All they have to do is have a website where the source can be downloaded. MS can put in the agreement that to distribute software with an extended license that an author has to provide a link to the source with the download. Boom - no more problems.
Oh, and if the license has the anti-Tivo clause then they just need to ensure that users have the ability to install their own software (unsigned, or with a known key). Then that clause doesn't kick in either.
It really isn't a big deal. The GPL is doing what it was intended to do - keep people from distributing binaries without making source available, or utilizing free software to enhance a platform that users can't modify. Some people just don't like that ideal and thus call it a design flaw. It is in fact a design that meets the requirements, and it is the requirements that people really have a problem with.
Uh, the article is about wireless transmissions, and you're talking about wired ethernet. Surely you're not suggesting that two radio devices can communicate with each other without any possibility from interference from any of the billions of other radio sources in the cosmos - a few thousand of which are going to be in the local vicinity transmitting with considerable power?
Uh, this technology lets you SEND and RECEIVE on the same frequency at the same time. So, if the bandwidth of the link is 1Mbps, you can now send and receive 1Mbps at the same time. You can't send 2Mbps over the link, or receive as much.
So, other than your ACK packets getting out faster, this isn't going to speed up downloads much.
As far as fiber optic and different colors on the same cable goes - color is just another way of saying frequency. Using two colors at the same time is just another way of saying that you're using two frequencies at the same time. We do that all the time with radio waves. It just hasn't been done much for optical cables until recently I gather. This is probably because for the most part the extra hardware needed to do it just isn't necessary with the huge amount of bandwidth that a cable provides, and the fact that laying two cables at the same time doesn't cost much more than laying one. As the demand for bandwidth goes up no doubt money will get spent upgrading the hardware on either end of a cable to avoid running another line.
Ever take a flight across the US? Trust me - they're not going to mind some 1 mi^2 detention camp in the middle of 10,000 mi^2 of desert wasteland. Sure, there are people that live in the desert, but there are miles and miles of land with virtually nobody living in it.
Another issue is Federal court jurisdiction and pesky lawyers trying to interpose civilian authority over a fundamentally military matter.
Ok, so the whole point of closing GitMo is that prisoners are denied due-process. If you accept that, then fear of prisoners being allowed due-process should not deter you from closing it. If you don't accept that, then why bother to close it in the first place?
People don't object to GitMo because of its location, or the weather, or whatever. They object to what happens there, and the fact that there is no due process. If you did the same thing in some suburb in the US it wouldn't be any better, and finding some other country to abuse the prisoners in the same way isn't any better either.
Many higher-end cameras do in fact include technology to authenticate original photos. I cannot vouch for how well-implemented they are.
However, all of them are susceptible to the DRM weakness - the guy with the camera has physical possession of everything necessary to generate a faked photo, including the keys. Sure, the keys might be locked up in some chip where they are theoretically difficult to access. However, they are still vulnerable to interception. If you extract the keys then you can make any picture you want "authentic."
With software like photoshop the DRM weakness is much greater, since now we're talking software-level attacks instead of hardware attacks. The only way this would work is if the entire chain from hardware to bios to OS to software uses a trusted boot chain with keys in a TPM module or whatever, and no point along the chain contains a vulnerability. The chances of that ever happening down to the level of an app like Photoshop are pretty slim.
Sure, it's Linux, so you can strip it down to near nothing and have a rock-solid, dependable, secure system designed for a specific hardware setup, but if they want to stay alive, they may need to realize that they need less secure measures that allow the typical end-user to use their OS behind the scenes without any extra effort on their part.
Uh, define "stay alive" for me? It is an operating system. It isn't alive, so it can't stay alive. It will exist in perpetuity, or until the last person deletes their copy of the source code.
Most of the people who maintain linux don't really need these features, and they will likely continue to maintain it indefinitely without them - unless something better comes along (and then why should we want linux maintained anyway?). Sure, it might have microscopic market share on the desktop, but I don't get paid to manage linux desktops, so that doesn't really bother me...
Actually, I read somewhere about a study that found that women on average were very similar to men in almost any measurable quantity, but they tended to be a much more uniform population than men. So, if you look at the top n women vs the top n men the men are likely to outperform them, just as the bottom n women are more likely to outperform the bottom n men.
So, on average women are assholes about as often as men are, but they may very well be FLAMING assholes less often.:) Or so that study would suggest.
