No he isn't. As an economist in one African country said: the mobile phone companies have had a bigger positive impact on the economy and well-being of the people than any governmental or NGO-led programme. Mobile phones are not the same thing as Internet, I know, but in the end they both offer what those people need: information and a means of communicating. This has helped them with things like emergency response, information and education (for example: on basic sanitation and issues around drinking water), but it also helps them to get better prices for their produce, arrange payment and transportation for goods sold and received, thus freeing up time for other things. It can calso help them find and procure services essential to the community (like getting a water pump, generator or farming tools fixed). Communication makes all of these activities easier (or possible), and enables people to help themselves better as well.
Gates might be right if we were talking about fly-ridden hunger victims scrabbling in the dirt for a few bits to eat, but you may be surprised to learn that many, many poor people do not live like that.
Solar works pretty well in temperate climates. Here in NL, you get paid for solar power going into the grid as much as you pay for getting it out (in my case: €0.19 / kWh or so). Doing the math on solar panels I found out that, even with no subsidies and a suboptimal setup (SW facing roof), solar panels will pay for themselves in 8-10 years. Work out the longer term economics (maintenance etc) and you'll arrive at a decent ROI, far better than anything you'll get on bonds or a savings account. Your money is safer on the roof than in the bank.
I'm holding out though. A big part of the expense in solar is installation and labour, and there are some interesting developments going on that will make that part of the bill a lot lower.
That might actually the goal here for governments and their secret services: provoke Greenwald et al to leak everything unredacted, then make a huge stink about how irresponsible these activists are for spilling state secrets, and hope that the whole thing blows over quickly. The activists on the other hand are best served by leaking the information piecemeal in a responsible matter, so that they keep the issue on the agenda, keep their cards under the table in case they can catch the government on a lie, and retain their credibility as activists rather than hacky thrill-seekers.
Some/. poster suggested that detaining Miranda might even have been done in hopes of grabbing the encryption key to the Snowden files, so that the state can orchestrate an "irresponsible leak" themselves in case they can't provoke Greenwald or Snowden to do so. I'm ot sure what to believe here, but if this turns out to be true, it would not surprise me. Not one little bit.
Are they really, or is that some media spin? Saying that mass immigration of people with few economic prospects is not sustainable in the long run (or fair to the tax payer), or that multiculturalism is an idea that has brought far mor pain than gain in most countries that have tried it, is not the same as saying that one hates coloured people or that all resident immigrants ought to be booted out or put on the trains to internment camps. Yet that is often how biased reporters and political opponents portray the issue: you either love immigration and multiculturalism, or you are a kitten-drowning Hitler.
By the way, I think that the fact that the two extreme ends seem to be the only viable political positions in this debate, is the reason why we are utterly failing to address the (real) problems around culture and immigration. I'm talking about Europe, though.
This is about copyright, i.e. ownership of a work, not the licensing models. The main issues seem to be the duration of that ownership (which is pretty much defined as being as long as necessary for keeping Mickey Mouse out of the public domain), and the penalties for violating copyright law. Changing copyright law would affect those Open licenses as well: if we reduce the duration of intellectual ownership to a term of 20 years, then works released under BSD, GPL, CC etc would revert to the public domain after 20 years as well (free them up for commercial use and removing the requirement of attribution, for instance)
Our country (NL) soon to follow suit, if the justice minister has his way. Drugs, kiddie porn and terrorism are the biggest threats to the free west. Not for any harm these three things may cause our society to suffer, but because of the harm we permit our rulers to inflict on our rights, in the name of the war against these threats.
It's an impressive demonstration of voice recognition, and rather useful for people suffering from RSI, but to suggest that we may all benefit from this? Besides the fact that speech-to-text is a decidedly crappy input method in open plan offices (especially with the extra noises added on), it is also questionable if this will make us code faster. In my experience, typing speed is not really a major limiting factor in coding speed, when taking problem solving and debugging into account. When coding, I do not spend that much time ting, actually.
