TOR network is designed to make two things very difficult: tracking packets back to their source and shutting down the network itself. In addition to the well known relay nodes there's an ever changing list of bridge nodes, private operators who forward traffic to and from the well know relay nodes. It's these bridge nodes especially that make TOR difficult to stop completely. Even the Chinese, with their great firewall, haven't been able to stamp it out completely because it's a constant game of whack-a-mole with the bridge nodes on dynamic IPs.
If violent and repressive regimes, willing to kill without trial or mercy, cannot stop Tor then how much less will a western style constitution democracy be able to stop it? Unless the Japanese are prepared to cut off all electronic communications with the outside world, which would be tantamount to economic suicide, they will fail. Blocking known relay nodes will slow Tor down, it won't stop it because people will still be able to use bridges to get onto the network.
I can see why the iPad might be preferred for taking notes in class or while on campus during the day, but isn't it likely that many of these same students also have a larger regular laptop waiting for them in their dorm rooms at the end of the day, something that can be used for typing papers and offloading notes from the tablet? I agree that the tablet is definitely trending on college campuses today, but I continue to suspect that many of these students own and use multiple devices.
As for the Sun Solaris days I caught the tail end of those when I was in school although by that time the commodity PC, usually running Windows NT or some variant of Linux, was already well on its way to replacing the dedicated workstation hardware that had existed in the 80s and early 90s. I think that students today are ironically less aware of what their devices do and how they actually work. This sense of detachment is fueled and encouraged by Apple and others who urge people to remain ignorant of how their computing devices actually work with slogans like, "it just works". The app store and walled gardens magnify this effect. I also think that something has definitely been lost since those early UNIX days when knowing how to use the machine required at least a good working knowledge of how the machine functioned and how the different commands ultimately mapped onto the hardware running them. It's really somewhat alien to me too because sometimes in their rush to embrace the new these kids forget that newer is not always better and that we elders still have a thing or two to teach them about computing from the good old days.
but I suspect that over time even those will go the way of the dodo as mobile devices get more and more processing power and more and more users move to them—which will tend to produce as web apps or mobile apps those things that used to be PC apps.
The limiting factor in mobile devices is less the processing power, which is adequate for the tasks they perform, and more about the form factor itself. The very features that make these devices convenient for everyday mobile use, including light weight, simple interfaces and low power also make them unattractive for serious professional work. Even to use your college student example, I doubt that there are many students who would completely forgo a laptop in favor of a tablet. College is so ridiculously expensive anyway that there's little reason not to simply have 3 or even 4 devices: laptop (typically large desktop replacement style with big screen), tablet, smartphone and e-reader (with e-ink display).The additional cost is negligible compared to tuition, room and board not to mention books (or more probably e-books for your tablet or e-reader). I think that what was once the consumer app market on the workstation PC will largely disappear, but even then there will still be high end professional offerings and free open source apps to fill in the gaps.
I used to tell folks that adding RAM would be their best speed upgrade, but now I tell them that an SSD is the best speed upgrade.
The problem with giving this advice to unsophisticated users is that they will use the SSD in ways that tend to shorten its service life. It can be quite a shock to these users when they go to boot their machine one day and find it dead. Their experience with traditional hard drives, which rarely fail so badly and suddenly that there isn't at least a chance to move data off, may earn them a nasty surprise when their data is lost. If you recommend an SSD upgrade you should probably also recommend a traditional external hard drive as a backup device, with regular automated backups, and at least warn them that SSDs have a limited number of writes and can become unreadable with little or no warning.
Annette certainly had an impressive pair of guns...
Too bad Uncle Walt wouldn't let her show them off. Even after her contract with Disney was up, Walt talked her out of appearing bikini clad in Beach Party because in his words she "had an image to uphold".
You aren't reading about all of the failures over the decades because nobody wants to talk about those. People like to throw out things like the space program or the Internet while ignoring the great multitudes of unsuccessful and failed R&D projects.
The financial crises in my working life, dating back about 35 yrs, were largely due to a lack of government oversight, and were far more damaging than money lost in loans for development.
I presume then that you are old enough to remember when the dollar could still be exchanged for silver? Look at everything that has happened from say 1968 to now from an economic standpoint and you still want to say that things would have been alright or even much better now if the government had been even more involved? Are you nuts?
Since companies and corporations actively try to get government money or favorable policies and since this is supported to some extent by members of both the Dems and the GOP
So you understand then that government is corrupt and wastes resources, but "more government oversight" will solve this? Forgive me, but can that even be said with a straight face?
this won't be solved without changing the constitution.
