The NoScript addon also features regular expression filtering of urls to catch common xss attempts and block them. These filters can also be applied to sites that are otherwise allowed via the whitelist. I agree that one has to be knowledgeable to use NoScript, but it really does have a lot of features for knowledgeable users and it is almost certainly better than nothing for any user who is not a complete novice. From the wiki article:
"However NoScript supports also an optional blacklist mode: users can choose to enable scripts globally and disable them on selected sites which they do not trust. Even in this configuration, NoScript keeps providing a significant security enhancement because anti-XSS, anti-CSRF and anti-Clickjacking features remain active."
Even if the menus are made "text-to-speach" there is still a potential ADA lawsuit over the publisher willfully "turning-off" a feature without regard to legally blind or other disabled users. The publishers might be compelled to turn it back on for users who can prove that they are legally blind or otherwise disabled in such a way that they cannot read the e-book text on the screen without assistance.
India and Russia both have this habit of announcing these awesome things
The Americans started the tradition, at least with regard to anti-satellite and space based weapons, with the Strategic Defense Initiative (aka "Star Wars") under then president Ronald Reagan. It has been speculated by some that SDI hastened the decline of the Soviet Union by promoting even more military research and spending on counter-counter measures at a time when the Soviet Union could least afford to "keep up" with accelerated US defense spending. The Soviets bought the artist renderings and animations of SDI laser satellites (peew, peew, peew) hook, line and sinker. They thought that not only were the Americans capable of building such things, but that they would work exactly as advertised (the Soviets had long had an inferiority complex when it came to western technology). It worked for the US during the Cold War so now other countries are taking a page out of the US playbook and touting their own "advanced" weapons or counter-measures programs.
Smart companies need to keep a finger on the pulse of these possibly emerging markets,
Except it seems that China is perpetually "emerging" without ever bringing the promised benefits to western investors. Now some of the western investors are waking up to the fact that the Chinese government is playing them for chumps (i.e. demanding local partners who do little but collect 50% of the profits, huge bribes to endless hordes of petty government officials, and wildly arbitrary contract negotiations and re-negotiations).
if China opens up the disposable income gap could swap in a short time.
I don't believe it ever will, or at least not in my lifetime. Why should the elites in China spread the wealth? They have the political power, the guns, and a veritable pool of underpaid slave laborers. As long as they don't mind the bad press (and it seems that PRC couldn't care less about western media) and new suckers line up for an "opportunity" to do business in China there isn't any reason for them to share the power or wealth.
Amazon.com and Walmart both have substantial experience in retail, are well established, and have large head starts. Just because Google has franchises in Internet advertising and search doesn't mean that they will be able to successfully extend their reach into new franchises in areas with well established competitors. You mention their foray into the mobile market as an example, which btw has natural tie-ins with their existing search and advertising business, but even there they are still a distant second to iPhone and the Apple app store + itunes behemoth. IMHO, it may be another case of Apple getting it right and Google playing to the niche with Android because, lets face it, the general public largely isn't smart enough to configure and customize a mobile OS as complex and with as many options as Android. I don't think that establishing new tangible franchises will be as easy as Google wishing them into being.
Just how far away is your Best Buy, grocery store and bank?
I don't know about other states, but here in California it is quite possible to live a couple of hours away (by freeway) from major shopping due both to the size and great length of the state. So if it takes 2.5 hours each way then that would make for 5 hours of total driving. A major factor, at least until the recent housing bust, was two decades of massive increases in housing prices which pushed families farther and farther into the outlying areas in search of an homes which were barely affordable, even with 1+ hour commute times in every direction. Personally, I use Amazon in most cases because it takes me 45+ minutes to reach any major shopping by car and even then the selection is not nearly as broad as what is offered online.
My pockets have been picked since I started working to fight useless wars and fund an enormous, expensive and increasingly ineffective military. Not to mention the soaring spending rates on police agencies from local to Federal which reduce my freedoms. The money being spent on Volt subsidies is nothing compared to handouts to corn farmers. It's a pittance compared to money we just hand over to other nations.
Two wrongs don't make a right. On the other hand, without a military there is little to prevent the have-nots of this world from coming over with their nail-boards and extorting from you whatever they can. Do we spend too much on these things? Probably. Does that make the Chevy Volt subsidy any more noble or right than it otherwise would be? IMHO, no.
If privacy is such an outdated concept, Mr. Zuckerberg, why can't I see your friends list, your photos, or just about anything else on your Facebook page?