Running your own cloud gives you a cost savings that could be significant, as it lets you consolidate hardware. More importantly, running software on virtual machines makes replacing or upgrading the actual hardware much less painful. And depending on your setup, provisioning new machines for projects is a lot faster if these machines are virtual. Enough benefits for my current client to make the switch (even though they outsourced the datacenter later on)
We've already sent robots. If we're now in a position to send men, then let's get our ass to Mars. Why? Because it's hard, and because we can. Good for science and engineering. And humans may be fragile but they are also versatile. Won't a manned mission be able to do more than a robotic one?
As for expenses: we have the money and the resources. If we spend only a fraction of what we waste on useless crap, our space program should be flush with cash.
How is that disturbing? I prefer society's perverts getting their jollies from auto-generated virtual kiddie porn, to them getting it from porn produced using actual children. One could argue that access to virtual porn will fuel their desire for the real thing, but virtual porn might also be sufficient to satisfy their needs so that they will no longer need the real deal.
Jobs knew what he wanted, had the clout to push his organisation to follow his vision, had good taste (in gadgets), and was uncompromising even when it affected project plans or retail prices. That is what made Apple products what they are, and it's a rare combination of traits to be found in a CEO. Even rarer when the CEO is not the company's founder.
There are a few similar "inventor" CEOs out there, but they are busy with their own companies and following their own vision.
Same here; I had no idea for the simple reason that I have given up on TV. Watching at set times, being force-fed endless commercials, and no way to catch up on a series that has been running for a while already. HBO is available here and I got a subscription because I watch a lot of their stuff, but even in that case it is so much more convenient to get old and current episodes through Sickbeard.
I look forward to the imminent introduction of Netflix here in the Netherlands and I hope that they will offer some of the top series.
Technically, I think we'd have a good shot at it (of course I know everything about building space stations...) But socially? We'd need a pressing reason to build it first, and we'd need that reason quite soon in order to drive our resources towards that project early enough. For anything short of survival of the species, building this thing will likely not make economic sense even in 150 years. The Earth being "broken" in 150 years (environmental issues)? That might not cut it for current generation to give up their comforts or pay extra taxes. Even a 100% certainty of total destruction in 150 years may not be enough to motivate people living today, and might actually prompt some people to go on a counterproductive pre-apocalyptic spending / looting / killing spree. So even if we know that the end is coming, we'll probably have a late start in this project.
Once the project gets under way, the number one challenge may well be to keep the teeming billions in check who have no hope on being invited onto the station. Reserving the thing for the rich & powerful isn't going to be very motivating to the work force; to prevent the masses from storming the launch facilities, you'd probably have to give everyone a fair shot at winning a berth in a lottery, and only announce the winners at the last minute.
Protecting the privacy of citizens should include (or even start with) protecting that privacy from governmental prying eyes. If a company is not obliged by law to comply with a request for information, they should be forbidden, by law, to comply.
1) How would you guard against that?
2) If it's based on individual suspicion, it's not mass surveillance anymore. Or do you mean everything is recorded but only released if an individual case merits it? That is not unreasonable in principle, but there would have to be an ironclad mechanism for releasing these recordings in approved cases only.
3) Maybe you also want to include kiddie porn. And drug trafficking. And seeding sedition. And copyright violations. And if you don't want to include any of that, there are plenty of legislators and voters who do want this. See how that works?
I also think that there are cases where mass surveillance would be warranted. But in practice I think the downsides and dangers, not to mention any honest person's right to privacy, far outweigh the potential benefits. Even if those benefits include not having the occasional occupied building or train blow up. Freedom does come at a price
Firing someone like this is wrong from a moral and practical perspective, possibly also legal. Like they say: praise in public, scold in private. By all means take him outside and then fire him. But not before you get all the facts straight. I would not even reprimand someone before getting the facts, not even in private. If I run a meeting and an attendee would whip out a camera and started taking pictures, I would be very surprised as well. But I'd simply ask him "what's with he camera?". In this case the guy would have mentioned that he habitually does that for the company blog. A simple "not this meeting you're not, please put that away" would/shoud have ended it there.
