Such stories are common in any dictatorship or conflict. Look at Russia, Turkey, Venezuela. Bizarre, improbably stories of "foreign agitators". As they say, the first victim of any war is the truth.
Re. Point 4, the key factor is how durable the solar panel surface is compared to regular roads. Servicing roads comes with a ton of hidden costs in the form of increased traffic jams or long detours when a road is (partially) closed. If solar roads have to be resurfaced much more often than regular roads, it quickly becomes an unattractive option.
Free speech means that you are free to say whatever you want. But it does not place any entity, private or public, under any obligation to offer you a platform. If Twitter decides to censor Trump, that's censorship, but it's not unimaginable since it's a private company. They are free to censor him because they think his views are bad, because they hate his guts, or because it's a full moon on Saturday.
Parsing a CSV is harder than you'd think, for that reason amongst others. Even Excel doesn't always get it right, I remember having to get some 3rd party library to correctly read all cases, and it was quite a lot of code. Not just fields=split(line,",")
"The empowered far-right" refers to democratic parties, not skinheads and criminals. And they are bolstered by the ongoing immigration crisis and the total absence of adequate measures to prevent or mitigate the resulting problems. Worried but otherwise moderate people are increasingly voicing support for what is termed the "far right" because none of the other parties appear to be interested in taking action.
By the way, that has nothing to do with the inability to differentiate between individuals and groups. Moderate, reasonable people know the distinction and while they may (rightly) fear the problems of mass immigration, that does not mean they have anything against individual immigrants, against the group of immigrants who are here already, or against bona fide refugees. It does not mean that they are xenofobes who hate foreigners or their culture. They just want less immigration overall as they see the effect it is starting to have on their countries' culture, safety and finances. And some don't even want less immigration but stricter selection and integration processes, and effective repatriation policies.
And since we now have face recognition, everyone who displays their face in plain view have no expectation of privacy either. If you don't want to be tracked, it's a burqa for you... or you can just keep walking with your head up your arse, I suppose.
Over here, privacy laws make a clear distinction between data being available, and the acts of collecting, processing and sharing that data. Each of those acts is strictly regulated, and the fact that your license plate is always in full view doesn't mean that everyone has the right to track your whereabouts 24/7. In this case, the idea behind this setup (catching outstanding fines with a license plate reader) does not clash with principles of good privacy, but the implementation does: a private company having access to that list of deadbeats, for instance. I would expect the police to (be ordered to) demand a system that is under their full control, with no 3rd parties having access to any of the data.
Sure, but it doesn't make a compelling case for the blockchain being the most important discovery of our age. Is it important in being a new fundamental insight or method that opens up a whole new area of business or research? No. Is it important because of the impact it has on the field of computing or another sector, or on society as a whole? No. The potential uses mentioned in the article are all incremental improvements rather that revolutionary: doing what we already are doing, but slightly better. Blockchains and distributed trust have the potential to transform the way we handle money or land registries, but in and of themselves they are insufficient to solve the problems with centralised solutions. When they start transforming our world, we can name them the greatest IT invention. Such things are better done in hindsight.
Most people in smaller markets will most likely continue to overpay to get their content later than anyone else. And even if enough of us stop watching and listening to hurt their pocketbook, they will just blame it on piracy anyway. Better that a government reminds them in no uncertain terms that intellectual "property" is not a natural right but an artificial privilege granted by society, and that society can revoke that privilege if it is abused.
Thankfully the Pirate Bay has none of those issues.
I rather liked the policy long held by Dutch legislators: "We don't like piracy, but until there's a reasonable legal alternative, we're not going to do anything about it". This held for a good while for downloadable music and still held for movies when this policy sadly was abandonded. And it seems that at least a few politicians are getting increasingly pissed off about DRM, regional licensing and region codes. I'd like to see the old policy revived and applied per work: if certain content is available in other countries but not here (at similar prices), it's ok to pirate it. Sadly international agreements probably preclude such a policy, and if TTIP is implemented, publishers could sue the Dutch government for this in secret court.