I agree. Mr Zuckerberg should put his money where his mouth is or STFU.
No, don't bother. The idiots at Greenpeace are the type that has no qualms about scaring scientifically illiterate people with important sounding language like dihydrogen monoxide if it advances their agenda. They fight tooth and nail dirty and they only seem to get what they want by scaring people. Greenpeace and the Sierra Club can kiss my axle.
You mean Production IG? They did a good job with GITSAC, which was good quality for a television series, but Dune is not anime-style action riot police; it requires a very different look, feel and pacing. No, Dune would require someone more like Miyazaki Hayao who can create really unique and different worlds with organic characters and settings. Except I doubt that Miyazaki himself would be interested, because most (all?) of his films have used original characters and settings of his own creation whereas Dune already has many set pieces which have to be included or done in certain ways. I like the anime series suggestion though; it has promise and could be done well for less than the 0.5-1 billion or so that a live action series of films at that scale might cost nowadays. The real problem though is finding the right director and enough skilled animators who really care about the project to see the vision through to completion.
The key observation here is that the entire event takes place on private property, which generally includes a large attached convention hall (especially in Las Vegas which regularly draws huge conventions). As such, the casino/resort corp (i.e. the owner) is perfectly within its rights to make a contract with the event organizer and you (when you rent the room) which specifies, within legally allowable limits, what one can and cannot do on the property. If the hotel makes an exclusivity deal with the convention promoter (i.e. no competing convention activities on hotel property) then the casino/resort operator can enforce that as part of your suite rental agreement (i.e. you cannot operate a competing activity out of your hotel suite without the permission of the event promoters).
Could you explore this free-riding concept a little bit more.
The event promoter paid for the advertising and logistics necessary to promote and operate the convention on specific dates and brought many thousands of business people, who otherwise would not have been in Las Vegas on those dates, into town with the intent to listen to vendors, investigate products, and be pitched for products or services. If you can rent your own room, troll the convention hall handing out bills or directing people to your suite without paying the promoter for space on the floor then you are "free riding" in the sense that you benefit from the large crowd of potentially interested customers, as opposed to the general public, present at a specific place and time without paying the promoter for the privilege of being a listed vendor at their convention (with floor space).
The vendors who got kicked out by the hotels also have a legitimate complaint against the hotel since they complied with the standard hotel usage agreements(I'm assuming the hotel failed to modify their rental agreements) and were kicked out anyway.
The casino/resorts have general clauses in their room rental agreements that say something to the effect of, "we reserve the right to eject anyone at anytime from private hotel property for any reason whatsoever." This is also how they get rid of gamblers who are breaking rules in the casino (or just winning too much); they ask you to leave and if you refuse, they read the trespassing statute before having security (or local law enforcement if necessary) escort you off hotel property. Its their private property and they can exclude whomever they want for whatever reason they want except as prohibited by law (i.e. the race, gender, disability or sexual orientation discrimination laws). Of course, when they throw you out the generally don't tell you why (and they don't have to) to avoid just those sorts of discrimination lawsuits (frivolous or not).
At a minimum the vendors deserve a refund for the unused time they paid for.
That is reasonable and they probably did get some sort of pro-rated refund, but they can still be banned at the discretion of the property owners; the casino/resort in this case.
While it seems most American companies see IT as the place to save costs, the companies I've dealt with here recognize that our IT systems contribute directly to our competitiveness in the global market, and invest accordingly.
There are some firms like this in America too but the properly run firms with low profiles and steady profits don't often make the news, unless their name is Google, because they are "boring" and "un-interesting" from a news standpoint (and I use the term "news" loosely here because most of the trade rags that publish these sorts of "tech news" stories are little more than front operations for PR firms). In any case, the marketplace and globalization will settle the matter as to which sort of organization is "superior" and the less able tech firms or firms which handle tech less ably will eventually find themselves in receivership; provided that governments don't intervene to preserve "zombie" firms and old ways of doing business at the expense of progress and creative destruction.
Vendors have been showing their products in hotel hospitality suites for decades. I've never been to any trade show yet where this wasn't the case.
Yes, but those same vendors also have a space on the exhibition floor for which they have paid the aforementioned $10,000 fee to the conference promoters. If they want to have a fancy suite(s) for VIP guests and "high-roller" types to demo gear and network in a more private setting (away from the riffraff on the convention floor) in addition to the floor space; nobody minds. The problem here is that some vendors who have NOT paid for floor space were attempting to hustle people into their hotel suites instead (i.e. taking advantage of the conference promoters efforts to bring everyone into town for the show, but not paying the exhibitor fees).
