That logic makes about as much sense as a typical "discussion" at an Occupy rally. The surveillance state problem does not spring from capitalism, nor is socialism or any other -ism a panacea against it. Switching one -ism for another will only result in a different set of powerful people pulling the strings.
The solution is a government of integrity, small of scale but powerful where they need to be. That does not necessarily mean scaling back capitalism, but it does mean eradicating the undue influence that corporations and rich individuals exert on our politicians. In other words, a government for the people.
So the job market consists of programmers and sales droids?
By the way, perhaps this will work especially for programmers. The best programmers might not be into networking or social media at all... but in my experience, the genius basement dwellers are not the programmers who are most valuable to your company. Good coders with a wide network of peers and people outside their own profession, as well as strong coaching (!= teaching) skills, are the true stars: hard to find, but incredibly valuable.
Of course a strong presence on FB or G+ isn't really a good indicator for this type of person.
Funny, that is how most middle managers I know work with risk, but the correct term is risk avoidance. Risk management is to knowlingly take risks and work to understand them, so that you can reduce the likelihood of them occurring, or mitigate the results.
Internet access may give locals fishing instructions as well as directions to local bodies of water, and instructions to create tackle using locally available materials, rather than having to rely on a factory made tackle that cannot be fixed locally when broken. It will help him find the best price to sell his fish for, and even enable a business model where the fish is collected at his place rather than having him travel to market. Internet access in one form or another (mobile phones for example) is already making a huge difference in developing countries. You'd be surprised to learn that not all people in such countries are fly-ridden victims of hunger and disease, scrabbling in the dirt for sustenance.
On top of that, you need to be careful even when providing sustenance. Many local farms have been driven out of business because of a sudden influx of well meaning people bringing free food.
This. I work in a similar manner: more fun much better pay and in the end the client pays less than what he would have for a more traditional development project.
Even outside of science, there's a demand for such code. Not much, because many managers feel that all coding projects have to be firmly embedded in a strong project management framework, and that support has to be arranged and ITIL-ized down to the last detail.
My current client understands that this is not always necessary. Get a clever guy to write some crappy code that works, and use it for non mission critical stuff. Is there support? No, if he wants it fixed or changed, he has to get another clever guy in to do the work. Sounds like an awful way to use code, but all this while the guy is deriving a great amount of value from this software, while I'd say his costs for building and maintaining it are less than 1% (yes, 1/100) of what a full blown development project and support structure would have cost (yes, including hidden costs). And what if he can't find a clever guy to fix his shitty software? In that case he'll have to make do without... (which is why you use it for non critical applications only).
There are of course plenty other cases where this approach wouldn't be optimal. But much as many coders and managers around me hate to admit, sometimes this is a cost effective way of doing thing. Sometimes it is the only way a certain piece of software will see the light of day, because it'll be too expensive otherwise.
Not sure about Moscow (which apparently is one of the most expensive cities to live in), but I remember taking a girl out in st Petersburg for $40 for the both of us, a couple of years ago. Not to the hottest venues in town to be sure, but it got us good seats at world class ballet (the Kirov, who at the time outshone the Bolshoi company), a great dinner, and drinks and dancing into the wee hours. Damn, Russia was a fun place back then.
Ebert argues that unlike movies, video games can never really be considered works of art. Whether or not he is right is beside the point; I say he comes off as being rather conceited, since he reviews works of entertainment, not art, even though an entertaining movie could in time be considered a work of art as well. Perhaps he is not interested in video games, but in that case why not just say so instead of implying that games are not worth the time of a serious reviewer.
I'm not sure what reading the news on Facebook is like (having no account there), but besides a simple news app (headlines + short summary) I get my news mostly from two (Dutch) blogs, one of them a left-leaning site that proclaims to be somewhat civilized, the other is a rather irreverent and somewhat puerile right-leaning blog (its tag line proudly states: "tendentious, unfounded and needlessly grievous"). Both cover the news of the day fairly well.
