More like farts. We generate a lot of them and they aren't particularly valuable to us, but we still don't want companies to come and harvest them from us.
As far as compression of the source material goes, you can clearly hear the difference even on shitty hardware. Check Youtube for some examples and play them on your laptop speakers.
It depends on what the study means by "similar jobs". If you simply compare average salaries of males and females in Oracle, that opportunity cost would show up there. But that cost often manifests itself as a hiatus in on-the-job knowledge or missed career opportunities. The female software engineer who chooses to have a kid instead of taking that promotion to lead engineer, should earn as much as her male software engineer colleagues (with similar skills) when she returns to the job. If that's how you compare wages, the opportunity cost of maternity leave shouldn't show up.
I think Eps. 1-3 are decent but could have been much better. They had storylines a good director could work with, but they were somewhat ruined by the wooden acting, the rather overdone CGI and the departure from the "feel" of the first 3 movies (something that Disney thankfully returned to), and the unhealthy doses of what the MST3K guys call "Lucas Stupid" of which Jar Jar is just one example. The first movies also did a much better job of drawing in the audience, where Eps. 1-3 throw an endless stream of outlandishly extreme worlds and creatures at the viewer.
The latest movies (Eps. 7 and 8) however couldn't have been rescued without a major rewrite. The story is just a mess and the characters are almost all uninteresting and rather forgetable. I did rather like Rogue One.
Ripple has some serious issues, for instance the company and founders still holding over half of the total coins, and they have the ability to freeze the network or an individual account. Ripple isn't fully decentralized; parts of it are firmly under control of Ripple Labs.
Many banks have used Ripple, but in most cases the purpose was to experiment, with Ripple being a convenient mechanism to manage transactions and settlement outside of the banks' own bloated and antiquated systems which lend themselves poorly to experimentation.
I have my doubts as as well. A slightly higher temperature killed the insects? Sure, there's more to it than that, stuff migrates when the climate changes for example, which can disrupt an ecosystem. But the earth has been as warm before as it is now, and warmer.
Wouldn't be the first time that a scientist blames global warming for some unexplained phenomenon. And no, we don't need more data, we need more study into this.
Don't get me wrong, I love women and I believe in equality
You shouldn't have to f'ing write that... but lately I find myself making similar half baked apologies in my posts as well. The fact that you feel you need to make this clear in advance is a sign of how toxic public debate has become.
Reading her Twitter feed, this Lindsey Ledford sounds like pure poison, of the kind that the DerbyCon organizers describe. They focus on the negative and blow it out of all proportion just so they can have their little crusade. It is time to deplatform the lot of them... ignoring them is not good enough, because they will always manage to kick up enough of a public stink to have respectable people withdraw their support of what you're doing. Venue operators, sponsors and advertisers, even your employer... the last thing they want is public controversy in which they are involved.
Still, but for how long? The market is set to split even further, and each player tends to charge around $10. Or do you think Netflix will drop their rates by $2 if Disney and Warner pull their content from that service? The thing is: people are willing to pay $10 for Netflix because it offers a wide variety of content. What will Disney offer for $10? Their own stuff, with perhaps a bunch of 3rd party content thrown in that can also be had from the other streaming services. I will pay $10 for all the stuff on Netflix; I won't pay $10 a month just to watch the latest Star Wars movie and perhaps a handful of animated features. If those are not available anywhere else... people will probably turn to piracy again. Unless these streaming services will also offer a pay-per-view option without subscription that isn't priced outrageously so that you might as well take the subscription.
The practice makes sense for highly paid jobs involving big investments in training, and for staff with valuable proprietary knowledge.
No it doesn't. Here in the Netherlands, non compete clauses can only be enforced in a few very specific cases. Pay doesn't (and shouldn't have) anything to do with it. Neither does training: if a company invests a lot of money in your training, they usually add a clause that you have to partly refund the cost of training if you leave within x number of years, the cost being written off during that period. For proprietary knowledge there are things like NDAs. And in most cases a judge will invalidate overly broad clauses: you can keep someone from working for a direct competitor for a reasonable amount of time, not ban him from the entire industry for years.