I don't know what the hell CES management is thinking if they consider this any kind of a problem.
Its a problem because these vendors did not also pay the $10,000 exhibitor fees. They are "free-riding" off of the event promoters' efforts to organize, advertise and bring a large and interested audience into town for a couple of days without paying the exhibitor's price of admission. I can understand why the event promoters are upset in this case; especially since they probably paid these hotels extra for exclusivity deals as part of their contracts.
I would really like to see the definitive version of the Dune saga done right; without the sort of budget and casting constraints that have crippled previous outings (i.e. "the original" which was a David Lynch 80s style film and the SciFi channel remakes which, while better and more ambitious, still suffered from obvious budget constraints). The Dune saga really deserves better treatment than it has received at the hands of previous studios and directors. The success of Avatar has proven the market for high-quality 3D "epic" Science Fiction films and Dune would look really great if it was done in a similar fashion; with the budget and length required to do justice to the story. IMHO, either James Cameron or Steve Jackson would be good choices to direct, but others may have different opinions. If Lord of the Rings can be done well, then so can a sophisticated and high-brow SciFi epic like the Dune saga.
I have never liked the Firefox design, and I have never trusted the XPI installer mechanism.
So don't use it. Pick a browser with a more closed ecosystem instead (Opera?), but leave the powerful addon framework for those of us who need or want it. Firefox is really the only browser around right now where powerful addons are first-class citizens rather than crippled afterthoughts.
Switching to an extension mechanism that doesn't open up the whole performance and security bag of worms the Firefox extensions do would be worth trying.
I would prefer that Google do this with their new Chrome browser, if only to further differentiate it from the more open addon culture expressed by Firefox. There is room for different types of browser in the market today. Firefox caters to the addon niche and should continue to serve it in order to better brand and differentiate itself from other browsers with different (and competing) philosophies.
Is this a back-door effort to get ad-blocking out of Firefox?
It had better not be. Mozilla would be wise to respect popular plugins, like AdBlock Plus, with their new addon framework. In fact, the API for the old framework should be maintained intact for existing addons which may not be updated. A big part of their 20%+ share of the browser market is due to the addon scene, so it would be extremely stupid for Mozilla to aggravate their user base by pulling the rug out from under them with a new crippled addon framework.
If anyone at Google is listening (Mozilla takes their marching orders from Google): Take care not to disrupt the Firefox community. Firefox is the first browser in a decade to put serious pressure on Microsoft and Internet Explorer and Chrome is not yet a serious competitor in this market. Please, don't kick the sleeping bear by breaking backward compatibility or removing essential features from the addon frameworks in Firefox; your users will punish you if you do.
In a world where many programmers are lucky to even finish the project with working code (software projects have very high failure rates in the real world), performance tuning of the type where statistics would be useful is often an unaffordable luxury. Most programmers make a genuine effort to avoid the more obvious performance sinks with some knowledge of Big O Notation and known antipatterns, but in a world populated by demanding managers and slashed budgets that is really the best that most of us can do. If Zed wants programmers at his company to become experts on statistics and do detailed performance benchmarking then he can pay them himself for the privilege (hint: programmer cycles are vastly more expensive than processor cycles); otherwise he can, with all do respect, shove it.
It is a good reason, but its not the only one. EA also uses intrusive DRM in their games which damages users' computers and doesn't respect their property (namely the aforementioned computer) or their freedom. I have neither bought nor played an EA game for a long time now and with the way things are going it doesn't look like that will change any time soon. Message to EA: DRM KILLS THE FUN OF GAMING, DRM == LOST SALE, END THE MADNESS AND DUMP DRM.
I also agree with the parents; the discrete math course with graphs, sets, algorithms and proofs has much greater applicability in a larger number of real world software jobs than the second course in math analysis, vectors, euclidean space and differentials. Unless you plan to go into physics, game programming or defense, your future jobs are likely to involve more of the former and less of the later. Also, I would advise taking the teaching assistants' advice with a grain of salt. The teaching assistants are typically graduate students in CS working towards their PhDs and they generally intend to pursue careers as academic computer scientists or researchers rather than software developers. So unless you plan to follow in their footsteps, what they deem to be "useful" or "important" may not be the same as what we who have worked as software developers have found to be useful (or at least more useful) or important in our real world jobs. I like the parents other suggestion too: take the discrete math course and the "selected math topics" course as pass/fail if and only if you have time (I wouldn't delay my graduation to take it in other words).