Alright, I'm listening. What do you propose? Remember that one of the central powers of Congress is the power to create and regulate money. Which branch of government is going to decide how tax monies are spent if not Congress? Surely not the Executive, they don't do that even in constitutional monarchies. What about the Judiciary you say? Should judges be handling money and interpreting the laws? If you think the system is corrupt now, hold on to your hats if the Judges have both the power to judge and the power to spend. I don't think that the US Constitution is the problem, but rather the voluminous multitude of laws and regulations that have come since it was written.
On someone ignorant like yourself wouldn't see that infrastructure spending
Does providing an electric sports cars to the Justin Bieber and other Hollywood elites represent a good "infrastructure" expenditure in your opinion?
It encourages education, it creates jobs.
Education is becoming the next big bubble and we're still waiting for those "green collar" jobs. How many people remain unemployed, underemployed or simply discouraged from looking? If there are all of these great green jobs being created then who is getting them? Certainly not the aforementioned people.
Waiting for private industry to solve all our problems means we wouldn't have a space program, nuclear tech, GPS satellites, or highways.
Is the United States the only country with those things? No? Is the United States the only wealthy and prosperous country in the world? No? Then how can it be that other countries also have these good things, if we allow that all of these things are good, and yet foreign governments didn't fund the research? Might not we have achieved many of the same things without spending as much of the taxpayer money as we have? Could not the same technologies have been discovered in cheaper ways? Most of these things, with the possible exception of the space program, would have existed anyway without generous government support and I would argue that many of the advances that have come out of the space program could have been had for less money through alternative means.
Private industry seeks to maximize profit, not benefit society.
Maximizing profit promotes efficient allocation of resources and maximizes total production of goods and services per person. Ask yourself how it can be that we live so well in the United States while millions of people in Africa and elsewhere still labor in abject poverty. At one time, the majority of the human race was living as subsistence level dirt farmers or hunter gatherers. What happened to change this? Could it have been capitalism and the free market? Something must explain that difference so if you reject capitalism then how else to explain why you live better than people in developing countries and if developing countries would develop faster with government control then why are so many of the choosing capitalism and free markets instead?
Private industry is better off in wars fought elsewhere - they sell bullets, health services, and reconstruction industries. As opposed to just selling cheap goods to a content population.
If private industry fails to deliver the goods then how is it that most of the planet subscribes to capitalist ideas and the few countries that don't, like Cuba and North Korea, aren't the pinnacles of economic achievement? Government does not create wealth, the private economy does that. Young people in Europe and America forget that at their own future peril so here's a tip. Forget the Marxist bullshit that they spoon fed you in college and get clued in to how the real world works because the mortgage doesn't pay itself and your wife and kids want food on the table and clothes on their backs (with a nice house and two cars to boot).
Why bother with cancer or diabetes research when we have so many who don't have medical coverage?
Either one would be a better expenditure than electric cars in my opinion. However, if the government is going to support development of drugs or treatments I would prefer that the incentive take the form of a prize to be awarded upon successful delivery of an effective product rather than grants or loans. Even then I remain highly skeptical of direct government involvement in economy. Sometimes it works, but more often it ends badly as it did in the case of Solyndra.
I will admit that the MidAmerican Energy solar and wind projects are interesting, but I would like to see at least a few years of profitable operations from these generating projects to confirm their worth. I also own utility stock, but the wind and solar portfolio remains small relative to the coal and nuclear capacity at most of these companies. It should also be noted that MidAmerican energy is a subsidiary of a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway representing about 0.4 percent of total assets.
"Elon Musk... doesn't count". So the question is.... who does?
When Warren Buffet announces a major green technology investment and honestly promotes it to the shareholders in public at the annual Berkshire meeting, I will take another look. Until then I won't be holding my breath or investing my own money in green tech.
And that 2% would make such a big difference in your life! Wow!
Only an ignorant young person, still in college with mommy and daddy paying the bills, or a rich jerk would say something like that. Plenty of people in America live paycheck to paycheck, just barely getting by. So yes, 2% is a big difference to most of us. Although I admit that it's not as burdensome for me personally as perhaps it is for others, that doesn't make it alright. Waste is waste and it ought to be called out. Now, some of you might say, "well yes but we spend even more on X" and you would be right, but two wrongs don't make a right. The long term spending in this country must be brought under control and that will never happen as long as boondoggles like these green "investments" continue. They're symbols of the waste that infects our system from top to bottom and so ending them is also symbolic of our commitment to the long term goal of cutting wasteful spending and preserving the rights of our children and grandchildren to be free of the crushing debts incurred by their parents and grandparents.
