— and in the future, it's easy to see how the same tool could be used to battle patent trolling, too."
and it's also easy to see how the same tool could be used to automatically generate even more patents.
After all, since we've already seen that computers can randomly generate fake nonsensical Physics research papers and get them published in real Science Journals. We're not so far off that they'll be able to do the same with patent claims. It would be just like a turing test, but only easier since real patent legal language is already designed to obfuscate the obvious -- it would be easy to have a computer mimic it.
But they didn't do anything illegal. They're basically just using their own download application that comes with extra stuff. In fact, Google does exactly the same with Chrome, so you should blame them too.
No, they didn't. So what?
There are plenty of things that are perfectly legal that people don't like.
In this case, the author of the open source security software should just make his own software blacklist the download.com site for malware/shadyware, which is also completely legal to do. And then hopefully, download.com would retaliate by blacklisting his software, so then everybody is happy. The author is happy. The consumer is happy. And download.com is relieved not to have to his software listed on their site anymore.
I work from home too, and sometimes I'll go work at a coffee shop with a friend just so we can keep each other accountable. Plus, if the person you're meeting at the coffee shop also happens to be working on the same project as you are, it's useful to know how far along their share of the work is going and if one of you is spinning his wheels for any reason, it's also easier for the person not spinning his wheels to actually notice the other person in trouble and offer to help out.
I've never had my billable hours questioned, and have always delivered quality software in the end.
What about the rest of us? Those of us less perfect than you are. Would we be allowed to enter such contracts? It's not like anyone is forcing you to enter into such contracts, as you've told us, you have plenty of clients who hire you without even asking you to do this. But what about us who actually want this?
I know many contract programmers, myself included, that charge less hours than they've actually spent working on a project, and then yes, many times we do deliver quality software, but we don't deliver it on time, or we don't communicate adequately the real pace of the work we're making (as we uncover more and more work to do that was originally unplanned). Now depending on the type of project you're working on, this may not be a problem, but then again, it could be a problem, and personally, I wouldn't mind this kind of screen capture for my own work (as long as it was disclosed to me upfront, which it clearly is, in this case, and as long as my boss/client wasn't a jerk about it, of course, if your boss/client is a jerk, then all bets would be off, and I'd want to have as little as contact with that person as possible).
most of the bloggers write up a summary with a link, this is not journalism. filming news happening and reporting on what is happening is called reporting the news.
in this case the blogger deserves what they got. the news media goes out of it's way to say alleged and not call people thieves until they get convicted in a court of law. which is the way it should be
Then you're arguing that journalists do not need more protection than bloggers since journalists do the right thing anyway?
This won't stop them from playing uhrkan masters using the.deb they smuggled in, assuming they have the user rights to install. (Failing that they could smuggle in a binary blob version) but it would help prevent cheating.
Cheating at what? Urhkan masters or the test? I'm afraid you might have lost sight of the original question.
Yes, this would work for about 5 minutes, and then the students would just figure out that they could turn their mobile phones into bluetooth hotspots.
The government has asked social media companies to develop a way to eliminate offensive content as soon as it is created, no matter what country it is created in, he said.
You'll notice, he said to "eliminate", not filter.
Call me paranoid, but I think that's a not-so-subtle death threat directed at Richard Gere.
Yes, that's the standard disclaimer, but who does that really?! The very reason we root our phones is so we can make a complete backup in the first place. Ignore the disclaimer, everything we do in life involves a little bit of risk.
Just do a partial backup of your own personal stuff, the stuff that can be gotten too at least, and not just on the SD card, but on your PC as well (since SD cards have been known to fail). And then look for the standard image that was originally used to flash your Nexus S by the manufacturer. It must be floating somewhere around the Internet. That at least should be able to restore your phone to its original manufacturer specs.
And be aware that despite all the precautions you're taking, it's still possible to completely brick your phone (however improbable that is), but like I said, everything in life involves a little bit of risk anyway.
If CM has the update before the Nexus phones do, then what is the point of buying a nexus phone?
It's to have a working video recorder and a fully working camera (among other things).