There are a few things for which one might consider a non compete clause to be valid: having a valuable client network (e.g. such as someone in Sales would have built up during his employment), or knowledge of corporate working practices and processes. For the first, companies here generally a different clause that only forbids you from taking your clients to your new employer (judges usually uphold those). As for the second issue: non compete clauses are generally limited to a period of time too short for that knowledge to become obsolete, but way too long for a person to go without employment. As such it is pointless and unreasonable, and in its current form serves only to keep the employee chained to his desk.
The fair thing would be to allow companies to enforce non compete clauses in cases where there is a danger of a direct competitor benefiting from proprietary knowledge, but to require the company to continue to pay wages to the employee if they choose to enforce it.
Maybe. Though I think that the network effect plays a much bigger role in an MMO, where people are much more socially invested in the game than in a casual shooter with short rounds and little if any social interaction. Total number of player also matters a lot more for MMOs, where insufficiently populated shards tend do die out. In games like BF or Fortnite, you can basically grab the next 24-64 players off the global queue and populate a game with them (doesn't work quite like that, but it almost amounts to the same thing).
What brought Fortnite to prominence is not a network effect, but word of mouth about a really fun F2P game. Not the same thing.
To be fair, I found that trailer and poster rather off-putting, not just for having a woman in there but because of the overall feel. BF titles have always been about casual realism, but after seeing the announcements for BF5 I thought they might be going for some cartoonish manga parody of WW2. I can imagine that other people have been put off by the trailers as well.
Bought the game anyway and wasn’t left disappointed by the gameplay itself. The games and maps are nice; as someone who lived for 20 years in that part of Rotterdam I really appreciated the BF map of the area - though today it looks a little different after the bombing. What annoys me is the lootboxy feel of the game, and the assignments - while a nice idea - make the gameplay feel rather grindy. They are best ignored. The menus are insanely convoluted, changing the simplest thing requires navigating a multitude of screens, kind of like the interface was designed for mobile. I can’t comment on the single player aspect of the game, I haven’t touched it (same as any other BF title I owned). But all in all, this is a decent game at its core.
That charging mat might be nice if it actually works like in the pictures: one or more devices just plonked down on the pad, all charging. If placement isn't critical and you can charge multiple devices, it might actually be worth getting one despite the sure to be ridiculous price Apple will charge. There are a few multi device charging mats out there, but again each device has to be placed just so, or it won't charge.
Apple has a history of taking features that are in the "somewhat functional" stage, and improving them to a point where they work rather well. This is a bloody charging mat that has been announced ages ago. So what's the holdup? Maybe they've figured out how to make a really good charging mat, is what I am hoping. But their last flagship product that also has been a long time in the making (their smart speaker) turned out to be a disappointing also-ran.
It will probably be like this:
Today - Normal car €25,000
Tomorrow - Car with Spyware €24,000, Car without Spyware €30,000 and a double insurance premium.
I'm not against this sort of technology on principal grounds, but what scares me is that we'll end up in a situation where we will have no choice but to have them invade our privacy, either because all products do it or they make the non spying ones prohibitively expensive. I'd be in favour of beefing up the GDPR a little, so that any data collection and transmission of data to the mothership is strictly opt-in after purchase, with the companies being allowed to offer a monetary reward for opting in but not exceeding a certain (smallish) % of the purchase price. And with a strict separation of features, so you can't bundle them in order to force them to buy them ("Sorry, you cannot get the autopilot feature without the in-cab cameras and rectal thermometers")
I tend to agree with all that: 5G could turn out like 4k televisions: the tech is there, prices are dropping and people are buying it... but the vast majority of people still do not have a compelling reason to select devices that support the tech, other than bragging rights.
That idea is supported by the statement that the smartphone market has stagnated. People do not upgrade as often as they used to. And I suspect rollable phones and 5G are not going to change that. But it’s silly to think that’s a reason to exit the smartphone market. It is however a reason to rethink your value proposition: instead of thinking about what features you can keep adding that will make customers upgrade their phones every 2-3 years, think about what you can do to make consumers select your phone to use for the next 5-7 years.