You don't have to excuse the jerks that you run into, but you do have to find a way to cope, because they're not going to magically vanish.
You don't need to cope - just find something more productive to do with your time than argue with a bunch of people who have no idea what they're talking about but who know how to use the watch function and have time to post paragraphs every time a poll comes up.
At work I'll cope with jerks, but for the most part they tick off management even faster than they tick me off, so that is a self-correcting problem. However, I'm being paid to do work, and paid really well. I'm not being paid to go back and forth on whatever piece of random trivia we're debating the significance of on WP. The WPedians can do whatever they want with their website, and I'll use it if it ends up being useful.:) Besides, I have other open-source projects to contribute to where my work speaks for itself and we don't have endless debates over whether something is good enough or not...
Yup, and you don't see McDonalds doing burger-flipper re-orgs every six months or contemplating that perhaps their whole problem is that they're selling burgers when smartphones make so much money.
Mature industries can be boring, and simply changing everything doesn't guarantee a huge improvement. However, it is hard to justify a 8-figure salary if you're just saying that you're going to do more of the same, so CxOs feel the need to "transform" their business every six months or so.
The only thing that we know is finite in size is the OBSERVABLE universe. It is finite essentially by definition. It is a sphere centered on us with a radius equal to the distance that light can travel since the big bang.
What lies beyond the observable universe is fairly speculative. Indeed, half of what we think we know about the observable universe itself is pretty speculative.
Uh, I'm very skeptical that any recent version of Ubuntu will work well on 512MB of RAM. Maybe Xubuntu would be fine.
I ditched KDE once my distro dropped 3.5, because while I didn't mind KDE4 it was way too slow on my system, and it has 2GB of RAM (but runs a ton of services). When I switched to xfce it was like getting a whole new box. I'm slowly working on upgrading the thing...
From what I've read over the years, the problem has been that while everybody realizes a lump of metal isn't a great standard, all the other proposals have turned out to be worse in actual practice.
Sure, counting atoms/etc is theoretically a great way of measuring mass. In practice, it is hard to do - so you get a mass that has even more error than the lump of metal whose mass seems to be changing.
No doubt improvements in technique will eventually make the theoretical approaches better (they will only get better, and the lump will only degrade). The logical time to switch is when they're close enough that convenience makes the theoretical standard worth the temporary increase in error...
Actually, the device I was describing was a completely traditional laptop.
My point was that the term "tablet" is getting stretched to mean anything.
If you confine the term "tablet" to mean a relatively small device that lacks a keyboard, then most of the criticisms about content creation will apply. If you redefine it to include a keyboard/etc then the creation issues go away, but now it is basically just a laptop by another name...
Again, nothing against tablets - they can be useful. However, they are useful in a certain niche, and I doubt they'll ever replace laptops.
The US occasionally did bomb strategic targets - usually for political reasons (the North would walk out of talks, the US would bomb Hanoi, etc).
If the US actually wanted to fight to win some of the things it would have done would include:
1. Unrelenting air campaign all the way to the northern border.
2. Full army invasion of the north - keep marching and be sure to occupy all the major cities (Hanoi, etc).
The US wanted to fight a contained war, and there is no such thing. If somebody is shooting at you, you bomb their capital until there is no government building left, and then you occupy it so that YOU are their government. You also can't be afraid of killing Soviets or whoever might be on the ground in the combat zone.
Oh, it would have turned into a mess like Iraq no doubt. And I'm not arguing the merits of the war itself. But, if you're going to fight a war, fight it to win. Don't mess around with people who are shooting at your soldiers/etc.
The US fought Korea with tactics like I describe, and that is why South Korea is still a democracy. On the other hand, Korea really did come close to getting out of hand.
If you're going to fight, fight to win. By all means avoid the fight if you can.
My friend wasn't working for a government contractor, so I doubt they were audited.
And who knows, perhaps the charge code for bribes was labeled "extra pencils" or whatever.
Don't get me wrong - companies shouldn't work this way, and they shouldn't have to work this way. Perhaps they no longer do - I got the impression that this dated back at least a fair bit - the 90s at the latest.
No doubt they got a foreign national to do the bribing or whatever. No doubt the senior executives just told their subordinates to "get things done" and "don't bother me with the details" (wink, wink) so that anybody who could be held accountable has plausible deniability.