Whether the government should be investing at these different levels is what's really up for debate.
I question whether the government should be "investing" in any company, least of all green tech boondoggles like Fisker and Solyndra. Meanwhile, millions of Americans who sorely needed that extra 2% in their paychecks before the payroll tax cut expired have now been hit with a higher tax bill. People were surprised when their payroll tax withholdings increased because they believed Obama when he said that he wouldn't raise their taxes. How's that change working for ya? Meanwhile Obama blows money on stupid shit like Solyndra and Fisker. I'd rather have that 2% back in my pocket Mr President thank you very much. If green technology is such a great investment then where are all the qualified professional investors? Why aren't they throwing in? Elon Musk is like a modern day Howard Hughes, a billionaire who puts money into tech that interests him regardless of whether it makes or mostly loses money, so he doesn't count. If qualified professional investors don't feel that green is a good investment then why the hell should the average taxpayer, who knows almost nothing about investing, be asked to "invest" in these companies. It's just another taxpayer rip-off and government waste of our hard earned money if you ask me.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget the medical school loans if the doctor is under 40. Although to be fair, it would be quite an accomplishment to have a medical practice, two or three ex wives, a mistress and multiple children all before the age of 40.
You can probably count on one hand all the directly life critical software running as a regular app on XP
Not sure about XP, but didn't Microsoft put a clause in the old NT license specifically warning against use of Windows in applications where life and limb was at stake?
Sigh, it's definitely time to throw in the towel when the words start blurring together on your screen. That would be Australia for the double bogey to finish twenty over par. Thank you.
Correction. He was appointed as ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg, the European Union, and NATO by Austria and Austria does indeed have a consulate office in Los Angeles. From TFA he sounds like an intelligent and well educated man who's made a reasonable request. Saying things about someone online is one thing, but impersonating them is quite another. Perhaps after all of this Facebook can spare this gentlemen a few moments of their time. I especially liked his advice about dashing off messages while you're angry. I know that I've done it before, without much good coming of it, and so have many of us here on Slashdot. I suppose you learn a thing or two about polite conduct being a diplomat.
This guy isn't just anybody, he's a former Belgian ambassador. Not sure if Belgium has a consolate in Los Angeles, but surely he can convince the Belgian embassy in Washington DC to make a few phone calls or perhaps send them a certified letter on official letterhead asking them to kindly remove the offending pages. Facebook would do well not to ignore consular requests when made concerning such matters.
Facebook is located in California and here in California impersonating somebody online without their permission is now a crime punishable by a $1000 fine or up to a year in jail. It also creates an opportunity, independent of any other civil remedies which may also be available, to sue for injunctive relief (removal of Facebook page) and compensatory damages. At the very least this law could probably be used to get Facebook to remove the page for the price of a California attorney writing them a letter requesting that they do so and citing the statute.
The British already live in a society where public surveillance, paid for by the state, is pervasive with an inward focused intelligence agency to watch everyone and pry into their private affairs. Consider also the long history of state monitoring and nanny state paternalism and it would seem that the privacy horse has long since left the barn in the UK, yes?
The exit nodes aren't located in countries that block requests.
In Japan, it is already illegal to own an axe.
What if you're a rural farmer who needs the axe for legitimate farming activities or other rural chores?
It's difficult to imagine the circumstances under which Japan would ask China for help and even more difficult to imagine China actually giving any, even if Japan asked.
The TOR network is designed to make two things very difficult: tracking packets back to their source and shutting down the network itself. In addition to the well known relay nodes there's an ever changing list of bridge nodes, private operators who forward traffic to and from the well know relay nodes. It's these bridge nodes especially that make TOR difficult to stop completely. Even the Chinese, with their great firewall, haven't been able to stamp it out completely because it's a constant game of whack-a-mole with the bridge nodes on dynamic IPs.
If violent and repressive regimes, willing to kill without trial or mercy, cannot stop Tor then how much less will a western style constitution democracy be able to stop it? Unless the Japanese are prepared to cut off all electronic communications with the outside world, which would be tantamount to economic suicide, they will fail. Blocking known relay nodes will slow Tor down, it won't stop it because people will still be able to use bridges to get onto the network.
Incidentally, Kip did indeed receive a one year subscription of Penthouse to the "outrage of his liberated wife", as Hawking describes it.
I can see why the iPad might be preferred for taking notes in class or while on campus during the day, but isn't it likely that many of these same students also have a larger regular laptop waiting for them in their dorm rooms at the end of the day, something that can be used for typing papers and offloading notes from the tablet? I agree that the tablet is definitely trending on college campuses today, but I continue to suspect that many of these students own and use multiple devices.