So I thought as well... But a good high-res screen does make a difference. I hated reading books on the older model iPad but on the iPad 3 it's fine, and that is what I use most of the time. It does perform poorly in bright sunlight, so on holidays I still take my old iRex reader which has a nice 8" e-ink screen. That's another advantage of tablets: the screens tend to be larger and for prolonged reading, 6" doesn't cut it.
By the way, I still buy all my non-fiction on dead trees. These are books that I am more likely to scribble in, re-read, or lend to friends. Works of fiction I read once, then they end up on the shelf... it is nice having all these books sitting there but in truth I rarely read any of them a second time, and few people borrow them. These days all my fiction is in the form of ebooks.
Maybe he was lucky... If you are drunk, texting, talking on the phone or concentrating on adjusting the climate control on the unbelievably crappy BMW "smart control", you are not going to have an accident as long as nothing unexpected happens. But if something does, a child crossing the road, tire blowing out, someone cutting in front of you or braking hard... then your chances of avoiding that accident are a lot worse compared to a fit and alert driver.
Know your limits. For myself, a conversation to a passenger does not distract me. A phone call however does, even when calling hands-free, so I never take calls while driving. And anything that takes your eyes off the road for more than a brief moment is bad, no matter how good your concentration or cat-like your reflexes are. You can send a thousand text messages or read a hundred poems in perfect safety, but fail to notice slowed/stopped traffic up ahead on the highway once, and you're toast. Perhaps it never happens but why worsen the odds?
Delegation often doesn't work for endeavours like that. He'll delegate it to someone else (or more likely: a team of executives), and they will certainly push work and decisions even further down the chain until you end up with a typical corporate managerial quicksand geared to kill any innovative idea. Compare that with a driven, visionary, smart and in-control CEO, who knows when to step in and has the authority to do so (and knows how to make his middle managers sit up straight when ordered, too). Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, people like that who are not afraid to take charge of the nitty-gritty, even if they do not always get it right. It's a rare combination of talent and influence, which cannot be delegated... unless he finds the next Jobs and gives him carte blanche.
Sure, we seem to need managers. And I say "seem" because there is good argument that we don't really need them. Management, that is, in the form of full time, trained professionals who do nothing but. What we need is leaders (who can be found amongst the "Indians", even those who profess to have no interest in a management career), and coordinators, who again can be recruited from the rank and file, and which if you structure your projects well is not a full time job in any way shape or form.
But the submitter and article aren't even asking whether or to we need managers. This is about the idiotic notion that all leaders should be managers, and that management is the only career option after senior engineer, and that there is something wrong with those whom do not choose that career path (except perhaps the few gifted individuals who become principal consultants or CTOs). This appears to be the case in most modern organizations, but if you turn away an experienced engineer just because he is happy not to be a manager, you are wasting talent.
1. The knives tend to be carried to threaten, in the case of mugging, rather than as a response to the likelihood that the victim is also carrying a knife; 2. A gunshot is more likely to cause a fatal injury than a knife wound.
1) Holds true for guns as well: most muggers carry them to threaten, rather than for defense against victims who also carry a weapon. I suppose a mugger is likely to upgrade from knife to gun if he suspects his victims are likely to carry either.
2) Not so. Several studies show that gunshot wounds are about as likely to kill as knife wounds inflicted in the same area (vital organs), with the exception of shotgun wounds (which are far more lethal). And consider also that a gunshot wound in a non-vital part of the body (arms, legs etc) is rarely fatal, but a knife can easily cause deadly injury with the victim often bleeding to death before help arrives. Knifes are far less likely to cause collateral damage i.e. injure an innocent bystander.
I think you are somewhat right about the escalation factor: if people are more likely to carry a gun (or knife), criminals will start carrying them as well. Even so, if it comes down to hand to hand combat (with whatever weapon) with a criminal, compared to gun vs. gun, I prefer the odds that firearms give me.