You're lucky. After someone got killed in our street they did exactly nothing despite repeated petitions from the residents. After about 15 years they finally installed a bollard to block thru traffic at least.
The problem is that it's a revenue stream at all. Over here, income from fines used to be off-budget and got dumped straight into the national debt. Then they changed the rules and added the income to the budget. And every year the take from fines has gone up, both nr of fines issued and the amounts have been increasing steadily.
Now, if this was to improve road safety, you'd expect them to do 2 things: issue loads of fines to speeders to remind them that they're being watched, and have speed traps in places where people often drive dangerously fast. And no, those 2 things are not the same, and the speed traps are placed almost exclusively to cover the first case. Do 5km/h over the limit on a highway where it is perfectly safe to do so and you are likely to get a fine. Do 60km/h on a road that is built for traffic at 80km/h but happens to be within the city limit so it's a 50, and you are likely to pass a speed trap (cops love those roads). Do 60km/h on a quiet narrow road where even the posted limit of 30km/h is on the fast side... and you're safe. No cop will ever post there.
Case in point: a few years ago the cops posted at the end of a stretch of highway with reduced speed limit due to road works. They reported that to their horror, 80% of passing drivers were exceeding the speed limit. And my initial reaction was the same: wow, 80%, idiot drivers. But then I thought: if you are all about traffic safety and you notice this, wouldn't it occur to you that perhaps the speed limit reduction might not have been posted clearly enough? Wouldn't the better course of action not be to sit tight and rake in fines, but to move your speed trap to a very visible spot at the start of the road works? You probably wouldn't grab a single fine but you'll slow everyone down nicely.
Slashdot Mirror
This. As a European I say: good on Google for pulling out if this dumb law gets passed.
More like farts. We generate a lot of them and they aren't particularly valuable to us, but we still don't want companies to come and harvest them from us.
As far as compression of the source material goes, you can clearly hear the difference even on shitty hardware. Check Youtube for some examples and play them on your laptop speakers.
Perhaps they don’t want under 5s to rock up alone
It depends on what the study means by "similar jobs". If you simply compare average salaries of males and females in Oracle, that opportunity cost would show up there. But that cost often manifests itself as a hiatus in on-the-job knowledge or missed career opportunities. The female software engineer who chooses to have a kid instead of taking that promotion to lead engineer, should earn as much as her male software engineer colleagues (with similar skills) when she returns to the job. If that's how you compare wages, the opportunity cost of maternity leave shouldn't show up.
I think Eps. 1-3 are decent but could have been much better. They had storylines a good director could work with, but they were somewhat ruined by the wooden acting, the rather overdone CGI and the departure from the "feel" of the first 3 movies (something that Disney thankfully returned to), and the unhealthy doses of what the MST3K guys call "Lucas Stupid" of which Jar Jar is just one example. The first movies also did a much better job of drawing in the audience, where Eps. 1-3 throw an endless stream of outlandishly extreme worlds and creatures at the viewer.
The latest movies (Eps. 7 and 8) however couldn't have been rescued without a major rewrite. The story is just a mess and the characters are almost all uninteresting and rather forgetable. I did rather like Rogue One.
Are many churches funded by hedge funds?
Ripple has some serious issues, for instance the company and founders still holding over half of the total coins, and they have the ability to freeze the network or an individual account. Ripple isn't fully decentralized; parts of it are firmly under control of Ripple Labs.
Many banks have used Ripple, but in most cases the purpose was to experiment, with Ripple being a convenient mechanism to manage transactions and settlement outside of the banks' own bloated and antiquated systems which lend themselves poorly to experimentation.
Thanks, now I really feel old.
That’s how you siphon off money from startups, struggling companies or even foundations into your own pocket.
I have my doubts as as well. A slightly higher temperature killed the insects? Sure, there's more to it than that, stuff migrates when the climate changes for example, which can disrupt an ecosystem. But the earth has been as warm before as it is now, and warmer.