Right now, the modded version of ICS doesn't have those things, but at least it can make phone calls. So if you want to be the coolest kid on the block, mod your phone with a modded version of ICS, just note that it won't be fully usable until it gets access to the official update.
I disagree. As a CEO, accepting huge below-price government loans with no strings attached is the correct response, not the incorrect one.
Even a healthy bank should accept such loans, since it would make money on the price differential alone. And not accepting the money would only make sure that its competitors (healthy or not) who did accept the money, would have an unfair advantage against it when loaning out that money on the open Market.
And the way our corporation by-laws are written, if such (an almost) free loan was offered by the government, and if the CEO had refused it on moral grounds, he would have been negligent to refuse it in the first place.
And when that happens, as a shareholder that's the only time I can really sue the CEO personally. Normally, he would be protected from personal liability by the Corporation and if that didn't work, he would be protected from personal liability by his Board & Officer's insurance, but if he was found negligent in this way, all bets would be off, I could go after his house, his car, his personal property, basically anything that wasn't already protected by the law of the State his personal property was already located in.
How do they reach that conclusion? Every dollar I don't spend buying a song or book or movie is not necessarily a dollar I spend on some other piece of media. Those dollars go into the general fund, and get spent on food and gas and rent and utilities.
I think they're talking about an aggregate, not your single data point. I also think you're being disingenuous. We're talking about disposable income here, not the money you spend on rent, food, gas, or utilities. I doubt your landlord gets an extra donation every time you save some money on something else. You also don't sound like you're a heavy consumer. I doubt the music industry is making much money on you either way.
You'd have to test it -- you know, environmental chambers, shakers, etc.
That's what I'm saying. That's what NASA has been doing.
I don't remember any of the figures they've tested it at, so I said "all kinds of temperatures", etc. I probably shouldn't have said that, that kind language is so imprecise, it's basically worthless to make a claim with it.
But thus far, their testing is on track, and has been quite successful.
We don't know how it works in vacuum, because it hasn't really been in vacuum...
Well, your statement is incorrect. It has indeed been tested in a vaccum chamber(s). For how long, I don't know. The Nexus One came out in January 2010, so however long, it couldn't have been very long yet, certainly not 30 years yet. That's the only point I can concede you on.
I have once seen tests of a fairly unassuming low-key data acquisition device in vacuum at -100C to 100C temperature ranges, and there was a lot of redesign involved to get it to work acceptably with no air present around it.
Yes, but that device was probably not a consumer-grade cell phone. Even among consumer-grade devices, there are huge differences between let's say a TV set-top box and an actual cell phone. It would make sense that such a cell phone was over-engineered up the wazoo, but that a TV set top box just wouldn't need to be.
The only thing consequentially different is computer capability, but a faster/more complex computer would just as likely be a liability as a bonus. Software design techniques, if anything, have gone rapidly backwards for this sort of application since the late 70s/early 80s.
Thankfully, some of our/your assumptions about space technology are currently being proven wrong. For instance, take the Nexus One. NASA has been testing it to see if it could make cheaper smaller satellites with it, and its performance in that regard has been completely outstanding.
Granted, it hasn't survived 30 years in space yet, only time will tell on that one.
But it can survive in all kinds of extreme temperatures, all kinds of G forces, and it works perfectly well in a vacuum. And it's so small to begin with, the extra hardware it needs to power it, recharge it, move it, etc, doesn't have to be that big to begin with.
During one of its space test, the Nexus One was even strapped to the tip of a rocket and the rocket accidentally crashed back into the desert leaving a large crater, but the phone only got a cracked screen and was still fully functional otherwise.
And this is probably something that's not unique to that phone, or to Android, in particular. Consumer-grade devices, because they've been designed to survive actual consumers and sometimes even little kids, have come a long way in terms of reliability.
And granted, a Nexus One will still have bugs that would normally be intolerable in the older type of computers designed for space, but it has enough computing power to be reprogrammed remotely and compensate for most bugs that are found after the fact. And since they take much less space and weight, and are much cheaper to launch. You can launch half a dozen for a fraction of the cost it used to launch an older type of satellite, thus building a type of redundancy that we just couldn't afford to have with the older kind.