Slashdot Mirror
No he isn't. As an economist in one African country said: the mobile phone companies have had a bigger positive impact on the economy and well-being of the people than any governmental or NGO-led programme. Mobile phones are not the same thing as Internet, I know, but in the end they both offer what those people need: information and a means of communicating. This has helped them with things like emergency response, information and education (for example: on basic sanitation and issues around drinking water), but it also helps them to get better prices for their produce, arrange payment and transportation for goods sold and received, thus freeing up time for other things. It can calso help them find and procure services essential to the community (like getting a water pump, generator or farming tools fixed). Communication makes all of these activities easier (or possible), and enables people to help themselves better as well.
Gates might be right if we were talking about fly-ridden hunger victims scrabbling in the dirt for a few bits to eat, but you may be surprised to learn that many, many poor people do not live like that.
Solar works pretty well in temperate climates. Here in NL, you get paid for solar power going into the grid as much as you pay for getting it out (in my case: €0.19 / kWh or so). Doing the math on solar panels I found out that, even with no subsidies and a suboptimal setup (SW facing roof), solar panels will pay for themselves in 8-10 years. Work out the longer term economics (maintenance etc) and you'll arrive at a decent ROI, far better than anything you'll get on bonds or a savings account. Your money is safer on the roof than in the bank.
I'm holding out though. A big part of the expense in solar is installation and labour, and there are some interesting developments going on that will make that part of the bill a lot lower.
That might actually the goal here for governments and their secret services: provoke Greenwald et al to leak everything unredacted, then make a huge stink about how irresponsible these activists are for spilling state secrets, and hope that the whole thing blows over quickly. The activists on the other hand are best served by leaking the information piecemeal in a responsible matter, so that they keep the issue on the agenda, keep their cards under the table in case they can catch the government on a lie, and retain their credibility as activists rather than hacky thrill-seekers.
/. poster suggested that detaining Miranda might even have been done in hopes of grabbing the encryption key to the Snowden files, so that the state can orchestrate an "irresponsible leak" themselves in case they can't provoke Greenwald or Snowden to do so. I'm ot sure what to believe here, but if this turns out to be true, it would not surprise me. Not one little bit.
Some
Are they really, or is that some media spin? Saying that mass immigration of people with few economic prospects is not sustainable in the long run (or fair to the tax payer), or that multiculturalism is an idea that has brought far mor pain than gain in most countries that have tried it, is not the same as saying that one hates coloured people or that all resident immigrants ought to be booted out or put on the trains to internment camps. Yet that is often how biased reporters and political opponents portray the issue: you either love immigration and multiculturalism, or you are a kitten-drowning Hitler.
By the way, I think that the fact that the two extreme ends seem to be the only viable political positions in this debate, is the reason why we are utterly failing to address the (real) problems around culture and immigration. I'm talking about Europe, though.
This is about copyright, i.e. ownership of a work, not the licensing models. The main issues seem to be the duration of that ownership (which is pretty much defined as being as long as necessary for keeping Mickey Mouse out of the public domain), and the penalties for violating copyright law. Changing copyright law would affect those Open licenses as well: if we reduce the duration of intellectual ownership to a term of 20 years, then works released under BSD, GPL, CC etc would revert to the public domain after 20 years as well (free them up for commercial use and removing the requirement of attribution, for instance)
Still better than how I first read the headline: "Researchers Release Tool That Can Sue the Entire Internet In Under an Hour"
Never post from an iPad without proof-reading your contribution...
Our country (NL) soon to follow suit, if the justice minister has his way. Drugs, kiddie porn and terrorism are the biggest threats to the free west. Not for any harm these three things may cause our society to suffer, but because of the harm we permit our rulers to inflict on our rights, in the name of the war against these threats.
It's an impressive demonstration of voice recognition, and rather useful for people suffering from RSI, but to suggest that we may all benefit from this? Besides the fact that speech-to-text is a decidedly crappy input method in open plan offices (especially with the extra noises added on), it is also questionable if this will make us code faster. In my experience, typing speed is not really a major limiting factor in coding speed, when taking problem solving and debugging into account. When coding, I do not spend that much time ting, actually.