The question is if trying to "kill the terrorists" will work and the experience from IRA, ETA and several other european terror organizations is that it won't.
The IRA and ETA are often compared to Al-Qaeda and other islamist militants, but I don't believe that it is an apples and apples comparison because the religious motivation of the islamist militants adds an additional dimension of complexity NOT found in groups like IRA and ETA which were essentially political in nature and not motivated, or at least not to the same degree, by religion as the islamist militants are. The IRA case is perhaps a bit more debatable on that point (i.e. religion was an issue insofar as it created an "us vs them" attitude in the struggle for separation of Northern Ireland from England as a political entity, but IRA terrorists were not using suicide bombers and weren't essentially motivated by an afterlife with 72 virgins as a islamist militants are).
An example where "kill the terrorists" has worked (or at least yielded substantial results) is in the ongoing Israeli efforts against Hammas, PLO, and Hezbollah. Are targeted killings a permanent solution? No, but they have been effective, along with the west bank barrier, at limiting the effectiveness of suicide bombers and terrorism against the Israeli people; reducing both the number and severity of successful attacks.
Going in heavy-handed and trigger-happy will mean a harassed population, huge civilian losses and huge public backlash that'll fuel the terrorists, If you can't be accurate enough, it'll only make the problem worse and worse until muslims and christians in general are at arms.
Right, which is why I said "kill the terrorists", NOT kill everyone including the civilians who are stuck in the middle and might help us in exchange for development aid and protection. In practice this probably means more winning of hearts and minds and less shooting, as Gen McCrystal outlined in his Afghanistan strategy. However, when we locate the Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders and fighters we should kill them. In this way we both eliminate our enemies and convince the rest that fighting the US doesn't pay and that both development aid and US protection are more attractive options.
But they might stop if other muslims said "WTF are you doing? Are you crazy? Stop that shit."
Cooler heads in the muslim community and prominent muslim scholars have been consistent and frequent critics of the militants; highlighting the militants' lack of serious scholarship when issuing fatwahs and their substantial misunderstandings of both the Koran and the Hadith, but it seems that the militants aren't listening.
Either there'll then be an internal feud and the muslims will weed them out on their own, or in worst case the militants will win but even then I think a post-WWIII where they can look at the militants the way germans today look at nazis is better than a christian-led escalation of the conflict.
I would argue that there is a feud going on right now and that the muslim majority has been unsuccessful in rooting out the militants. Surely I cannot be the only one to have noticed that militant islamists kill more fellow muslims than just about any other group. The muslims have an incentive to rid themselves of militants, but they will need US and European help to do it because the average muslim in Afghanistan and Pakistan still fears Al-Qaeda and Taliban threats to kill them for cooperating with America and the Pakistani government.
So you're saying the ignorance and incompetence demonstrated by the American government is the better option?
IMHO, the government has not been completely incompetent in their handling of the wars and the response to terrorism. Have there been missteps? Yes, but our intelligence agencies, military, and leaders have done a pretty decent job all things considered. I think that Obama was wrong to close the prison at Guantanamo and to try some of the prisoners in New York, but I agree with his decision to expand the drone program in the tribal areas of Pakistan. So again, it has been a mixed bag but not a complete clusterf**k.
but its hard to say that the European governments, by trying to act as good examples of diplomacy, are doing any worse a job of improving the situation than we are
The Europeans have substantial problems with large unassimilated muslim populations, a portion of which are being radicalized and prepared for attacks in Europe and the United States. In many ways, the Europeans face a more immediate and serious threat from militant islam than the United States does given their proximity to the middle east, the aforementioned cultural invasion, and the history of Europe and the Middle East. In my opinion the Europeans are doing and have done a worse job of countering the threat of militant islam than the United States has.
Finally, with regard to being "assholes" and the rest. The terrorists of Al-Qaeda started this war and they intend to press on with fighting. They hate the West and nothing that you can do or say will dissuade them from continuing to fight. So I don't really care what they think about us; we should kill the terrorists and continue killing them and when they get new leaders we should kill them too and so on.
To clarify, my thoughts on the matter are basically thus:
The chances of death by terrorist are low so we should stop getting our shorts in a twist everytime there is a terrorist incident. Take reasonable precautions and for peat's sake start profiling (the terrorists have all been young males from a select list of Arab and African countries); but forcing businessmen remove their shoes and making grandma turn over her shampoo (while waving Mr. Ali Kaboom through the line) isn't making us any safer.