So if anything needs to improve, it's probably not our technology, but our mindset. We have good technology. That technology may not be perfect, but it should be more than good enough for unmanned space exploration at least. And it's grand time we start using it for that purpose.
Technically, only the CEO should be the one to apologize for something like this.
I guess the lawyer who initially sent the letter, or the person in charge of the PR department, could apologize for it, but ultimately, as a consumer I could never trust fully that an underling wasn't ordered by someone above him/her to take the blame for an higher-up's decision.
you should always ask yourself why a no-name chinese battery costs 1/3 of the original battery.
I think we're safe there, I hear that the Apple-branded replacement batteries from the Chinese no-name manufacturers cost as much as the new iPhones themselves.
They already have a name. No one objects to them making a KGaA facebook page.
In fact, we even registered the KGaA.xxx domain name just so that we could give it to them, not that they even appreciated our gift -- those ungrateful Germans.
After all, if there is enough evidence to show that they could be accused of doing the same thing, because they're far more public about their intent, they're in a far more vulnerable position themselves and they're far more likely to step all over the rights of their own customers to try to save themselves instead.
Except that the one advertising "Seedbox hosting" wasn't Koppla, it was Santrex, the ones who DID the disconnecting.
You're right.
This is the worst written blog article I have ever read (hopefully, someone will read this entry and fix it). They need to qualify who's doing what instead of using ambiguous pronouns for everything. It's only once you read the rest of the blog article that you understand what happened.
Also an IT staffer is often exempt from getting paid over-time, so if an IT exempt employee tries to please everybody at work, he's going to give up all his free time for no pay (unless he happens to be extremely lucky). This is often why IT personnel will often refer me for a job, which they could easily do themselves. It's not because they think I'm smarter, or more experienced.
It's just because if something goes wrong when they do it, as it does happen sometimes, they have to remain over the weekend without pay to fix it, but if something goes wrong when I do something, I get to bill for my extra hours (or if the client wants me to absorb that cost, that usually means they paid me handsomely upfront for me to be willing to accept that risk in the first place).
Often times, IT personnel never gets that kind of consideration when they're negotiating with HR for compensation. That's why when a job is originally spec'ed out for them, they must rabidly defend that original job description, otherwise we all know, they're the ones who will have to bear the additional hidden cost of having that job changed from under them.
Can someone explain how it is crowded countries like Japan or Germany can manage to get land for high speed rail, but the US can't?
You picked some particularly bad examples.
In Germany, Hitler had the rail system and the road system completely redone in a grid-like design. He viewed efficient transportation as an imperative military advantage and made it his top priority. So Germany didn't have high speed rail at the time, but having cleared out the way for a grid-like German rail system certainly made if possible for their high speed rail of today.
And I'm not too familiar with Japan's history, but you have to take into account that countries Japan or Germany main weaknesses were their lack of access to Petroleum. So it sort of makes sense that automobile transportation never made it as big as in the US. In the US, you can rest assured that if the automobile system hadn't taken such a high priority for us Americans (Californians especially), we would have better rail system as an alternative.
Can someone explain how it is crowded countries like Japan or Germany can manage to get land for high speed rail, but the US can't?
Population density can actually make it easier for creating a public transportation system. Having a guaranteed projected source of revenue from future riders helps fund projects like this. In Europe for instance, a city Metro system usually only gets built if there is at least one Million people within a small area (barring no geological problems of course).
And when connecting multiple cities, you have to take into account the future amount of riders between those cities that will take that train to make the project financially sustainable over the long-term. Also, what will happen when the high speed rail connect San Francisco with LA? The culture is just different over here. Will people really forego taking their car all the way from San Francisco to LA? Have you tried taking the bus in LA? I tried it once twenty years ago. I was a naive clueless young European at the time. I wanted to go to Water World (or something like that). That was one of the biggest mistakes I made as a traveler. I suspect that most people who will ride the bullet train to LA will either have someone already waiting for them there, or will simply rent a car, when they arrive, or their movements will be very restricted otherwise (that's why I think many just won't bother and will just end up driving there instead).
Especially since Japan seems to have such problems getting land for airports that they have to build artificial islands just to house them.