If they are faithful to their spouse, are they any less likely to cheat their employer? I wonder. And regardless of the correlation, what counts is the matter of privacy. If no laws are broken, your employer has no business knowing about that any more than your sexual orientation, your fetishes, or how you treat your neighbours.
Not this argument again. In most places I've seen implement BYOD, it always started as an optional scheme. Get a company Blackberry if you're eligible (same rules as before), or get your corporate mail, calendar, contacts and certain documents on your own phone. Or you can have both. And when such a scheme launched, pretty much all the execs dropped their company BB and started using the Android or iPhone they already owned. In some companies the Blackberries all but disappeared in a few short monts.
What assets have they acquired, exactly? An office, a handful of employees (who might leave or be laid off anyway), and some software that's probably cheaper to rewrite from scratch? There's also this:
The person familiar with the deal added that as part of the transaction, GM will also get a license to a patent that was granted to Sidecar CEO Paul in 2002: “System and method for determining an efficient transportation route.”
Sidecar executives believed the patent covered the essential intellectual property behind ride-sharing, though Uber and Lyft never responded to Sidecar’s repeated attempts to enforce the patent, this person said.
It seems a poor deal for GM that they won't get ownership of that patent so they can whack Uber around the head with; all they get is a license to use it. But perhaps there are more patents owned by Sidecar? Seems hardly worth buying the company at all, otherwise.
Also, an acute psychosis brought on by too much cannabis is a well-known issue and cause of death for young tourists in Amsterdam as well. Usually we have a few casualties each summer because people in a psychosis sometimes think they can fly.
This is not about responsibility or picking the "right" targets. They could have singled out Apple, Samsung and Sony because they get parts from companies who get sub-parts from companies who source their raw materials from mines where the company-provided lunch is delivered daily by *horror* CHILDREN.
The point is: if Amnesty brings this up with Foxconn, that company will just laugh at them and the public will ask "who the hell is Foxconn?". By going after Apple and Sony, they create much more awareness with the public, and since those companies pay lip service to such moral issues at least, there's a chance that they will take action, and they have a much better chance than Amnesty to get working conditions at supplier and subcontracting companies changed.
ITER is an international effort that happens to be built in France (Japan was the other candidate IIRC). Besides demonstrating a capability to sustain fusion at a significant net energy surplus, it should answer the question of to what degree the reactor vessel will become radioactive, and many other difficult questions as well. Sadly it'll be a while before we'll know more; realistically, ITER won't see first plasma before 2025, and will take years to demonstrate sustained fusion.
Meanwhile, interesting things are happening in Germany. The Wendelstein stellerator has seen first plasma last month and is going operational this year. This thing attempts to solve a number of issues with the classical Tokamak design, and the goals for this reactor are rather ambitious: to sustain plasma for up to 30 minutes.
And then there's programming, where you're expected to create algorithms.
And yet, young kids from all manner of backgrounds manage to make the little turtle move along its prescribed path with a couple of Logo statements. That is programming. Crafting complex, well-formed programs requires a lot of training and experience, but you don't need all that to get started. That was true back when my high school received a roomful of C64s, one clueless math teacher took it upon himself to teach us, and the provided learning material sucked horribly. We can do much better today; a CS course can include some basic computer theory (computer components, what goes on in a CPU, etc), fun programming assignments, and some formal coding subjects like data structures, loops and functions, object orientation, basic algorithms like sorting, etc. None of this is above the level of (senior) high school students.
Sure, not all kids will like it, but they don't all like math, chemistry or Spanish. That doesn't and shouldn't stop us from teaching these subjects. Make the foundation course compulsory with advanced classes as electives, much like any other subject taught in our schools (in the Netherlands, anyway)
This was the firm "Haags Juristen College" in NL, ran by Toine Manders. I found only Dutch articles on Google. If you do a search, be aware that there are two famous Toine Manderses around, and that most articles on his company are rather biased one way or another (for or against).