These kinds of laws are routinely violated and bribes are routinely given in many Asian countries. You simply can't get work done otherwise.
Sure, changing the laws is the "right" thing to do - and you can go ahead and get started on that while your competitors all just pay bribes.
I recall reading in Chemical and Engineering News that a decade ago (and perhaps still today) smuggling was a primary method of commerce in China. We aren't talking about guys stowing boxes in small boats - we're talking about supertankers. As long as you're not doing anything dangerous/etc nobody in government cares as long as you hand the proper bribes to the appropriate officials. If you try to do things the "right" way you'll end up with your cargo in customs for a year just due to red tape.
I do fully support the intent of the FCPA. The problem is that it wasn't really written with some foreign practices in mind. There are a lot of countries out there where laws exist with no real intent to enforce them.
As you say, this is basically just an insult to the Iranian government. Nobody really cares if people can use Chrome or Google Earth or whatever - they're pretty harmless apps (or at least so ubiquitous that it makes no difference - like a ban on the sale of BBs or whatever).
No doubt the Iranian government can get their hands on this. However, they have to jump through hoops at the whim of the US State Department, and everybody on the planet knows it.
Well, Google has to follow the law, and so they are following it. I doubt they really care much either way - if the regulator says that some completely meaningless but simple to implement control is satisfactory, why would Google argue with them over it?
Lots of countries actually have these kinds of laws on the books. They're mostly a matter of national pride or sending a message.
I know a guy who was working for a fortune 500 company and was setting up a plant in asia. They had a budget code for bribes. Why? Simple - the country forbid (on the books) the import of any device containing parts made in japan. They needed to import high-end laboratory equipment with computer controllers. There are probably three vendors making this type of equipment in total, and the number making ones without ANY parts from Japan is zero.
The solution was simple - just bribe the customs official a nominal amount to not check the chips/etc inside.
The local government didn't really care. They were just still upset about WWII, but they certainly cared about jobs and a big foreign plant more than national pride. Forcing companies to stoop to bribes satisfied their need to stick it to their former occupier and insult the Japanese government, and in the end the plant got built with the equipment it needed and employed lots of locals. The bribes were such a token amount that the company didn't care about them either. It was all about saving face, which matters in Asia.
This law is just the US version of the same. Now, in the US bribes are not considered a customary part of doing business. Instead, the process is to make companies go through a lot of hassle and delay and to make them fill out 40,000 forms, and make a few design changes. In the end the deal still goes through, and the insult necessary for national diplomacy was delivered.
My model of my house heating system has determined that wife happiness is directly proportional to thermostat setting over all settings I have been able to observe. I conclude that God must not exist, because if He did exist then He would have placed man on the surface of the sun where everybody would be happiest.
Current gravitational models can't get galaxies to form correctly with the constants set to what we observe them at. How can they possibly tell us how a universe would behave if the constants were different?
I'll buy the general argument that a lower cosmological constant will probably generate a clumpier universe. More than that is pushing it - clumpier could just mean one big singularity.
Maybe your country needs to solve the problem that people can't move to be close to work, because commuting is inefficient.
Suppose the husband is a specialist in operating space probes. Suppose the wife is a high-powered advertising executive. How many homes are within a mile of a mission control facility and a serious advertising agency? Sure, that is a contrived example, but lots of people run into situations that only vary in degree.
The problem is that society has become very specialized. There are only probably 20 places I can work in the whole USA where I'd really make peak earnings potential. If my wife is in the same boat then we might end up working in the only city that has a decent employer for both of us, If those employers are 20 miles away from each other than one or both of us will be commuting. Alternatively one of us could generalize and take a massive pay cut.
High salaries are usually only attainable with specialization. Programmers don't get paid well. Specialists in SAP implementation in the soda industry probably get paid very well, but there are only so many soda giants out there, and they each only have one site where they do their programming work most likely.
Exactly - I have a tablet just like this and I find it very productive. It is kind of like the iPad, except it has a bigger screen. Oh, and it also has a keyboard that you can expose with a trackpad. Oh, and I can plug a mouse into it. Oh, and it doesn't have a touchscreen.
A few years ago we called them laptops, but apparently that isn't sufficiently cool these days...:)
I don't have a problem with tablets/etc, but they're not great for heavy content creation, and anything that is good for this is just a laptop by a different name.
They used to be for people who would do things like "copy a few cells in their favourite spreadsheet program". Most people never did that, or understood what meant.