Wouldn't be the first time that a scientist blames global warming for some unexplained phenomenon. And no, we don't need more data, we need more study into this.
Seriously, that’s it? It’s an inappropriate and unprofessional little joke, but it comes nowhere near making light of sexual assault.
What #MeToo? I didn't see anything offensive on that board (though I am having trouble reading some of the remarks). Which is the offensive one?
Don't get me wrong, I love women and I believe in equality
You shouldn't have to f'ing write that... but lately I find myself making similar half baked apologies in my posts as well. The fact that you feel you need to make this clear in advance is a sign of how toxic public debate has become.
Reading her Twitter feed, this Lindsey Ledford sounds like pure poison, of the kind that the DerbyCon organizers describe. They focus on the negative and blow it out of all proportion just so they can have their little crusade. It is time to deplatform the lot of them... ignoring them is not good enough, because they will always manage to kick up enough of a public stink to have respectable people withdraw their support of what you're doing. Venue operators, sponsors and advertisers, even your employer... the last thing they want is public controversy in which they are involved.
Still, but for how long? The market is set to split even further, and each player tends to charge around $10. Or do you think Netflix will drop their rates by $2 if Disney and Warner pull their content from that service? The thing is: people are willing to pay $10 for Netflix because it offers a wide variety of content. What will Disney offer for $10? Their own stuff, with perhaps a bunch of 3rd party content thrown in that can also be had from the other streaming services. I will pay $10 for all the stuff on Netflix; I won't pay $10 a month just to watch the latest Star Wars movie and perhaps a handful of animated features. If those are not available anywhere else... people will probably turn to piracy again. Unless these streaming services will also offer a pay-per-view option without subscription that isn't priced outrageously so that you might as well take the subscription.
The practice makes sense for highly paid jobs involving big investments in training, and for staff with valuable proprietary knowledge.
No it doesn't. Here in the Netherlands, non compete clauses can only be enforced in a few very specific cases. Pay doesn't (and shouldn't have) anything to do with it. Neither does training: if a company invests a lot of money in your training, they usually add a clause that you have to partly refund the cost of training if you leave within x number of years, the cost being written off during that period. For proprietary knowledge there are things like NDAs. And in most cases a judge will invalidate overly broad clauses: you can keep someone from working for a direct competitor for a reasonable amount of time, not ban him from the entire industry for years.
There are a few things for which one might consider a non compete clause to be valid: having a valuable client network (e.g. such as someone in Sales would have built up during his employment), or knowledge of corporate working practices and processes. For the first, companies here generally a different clause that only forbids you from taking your clients to your new employer (judges usually uphold those). As for the second issue: non compete clauses are generally limited to a period of time too short for that knowledge to become obsolete, but way too long for a person to go without employment. As such it is pointless and unreasonable, and in its current form serves only to keep the employee chained to his desk.
The fair thing would be to allow companies to enforce non compete clauses in cases where there is a danger of a direct competitor benefiting from proprietary knowledge, but to require the company to continue to pay wages to the employee if they choose to enforce it.
For that reason, ask for it to be removed from the contract before you sign it.
Maybe. Though I think that the network effect plays a much bigger role in an MMO, where people are much more socially invested in the game than in a casual shooter with short rounds and little if any social interaction. Total number of player also matters a lot more for MMOs, where insufficiently populated shards tend do die out. In games like BF or Fortnite, you can basically grab the next 24-64 players off the global queue and populate a game with them (doesn't work quite like that, but it almost amounts to the same thing).
What brought Fortnite to prominence is not a network effect, but word of mouth about a really fun F2P game. Not the same thing.
To be fair, I found that trailer and poster rather off-putting, not just for having a woman in there but because of the overall feel. BF titles have always been about casual realism, but after seeing the announcements for BF5 I thought they might be going for some cartoonish manga parody of WW2. I can imagine that other people have been put off by the trailers as well.