I don't really give a damn about the terrorist's rights and trying them in a NY courtroom (giving KSM exactly what he has always wanted) is monumentally stupid. The terrorists are ruthless and we should be ruthless in turn when fighting them. They neither give nor ask for quarter so why should we give it to them? As Cicero said, inter arma enim silent leges. They aren't Americans and they don't have the rights of citizens. They shouldn't be treated as if they do.
Slashdot Mirror
The NoScript addon also features regular expression filtering of urls to catch common xss attempts and block them. These filters can also be applied to sites that are otherwise allowed via the whitelist. I agree that one has to be knowledgeable to use NoScript, but it really does have a lot of features for knowledgeable users and it is almost certainly better than nothing for any user who is not a complete novice. From the wiki article:
"However NoScript supports also an optional blacklist mode: users can choose to enable scripts globally and disable them on selected sites which they do not trust. Even in this configuration, NoScript keeps providing a significant security enhancement because anti-XSS, anti-CSRF and anti-Clickjacking features remain active."
What does liquid resistance have to do with it?
Perhaps he was referring to the viscous sludge cycling through his oil filter while he sits in traffic listening to his audio book...
Even if the menus are made "text-to-speach" there is still a potential ADA lawsuit over the publisher willfully "turning-off" a feature without regard to legally blind or other disabled users. The publishers might be compelled to turn it back on for users who can prove that they are legally blind or otherwise disabled in such a way that they cannot read the e-book text on the screen without assistance.
It will sound something like this: peew, peew, peew.
India and Russia both have this habit of announcing these awesome things
The Americans started the tradition, at least with regard to anti-satellite and space based weapons, with the Strategic Defense Initiative (aka "Star Wars") under then president Ronald Reagan. It has been speculated by some that SDI hastened the decline of the Soviet Union by promoting even more military research and spending on counter-counter measures at a time when the Soviet Union could least afford to "keep up" with accelerated US defense spending. The Soviets bought the artist renderings and animations of SDI laser satellites (peew, peew, peew) hook, line and sinker. They thought that not only were the Americans capable of building such things, but that they would work exactly as advertised (the Soviets had long had an inferiority complex when it came to western technology). It worked for the US during the Cold War so now other countries are taking a page out of the US playbook and touting their own "advanced" weapons or counter-measures programs.
Smart companies need to keep a finger on the pulse of these possibly emerging markets,
Except it seems that China is perpetually "emerging" without ever bringing the promised benefits to western investors. Now some of the western investors are waking up to the fact that the Chinese government is playing them for chumps (i.e. demanding local partners who do little but collect 50% of the profits, huge bribes to endless hordes of petty government officials, and wildly arbitrary contract negotiations and re-negotiations).
if China opens up the disposable income gap could swap in a short time.
I don't believe it ever will, or at least not in my lifetime. Why should the elites in China spread the wealth? They have the political power, the guns, and a veritable pool of underpaid slave laborers. As long as they don't mind the bad press (and it seems that PRC couldn't care less about western media) and new suckers line up for an "opportunity" to do business in China there isn't any reason for them to share the power or wealth.
Amazon.com and Walmart both have substantial experience in retail, are well established, and have large head starts. Just because Google has franchises in Internet advertising and search doesn't mean that they will be able to successfully extend their reach into new franchises in areas with well established competitors. You mention their foray into the mobile market as an example, which btw has natural tie-ins with their existing search and advertising business, but even there they are still a distant second to iPhone and the Apple app store + itunes behemoth. IMHO, it may be another case of Apple getting it right and Google playing to the niche with Android because, lets face it, the general public largely isn't smart enough to configure and customize a mobile OS as complex and with as many options as Android. I don't think that establishing new tangible franchises will be as easy as Google wishing them into being.
Just how far away is your Best Buy, grocery store and bank?
I don't know about other states, but here in California it is quite possible to live a couple of hours away (by freeway) from major shopping due both to the size and great length of the state. So if it takes 2.5 hours each way then that would make for 5 hours of total driving. A major factor, at least until the recent housing bust, was two decades of massive increases in housing prices which pushed families farther and farther into the outlying areas in search of an homes which were barely affordable, even with 1+ hour commute times in every direction. Personally, I use Amazon in most cases because it takes me 45+ minutes to reach any major shopping by car and even then the selection is not nearly as broad as what is offered online.