Hardly - they did it all the time, but using their paper analogues. They would do calculations on a calculator, and transcribe the results into paper reports or hand paper tapes to a secretary to type up the reports for them, or whatever.
And that means the PC is going back to what it once was: A niche product for people who care about spreadsheets.
Uh, just what do you think those tens of thousands of employees at a typical Fortune-500 company do all day? Ever dollar in your wallet probably has been tracked on a thousand different spreadsheets in 100 different companies before it ever got there.
And of course PCs are good for more than spreadsheets - just about any kind of electronic content creation is ideally done with a keyboard and mouse. A few art-oriented fields would benefit from a pen interface, and I'm sure they already are using them where they can (pen-based tablets have been around for a decade - and they were pretty good even a decade ago, but they didn't have capacitive touch screens and an app store full of games/facebook/etc).
I'm a big proponent of the right tool for the job. I have been involved with deployments at work of tablets, handhelds, barcode scanners, RFID evaluations, industrialized versions of many of these, and of course desktops and laptops. Whenever I hand a new toy over to a customer I always encourage them to use it for real-world work and try to get beyond the gee-whiz factor. For some tasks a fancy tablet is a lot more productive. For most tasks like typing notes or whatever a laptop just works a whole lot better.
The main people saying that PCs are dying are people who don't actually create content. They are often decision-makers, but that doesn't mean that ditching PCs will actually make their companies more productive. If you just read TPS reports all day I'd be the first to tell you to buy a tablet and enjoy it...
Hence the reason that the biggest proponents of tablets at work are managers who don't actually do anything but read documents others have made and reply with emails saying "sounds good" or "needs more sizzle."
If all you do is consume content 95% of the time I'd be the first to agree that a tablet is a much better experience. The iPad was basically made primarily for this purpose.
If you actually create anything tangible or with significant value-add using a computer the tablet just isn't there. Note - I'm mainly talking in terms of creating information resources of value. If you use your computer as a control panel to operate a machine or whatever then the tablet might be just perfect for the job - you're not really creating value from information, but you're manufacturing something or whatever, and the computer is helping you consume content to do it, or take simple instructions.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you figure?
All they have to do is have a website where the source can be downloaded. MS can put in the agreement that to distribute software with an extended license that an author has to provide a link to the source with the download. Boom - no more problems.
Oh, and if the license has the anti-Tivo clause then they just need to ensure that users have the ability to install their own software (unsigned, or with a known key). Then that clause doesn't kick in either.
It really isn't a big deal. The GPL is doing what it was intended to do - keep people from distributing binaries without making source available, or utilizing free software to enhance a platform that users can't modify. Some people just don't like that ideal and thus call it a design flaw. It is in fact a design that meets the requirements, and it is the requirements that people really have a problem with.
Uh, the article is about wireless transmissions, and you're talking about wired ethernet. Surely you're not suggesting that two radio devices can communicate with each other without any possibility from interference from any of the billions of other radio sources in the cosmos - a few thousand of which are going to be in the local vicinity transmitting with considerable power?
Uh, this technology lets you SEND and RECEIVE on the same frequency at the same time. So, if the bandwidth of the link is 1Mbps, you can now send and receive 1Mbps at the same time. You can't send 2Mbps over the link, or receive as much.
So, other than your ACK packets getting out faster, this isn't going to speed up downloads much.
As far as fiber optic and different colors on the same cable goes - color is just another way of saying frequency. Using two colors at the same time is just another way of saying that you're using two frequencies at the same time. We do that all the time with radio waves. It just hasn't been done much for optical cables until recently I gather. This is probably because for the most part the extra hardware needed to do it just isn't necessary with the huge amount of bandwidth that a cable provides, and the fact that laying two cables at the same time doesn't cost much more than laying one. As the demand for bandwidth goes up no doubt money will get spent upgrading the hardware on either end of a cable to avoid running another line.
Ever take a flight across the US? Trust me - they're not going to mind some 1 mi^2 detention camp in the middle of 10,000 mi^2 of desert wasteland. Sure, there are people that live in the desert, but there are miles and miles of land with virtually nobody living in it.
Another issue is Federal court jurisdiction and pesky lawyers trying to interpose civilian authority over a fundamentally military matter.
