The real question is: what does the law say about how illegal agreements like these should be handled? In some EU countries at least, if an agreement between government and a private person or company is deemed illegal, it cannot be annulled just like that; the government is supposed to be a trustworthy partner and cannot strike a deal then simply declare it illegal. In some cases the agreement itself will be considered void, but the affected person or company will not be on the hook for the whole amount owed, or will be compensated for incurred costs (like when a building permit that shouldn't have been issued is rescinded when building has already started). In other cases, the agreement stands up to the date of the ruling and is only void going forward (so no back taxes would be owed).
They didn't spent $74M on the orbiter but on the entire mission. Let that sink in... Part of that was achieved by using cheap stuff developed in-house instead of spending a lot of money buying abroad.
Then we get a resurrection of that other gem of an EU proposal (which I believe was also instigated by the news outlets): the notion that simply linking to content constitutes copyright infringement.
"You are not allowed to advertise our business without paying us for the privilege"
"Oh, and you are obliged to advertise our business"
Patently absurd when applied to any business, except publishing apparently. It's a brilliant plan, really. The EU values a healthy, independent press. Even though I use the term independent very lightly, it wouldn't be good if government were seen to subsidise the perss directly. So instead they give them the power to tax private parties with deep pockets.
The same goes for his other "inventions". The Air Blade hand dryer and the bladeless fan were not invented by him. He did an Apple on those, making improvements on existing technology and turning them into viable products (some would argue the "viable" part).
It doesn't. Here in the Netherlands, downloading was actually legal until recently, regardless of where the download was from. Uploading of copyrighted material always has been punishable. Meaning that using Torrent to get these movies is illegal whether you already own a copy or not, since you're "helping piracy".
Which is true in a way. I see that as a hearty FU to the media companies for their customer-hating tactics in hopes they will change their ways. That's how far my ethics go. That, by the way, was also the policy of Dutch lawmakers for a good while: their stance was to not make downloading illegal, or to decline to prosecute downloads of any content that isn't reasonably available for download from a legal source. (reasonably meaning: released in a timely manner, priced at or below the physical medium, allowing time shifting and offline playback). Sadly they dropped that stance and kowtow to the "intellectual property" camp.
Pay the fee and go ad-free. I actually like that model a lot: a free, ad-supported service with the option to pay to have ads removed. My only issue is that the temptation to keep adding more and more ads to the free service often proves too great, or they try and sneak in ads into the paid service.
Got a bunch of Blurays but never played them, in fact most are still in the wrapper. I only get them because legal digital download-to-own doesn't exist (not really). So I "steal" movies via torrent and buy the Blurays as a license for the ones I want to keep. Everything is played from a NAS, music as well, haven't bothered with CDs in ages.
It would be nice to set some legal ground rules for EULAs. Such as: they cannot be changed without prior notice, the text should fit on 4 A4-sized sheets in 12 point font, and you can only use the words in this dictionary ("the ten-hundred most used words").
Last year I got a mortgage for a commercial property, and was pleasantly surprised by the terms and conditions: written in very plain and succinct language, and especially lacking in those unbelievable run-on sentences found in regular legalese. It is possible to write agreements that can actually be read and understood. Time to make that a requirement if companies want to have them legally enforced.
Even making them less expensive doesn't seem to help. Young people have "upward potential", whereas an older person who is applying for a job that much younger people also applied for clearly is a "loser" with a dead end career... Never mind the years of experience that he brings. And young people "exciting new ideas and insights to the company", whereas old guys are "change-averse". True to some extent, but sometimes that is the benefit of experience as well. I worked in an organisation with a great mix of old and young, and every now and then some young manager would come up with a brilliant new way of doing things. To which the old guys often responded: "yeah, we tried that before, in '86, '95, 2001 and 2007, and it didn't work. How are we going to try this differently this time?"
Are the batteries glued down these days in iPhones? The older iPhones had removable batteries, though you needed the right screwdriver for those itty bitty screws to get the case open.
We have cell phone shops that already did this for ages. They have trade-in deals on new phones, and sell the old phones on as "refurbished", wiped, tested, and with some form of warranty. Perhaps the manufacturers thought they could not compete well enough with this setup, or they did not want to tarnish their reputation as a premium brand. Apple might be sensitive to that, though presumably they are also gearing up for the refurb market with their yearly upgrade program. Maybe they will sell refurbed phones in bulk to retailers...