Japan is a special case. I don't know enough about its history, but I can at least tell you that Japan has a mountainous geography. This one of the reasons most of its population lives in only 20% of its total area, and the rest are just Mountainous natural reserves. And this is why they like to chop off mountains to make them flat and then carry the extra soil into the sea to make flat artificial islands (flat land comes with such a high premium over there). With bullet trains, they can make tunnels, or sky-ways, at least. With airplanes, they don't have that luxury.
The Olympic Commission is an openly corrupt international organization which answers to no government. For the most part, governments let the commission do what it wants for fear that the Commission will blackball their country as a future host if they make too much troubles for them.
This isn't to say that corruption scandals regarding the Olympics, or any of the Olympic Commission members, don't come to light once in a while. It's just that you shouldn't expect that the bidding process will try to be fair, or even try to be government-like in anyway. Any bidding process for the Olympics will be completely opaque and directed by the Commission members themselves.
Furthermore, you can count on any value derived from the publicity of being a designated official vendor to the Olympics will be taken into account for any final bill.
Is a specific job immediately assigned to you with scant regards for your abilities and disabilities? Is starvation the only (legal) alternative to this job?
I don't know about Hungary specifically, but usually disability benefits are separate from unemployment benefits. Also in some European countries, some benefits only kick-in after the person is over the age of 25, the assumption being that if you're healthy, and young with no kids, you can usually find a job and shouldn't have to depend on government benefits.
In the US, our citizens may actually get treated a lot worse, since our unemployment benefits can run out so quickly.
Also in the US, we do community service sometimes in lieu of paying traffic fines, and finding a "community service" job where you're not getting paid anything is dead easy in the US. For my last car pool fine, which was rather expensive, I asked the judge that I do community service instead, and the clerk gave me the choice to pick from a directory of thousands of non-profit organizations. And yes, I could have opted for picking up trash on the side of the road, that's an easy choice if you don't know how to do anything else, but I ended up selecting a non-profit that didn't do that type of work and I ended up doing mostly unskilled office work and data entry for them.
Are worker protections not applicable for this job?
Are you really asking us, or are you saying that worker protections are not applicable to this job? 4-hours a day of public service sounds hardly like back-breaking work to me. Don't tell me that long-term unemployed healthy people need 12 hours a day to find a job for themselves. Most likely, they'll spend one hour a day if they have self-discipline, and the rest of the time, they'll spend it on watching TV, playing computer games, or browsing the internet (at least, that's what I do on my better days when I'm in between jobs for any significant period of time). Sometimes doing volunteer work, even non-court mandated community work, can be the best thing for a long-term unemployed person because it gives that person a little bit of structure and a sense of satisfaction of doing something useful.
I will certainly ride this train if it actually gets built.
I doubt it. If it indeed gets built and finished by 2030, it will be far too expensive for anyone to use anyhow.
The projected fare they have in mind which is supposed to be 80% of what a price of a ticket on Southwest should cost -- was based on overly optimistic plainly wrong rider-ship forecasts. And if you talk to anyone who is honest about their numbers, no one actually thinks that this project will be financially sustainable by 2030.
Some supporters of this project just want the money being spent in their districts, so it doesn't matter if the money gets wasted as long as it's in their little hole in the middle of nowhere. And the rest of the supporters are planning on being retired or being in different jobs by the time 2030 rolls around, and some are just wishing that if they build it, that the government will come in with massive subsidies, or that the government will stop subsidizing car travel altogether (which would be nice, but that's an entirely different battle), because no traveler in his/her right mind will pay 300% of a price of a plane ticket just to take the train.
And if anyone thinks that I don't like the train, please don't put me in that category. I take the train in the San Francisco Bay Area quite a bit actually. Sometimes, I'm even the only to take it. I literally have to go to the phone box at the Oakland/Coliseum Station and ask that the next train stops at that stop, because if I didn't do that on some days, it just wouldn't stop for me to get on it at all.
Slashdot Mirror
— and in the future, it's easy to see how the same tool could be used to battle patent trolling, too."
and it's also easy to see how the same tool could be used to automatically generate even more patents.