These being internet blogs, you can guess at the sort of comments that grace the news articles on their sites. They range from a lot of noise and insults to sometimes fairly intelligent discussion, but the real gems are often found in links to background material that people post. To my surprise, I gain a lot more insight into the background of issues and the merits of other points of view from these comments and links, than I do from reading the paper on Saturday.
This. I'm still eagerly awaiting the details on wiretapping that has been going on in the Netherlands. Then, when politicians finally express outrage at their phones being tapped, we can throw their dismissive attitude on matters of privacy back in their face. "How did this become an issue only when it was your phone being tapped? After all, surely you guys have nothing to hide!".
I think we'll see some high-speed lanes (like diamond lanes) for robo-drivers only. They can do 160km/h safely, bumper to bumper. When there are enough robo-cars, the main reason to impose a speed limit at all is noise or environmental concerns
Dear god, the UN? I'm not American but I would *not* like to see them take over. Besides, reading TFA reveals that it isn't really about controlling top level DNS, or the hardware (a lot of which is Chinese), or controlling key hubs (many of which are outside of the US). It is not about the Internet at all, but about the services. So, no need to transfer control of DNS or whatnot to the UN, or even to "fork" parts of the Internet... just roll your own secure services and cloud centers.
And, for a number of the smaller European countries, they don't really have security agencies of this scale and capability at all.
You'd think so. And you'd be wrong. These agencies may not have the capability to do covert surveillance abroad on the scale of the NSA operation, but domestically some of them are quite active and capable.
In Germany, various police and security agencies have infiltrated the extreme right Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, but refuse to disclose the names of their inside men to each other. The joke goes that the party leadership now consists entirely of government agents.
As for "legal" surveillance, there are days on which the Netherlands performs more (court-mandated) wiretaps than the entire USA conducts in a year.
How about one without back doors toany security organisations?
Same problem with that proposed new EU law: if adopted, it will forbid companies to share data to non-EU law enforcement agencies without an EU judge approving the matter. I am much in favour of this idea: if the law does not compel you to share data, you are forbidden to share it; none of this voluntary cooperation crap. But I was disappointed to note that no-one spoke up to make the law universal, i.e. to also forbid voluntary sharing with EU-based agencies.
4k may not make much sense on a 42" TV, but on 55" the difference is clearly visible. And screens are getting bigger all the time, with sizes around 65" being common and even a few screens of over 100" hitting the market.
Also the comparison to 3D is flawed. 3D requires 3D content, but viewing stuff on a 4k screen carries a benefit even for content not in that resolution. Compare an ordinary blu-ray on a HD screen and a 4K one (both 55" or over); you'll see a marked difference in quality thanks to the upscaler. The same way DVDs look way better on my upscaling HD screen than they do on a lower res one of the same size.
There are two reasons that make gorilla arm an issue in particular for touch screen (or gesture based) interfaces:
- When using a touch screen or gesture interface continuously, you have very little (if any) opportunity to rest your arms a moment by leaning them against something. This puts a constant strain on your muscles that becomes problematic after a while
- The required precision of gestures puts an additional strain on your muscles
In contrast, most other professions where your arms are in constant use have your arms / hands resting on something from time to time, and/or constantly cycle muscles between tension and relaxation. There are a few professions where this is not the case, and those suffer from gorilla arm as well if no regular breaks are taken.
I've recently visited a few times recently (New York, Houston, L.A.) and found both entering and exiting the country to be mostly painless. The difference between US and EU immigration is a TSA guy asking me a few (innocent) questions, the long-ish queue before getting to the TSA guy, and that's it. Leaving the US was the same as leaving the EU, except that the security guys were more polite. Oh, when I got home I found a note in my suitcase: "We're the TSA and we've rifled through your stuff", which I found interesting; NL airport security will examine suitcases but they don't leave notes.
Given the way they reacted to the popular request to bring back the Start button and menu in Windows 8, I'd say they are still pretty confident in telling everybody to do just that, and ignoring their customers.
Not groundbreaking, but the company claims that their machine is reliable and very easy to field-repair. For a small-scale machine used in developing countries, this is crucial. Farms or small businesses in those countries sometimes receive high tech equipment from well-meaning charities, only to have then break down, at which point they find they lack the skill, parts or money to keep the equipment in good repair.