It doesn't have to. Not in the sense that every kid ends up being a competent coder.
It is good that kids are exposed to coding and learn some of the rudiments. A few kids may be inspired to take up a career in IT, others may derive some benefit from when they take a job that involves computers, and for others still will simply be part of having a well rounded education. The same can be said for biology, poetry, economics or history, by the way.
What you're talking about is restoring an old car, and that's expensive even with cheap aftermarket replacement parts. You're right: the labour will be killing. For example: instead of painting the car at the optimum moment during assembly, you'll have to remove a bunch of stuff from the car, mask the rest, sand fill and otherwise prepare the surfaces by hand, paint, then re-fit whatever you removed. That doesn't lend itself well to scaling up or automation. That's why there's only two reasons why people choose to refurbish a car: either it's a rare, valuable classic, or the car is so old that it is eligible for interesting tax deductions (some European countries exempt old-timers from the often substantial (=extortionate) road tax).
Not just that. Complicated and expensive (in terms of an absolute euro value) tax evasion schemes benefit large corporation but remain largely unavailable for small companies and middle class individuals due to complexity and cost. This puts smaller companies as a competitive disadvantage. I'm still paying 20% tax on profits for my company, and in many other EU countries that amount is higher still. Meanwhile larger companies are paying bugger all.
This is a well known fact in political circles, of course. A few years ago an entrepreneur started a fiscal consultancy firm to advise smaller companies on how to avoid paying tax on profits, and to do the legal and bureaucratic legwork for them for a reasonable fee. It didn't take long for the tax office, the finance minister, and the public prosecutor to catch on, and they went after him with a vengeance. Can't have the little people have their break after all... In that sense it is only fair that they are going after the big boys now... as long as they stay within the law doing so, and only prosecute for actual wrongdoings, not just for "unethical behaviour"
Slashdot Mirror
Such stories are common in any dictatorship or conflict. Look at Russia, Turkey, Venezuela. Bizarre, improbably stories of "foreign agitators". As they say, the first victim of any war is the truth.
Trying to stay ahead, I suppose. Our police started an experiment training large birds of prey to attack and take out (small) drones. Israelis come up with a drone that fights back.
Re. Point 4, the key factor is how durable the solar panel surface is compared to regular roads. Servicing roads comes with a ton of hidden costs in the form of increased traffic jams or long detours when a road is (partially) closed. If solar roads have to be resurfaced much more often than regular roads, it quickly becomes an unattractive option.
Free speech means that you are free to say whatever you want. But it does not place any entity, private or public, under any obligation to offer you a platform. If Twitter decides to censor Trump, that's censorship, but it's not unimaginable since it's a private company. They are free to censor him because they think his views are bad, because they hate his guts, or because it's a full moon on Saturday.
Parsing a CSV is harder than you'd think, for that reason amongst others. Even Excel doesn't always get it right, I remember having to get some 3rd party library to correctly read all cases, and it was quite a lot of code. Not just fields=split(line,",")
"The empowered far-right" refers to democratic parties, not skinheads and criminals. And they are bolstered by the ongoing immigration crisis and the total absence of adequate measures to prevent or mitigate the resulting problems. Worried but otherwise moderate people are increasingly voicing support for what is termed the "far right" because none of the other parties appear to be interested in taking action.
By the way, that has nothing to do with the inability to differentiate between individuals and groups. Moderate, reasonable people know the distinction and while they may (rightly) fear the problems of mass immigration, that does not mean they have anything against individual immigrants, against the group of immigrants who are here already, or against bona fide refugees. It does not mean that they are xenofobes who hate foreigners or their culture. They just want less immigration overall as they see the effect it is starting to have on their countries' culture, safety and finances. And some don't even want less immigration but stricter selection and integration processes, and effective repatriation policies.
I never realised it was the same guy. That only makes him more awesome.
And since we now have face recognition, everyone who displays their face in plain view have no expectation of privacy either. If you don't want to be tracked, it's a burqa for you... or you can just keep walking with your head up your arse, I suppose.