Ok, so the whole point of closing GitMo is that prisoners are denied due-process. If you accept that, then fear of prisoners being allowed due-process should not deter you from closing it. If you don't accept that, then why bother to close it in the first place?
People don't object to GitMo because of its location, or the weather, or whatever. They object to what happens there, and the fact that there is no due process. If you did the same thing in some suburb in the US it wouldn't be any better, and finding some other country to abuse the prisoners in the same way isn't any better either.
Many higher-end cameras do in fact include technology to authenticate original photos. I cannot vouch for how well-implemented they are.
However, all of them are susceptible to the DRM weakness - the guy with the camera has physical possession of everything necessary to generate a faked photo, including the keys. Sure, the keys might be locked up in some chip where they are theoretically difficult to access. However, they are still vulnerable to interception. If you extract the keys then you can make any picture you want "authentic."
With software like photoshop the DRM weakness is much greater, since now we're talking software-level attacks instead of hardware attacks. The only way this would work is if the entire chain from hardware to bios to OS to software uses a trusted boot chain with keys in a TPM module or whatever, and no point along the chain contains a vulnerability. The chances of that ever happening down to the level of an app like Photoshop are pretty slim.
Sure, it's Linux, so you can strip it down to near nothing and have a rock-solid, dependable, secure system designed for a specific hardware setup, but if they want to stay alive, they may need to realize that they need less secure measures that allow the typical end-user to use their OS behind the scenes without any extra effort on their part.
Uh, define "stay alive" for me? It is an operating system. It isn't alive, so it can't stay alive. It will exist in perpetuity, or until the last person deletes their copy of the source code.
Most of the people who maintain linux don't really need these features, and they will likely continue to maintain it indefinitely without them - unless something better comes along (and then why should we want linux maintained anyway?). Sure, it might have microscopic market share on the desktop, but I don't get paid to manage linux desktops, so that doesn't really bother me...
Actually, I read somewhere about a study that found that women on average were very similar to men in almost any measurable quantity, but they tended to be a much more uniform population than men. So, if you look at the top n women vs the top n men the men are likely to outperform them, just as the bottom n women are more likely to outperform the bottom n men.
So, on average women are assholes about as often as men are, but they may very well be FLAMING assholes less often. :) Or so that study would suggest.
You don't need to cope - just find something more productive to do with your time than argue with a bunch of people who have no idea what they're talking about but who know how to use the watch function and have time to post paragraphs every time a poll comes up.
At work I'll cope with jerks, but for the most part they tick off management even faster than they tick me off, so that is a self-correcting problem. However, I'm being paid to do work, and paid really well. I'm not being paid to go back and forth on whatever piece of random trivia we're debating the significance of on WP. The WPedians can do whatever they want with their website, and I'll use it if it ends up being useful. :) Besides, I have other open-source projects to contribute to where my work speaks for itself and we don't have endless debates over whether something is good enough or not...
Yup, and you don't see McDonalds doing burger-flipper re-orgs every six months or contemplating that perhaps their whole problem is that they're selling burgers when smartphones make so much money.
Mature industries can be boring, and simply changing everything doesn't guarantee a huge improvement. However, it is hard to justify a 8-figure salary if you're just saying that you're going to do more of the same, so CxOs feel the need to "transform" their business every six months or so.
The only thing that we know is finite in size is the OBSERVABLE universe. It is finite essentially by definition. It is a sphere centered on us with a radius equal to the distance that light can travel since the big bang.
What lies beyond the observable universe is fairly speculative. Indeed, half of what we think we know about the observable universe itself is pretty speculative.
Uh, I'm very skeptical that any recent version of Ubuntu will work well on 512MB of RAM. Maybe Xubuntu would be fine.
I ditched KDE once my distro dropped 3.5, because while I didn't mind KDE4 it was way too slow on my system, and it has 2GB of RAM (but runs a ton of services). When I switched to xfce it was like getting a whole new box. I'm slowly working on upgrading the thing...
From what I've read over the years, the problem has been that while everybody realizes a lump of metal isn't a great standard, all the other proposals have turned out to be worse in actual practice.
Sure, counting atoms/etc is theoretically a great way of measuring mass. In practice, it is hard to do - so you get a mass that has even more error than the lump of metal whose mass seems to be changing.
No doubt improvements in technique will eventually make the theoretical approaches better (they will only get better, and the lump will only degrade). The logical time to switch is when they're close enough that convenience makes the theoretical standard worth the temporary increase in error...