After all, since we've already seen that computers can randomly generate fake nonsensical Physics research papers and get them published in real Science Journals. We're not so far off that they'll be able to do the same with patent claims. It would be just like a turing test, but only easier since real patent legal language is already designed to obfuscate the obvious -- it would be easy to have a computer mimic it.
But they didn't do anything illegal. They're basically just using their own download application that comes with extra stuff. In fact, Google does exactly the same with Chrome, so you should blame them too.
No, they didn't. So what?
There are plenty of things that are perfectly legal that people don't like.
In this case, the author of the open source security software should just make his own software blacklist the download.com site for malware/shadyware, which is also completely legal to do. And then hopefully, download.com would retaliate by blacklisting his software, so then everybody is happy. The author is happy. The consumer is happy. And download.com is relieved not to have to his software listed on their site anymore.
Personally, I don't understand your outrage.
I work from home too, and sometimes I'll go work at a coffee shop with a friend just so we can keep each other accountable. Plus, if the person you're meeting at the coffee shop also happens to be working on the same project as you are, it's useful to know how far along their share of the work is going and if one of you is spinning his wheels for any reason, it's also easier for the person not spinning his wheels to actually notice the other person in trouble and offer to help out.
I've never had my billable hours questioned, and have always delivered quality software in the end.
What about the rest of us? Those of us less perfect than you are. Would we be allowed to enter such contracts? It's not like anyone is forcing you to enter into such contracts, as you've told us, you have plenty of clients who hire you without even asking you to do this. But what about us who actually want this?
I know many contract programmers, myself included, that charge less hours than they've actually spent working on a project, and then yes, many times we do deliver quality software, but we don't deliver it on time, or we don't communicate adequately the real pace of the work we're making (as we uncover more and more work to do that was originally unplanned). Now depending on the type of project you're working on, this may not be a problem, but then again, it could be a problem, and personally, I wouldn't mind this kind of screen capture for my own work (as long as it was disclosed to me upfront, which it clearly is, in this case, and as long as my boss/client wasn't a jerk about it, of course, if your boss/client is a jerk, then all bets would be off, and I'd want to have as little as contact with that person as possible).
most of the bloggers write up a summary with a link, this is not journalism. filming news happening and reporting on what is happening is called reporting the news.
in this case the blogger deserves what they got. the news media goes out of it's way to say alleged and not call people thieves until they get convicted in a court of law. which is the way it should be
Then you're arguing that journalists do not need more protection than bloggers since journalists do the right thing anyway?
This won't stop them from playing uhrkan masters using the .deb they smuggled in, assuming they have the user rights to install. (Failing that they could smuggle in a binary blob version) but it would help prevent cheating.
Cheating at what? Urhkan masters or the test? I'm afraid you might have lost sight of the original question.
Yes, this would work for about 5 minutes, and then the students would just figure out that they could turn their mobile phones into bluetooth hotspots.
The government has asked social media companies to develop a way to eliminate offensive content as soon as it is created, no matter what country it is created in, he said.
You'll notice, he said to "eliminate", not filter.
Call me paranoid, but I think that's a not-so-subtle death threat directed at Richard Gere.
and I need to make a backup before I root
Yes, that's the standard disclaimer, but who does that really?! The very reason we root our phones is so we can make a complete backup in the first place. Ignore the disclaimer, everything we do in life involves a little bit of risk.
Just do a partial backup of your own personal stuff, the stuff that can be gotten too at least, and not just on the SD card, but on your PC as well (since SD cards have been known to fail). And then look for the standard image that was originally used to flash your Nexus S by the manufacturer. It must be floating somewhere around the Internet. That at least should be able to restore your phone to its original manufacturer specs.
And be aware that despite all the precautions you're taking, it's still possible to completely brick your phone (however improbable that is), but like I said, everything in life involves a little bit of risk anyway.
If CM has the update before the Nexus phones do, then what is the point of buying a nexus phone?
It's to have a working video recorder and a fully working camera (among other things).
Right now, the modded version of ICS doesn't have those things, but at least it can make phone calls. So if you want to be the coolest kid on the block, mod your phone with a modded version of ICS, just note that it won't be fully usable until it gets access to the official update.