My pockets have been picked since I started working to fight useless wars and fund an enormous, expensive and increasingly ineffective military. Not to mention the soaring spending rates on police agencies from local to Federal which reduce my freedoms. The money being spent on Volt subsidies is nothing compared to handouts to corn farmers. It's a pittance compared to money we just hand over to other nations.
Two wrongs don't make a right. On the other hand, without a military there is little to prevent the have-nots of this world from coming over with their nail-boards and extorting from you whatever they can. Do we spend too much on these things? Probably. Does that make the Chevy Volt subsidy any more noble or right than it otherwise would be? IMHO, no.
If privacy is such an outdated concept, Mr. Zuckerberg, why can't I see your friends list, your photos, or just about anything else on your Facebook page?
I agree. Mr Zuckerberg should put his money where his mouth is or STFU.
Lets just agree with the idiots at Greenpeace
No, don't bother. The idiots at Greenpeace are the type that has no qualms about scaring scientifically illiterate people with important sounding language like dihydrogen monoxide if it advances their agenda. They fight tooth and nail dirty and they only seem to get what they want by scaring people. Greenpeace and the Sierra Club can kiss my axle.
The guys who did GITS could do it justice, maybe.
You mean Production IG? They did a good job with GITSAC, which was good quality for a television series, but Dune is not anime-style action riot police; it requires a very different look, feel and pacing. No, Dune would require someone more like Miyazaki Hayao who can create really unique and different worlds with organic characters and settings. Except I doubt that Miyazaki himself would be interested, because most (all?) of his films have used original characters and settings of his own creation whereas Dune already has many set pieces which have to be included or done in certain ways. I like the anime series suggestion though; it has promise and could be done well for less than the 0.5-1 billion or so that a live action series of films at that scale might cost nowadays. The real problem though is finding the right director and enough skilled animators who really care about the project to see the vision through to completion.
Could you explore this free-riding concept a little bit more.
The event promoter paid for the advertising and logistics necessary to promote and operate the convention on specific dates and brought many thousands of business people, who otherwise would not have been in Las Vegas on those dates, into town with the intent to listen to vendors, investigate products, and be pitched for products or services. If you can rent your own room, troll the convention hall handing out bills or directing people to your suite without paying the promoter for space on the floor then you are "free riding" in the sense that you benefit from the large crowd of potentially interested customers, as opposed to the general public, present at a specific place and time without paying the promoter for the privilege of being a listed vendor at their convention (with floor space).
The vendors who got kicked out by the hotels also have a legitimate complaint against the hotel since they complied with the standard hotel usage agreements(I'm assuming the hotel failed to modify their rental agreements) and were kicked out anyway.
The casino/resorts have general clauses in their room rental agreements that say something to the effect of, "we reserve the right to eject anyone at anytime from private hotel property for any reason whatsoever." This is also how they get rid of gamblers who are breaking rules in the casino (or just winning too much); they ask you to leave and if you refuse, they read the trespassing statute before having security (or local law enforcement if necessary) escort you off hotel property. Its their private property and they can exclude whomever they want for whatever reason they want except as prohibited by law (i.e. the race, gender, disability or sexual orientation discrimination laws). Of course, when they throw you out the generally don't tell you why (and they don't have to) to avoid just those sorts of discrimination lawsuits (frivolous or not).
At a minimum the vendors deserve a refund for the unused time they paid for.
That is reasonable and they probably did get some sort of pro-rated refund, but they can still be banned at the discretion of the property owners; the casino/resort in this case.
Golly, we got us a shortage, best open the H1B floodgates
How to not hire American workers
While it seems most American companies see IT as the place to save costs, the companies I've dealt with here recognize that our IT systems contribute directly to our competitiveness in the global market, and invest accordingly.
There are some firms like this in America too but the properly run firms with low profiles and steady profits don't often make the news, unless their name is Google, because they are "boring" and "un-interesting" from a news standpoint (and I use the term "news" loosely here because most of the trade rags that publish these sorts of "tech news" stories are little more than front operations for PR firms). In any case, the marketplace and globalization will settle the matter as to which sort of organization is "superior" and the less able tech firms or firms which handle tech less ably will eventually find themselves in receivership; provided that governments don't intervene to preserve "zombie" firms and old ways of doing business at the expense of progress and creative destruction.
Vendors have been showing their products in hotel hospitality suites for decades. I've never been to any trade show yet where this wasn't the case.