Actually, the device I was describing was a completely traditional laptop.
My point was that the term "tablet" is getting stretched to mean anything.
If you confine the term "tablet" to mean a relatively small device that lacks a keyboard, then most of the criticisms about content creation will apply. If you redefine it to include a keyboard/etc then the creation issues go away, but now it is basically just a laptop by another name...
Again, nothing against tablets - they can be useful. However, they are useful in a certain niche, and I doubt they'll ever replace laptops.
The US occasionally did bomb strategic targets - usually for political reasons (the North would walk out of talks, the US would bomb Hanoi, etc).
If the US actually wanted to fight to win some of the things it would have done would include:
1. Unrelenting air campaign all the way to the northern border.
2. Full army invasion of the north - keep marching and be sure to occupy all the major cities (Hanoi, etc).
The US wanted to fight a contained war, and there is no such thing. If somebody is shooting at you, you bomb their capital until there is no government building left, and then you occupy it so that YOU are their government. You also can't be afraid of killing Soviets or whoever might be on the ground in the combat zone.
Oh, it would have turned into a mess like Iraq no doubt. And I'm not arguing the merits of the war itself. But, if you're going to fight a war, fight it to win. Don't mess around with people who are shooting at your soldiers/etc.
The US fought Korea with tactics like I describe, and that is why South Korea is still a democracy. On the other hand, Korea really did come close to getting out of hand.
If you're going to fight, fight to win. By all means avoid the fight if you can.
My friend wasn't working for a government contractor, so I doubt they were audited.
And who knows, perhaps the charge code for bribes was labeled "extra pencils" or whatever.
Don't get me wrong - companies shouldn't work this way, and they shouldn't have to work this way. Perhaps they no longer do - I got the impression that this dated back at least a fair bit - the 90s at the latest.
No doubt they got a foreign national to do the bribing or whatever. No doubt the senior executives just told their subordinates to "get things done" and "don't bother me with the details" (wink, wink) so that anybody who could be held accountable has plausible deniability.
These kinds of laws are routinely violated and bribes are routinely given in many Asian countries. You simply can't get work done otherwise.
Sure, changing the laws is the "right" thing to do - and you can go ahead and get started on that while your competitors all just pay bribes.
I recall reading in Chemical and Engineering News that a decade ago (and perhaps still today) smuggling was a primary method of commerce in China. We aren't talking about guys stowing boxes in small boats - we're talking about supertankers. As long as you're not doing anything dangerous/etc nobody in government cares as long as you hand the proper bribes to the appropriate officials. If you try to do things the "right" way you'll end up with your cargo in customs for a year just due to red tape.
I do fully support the intent of the FCPA. The problem is that it wasn't really written with some foreign practices in mind. There are a lot of countries out there where laws exist with no real intent to enforce them.
I just made my download folder /tmp. Problem solved... :)
As you say, this is basically just an insult to the Iranian government. Nobody really cares if people can use Chrome or Google Earth or whatever - they're pretty harmless apps (or at least so ubiquitous that it makes no difference - like a ban on the sale of BBs or whatever).
No doubt the Iranian government can get their hands on this. However, they have to jump through hoops at the whim of the US State Department, and everybody on the planet knows it.
Well, Google has to follow the law, and so they are following it. I doubt they really care much either way - if the regulator says that some completely meaningless but simple to implement control is satisfactory, why would Google argue with them over it?
Lots of countries actually have these kinds of laws on the books. They're mostly a matter of national pride or sending a message.
I know a guy who was working for a fortune 500 company and was setting up a plant in asia. They had a budget code for bribes. Why? Simple - the country forbid (on the books) the import of any device containing parts made in japan. They needed to import high-end laboratory equipment with computer controllers. There are probably three vendors making this type of equipment in total, and the number making ones without ANY parts from Japan is zero.
The solution was simple - just bribe the customs official a nominal amount to not check the chips/etc inside.
The local government didn't really care. They were just still upset about WWII, but they certainly cared about jobs and a big foreign plant more than national pride. Forcing companies to stoop to bribes satisfied their need to stick it to their former occupier and insult the Japanese government, and in the end the plant got built with the equipment it needed and employed lots of locals. The bribes were such a token amount that the company didn't care about them either. It was all about saving face, which matters in Asia.