As for the Sun Solaris days I caught the tail end of those when I was in school although by that time the commodity PC, usually running Windows NT or some variant of Linux, was already well on its way to replacing the dedicated workstation hardware that had existed in the 80s and early 90s. I think that students today are ironically less aware of what their devices do and how they actually work. This sense of detachment is fueled and encouraged by Apple and others who urge people to remain ignorant of how their computing devices actually work with slogans like, "it just works". The app store and walled gardens magnify this effect. I also think that something has definitely been lost since those early UNIX days when knowing how to use the machine required at least a good working knowledge of how the machine functioned and how the different commands ultimately mapped onto the hardware running them. It's really somewhat alien to me too because sometimes in their rush to embrace the new these kids forget that newer is not always better and that we elders still have a thing or two to teach them about computing from the good old days.
What is wrong with California?
In a word, the Democrats. Next question.
but I suspect that over time even those will go the way of the dodo as mobile devices get more and more processing power and more and more users move to them—which will tend to produce as web apps or mobile apps those things that used to be PC apps.
The limiting factor in mobile devices is less the processing power, which is adequate for the tasks they perform, and more about the form factor itself. The very features that make these devices convenient for everyday mobile use, including light weight, simple interfaces and low power also make them unattractive for serious professional work. Even to use your college student example, I doubt that there are many students who would completely forgo a laptop in favor of a tablet. College is so ridiculously expensive anyway that there's little reason not to simply have 3 or even 4 devices: laptop (typically large desktop replacement style with big screen), tablet, smartphone and e-reader (with e-ink display).The additional cost is negligible compared to tuition, room and board not to mention books (or more probably e-books for your tablet or e-reader). I think that what was once the consumer app market on the workstation PC will largely disappear, but even then there will still be high end professional offerings and free open source apps to fill in the gaps.
I used to tell folks that adding RAM would be their best speed upgrade, but now I tell them that an SSD is the best speed upgrade.
The problem with giving this advice to unsophisticated users is that they will use the SSD in ways that tend to shorten its service life. It can be quite a shock to these users when they go to boot their machine one day and find it dead. Their experience with traditional hard drives, which rarely fail so badly and suddenly that there isn't at least a chance to move data off, may earn them a nasty surprise when their data is lost. If you recommend an SSD upgrade you should probably also recommend a traditional external hard drive as a backup device, with regular automated backups, and at least warn them that SSDs have a limited number of writes and can become unreadable with little or no warning.
Annette certainly had an impressive pair of guns...
Too bad Uncle Walt wouldn't let her show them off. Even after her contract with Disney was up, Walt talked her out of appearing bikini clad in Beach Party because in his words she "had an image to uphold".
You aren't reading about all of the failures over the decades because nobody wants to talk about those. People like to throw out things like the space program or the Internet while ignoring the great multitudes of unsuccessful and failed R&D projects.
The financial crises in my working life, dating back about 35 yrs, were largely due to a lack of government oversight, and were far more damaging than money lost in loans for development.
I presume then that you are old enough to remember when the dollar could still be exchanged for silver? Look at everything that has happened from say 1968 to now from an economic standpoint and you still want to say that things would have been alright or even much better now if the government had been even more involved? Are you nuts?
Since companies and corporations actively try to get government money or favorable policies and since this is supported to some extent by members of both the Dems and the GOP
So you understand then that government is corrupt and wastes resources, but "more government oversight" will solve this? Forgive me, but can that even be said with a straight face?
this won't be solved without changing the constitution.
Alright, I'm listening. What do you propose? Remember that one of the central powers of Congress is the power to create and regulate money. Which branch of government is going to decide how tax monies are spent if not Congress? Surely not the Executive, they don't do that even in constitutional monarchies. What about the Judiciary you say? Should judges be handling money and interpreting the laws? If you think the system is corrupt now, hold on to your hats if the Judges have both the power to judge and the power to spend. I don't think that the US Constitution is the problem, but rather the voluminous multitude of laws and regulations that have come since it was written.
On someone ignorant like yourself wouldn't see that infrastructure spending
Does providing an electric sports cars to the Justin Bieber and other Hollywood elites represent a good "infrastructure" expenditure in your opinion?
It encourages education, it creates jobs.
Education is becoming the next big bubble and we're still waiting for those "green collar" jobs. How many people remain unemployed, underemployed or simply discouraged from looking? If there are all of these great green jobs being created then who is getting them? Certainly not the aforementioned people.
Waiting for private industry to solve all our problems means we wouldn't have a space program, nuclear tech, GPS satellites, or highways.