Yes, but those same vendors also have a space on the exhibition floor for which they have paid the aforementioned $10,000 fee to the conference promoters. If they want to have a fancy suite(s) for VIP guests and "high-roller" types to demo gear and network in a more private setting (away from the riffraff on the convention floor) in addition to the floor space; nobody minds. The problem here is that some vendors who have NOT paid for floor space were attempting to hustle people into their hotel suites instead (i.e. taking advantage of the conference promoters efforts to bring everyone into town for the show, but not paying the exhibitor fees).
I don't know what the hell CES management is thinking if they consider this any kind of a problem.
Its a problem because these vendors did not also pay the $10,000 exhibitor fees. They are "free-riding" off of the event promoters' efforts to organize, advertise and bring a large and interested audience into town for a couple of days without paying the exhibitor's price of admission. I can understand why the event promoters are upset in this case; especially since they probably paid these hotels extra for exclusivity deals as part of their contracts.
I would really like to see the definitive version of the Dune saga done right ; without the sort of budget and casting constraints that have crippled previous outings (i.e. "the original" which was a David Lynch 80s style film and the SciFi channel remakes which, while better and more ambitious, still suffered from obvious budget constraints). The Dune saga really deserves better treatment than it has received at the hands of previous studios and directors. The success of Avatar has proven the market for high-quality 3D "epic" Science Fiction films and Dune would look really great if it was done in a similar fashion; with the budget and length required to do justice to the story. IMHO, either James Cameron or Steve Jackson would be good choices to direct, but others may have different opinions. If Lord of the Rings can be done well, then so can a sophisticated and high-brow SciFi epic like the Dune saga.
I have never liked the Firefox design, and I have never trusted the XPI installer mechanism.
So don't use it. Pick a browser with a more closed ecosystem instead (Opera?), but leave the powerful addon framework for those of us who need or want it. Firefox is really the only browser around right now where powerful addons are first-class citizens rather than crippled afterthoughts.
Switching to an extension mechanism that doesn't open up the whole performance and security bag of worms the Firefox extensions do would be worth trying.
I would prefer that Google do this with their new Chrome browser, if only to further differentiate it from the more open addon culture expressed by Firefox. There is room for different types of browser in the market today. Firefox caters to the addon niche and should continue to serve it in order to better brand and differentiate itself from other browsers with different (and competing) philosophies.
Is this a back-door effort to get ad-blocking out of Firefox?
It had better not be. Mozilla would be wise to respect popular plugins, like AdBlock Plus, with their new addon framework. In fact, the API for the old framework should be maintained intact for existing addons which may not be updated. A big part of their 20%+ share of the browser market is due to the addon scene, so it would be extremely stupid for Mozilla to aggravate their user base by pulling the rug out from under them with a new crippled addon framework.
If anyone at Google is listening (Mozilla takes their marching orders from Google): Take care not to disrupt the Firefox community. Firefox is the first browser in a decade to put serious pressure on Microsoft and Internet Explorer and Chrome is not yet a serious competitor in this market. Please, don't kick the sleeping bear by breaking backward compatibility or removing essential features from the addon frameworks in Firefox; your users will punish you if you do.
In a world where many programmers are lucky to even finish the project with working code (software projects have very high failure rates in the real world), performance tuning of the type where statistics would be useful is often an unaffordable luxury. Most programmers make a genuine effort to avoid the more obvious performance sinks with some knowledge of Big O Notation and known antipatterns, but in a world populated by demanding managers and slashed budgets that is really the best that most of us can do. If Zed wants programmers at his company to become experts on statistics and do detailed performance benchmarking then he can pay them himself for the privilege (hint: programmer cycles are vastly more expensive than processor cycles); otherwise he can, with all do respect, shove it.
This why people shouldn't buy their games.
It is a good reason, but its not the only one. EA also uses intrusive DRM in their games which damages users' computers and doesn't respect their property (namely the aforementioned computer) or their freedom. I have neither bought nor played an EA game for a long time now and with the way things are going it doesn't look like that will change any time soon. Message to EA: DRM KILLS THE FUN OF GAMING, DRM == LOST SALE, END THE MADNESS AND DUMP DRM.