Yes, but for most students, I'll bet that their official school email address is still their primary email address for all the important stuff.
I disagree. As a CEO, accepting huge below-price government loans with no strings attached is the correct response, not the incorrect one.
Even a healthy bank should accept such loans, since it would make money on the price differential alone. And not accepting the money would only make sure that its competitors (healthy or not) who did accept the money, would have an unfair advantage against it when loaning out that money on the open Market.
And the way our corporation by-laws are written, if such (an almost) free loan was offered by the government, and if the CEO had refused it on moral grounds, he would have been negligent to refuse it in the first place.
And when that happens, as a shareholder that's the only time I can really sue the CEO personally. Normally, he would be protected from personal liability by the Corporation and if that didn't work, he would be protected from personal liability by his Board & Officer's insurance, but if he was found negligent in this way, all bets would be off, I could go after his house, his car, his personal property, basically anything that wasn't already protected by the law of the State his personal property was already located in.
Damn! Austria must have invaded Australia.
How do they reach that conclusion? Every dollar I don't spend buying a song or book or movie is not necessarily a dollar I spend on some other piece of media. Those dollars go into the general fund, and get spent on food and gas and rent and utilities.
I think they're talking about an aggregate, not your single data point. I also think you're being disingenuous. We're talking about disposable income here, not the money you spend on rent, food, gas, or utilities. I doubt your landlord gets an extra donation every time you save some money on something else. You also don't sound like you're a heavy consumer. I doubt the music industry is making much money on you either way.
By the way, here is the presentation I saw that I'm basing my claims on.
Please feel free to tell me if it's a scam.
You'd have to test it -- you know, environmental chambers, shakers, etc.
That's what I'm saying. That's what NASA has been doing.
I don't remember any of the figures they've tested it at, so I said "all kinds of temperatures", etc. I probably shouldn't have said that, that kind language is so imprecise, it's basically worthless to make a claim with it.
But thus far, their testing is on track, and has been quite successful.
We don't know how it works in vacuum, because it hasn't really been in vacuum...
Well, your statement is incorrect. It has indeed been tested in a vaccum chamber(s). For how long, I don't know. The Nexus One came out in January 2010, so however long, it couldn't have been very long yet, certainly not 30 years yet. That's the only point I can concede you on.
I have once seen tests of a fairly unassuming low-key data acquisition device in vacuum at -100C to 100C temperature ranges, and there was a lot of redesign involved to get it to work acceptably with no air present around it.
Yes, but that device was probably not a consumer-grade cell phone. Even among consumer-grade devices, there are huge differences between let's say a TV set-top box and an actual cell phone. It would make sense that such a cell phone was over-engineered up the wazoo, but that a TV set top box just wouldn't need to be.
The only thing consequentially different is computer capability, but a faster/more complex computer would just as likely be a liability as a bonus. Software design techniques, if anything, have gone rapidly backwards for this sort of application since the late 70s/early 80s.
Thankfully, some of our/your assumptions about space technology are currently being proven wrong. For instance, take the Nexus One. NASA has been testing it to see if it could make cheaper smaller satellites with it, and its performance in that regard has been completely outstanding.
Granted, it hasn't survived 30 years in space yet, only time will tell on that one.
But it can survive in all kinds of extreme temperatures, all kinds of G forces, and it works perfectly well in a vacuum. And it's so small to begin with, the extra hardware it needs to power it, recharge it, move it, etc, doesn't have to be that big to begin with.
During one of its space test, the Nexus One was even strapped to the tip of a rocket and the rocket accidentally crashed back into the desert leaving a large crater, but the phone only got a cracked screen and was still fully functional otherwise.
And this is probably something that's not unique to that phone, or to Android, in particular. Consumer-grade devices, because they've been designed to survive actual consumers and sometimes even little kids, have come a long way in terms of reliability.
And granted, a Nexus One will still have bugs that would normally be intolerable in the older type of computers designed for space, but it has enough computing power to be reprogrammed remotely and compensate for most bugs that are found after the fact. And since they take much less space and weight, and are much cheaper to launch. You can launch half a dozen for a fraction of the cost it used to launch an older type of satellite, thus building a type of redundancy that we just couldn't afford to have with the older kind.