A bootcamp sounds great though for an experienced professional to pick up a new skill. When it comes to IT stuff, my experience is that a focused approach with plenty of hands on works best. You don't learn a new development framework well by trying a couple of tutorials from a book, you need to do an actual project. You can try this on the job, which usually sucks royally for all involved (unless you set up specifically for this). Or you do this yourself but this requires time and focus that not everyone may be able to muster in their spare time. You'll lack feedback as well, unless you happen to find a suitable and active FOSS project to work on.
A boot camp is better, as long as it's not just paint-by-numbers coding; students need to create their own code, which is then inspected and commented on. When I wanted an app, I tought myself iOS coding which was plenty hard as an experienced coder, and I learned a lot by doing. But I learned the most from when others took a look at that code and suggested improvements (after they stopped crying, of course). I can see how such a learning approach could be condensed into an intensive n-week course. What a good boot camp gives you is purpose, focus, and feedback.
One time I tried to bring a boot camp approach to the job instead. We had a small project team, set up do work in an environment that none of us had a great deal of experience with (though no one was a complete noob in it either). So we brought on an experienced dev to help, and a trainer providing coaching and feedback during the first development cycle of 12 weeks, including individual coaching sessions as well as classroom learning with examples and exercises taken from the actual project. Expensive as hell, but thankfully the budget for this approach was accepted, and the results were astounding... the end result of the project was ok but probably a hell of a lot better than it would have been otherwise. But the real result was training the staff, who were taken from junior to medior level on that product in a rather short timeframe. The next project they did on their own,effectively and with confidence.
We've been here before in the 90's, when CS and CIS degree programs were flooded by people in the field solely for the money
Calling those training courses "degree programs" is rather generous. I remember those days, there was a serious shortage of skilled IT people, and I don't mean shortage in the sense of "let's pretend there is one so we can import cheap overseas workers"; it was genuinely hard to find staff of any qualification. What we had then is similar to the current boot camps, short track training to quickly get people up to speed. They enrolled literally anyone into these programs: housewifes re-entering the job market, jobless artists, high school students looking for a summer job... and the results were to match. Very few people stayed in IT very long, the exceptions mostly turning out to be decent project support staff or project managers rather than qualified IT techs.
Laymen cannot audit this system, nor is the process of assuring anonymity and an accurate count transparent or comprehensible to laymen. That means they cannot trust this system... which is kind of an important aspect of a ballot.
Voting is meant to be anonymous; the process should be comprehensible to anyone, and anyone should be able to contribute to assuring that the ballot count is accurate. Paper based voting meets these requirements, and has the important bonus of being pretty resilient to tampering if enough citizens actually step up and help verify the results. The more you want to fraudulently influence a paper based vote, the more people you need to include in your scheme. Electronic voting on the other hand meets none of these requirements: anonymity is not guaranteed, the process is either sensitive to large scale fraud or hardened against fraud using encryption, making it completely intransparent to laymen. And auditing the count can only be done by experts, and even then fraud is pretty easy to miss.
Compartmentalization carries its own dangers. The idea is sound: only give people access to the systems and documents they need access to. The problem is that you'll never know beforehand which systems and documents those are. So, you need access to Doc X? "I know it takes 2 weeks to process an access request for this folder, so why don't I just email you the thing. Or I can email my credentials so you can access it with those". If your security measures get in the way of people doing their jobs, they will work around it.
Firefox forces me to obtain the self-signed certificate each time afresh, so each time it could be intercepted. Making hacking the cert very much easier.
I never really could imagine what posessed them to handle self signed certificates that way. But isn't there a check? Does FF actually remember the certificate and warn you if a different one is presented? That would make more sense: warn you every time that the cert cannot be verified, but also guard against a MITM replacing the cert with his own.