I also agree with the parents; the discrete math course with graphs, sets, algorithms and proofs has much greater applicability in a larger number of real world software jobs than the second course in math analysis, vectors, euclidean space and differentials. Unless you plan to go into physics, game programming or defense, your future jobs are likely to involve more of the former and less of the later. Also, I would advise taking the teaching assistants' advice with a grain of salt. The teaching assistants are typically graduate students in CS working towards their PhDs and they generally intend to pursue careers as academic computer scientists or researchers rather than software developers. So unless you plan to follow in their footsteps, what they deem to be "useful" or "important" may not be the same as what we who have worked as software developers have found to be useful (or at least more useful) or important in our real world jobs. I like the parents other suggestion too: take the discrete math course and the "selected math topics" course as pass/fail if and only if you have time (I wouldn't delay my graduation to take it in other words).
The question is if trying to "kill the terrorists" will work and the experience from IRA, ETA and several other european terror organizations is that it won't.
The IRA and ETA are often compared to Al-Qaeda and other islamist militants, but I don't believe that it is an apples and apples comparison because the religious motivation of the islamist militants adds an additional dimension of complexity NOT found in groups like IRA and ETA which were essentially political in nature and not motivated, or at least not to the same degree, by religion as the islamist militants are. The IRA case is perhaps a bit more debatable on that point (i.e. religion was an issue insofar as it created an "us vs them" attitude in the struggle for separation of Northern Ireland from England as a political entity, but IRA terrorists were not using suicide bombers and weren't essentially motivated by an afterlife with 72 virgins as a islamist militants are).
An example where "kill the terrorists" has worked (or at least yielded substantial results) is in the ongoing Israeli efforts against Hammas, PLO, and Hezbollah. Are targeted killings a permanent solution? No, but they have been effective, along with the west bank barrier, at limiting the effectiveness of suicide bombers and terrorism against the Israeli people; reducing both the number and severity of successful attacks.
Going in heavy-handed and trigger-happy will mean a harassed population, huge civilian losses and huge public backlash that'll fuel the terrorists, If you can't be accurate enough, it'll only make the problem worse and worse until muslims and christians in general are at arms.
Right, which is why I said "kill the terrorists", NOT kill everyone including the civilians who are stuck in the middle and might help us in exchange for development aid and protection. In practice this probably means more winning of hearts and minds and less shooting, as Gen McCrystal outlined in his Afghanistan strategy. However, when we locate the Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders and fighters we should kill them. In this way we both eliminate our enemies and convince the rest that fighting the US doesn't pay and that both development aid and US protection are more attractive options.
But they might stop if other muslims said "WTF are you doing? Are you crazy? Stop that shit."
Cooler heads in the muslim community and prominent muslim scholars have been consistent and frequent critics of the militants; highlighting the militants' lack of serious scholarship when issuing fatwahs and their substantial misunderstandings of both the Koran and the Hadith, but it seems that the militants aren't listening.
Either there'll then be an internal feud and the muslims will weed them out on their own, or in worst case the militants will win but even then I think a post-WWIII where they can look at the militants the way germans today look at nazis is better than a christian-led escalation of the conflict.
I would argue that there is a feud going on right now and that the muslim majority has been unsuccessful in rooting out the militants. Surely I cannot be the only one to have noticed that militant islamists kill more fellow muslims than just about any other group. The muslims have an incentive to rid themselves of militants, but they will need US and European help to do it because the average muslim in Afghanistan and Pakistan still fears Al-Qaeda and Taliban threats to kill them for cooperating with America and the Pakistani government.
So you're saying the ignorance and incompetence demonstrated by the American government is the better option?
IMHO, the government has not been completely incompetent in their handling of the wars and the response to terrorism. Have there been missteps? Yes, but our intelligence agencies, military, and leaders have done a pretty decent job all things considered. I think that Obama was wrong to close the prison at Guantanamo and to try some of the prisoners in New York, but I agree with his decision to expand the drone program in the tribal areas of Pakistan. So again, it has been a mixed bag but not a complete clusterf**k.
but its hard to say that the European governments, by trying to act as good examples of diplomacy, are doing any worse a job of improving the situation than we are
The Europeans have substantial problems with large unassimilated muslim populations, a portion of which are being radicalized and prepared for attacks in Europe and the United States. In many ways, the Europeans face a more immediate and serious threat from militant islam than the United States does given their proximity to the middle east, the aforementioned cultural invasion, and the history of Europe and the Middle East. In my opinion the Europeans are doing and have done a worse job of countering the threat of militant islam than the United States has.
Finally, with regard to being "assholes" and the rest. The terrorists of Al-Qaeda started this war and they intend to press on with fighting. They hate the West and nothing that you can do or say will dissuade them from continuing to fight. So I don't really care what they think about us; we should kill the terrorists and continue killing them and when they get new leaders we should kill them too and so on.