Bought the game anyway and wasn’t left disappointed by the gameplay itself. The games and maps are nice; as someone who lived for 20 years in that part of Rotterdam I really appreciated the BF map of the area - though today it looks a little different after the bombing. What annoys me is the lootboxy feel of the game, and the assignments - while a nice idea - make the gameplay feel rather grindy. They are best ignored. The menus are insanely convoluted, changing the simplest thing requires navigating a multitude of screens, kind of like the interface was designed for mobile. I can’t comment on the single player aspect of the game, I haven’t touched it (same as any other BF title I owned). But all in all, this is a decent game at its core.
That charging mat might be nice if it actually works like in the pictures: one or more devices just plonked down on the pad, all charging. If placement isn't critical and you can charge multiple devices, it might actually be worth getting one despite the sure to be ridiculous price Apple will charge. There are a few multi device charging mats out there, but again each device has to be placed just so, or it won't charge.
Apple has a history of taking features that are in the "somewhat functional" stage, and improving them to a point where they work rather well. This is a bloody charging mat that has been announced ages ago. So what's the holdup? Maybe they've figured out how to make a really good charging mat, is what I am hoping. But their last flagship product that also has been a long time in the making (their smart speaker) turned out to be a disappointing also-ran.
It will probably be like this:
Today - Normal car €25,000
Tomorrow - Car with Spyware €24,000, Car without Spyware €30,000 and a double insurance premium.
I'm not against this sort of technology on principal grounds, but what scares me is that we'll end up in a situation where we will have no choice but to have them invade our privacy, either because all products do it or they make the non spying ones prohibitively expensive. I'd be in favour of beefing up the GDPR a little, so that any data collection and transmission of data to the mothership is strictly opt-in after purchase, with the companies being allowed to offer a monetary reward for opting in but not exceeding a certain (smallish) % of the purchase price. And with a strict separation of features, so you can't bundle them in order to force them to buy them ("Sorry, you cannot get the autopilot feature without the in-cab cameras and rectal thermometers")
I tend to agree with all that: 5G could turn out like 4k televisions: the tech is there, prices are dropping and people are buying it... but the vast majority of people still do not have a compelling reason to select devices that support the tech, other than bragging rights.
That idea is supported by the statement that the smartphone market has stagnated. People do not upgrade as often as they used to. And I suspect rollable phones and 5G are not going to change that. But it’s silly to think that’s a reason to exit the smartphone market. It is however a reason to rethink your value proposition: instead of thinking about what features you can keep adding that will make customers upgrade their phones every 2-3 years, think about what you can do to make consumers select your phone to use for the next 5-7 years.
You're lucky. After someone got killed in our street they did exactly nothing despite repeated petitions from the residents. After about 15 years they finally installed a bollard to block thru traffic at least.
The problem is that it's a revenue stream at all. Over here, income from fines used to be off-budget and got dumped straight into the national debt. Then they changed the rules and added the income to the budget. And every year the take from fines has gone up, both nr of fines issued and the amounts have been increasing steadily.
Now, if this was to improve road safety, you'd expect them to do 2 things: issue loads of fines to speeders to remind them that they're being watched, and have speed traps in places where people often drive dangerously fast. And no, those 2 things are not the same, and the speed traps are placed almost exclusively to cover the first case. Do 5km/h over the limit on a highway where it is perfectly safe to do so and you are likely to get a fine. Do 60km/h on a road that is built for traffic at 80km/h but happens to be within the city limit so it's a 50, and you are likely to pass a speed trap (cops love those roads). Do 60km/h on a quiet narrow road where even the posted limit of 30km/h is on the fast side... and you're safe. No cop will ever post there.
Case in point: a few years ago the cops posted at the end of a stretch of highway with reduced speed limit due to road works. They reported that to their horror, 80% of passing drivers were exceeding the speed limit. And my initial reaction was the same: wow, 80%, idiot drivers. But then I thought: if you are all about traffic safety and you notice this, wouldn't it occur to you that perhaps the speed limit reduction might not have been posted clearly enough? Wouldn't the better course of action not be to sit tight and rake in fines, but to move your speed trap to a very visible spot at the start of the road works? You probably wouldn't grab a single fine but you'll slow everyone down nicely.