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The real question is: what does the law say about how illegal agreements like these should be handled? In some EU countries at least, if an agreement between government and a private person or company is deemed illegal, it cannot be annulled just like that; the government is supposed to be a trustworthy partner and cannot strike a deal then simply declare it illegal. In some cases the agreement itself will be considered void, but the affected person or company will not be on the hook for the whole amount owed, or will be compensated for incurred costs (like when a building permit that shouldn't have been issued is rescinded when building has already started). In other cases, the agreement stands up to the date of the ruling and is only void going forward (so no back taxes would be owed).
They didn't spent $74M on the orbiter but on the entire mission. Let that sink in... Part of that was achieved by using cheap stuff developed in-house instead of spending a lot of money buying abroad.
They already put a satellite in Mars orbit... and only spent $74 million putting it there. Who knows, they might go for a rover next.
Then we get a resurrection of that other gem of an EU proposal (which I believe was also instigated by the news outlets): the notion that simply linking to content constitutes copyright infringement.
"You are not allowed to advertise our business without paying us for the privilege"
"Oh, and you are obliged to advertise our business"
Patently absurd when applied to any business, except publishing apparently. It's a brilliant plan, really. The EU values a healthy, independent press. Even though I use the term independent very lightly, it wouldn't be good if government were seen to subsidise the perss directly. So instead they give them the power to tax private parties with deep pockets.
This is not a free market. In a free market you'd be free to buy from overseas companies.
The same goes for his other "inventions". The Air Blade hand dryer and the bladeless fan were not invented by him. He did an Apple on those, making improvements on existing technology and turning them into viable products (some would argue the "viable" part).
It doesn't. Here in the Netherlands, downloading was actually legal until recently, regardless of where the download was from. Uploading of copyrighted material always has been punishable. Meaning that using Torrent to get these movies is illegal whether you already own a copy or not, since you're "helping piracy".
Which is true in a way. I see that as a hearty FU to the media companies for their customer-hating tactics in hopes they will change their ways. That's how far my ethics go. That, by the way, was also the policy of Dutch lawmakers for a good while: their stance was to not make downloading illegal, or to decline to prosecute downloads of any content that isn't reasonably available for download from a legal source. (reasonably meaning: released in a timely manner, priced at or below the physical medium, allowing time shifting and offline playback). Sadly they dropped that stance and kowtow to the "intellectual property" camp.
Pay the fee and go ad-free. I actually like that model a lot: a free, ad-supported service with the option to pay to have ads removed. My only issue is that the temptation to keep adding more and more ads to the free service often proves too great, or they try and sneak in ads into the paid service.
Not to lawyers though. Which is why that will never happen; they will not give up their role as high priests to the law.
Got a bunch of Blurays but never played them, in fact most are still in the wrapper. I only get them because legal digital download-to-own doesn't exist (not really). So I "steal" movies via torrent and buy the Blurays as a license for the ones I want to keep. Everything is played from a NAS, music as well, haven't bothered with CDs in ages.
It would be nice to set some legal ground rules for EULAs. Such as: they cannot be changed without prior notice, the text should fit on 4 A4-sized sheets in 12 point font, and you can only use the words in this dictionary ("the ten-hundred most used words").
Last year I got a mortgage for a commercial property, and was pleasantly surprised by the terms and conditions: written in very plain and succinct language, and especially lacking in those unbelievable run-on sentences found in regular legalese. It is possible to write agreements that can actually be read and understood. Time to make that a requirement if companies want to have them legally enforced.
In a country pretty much run by lawyers, what's the difference.
Even making them less expensive doesn't seem to help. Young people have "upward potential", whereas an older person who is applying for a job that much younger people also applied for clearly is a "loser" with a dead end career... Never mind the years of experience that he brings. And young people "exciting new ideas and insights to the company", whereas old guys are "change-averse". True to some extent, but sometimes that is the benefit of experience as well. I worked in an organisation with a great mix of old and young, and every now and then some young manager would come up with a brilliant new way of doing things. To which the old guys often responded: "yeah, we tried that before, in '86, '95, 2001 and 2007, and it didn't work. How are we going to try this differently this time?"
C) Let Patel walk half a damn block.
Are the batteries glued down these days in iPhones? The older iPhones had removable batteries, though you needed the right screwdriver for those itty bitty screws to get the case open.