Running your own cloud gives you a cost savings that could be significant, as it lets you consolidate hardware. More importantly, running software on virtual machines makes replacing or upgrading the actual hardware much less painful. And depending on your setup, provisioning new machines for projects is a lot faster if these machines are virtual. Enough benefits for my current client to make the switch (even though they outsourced the datacenter later on)
We've already sent robots. If we're now in a position to send men, then let's get our ass to Mars. Why? Because it's hard, and because we can. Good for science and engineering. And humans may be fragile but they are also versatile. Won't a manned mission be able to do more than a robotic one?
As for expenses: we have the money and the resources. If we spend only a fraction of what we waste on useless crap, our space program should be flush with cash.
How is that disturbing? I prefer society's perverts getting their jollies from auto-generated virtual kiddie porn, to them getting it from porn produced using actual children. One could argue that access to virtual porn will fuel their desire for the real thing, but virtual porn might also be sufficient to satisfy their needs so that they will no longer need the real deal.
Jobs knew what he wanted, had the clout to push his organisation to follow his vision, had good taste (in gadgets), and was uncompromising even when it affected project plans or retail prices. That is what made Apple products what they are, and it's a rare combination of traits to be found in a CEO. Even rarer when the CEO is not the company's founder.
There are a few similar "inventor" CEOs out there, but they are busy with their own companies and following their own vision.
Same here; I had no idea for the simple reason that I have given up on TV. Watching at set times, being force-fed endless commercials, and no way to catch up on a series that has been running for a while already. HBO is available here and I got a subscription because I watch a lot of their stuff, but even in that case it is so much more convenient to get old and current episodes through Sickbeard.
I look forward to the imminent introduction of Netflix here in the Netherlands and I hope that they will offer some of the top series.
Technically, I think we'd have a good shot at it (of course I know everything about building space stations...) But socially? We'd need a pressing reason to build it first, and we'd need that reason quite soon in order to drive our resources towards that project early enough. For anything short of survival of the species, building this thing will likely not make economic sense even in 150 years. The Earth being "broken" in 150 years (environmental issues)? That might not cut it for current generation to give up their comforts or pay extra taxes. Even a 100% certainty of total destruction in 150 years may not be enough to motivate people living today, and might actually prompt some people to go on a counterproductive pre-apocalyptic spending / looting / killing spree. So even if we know that the end is coming, we'll probably have a late start in this project.
Once the project gets under way, the number one challenge may well be to keep the teeming billions in check who have no hope on being invited onto the station. Reserving the thing for the rich & powerful isn't going to be very motivating to the work force; to prevent the masses from storming the launch facilities, you'd probably have to give everyone a fair shot at winning a berth in a lottery, and only announce the winners at the last minute.
And apparently some did, and paid the price.
Protecting the privacy of citizens should include (or even start with) protecting that privacy from governmental prying eyes. If a company is not obliged by law to comply with a request for information, they should be forbidden, by law, to comply.
1) How would you guard against that?
2) If it's based on individual suspicion, it's not mass surveillance anymore. Or do you mean everything is recorded but only released if an individual case merits it? That is not unreasonable in principle, but there would have to be an ironclad mechanism for releasing these recordings in approved cases only.
3) Maybe you also want to include kiddie porn. And drug trafficking. And seeding sedition. And copyright violations. And if you don't want to include any of that, there are plenty of legislators and voters who do want this. See how that works?
I also think that there are cases where mass surveillance would be warranted. But in practice I think the downsides and dangers, not to mention any honest person's right to privacy, far outweigh the potential benefits. Even if those benefits include not having the occasional occupied building or train blow up. Freedom does come at a price
Firing someone like this is wrong from a moral and practical perspective, possibly also legal. Like they say: praise in public, scold in private. By all means take him outside and then fire him. But not before you get all the facts straight. I would not even reprimand someone before getting the facts, not even in private. If I run a meeting and an attendee would whip out a camera and started taking pictures, I would be very surprised as well. But I'd simply ask him "what's with he camera?". In this case the guy would have mentioned that he habitually does that for the company blog. A simple "not this meeting you're not, please put that away" would/shoud have ended it there.