This law is just the US version of the same. Now, in the US bribes are not considered a customary part of doing business. Instead, the process is to make companies go through a lot of hassle and delay and to make them fill out 40,000 forms, and make a few design changes. In the end the deal still goes through, and the insult necessary for national diplomacy was delivered.
Sure, just like any other kind of extrapolation.
My model of my house heating system has determined that wife happiness is directly proportional to thermostat setting over all settings I have been able to observe. I conclude that God must not exist, because if He did exist then He would have placed man on the surface of the sun where everybody would be happiest.
Current gravitational models can't get galaxies to form correctly with the constants set to what we observe them at. How can they possibly tell us how a universe would behave if the constants were different?
I'll buy the general argument that a lower cosmological constant will probably generate a clumpier universe. More than that is pushing it - clumpier could just mean one big singularity.
Maybe your country needs to solve the problem that people can't move to be close to work, because commuting is inefficient.
Suppose the husband is a specialist in operating space probes. Suppose the wife is a high-powered advertising executive. How many homes are within a mile of a mission control facility and a serious advertising agency? Sure, that is a contrived example, but lots of people run into situations that only vary in degree.
The problem is that society has become very specialized. There are only probably 20 places I can work in the whole USA where I'd really make peak earnings potential. If my wife is in the same boat then we might end up working in the only city that has a decent employer for both of us, If those employers are 20 miles away from each other than one or both of us will be commuting. Alternatively one of us could generalize and take a massive pay cut.
High salaries are usually only attainable with specialization. Programmers don't get paid well. Specialists in SAP implementation in the soda industry probably get paid very well, but there are only so many soda giants out there, and they each only have one site where they do their programming work most likely.
Exactly - I have a tablet just like this and I find it very productive. It is kind of like the iPad, except it has a bigger screen. Oh, and it also has a keyboard that you can expose with a trackpad. Oh, and I can plug a mouse into it. Oh, and it doesn't have a touchscreen.
A few years ago we called them laptops, but apparently that isn't sufficiently cool these days... :)
I don't have a problem with tablets/etc, but they're not great for heavy content creation, and anything that is good for this is just a laptop by a different name.
They used to be for people who would do things like "copy a few cells in their favourite spreadsheet program". Most people never did that, or understood what meant.
Hardly - they did it all the time, but using their paper analogues. They would do calculations on a calculator, and transcribe the results into paper reports or hand paper tapes to a secretary to type up the reports for them, or whatever.
And that means the PC is going back to what it once was: A niche product for people who care about spreadsheets.
Uh, just what do you think those tens of thousands of employees at a typical Fortune-500 company do all day? Ever dollar in your wallet probably has been tracked on a thousand different spreadsheets in 100 different companies before it ever got there.
And of course PCs are good for more than spreadsheets - just about any kind of electronic content creation is ideally done with a keyboard and mouse. A few art-oriented fields would benefit from a pen interface, and I'm sure they already are using them where they can (pen-based tablets have been around for a decade - and they were pretty good even a decade ago, but they didn't have capacitive touch screens and an app store full of games/facebook/etc).
I'm a big proponent of the right tool for the job. I have been involved with deployments at work of tablets, handhelds, barcode scanners, RFID evaluations, industrialized versions of many of these, and of course desktops and laptops. Whenever I hand a new toy over to a customer I always encourage them to use it for real-world work and try to get beyond the gee-whiz factor. For some tasks a fancy tablet is a lot more productive. For most tasks like typing notes or whatever a laptop just works a whole lot better.
The main people saying that PCs are dying are people who don't actually create content. They are often decision-makers, but that doesn't mean that ditching PCs will actually make their companies more productive. If you just read TPS reports all day I'd be the first to tell you to buy a tablet and enjoy it...
Hence the reason that the biggest proponents of tablets at work are managers who don't actually do anything but read documents others have made and reply with emails saying "sounds good" or "needs more sizzle."
If all you do is consume content 95% of the time I'd be the first to agree that a tablet is a much better experience. The iPad was basically made primarily for this purpose.
If you actually create anything tangible or with significant value-add using a computer the tablet just isn't there. Note - I'm mainly talking in terms of creating information resources of value. If you use your computer as a control panel to operate a machine or whatever then the tablet might be just perfect for the job - you're not really creating value from information, but you're manufacturing something or whatever, and the computer is helping you consume content to do it, or take simple instructions.