They are mentioning narrower seats as well, which sucks. I'm of average build but I already feel rather crowded in economy seats; I'd happily pay a bit extra for wider economy seating with the same shitty leg room (which is rarely an issue for me). Having more seats per row sucks as well; on longer flights it means climbing over 2 persons rather than 1 if you want to get out (or getting humped by 2 persons rather than 1 if you pick the aisle seat).
Proper premium economy seating for me would be: wide enough so you're not constantly jostling elbows with your neighbour, max 2 seats abreast at the windows and 3 in the middle, and enough legroom to comfortably step over your neighbour in case you want to get up. I'd pay 50% on top of the fare for that. Oh, and I don't give a crap about priority boarding, having a separate cabin, more entertainment options or free booze.
Most airlines offering premium economy give you a few inches extra legroom and nothing else, which I've never found worth the extra ticket price. In most cases you are better off booking early and reserving an exit seat, which is often possible for a slight markup. On a KLM flight I once gave up an exit seat for an economy-plus seat and found the latter to be worse.
Actually that's a poor example; reporting is an area where this way of programming has worked well, at least in my own experience. In most places I've worked, managers knew bugger all about programming or SQL, but they understood their own data well enough to produce reports themselves in tools like BusinessObjects, even fairly complex reports. In this case, the tool is an enabler for people who already know how to think about the problem.
This. Rules and oversight are meaningless if they cannot or will not be enforced. Break the rules and/or lie to congress = go directly to jail. Or should be. The problem is that legislators do no take our privacy seriously at all; they just keep telling us we have nothing to hide. This call for new rules and oversight is just a smoke screen.
If you want to get a taste of the state of things in 2013, take a look at the clusterfuck that is Sharepoint. They haven't learned from their own mistakes, nor from standard practices like separating text, meaning (metadata), formatting and layout. SP is actually worse at pretty much any system we're replacing with it, and those are all 5-15 years old.
Slashdot Mirror
That logic makes about as much sense as a typical "discussion" at an Occupy rally. The surveillance state problem does not spring from capitalism, nor is socialism or any other -ism a panacea against it. Switching one -ism for another will only result in a different set of powerful people pulling the strings.
The solution is a government of integrity, small of scale but powerful where they need to be. That does not necessarily mean scaling back capitalism, but it does mean eradicating the undue influence that corporations and rich individuals exert on our politicians. In other words, a government for the people.
So the job market consists of programmers and sales droids?
By the way, perhaps this will work especially for programmers. The best programmers might not be into networking or social media at all... but in my experience, the genius basement dwellers are not the programmers who are most valuable to your company. Good coders with a wide network of peers and people outside their own profession, as well as strong coaching (!= teaching) skills, are the true stars: hard to find, but incredibly valuable.
Of course a strong presence on FB or G+ isn't really a good indicator for this type of person.
Funny, that is how most middle managers I know work with risk, but the correct term is risk avoidance. Risk management is to knowlingly take risks and work to understand them, so that you can reduce the likelihood of them occurring, or mitigate the results.
Availability of water may change, as will food prices. One local finds out and tells others even in other villages. How? Internet or mobile phones.
Internet access may give locals fishing instructions as well as directions to local bodies of water, and instructions to create tackle using locally available materials, rather than having to rely on a factory made tackle that cannot be fixed locally when broken. It will help him find the best price to sell his fish for, and even enable a business model where the fish is collected at his place rather than having him travel to market. Internet access in one form or another (mobile phones for example) is already making a huge difference in developing countries. You'd be surprised to learn that not all people in such countries are fly-ridden victims of hunger and disease, scrabbling in the dirt for sustenance.
On top of that, you need to be careful even when providing sustenance. Many local farms have been driven out of business because of a sudden influx of well meaning people bringing free food.
This. I work in a similar manner: more fun much better pay and in the end the client pays less than what he would have for a more traditional development project.
Even outside of science, there's a demand for such code. Not much, because many managers feel that all coding projects have to be firmly embedded in a strong project management framework, and that support has to be arranged and ITIL-ized down to the last detail.