So if anything needs to improve, it's probably not our technology, but our mindset. We have good technology. That technology may not be perfect, but it should be more than good enough for unmanned space exploration at least. And it's grand time we start using it for that purpose.
Technically, only the CEO should be the one to apologize for something like this.
I guess the lawyer who initially sent the letter, or the person in charge of the PR department, could apologize for it, but ultimately, as a consumer I could never trust fully that an underling wasn't ordered by someone above him/her to take the blame for an higher-up's decision.
you should always ask yourself why a no-name chinese battery costs 1/3 of the original battery.
I think we're safe there, I hear that the Apple-branded replacement batteries from the Chinese no-name manufacturers cost as much as the new iPhones themselves.
I'm sure the American lawyers will say.
They already have a name. No one objects to them making a KGaA facebook page.
In fact, we even registered the KGaA.xxx domain name just so that we could give it to them, not that they even appreciated our gift -- those ungrateful Germans.
It could be that they were threatened themselves.
After all, if there is enough evidence to show that they could be accused of doing the same thing, because they're far more public about their intent, they're in a far more vulnerable position themselves and they're far more likely to step all over the rights of their own customers to try to save themselves instead.
Except that the one advertising "Seedbox hosting" wasn't Koppla, it was Santrex, the ones who DID the disconnecting.
You're right.
This is the worst written blog article I have ever read (hopefully, someone will read this entry and fix it). They need to qualify who's doing what instead of using ambiguous pronouns for everything. It's only once you read the rest of the blog article that you understand what happened.
Also an IT staffer is often exempt from getting paid over-time, so if an IT exempt employee tries to please everybody at work, he's going to give up all his free time for no pay (unless he happens to be extremely lucky). This is often why IT personnel will often refer me for a job, which they could easily do themselves. It's not because they think I'm smarter, or more experienced.
It's just because if something goes wrong when they do it, as it does happen sometimes, they have to remain over the weekend without pay to fix it, but if something goes wrong when I do something, I get to bill for my extra hours (or if the client wants me to absorb that cost, that usually means they paid me handsomely upfront for me to be willing to accept that risk in the first place).
Often times, IT personnel never gets that kind of consideration when they're negotiating with HR for compensation. That's why when a job is originally spec'ed out for them, they must rabidly defend that original job description, otherwise we all know, they're the ones who will have to bear the additional hidden cost of having that job changed from under them.
Can someone explain how it is crowded countries like Japan or Germany can manage to get land for high speed rail, but the US can't?
You picked some particularly bad examples.
In Germany, Hitler had the rail system and the road system completely redone in a grid-like design. He viewed efficient transportation as an imperative military advantage and made it his top priority. So Germany didn't have high speed rail at the time, but having cleared out the way for a grid-like German rail system certainly made if possible for their high speed rail of today.
And I'm not too familiar with Japan's history, but you have to take into account that countries Japan or Germany main weaknesses were their lack of access to Petroleum. So it sort of makes sense that automobile transportation never made it as big as in the US. In the US, you can rest assured that if the automobile system hadn't taken such a high priority for us Americans (Californians especially), we would have better rail system as an alternative.
Can someone explain how it is crowded countries like Japan or Germany can manage to get land for high speed rail, but the US can't?
Population density can actually make it easier for creating a public transportation system. Having a guaranteed projected source of revenue from future riders helps fund projects like this. In Europe for instance, a city Metro system usually only gets built if there is at least one Million people within a small area (barring no geological problems of course).
And when connecting multiple cities, you have to take into account the future amount of riders between those cities that will take that train to make the project financially sustainable over the long-term. Also, what will happen when the high speed rail connect San Francisco with LA? The culture is just different over here. Will people really forego taking their car all the way from San Francisco to LA? Have you tried taking the bus in LA? I tried it once twenty years ago. I was a naive clueless young European at the time. I wanted to go to Water World (or something like that). That was one of the biggest mistakes I made as a traveler. I suspect that most people who will ride the bullet train to LA will either have someone already waiting for them there, or will simply rent a car, when they arrive, or their movements will be very restricted otherwise (that's why I think many just won't bother and will just end up driving there instead).