Over here, privacy laws make a clear distinction between data being available, and the acts of collecting, processing and sharing that data. Each of those acts is strictly regulated, and the fact that your license plate is always in full view doesn't mean that everyone has the right to track your whereabouts 24/7. In this case, the idea behind this setup (catching outstanding fines with a license plate reader) does not clash with principles of good privacy, but the implementation does: a private company having access to that list of deadbeats, for instance. I would expect the police to (be ordered to) demand a system that is under their full control, with no 3rd parties having access to any of the data.
Sure, but it doesn't make a compelling case for the blockchain being the most important discovery of our age. Is it important in being a new fundamental insight or method that opens up a whole new area of business or research? No. Is it important because of the impact it has on the field of computing or another sector, or on society as a whole? No. The potential uses mentioned in the article are all incremental improvements rather that revolutionary: doing what we already are doing, but slightly better. Blockchains and distributed trust have the potential to transform the way we handle money or land registries, but in and of themselves they are insufficient to solve the problems with centralised solutions. When they start transforming our world, we can name them the greatest IT invention. Such things are better done in hindsight.
Most people in smaller markets will most likely continue to overpay to get their content later than anyone else. And even if enough of us stop watching and listening to hurt their pocketbook, they will just blame it on piracy anyway. Better that a government reminds them in no uncertain terms that intellectual "property" is not a natural right but an artificial privilege granted by society, and that society can revoke that privilege if it is abused.
Thankfully the Pirate Bay has none of those issues.
I rather liked the policy long held by Dutch legislators: "We don't like piracy, but until there's a reasonable legal alternative, we're not going to do anything about it". This held for a good while for downloadable music and still held for movies when this policy sadly was abandonded. And it seems that at least a few politicians are getting increasingly pissed off about DRM, regional licensing and region codes. I'd like to see the old policy revived and applied per work: if certain content is available in other countries but not here (at similar prices), it's ok to pirate it. Sadly international agreements probably preclude such a policy, and if TTIP is implemented, publishers could sue the Dutch government for this in secret court.
If they are faithful to their spouse, are they any less likely to cheat their employer? I wonder. And regardless of the correlation, what counts is the matter of privacy. If no laws are broken, your employer has no business knowing about that any more than your sexual orientation, your fetishes, or how you treat your neighbours.
Not this argument again. In most places I've seen implement BYOD, it always started as an optional scheme. Get a company Blackberry if you're eligible (same rules as before), or get your corporate mail, calendar, contacts and certain documents on your own phone. Or you can have both. And when such a scheme launched, pretty much all the execs dropped their company BB and started using the Android or iPhone they already owned. In some companies the Blackberries all but disappeared in a few short monts.
Just that there are an awful lot of news items about jumpers high on shrooms. Google turns up plenty of articles in English as well
The person familiar with the deal added that as part of the transaction, GM will also get a license to a patent that was granted to Sidecar CEO Paul in 2002: “System and method for determining an efficient transportation route.”
Sidecar executives believed the patent covered the essential intellectual property behind ride-sharing, though Uber and Lyft never responded to Sidecar’s repeated attempts to enforce the patent, this person said.
It seems a poor deal for GM that they won't get ownership of that patent so they can whack Uber around the head with; all they get is a license to use it. But perhaps there are more patents owned by Sidecar? Seems hardly worth buying the company at all, otherwise.
Also, an acute psychosis brought on by too much cannabis is a well-known issue and cause of death for young tourists in Amsterdam as well. Usually we have a few casualties each summer because people in a psychosis sometimes think they can fly.
The jumpers are mostly mushroom users.
This is not about responsibility or picking the "right" targets. They could have singled out Apple, Samsung and Sony because they get parts from companies who get sub-parts from companies who source their raw materials from mines where the company-provided lunch is delivered daily by *horror* CHILDREN.