My current client understands that this is not always necessary. Get a clever guy to write some crappy code that works, and use it for non mission critical stuff. Is there support? No, if he wants it fixed or changed, he has to get another clever guy in to do the work. Sounds like an awful way to use code, but all this while the guy is deriving a great amount of value from this software, while I'd say his costs for building and maintaining it are less than 1% (yes, 1/100) of what a full blown development project and support structure would have cost (yes, including hidden costs). And what if he can't find a clever guy to fix his shitty software? In that case he'll have to make do without... (which is why you use it for non critical applications only).
There are of course plenty other cases where this approach wouldn't be optimal. But much as many coders and managers around me hate to admit, sometimes this is a cost effective way of doing thing. Sometimes it is the only way a certain piece of software will see the light of day, because it'll be too expensive otherwise.
Not sure about Moscow (which apparently is one of the most expensive cities to live in), but I remember taking a girl out in st Petersburg for $40 for the both of us, a couple of years ago. Not to the hottest venues in town to be sure, but it got us good seats at world class ballet (the Kirov, who at the time outshone the Bolshoi company), a great dinner, and drinks and dancing into the wee hours. Damn, Russia was a fun place back then.
Ebert argues that unlike movies, video games can never really be considered works of art. Whether or not he is right is beside the point; I say he comes off as being rather conceited, since he reviews works of entertainment, not art, even though an entertaining movie could in time be considered a work of art as well. Perhaps he is not interested in video games, but in that case why not just say so instead of implying that games are not worth the time of a serious reviewer.
I'm not sure what reading the news on Facebook is like (having no account there), but besides a simple news app (headlines + short summary) I get my news mostly from two (Dutch) blogs, one of them a left-leaning site that proclaims to be somewhat civilized, the other is a rather irreverent and somewhat puerile right-leaning blog (its tag line proudly states: "tendentious, unfounded and needlessly grievous"). Both cover the news of the day fairly well.
These being internet blogs, you can guess at the sort of comments that grace the news articles on their sites. They range from a lot of noise and insults to sometimes fairly intelligent discussion, but the real gems are often found in links to background material that people post. To my surprise, I gain a lot more insight into the background of issues and the merits of other points of view from these comments and links, than I do from reading the paper on Saturday.
This. I'm still eagerly awaiting the details on wiretapping that has been going on in the Netherlands. Then, when politicians finally express outrage at their phones being tapped, we can throw their dismissive attitude on matters of privacy back in their face. "How did this become an issue only when it was your phone being tapped? After all, surely you guys have nothing to hide!".
I think we'll see some high-speed lanes (like diamond lanes) for robo-drivers only. They can do 160km/h safely, bumper to bumper. When there are enough robo-cars, the main reason to impose a speed limit at all is noise or environmental concerns
Dear god, the UN? I'm not American but I would *not* like to see them take over. Besides, reading TFA reveals that it isn't really about controlling top level DNS, or the hardware (a lot of which is Chinese), or controlling key hubs (many of which are outside of the US). It is not about the Internet at all, but about the services. So, no need to transfer control of DNS or whatnot to the UN, or even to "fork" parts of the Internet... just roll your own secure services and cloud centers.
And, for a number of the smaller European countries, they don't really have security agencies of this scale and capability at all.
You'd think so. And you'd be wrong. These agencies may not have the capability to do covert surveillance abroad on the scale of the NSA operation, but domestically some of them are quite active and capable.
In Germany, various police and security agencies have infiltrated the extreme right Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, but refuse to disclose the names of their inside men to each other. The joke goes that the party leadership now consists entirely of government agents.
As for "legal" surveillance, there are days on which the Netherlands performs more (court-mandated) wiretaps than the entire USA conducts in a year.
How about one without back doors toany security organisations?
Same problem with that proposed new EU law: if adopted, it will forbid companies to share data to non-EU law enforcement agencies without an EU judge approving the matter. I am much in favour of this idea: if the law does not compel you to share data, you are forbidden to share it; none of this voluntary cooperation crap. But I was disappointed to note that no-one spoke up to make the law universal, i.e. to also forbid voluntary sharing with EU-based agencies.