So I thought as well... But a good high-res screen does make a difference. I hated reading books on the older model iPad but on the iPad 3 it's fine, and that is what I use most of the time. It does perform poorly in bright sunlight, so on holidays I still take my old iRex reader which has a nice 8" e-ink screen. That's another advantage of tablets: the screens tend to be larger and for prolonged reading, 6" doesn't cut it.
By the way, I still buy all my non-fiction on dead trees. These are books that I am more likely to scribble in, re-read, or lend to friends. Works of fiction I read once, then they end up on the shelf... it is nice having all these books sitting there but in truth I rarely read any of them a second time, and few people borrow them. These days all my fiction is in the form of ebooks.
Maybe he was lucky... If you are drunk, texting, talking on the phone or concentrating on adjusting the climate control on the unbelievably crappy BMW "smart control", you are not going to have an accident as long as nothing unexpected happens. But if something does, a child crossing the road, tire blowing out, someone cutting in front of you or braking hard... then your chances of avoiding that accident are a lot worse compared to a fit and alert driver.
Know your limits. For myself, a conversation to a passenger does not distract me. A phone call however does, even when calling hands-free, so I never take calls while driving. And anything that takes your eyes off the road for more than a brief moment is bad, no matter how good your concentration or cat-like your reflexes are. You can send a thousand text messages or read a hundred poems in perfect safety, but fail to notice slowed/stopped traffic up ahead on the highway once, and you're toast. Perhaps it never happens but why worsen the odds?
Delegation often doesn't work for endeavours like that. He'll delegate it to someone else (or more likely: a team of executives), and they will certainly push work and decisions even further down the chain until you end up with a typical corporate managerial quicksand geared to kill any innovative idea. Compare that with a driven, visionary, smart and in-control CEO, who knows when to step in and has the authority to do so (and knows how to make his middle managers sit up straight when ordered, too). Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, people like that who are not afraid to take charge of the nitty-gritty, even if they do not always get it right. It's a rare combination of talent and influence, which cannot be delegated... unless he finds the next Jobs and gives him carte blanche.
The first mistake is confusing management with leadership.
Sure, we seem to need managers. And I say "seem" because there is good argument that we don't really need them. Management, that is, in the form of full time, trained professionals who do nothing but. What we need is leaders (who can be found amongst the "Indians", even those who profess to have no interest in a management career), and coordinators, who again can be recruited from the rank and file, and which if you structure your projects well is not a full time job in any way shape or form.
But the submitter and article aren't even asking whether or to we need managers. This is about the idiotic notion that all leaders should be managers, and that management is the only career option after senior engineer, and that there is something wrong with those whom do not choose that career path (except perhaps the few gifted individuals who become principal consultants or CTOs). This appears to be the case in most modern organizations, but if you turn away an experienced engineer just because he is happy not to be a manager, you are wasting talent.
The printers are dear but there's a few fablabs around where you can have your design printed in metal, at a reasonable cost.
1. The knives tend to be carried to threaten, in the case of mugging, rather than as a response to the likelihood that the victim is also carrying a knife; 2. A gunshot is more likely to cause a fatal injury than a knife wound.
1) Holds true for guns as well: most muggers carry them to threaten, rather than for defense against victims who also carry a weapon. I suppose a mugger is likely to upgrade from knife to gun if he suspects his victims are likely to carry either.
2) Not so. Several studies show that gunshot wounds are about as likely to kill as knife wounds inflicted in the same area (vital organs), with the exception of shotgun wounds (which are far more lethal). And consider also that a gunshot wound in a non-vital part of the body (arms, legs etc) is rarely fatal, but a knife can easily cause deadly injury with the victim often bleeding to death before help arrives. Knifes are far less likely to cause collateral damage i.e. injure an innocent bystander.
I think you are somewhat right about the escalation factor: if people are more likely to carry a gun (or knife), criminals will start carrying them as well. Even so, if it comes down to hand to hand combat (with whatever weapon) with a criminal, compared to gun vs. gun, I prefer the odds that firearms give me.