We have cell phone shops that already did this for ages. They have trade-in deals on new phones, and sell the old phones on as "refurbished", wiped, tested, and with some form of warranty. Perhaps the manufacturers thought they could not compete well enough with this setup, or they did not want to tarnish their reputation as a premium brand. Apple might be sensitive to that, though presumably they are also gearing up for the refurb market with their yearly upgrade program. Maybe they will sell refurbed phones in bulk to retailers...
Estimates range from 25% to 35%. Which is no surprise given their "military first" policy in a country that can't even reliably feed its people.
A bootcamp sounds great though for an experienced professional to pick up a new skill. When it comes to IT stuff, my experience is that a focused approach with plenty of hands on works best. You don't learn a new development framework well by trying a couple of tutorials from a book, you need to do an actual project. You can try this on the job, which usually sucks royally for all involved (unless you set up specifically for this). Or you do this yourself but this requires time and focus that not everyone may be able to muster in their spare time. You'll lack feedback as well, unless you happen to find a suitable and active FOSS project to work on.
,effectively and with confidence.
A boot camp is better, as long as it's not just paint-by-numbers coding; students need to create their own code, which is then inspected and commented on. When I wanted an app, I tought myself iOS coding which was plenty hard as an experienced coder, and I learned a lot by doing. But I learned the most from when others took a look at that code and suggested improvements (after they stopped crying, of course). I can see how such a learning approach could be condensed into an intensive n-week course. What a good boot camp gives you is purpose, focus, and feedback.
One time I tried to bring a boot camp approach to the job instead. We had a small project team, set up do work in an environment that none of us had a great deal of experience with (though no one was a complete noob in it either). So we brought on an experienced dev to help, and a trainer providing coaching and feedback during the first development cycle of 12 weeks, including individual coaching sessions as well as classroom learning with examples and exercises taken from the actual project. Expensive as hell, but thankfully the budget for this approach was accepted, and the results were astounding... the end result of the project was ok but probably a hell of a lot better than it would have been otherwise. But the real result was training the staff, who were taken from junior to medior level on that product in a rather short timeframe. The next project they did on their own
We've been here before in the 90's, when CS and CIS degree programs were flooded by people in the field solely for the money
Calling those training courses "degree programs" is rather generous. I remember those days, there was a serious shortage of skilled IT people, and I don't mean shortage in the sense of "let's pretend there is one so we can import cheap overseas workers"; it was genuinely hard to find staff of any qualification. What we had then is similar to the current boot camps, short track training to quickly get people up to speed. They enrolled literally anyone into these programs: housewifes re-entering the job market, jobless artists, high school students looking for a summer job... and the results were to match. Very few people stayed in IT very long, the exceptions mostly turning out to be decent project support staff or project managers rather than qualified IT techs.
This is like taxing car owners, period
FTFY. Your first question should be: where does the other 75% go?
Laymen cannot audit this system, nor is the process of assuring anonymity and an accurate count transparent or comprehensible to laymen. That means they cannot trust this system... which is kind of an important aspect of a ballot.
Voting is meant to be anonymous; the process should be comprehensible to anyone, and anyone should be able to contribute to assuring that the ballot count is accurate. Paper based voting meets these requirements, and has the important bonus of being pretty resilient to tampering if enough citizens actually step up and help verify the results. The more you want to fraudulently influence a paper based vote, the more people you need to include in your scheme. Electronic voting on the other hand meets none of these requirements: anonymity is not guaranteed, the process is either sensitive to large scale fraud or hardened against fraud using encryption, making it completely intransparent to laymen. And auditing the count can only be done by experts, and even then fraud is pretty easy to miss.
Compartmentalization carries its own dangers. The idea is sound: only give people access to the systems and documents they need access to. The problem is that you'll never know beforehand which systems and documents those are. So, you need access to Doc X? "I know it takes 2 weeks to process an access request for this folder, so why don't I just email you the thing. Or I can email my credentials so you can access it with those". If your security measures get in the way of people doing their jobs, they will work around it.
Firefox forces me to obtain the self-signed certificate each time afresh, so each time it could be intercepted. Making hacking the cert very much easier.
I never really could imagine what posessed them to handle self signed certificates that way. But isn't there a check? Does FF actually remember the certificate and warn you if a different one is presented? That would make more sense: warn you every time that the cert cannot be verified, but also guard against a MITM replacing the cert with his own.