Especially since Japan seems to have such problems getting land for airports that they have to build artificial islands just to house them.
Japan is a special case. I don't know enough about its history, but I can at least tell you that Japan has a mountainous geography. This one of the reasons most of its population lives in only 20% of its total area, and the rest are just Mountainous natural reserves. And this is why they like to chop off mountains to make them flat and then carry the extra soil into the sea to make flat artificial islands (flat land comes with such a high premium over there). With bullet trains, they can make tunnels, or sky-ways, at least. With airplanes, they don't have that luxury.
The Olympic Commission is an openly corrupt international organization which answers to no government. For the most part, governments let the commission do what it wants for fear that the Commission will blackball their country as a future host if they make too much troubles for them.
This isn't to say that corruption scandals regarding the Olympics, or any of the Olympic Commission members, don't come to light once in a while. It's just that you shouldn't expect that the bidding process will try to be fair, or even try to be government-like in anyway. Any bidding process for the Olympics will be completely opaque and directed by the Commission members themselves.
Furthermore, you can count on any value derived from the publicity of being a designated official vendor to the Olympics will be taken into account for any final bill.
Is a specific job immediately assigned to you with scant regards for your abilities and disabilities? Is starvation the only (legal) alternative to this job?
I don't know about Hungary specifically, but usually disability benefits are separate from unemployment benefits. Also in some European countries, some benefits only kick-in after the person is over the age of 25, the assumption being that if you're healthy, and young with no kids, you can usually find a job and shouldn't have to depend on government benefits.
In the US, our citizens may actually get treated a lot worse, since our unemployment benefits can run out so quickly.
Also in the US, we do community service sometimes in lieu of paying traffic fines, and finding a "community service" job where you're not getting paid anything is dead easy in the US. For my last car pool fine, which was rather expensive, I asked the judge that I do community service instead, and the clerk gave me the choice to pick from a directory of thousands of non-profit organizations. And yes, I could have opted for picking up trash on the side of the road, that's an easy choice if you don't know how to do anything else, but I ended up selecting a non-profit that didn't do that type of work and I ended up doing mostly unskilled office work and data entry for them.
Are worker protections not applicable for this job?
Are you really asking us, or are you saying that worker protections are not applicable to this job? 4-hours a day of public service sounds hardly like back-breaking work to me. Don't tell me that long-term unemployed healthy people need 12 hours a day to find a job for themselves. Most likely, they'll spend one hour a day if they have self-discipline, and the rest of the time, they'll spend it on watching TV, playing computer games, or browsing the internet (at least, that's what I do on my better days when I'm in between jobs for any significant period of time). Sometimes doing volunteer work, even non-court mandated community work, can be the best thing for a long-term unemployed person because it gives that person a little bit of structure and a sense of satisfaction of doing something useful.
I will certainly ride this train if it actually gets built.
I doubt it. If it indeed gets built and finished by 2030, it will be far too expensive for anyone to use anyhow.
The projected fare they have in mind which is supposed to be 80% of what a price of a ticket on Southwest should cost -- was based on overly optimistic plainly wrong rider-ship forecasts. And if you talk to anyone who is honest about their numbers, no one actually thinks that this project will be financially sustainable by 2030.
Some supporters of this project just want the money being spent in their districts, so it doesn't matter if the money gets wasted as long as it's in their little hole in the middle of nowhere. And the rest of the supporters are planning on being retired or being in different jobs by the time 2030 rolls around, and some are just wishing that if they build it, that the government will come in with massive subsidies, or that the government will stop subsidizing car travel altogether (which would be nice, but that's an entirely different battle), because no traveler in his/her right mind will pay 300% of a price of a plane ticket just to take the train.
And if anyone thinks that I don't like the train, please don't put me in that category. I take the train in the San Francisco Bay Area quite a bit actually. Sometimes, I'm even the only to take it. I literally have to go to the phone box at the Oakland/Coliseum Station and ask that the next train stops at that stop, because if I didn't do that on some days, it just wouldn't stop for me to get on it at all.