The point is: if Amnesty brings this up with Foxconn, that company will just laugh at them and the public will ask "who the hell is Foxconn?". By going after Apple and Sony, they create much more awareness with the public, and since those companies pay lip service to such moral issues at least, there's a chance that they will take action, and they have a much better chance than Amnesty to get working conditions at supplier and subcontracting companies changed.
ITER is an international effort that happens to be built in France (Japan was the other candidate IIRC). Besides demonstrating a capability to sustain fusion at a significant net energy surplus, it should answer the question of to what degree the reactor vessel will become radioactive, and many other difficult questions as well. Sadly it'll be a while before we'll know more; realistically, ITER won't see first plasma before 2025, and will take years to demonstrate sustained fusion.
Meanwhile, interesting things are happening in Germany. The Wendelstein stellerator has seen first plasma last month and is going operational this year. This thing attempts to solve a number of issues with the classical Tokamak design, and the goals for this reactor are rather ambitious: to sustain plasma for up to 30 minutes.
And then there's programming, where you're expected to create algorithms.
And yet, young kids from all manner of backgrounds manage to make the little turtle move along its prescribed path with a couple of Logo statements. That is programming. Crafting complex, well-formed programs requires a lot of training and experience, but you don't need all that to get started. That was true back when my high school received a roomful of C64s, one clueless math teacher took it upon himself to teach us, and the provided learning material sucked horribly. We can do much better today; a CS course can include some basic computer theory (computer components, what goes on in a CPU, etc), fun programming assignments, and some formal coding subjects like data structures, loops and functions, object orientation, basic algorithms like sorting, etc. None of this is above the level of (senior) high school students.
Sure, not all kids will like it, but they don't all like math, chemistry or Spanish. That doesn't and shouldn't stop us from teaching these subjects. Make the foundation course compulsory with advanced classes as electives, much like any other subject taught in our schools (in the Netherlands, anyway)
Awesome, thanks. I'll be watching that.
This was the firm "Haags Juristen College" in NL, ran by Toine Manders. I found only Dutch articles on Google. If you do a search, be aware that there are two famous Toine Manderses around, and that most articles on his company are rather biased one way or another (for or against).
It doesn't have to. Not in the sense that every kid ends up being a competent coder.
It is good that kids are exposed to coding and learn some of the rudiments. A few kids may be inspired to take up a career in IT, others may derive some benefit from when they take a job that involves computers, and for others still will simply be part of having a well rounded education. The same can be said for biology, poetry, economics or history, by the way.
What you're talking about is restoring an old car, and that's expensive even with cheap aftermarket replacement parts. You're right: the labour will be killing. For example: instead of painting the car at the optimum moment during assembly, you'll have to remove a bunch of stuff from the car, mask the rest, sand fill and otherwise prepare the surfaces by hand, paint, then re-fit whatever you removed. That doesn't lend itself well to scaling up or automation. That's why there's only two reasons why people choose to refurbish a car: either it's a rare, valuable classic, or the car is so old that it is eligible for interesting tax deductions (some European countries exempt old-timers from the often substantial (=extortionate) road tax).
Who cares about making sense? Bring on the next space race already...
Not just that. Complicated and expensive (in terms of an absolute euro value) tax evasion schemes benefit large corporation but remain largely unavailable for small companies and middle class individuals due to complexity and cost. This puts smaller companies as a competitive disadvantage. I'm still paying 20% tax on profits for my company, and in many other EU countries that amount is higher still. Meanwhile larger companies are paying bugger all.
This is a well known fact in political circles, of course. A few years ago an entrepreneur started a fiscal consultancy firm to advise smaller companies on how to avoid paying tax on profits, and to do the legal and bureaucratic legwork for them for a reasonable fee. It didn't take long for the tax office, the finance minister, and the public prosecutor to catch on, and they went after him with a vengeance. Can't have the little people have their break after all... In that sense it is only fair that they are going after the big boys now... as long as they stay within the law doing so, and only prosecute for actual wrongdoings, not just for "unethical behaviour"