Is the United States the only country with those things? No? Is the United States the only wealthy and prosperous country in the world? No? Then how can it be that other countries also have these good things, if we allow that all of these things are good, and yet foreign governments didn't fund the research? Might not we have achieved many of the same things without spending as much of the taxpayer money as we have? Could not the same technologies have been discovered in cheaper ways? Most of these things, with the possible exception of the space program, would have existed anyway without generous government support and I would argue that many of the advances that have come out of the space program could have been had for less money through alternative means.
Private industry seeks to maximize profit, not benefit society.
Maximizing profit promotes efficient allocation of resources and maximizes total production of goods and services per person. Ask yourself how it can be that we live so well in the United States while millions of people in Africa and elsewhere still labor in abject poverty. At one time, the majority of the human race was living as subsistence level dirt farmers or hunter gatherers. What happened to change this? Could it have been capitalism and the free market? Something must explain that difference so if you reject capitalism then how else to explain why you live better than people in developing countries and if developing countries would develop faster with government control then why are so many of the choosing capitalism and free markets instead?
Private industry is better off in wars fought elsewhere - they sell bullets, health services, and reconstruction industries. As opposed to just selling cheap goods to a content population.
If private industry fails to deliver the goods then how is it that most of the planet subscribes to capitalist ideas and the few countries that don't, like Cuba and North Korea, aren't the pinnacles of economic achievement? Government does not create wealth, the private economy does that. Young people in Europe and America forget that at their own future peril so here's a tip. Forget the Marxist bullshit that they spoon fed you in college and get clued in to how the real world works because the mortgage doesn't pay itself and your wife and kids want food on the table and clothes on their backs (with a nice house and two cars to boot).
Why bother with cancer or diabetes research when we have so many who don't have medical coverage?
Either one would be a better expenditure than electric cars in my opinion. However, if the government is going to support development of drugs or treatments I would prefer that the incentive take the form of a prize to be awarded upon successful delivery of an effective product rather than grants or loans. Even then I remain highly skeptical of direct government involvement in economy. Sometimes it works, but more often it ends badly as it did in the case of Solyndra.
I will admit that the MidAmerican Energy solar and wind projects are interesting, but I would like to see at least a few years of profitable operations from these generating projects to confirm their worth. I also own utility stock, but the wind and solar portfolio remains small relative to the coal and nuclear capacity at most of these companies. It should also be noted that MidAmerican energy is a subsidiary of a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway representing about 0.4 percent of total assets.
"Elon Musk... doesn't count". So the question is.... who does?
When Warren Buffet announces a major green technology investment and honestly promotes it to the shareholders in public at the annual Berkshire meeting, I will take another look. Until then I won't be holding my breath or investing my own money in green tech.
And that 2% would make such a big difference in your life! Wow!
Only an ignorant young person, still in college with mommy and daddy paying the bills, or a rich jerk would say something like that. Plenty of people in America live paycheck to paycheck, just barely getting by. So yes, 2% is a big difference to most of us. Although I admit that it's not as burdensome for me personally as perhaps it is for others, that doesn't make it alright. Waste is waste and it ought to be called out. Now, some of you might say, "well yes but we spend even more on X" and you would be right, but two wrongs don't make a right. The long term spending in this country must be brought under control and that will never happen as long as boondoggles like these green "investments" continue. They're symbols of the waste that infects our system from top to bottom and so ending them is also symbolic of our commitment to the long term goal of cutting wasteful spending and preserving the rights of our children and grandchildren to be free of the crushing debts incurred by their parents and grandparents.
Whether the government should be investing at these different levels is what's really up for debate.
I question whether the government should be "investing" in any company, least of all green tech boondoggles like Fisker and Solyndra. Meanwhile, millions of Americans who sorely needed that extra 2% in their paychecks before the payroll tax cut expired have now been hit with a higher tax bill. People were surprised when their payroll tax withholdings increased because they believed Obama when he said that he wouldn't raise their taxes. How's that change working for ya? Meanwhile Obama blows money on stupid shit like Solyndra and Fisker. I'd rather have that 2% back in my pocket Mr President thank you very much. If green technology is such a great investment then where are all the qualified professional investors? Why aren't they throwing in? Elon Musk is like a modern day Howard Hughes, a billionaire who puts money into tech that interests him regardless of whether it makes or mostly loses money, so he doesn't count. If qualified professional investors don't feel that green is a good investment then why the hell should the average taxpayer, who knows almost nothing about investing, be asked to "invest" in these companies. It's just another taxpayer rip-off and government waste of our hard earned money if you ask me.