4k may not make much sense on a 42" TV, but on 55" the difference is clearly visible. And screens are getting bigger all the time, with sizes around 65" being common and even a few screens of over 100" hitting the market.
Also the comparison to 3D is flawed. 3D requires 3D content, but viewing stuff on a 4k screen carries a benefit even for content not in that resolution. Compare an ordinary blu-ray on a HD screen and a 4K one (both 55" or over); you'll see a marked difference in quality thanks to the upscaler. The same way DVDs look way better on my upscaling HD screen than they do on a lower res one of the same size.
There are two reasons that make gorilla arm an issue in particular for touch screen (or gesture based) interfaces:
- When using a touch screen or gesture interface continuously, you have very little (if any) opportunity to rest your arms a moment by leaning them against something. This puts a constant strain on your muscles that becomes problematic after a while
- The required precision of gestures puts an additional strain on your muscles
In contrast, most other professions where your arms are in constant use have your arms / hands resting on something from time to time, and/or constantly cycle muscles between tension and relaxation. There are a few professions where this is not the case, and those suffer from gorilla arm as well if no regular breaks are taken.
Indeed... Maybe it's just me, but whenever I read it I first think of old people. Centennial = 100 year old person. Millenial = 1000 years old?
I've recently visited a few times recently (New York, Houston, L.A.) and found both entering and exiting the country to be mostly painless. The difference between US and EU immigration is a TSA guy asking me a few (innocent) questions, the long-ish queue before getting to the TSA guy, and that's it. Leaving the US was the same as leaving the EU, except that the security guys were more polite. Oh, when I got home I found a note in my suitcase: "We're the TSA and we've rifled through your stuff", which I found interesting; NL airport security will examine suitcases but they don't leave notes.
Given the way they reacted to the popular request to bring back the Start button and menu in Windows 8, I'd say they are still pretty confident in telling everybody to do just that, and ignoring their customers.
Not groundbreaking, but the company claims that their machine is reliable and very easy to field-repair. For a small-scale machine used in developing countries, this is crucial. Farms or small businesses in those countries sometimes receive high tech equipment from well-meaning charities, only to have then break down, at which point they find they lack the skill, parts or money to keep the equipment in good repair.
They are mentioning narrower seats as well, which sucks. I'm of average build but I already feel rather crowded in economy seats; I'd happily pay a bit extra for wider economy seating with the same shitty leg room (which is rarely an issue for me). Having more seats per row sucks as well; on longer flights it means climbing over 2 persons rather than 1 if you want to get out (or getting humped by 2 persons rather than 1 if you pick the aisle seat).
Proper premium economy seating for me would be: wide enough so you're not constantly jostling elbows with your neighbour, max 2 seats abreast at the windows and 3 in the middle, and enough legroom to comfortably step over your neighbour in case you want to get up. I'd pay 50% on top of the fare for that. Oh, and I don't give a crap about priority boarding, having a separate cabin, more entertainment options or free booze.
Most airlines offering premium economy give you a few inches extra legroom and nothing else, which I've never found worth the extra ticket price. In most cases you are better off booking early and reserving an exit seat, which is often possible for a slight markup. On a KLM flight I once gave up an exit seat for an economy-plus seat and found the latter to be worse.
Actually that's a poor example; reporting is an area where this way of programming has worked well, at least in my own experience. In most places I've worked, managers knew bugger all about programming or SQL, but they understood their own data well enough to produce reports themselves in tools like BusinessObjects, even fairly complex reports. In this case, the tool is an enabler for people who already know how to think about the problem.
This. Rules and oversight are meaningless if they cannot or will not be enforced. Break the rules and/or lie to congress = go directly to jail. Or should be. The problem is that legislators do no take our privacy seriously at all; they just keep telling us we have nothing to hide. This call for new rules and oversight is just a smoke screen.
If you want to get a taste of the state of things in 2013, take a look at the clusterfuck that is Sharepoint. They haven't learned from their own mistakes, nor from standard practices like separating text, meaning (metadata), formatting and layout. SP is actually worse at pretty much any system we're replacing with it, and those are all 5-15 years old.