Adams has pledged if elected to delegate most of his decisions to people who know more than him, and flip-flop on any issue where new evidence causes him to modify his position
The problem with that is that there are millions of people who know more about X than any individual decision maker. The main issue is prioritizing what you want done, and that's where it all turns political.
Even if the group's ticket doesn't win, its impact will force Democrats and Republicans in the nation's capital to start bridging their cavernous ideological divide."
Did I miss the part about how Americans Elect will raise the billions of dollars necessary to get any particular issue noticed?
Or the part about what has changed since the second coming of Jimmy Carter took over from the second coming of James Buchanan in 2009?
More likely, its a PAC that formed for the intent of separating suckers from their money, but at least they're honest about not particularly caring about any particular issue - like other politicians they'll just follow the money.
>> the majority of such events held there are mostly vendor-driven and free for visitors.
What? Nearly all security conferences in the US are free for visitors. Even if there's a posted charge, you can almost always get free admission by promising to talk to a sponsoring vendor there. (Most sponsoring vendors either get a set number of free tickets to the event or consider a few hundred bucks to meet a real live prospect the price of doing business.)
Also, most security conferences in the US (e.g., RSA) are driven by vendors. The big vendors set the agenda, are encouraged to weave (non-overt) product pitches into the educational side of the conference and get priority access to attendee lists and attendee behavior so they can sell more effectively to those groups after the event.
Don't believe me? Make some friends in your company's marketing department and ask for yourself...
1) Law enforcement sees product, laughs at the idea. 2) Manufacturer lobbies Congress to pass bill with massive federal grant for their new toy 3) Law enforcement brass around the country buy these with federal funds 4) Law enforcement rank-and-file take them home and give them to their kids 5) Repeat
They were turned down because the offer was too low
...and how did THAT work out for Netscape the Company? History suggests (Yahoo, ahem) that Microsoft is happy to overpay to remove competitors from the landscape.
imagine if Netscape had accepted: no browser wars, no open Web standards, no Mozilla, no Firefox
The browser wars would have still happened. Remember Opera goes all the way back to 1994 and it was possible to crank out your own web browser in less than a year at that time.
As a former security auditor myself, I'd attack the voice response units. Quite frequently those boxes (often standalone towers covered with a quarter inch of dust) were neglected in the corner, with no IDS, no one checking logs and frequently no automatic lockouts. Routed through Skype and/or Google Voice...
Typical government initiative - the nationwide system is finally ready 22 years after the end of the cold war, and 60 years after the threat was established.
Can we please cancel this program (we have the CNN and the Internet now) and take the useless TSA with it too?
> What private corporation is going to do what the US Geological Survey does?
Which is what, exactly?
In terms of mapping rocks and whatnot, there are great incentives for energy and mineral companies to perform this kind of research internally.
On earthquake research, there are a number of universities (many of which claim to be privately funded/endowed) that compete with each other on prestige that would likely continue this research.
It's nice to have a federal agency with a nice web site, but at some point in the past we may have hit a point of diminishing returns on additional spend here.
1) Simple things like "copy one row to another" regularly crash OpenOffice for many users. The reaction on the forums? "Dink around with Java for a few hours, tweak some clipboard settings and pray, etc." That's not the mark of a product ready for office consumers.
2) GoogleDocs. Where's the "share this with my colleagues and let them make updates" function in OpenOffice?
3) Poor formatting of Microsoft Office documents. Sure, you can read incoming Microsoft Office documents, but OpenOffice has a way of uglifying them by not quite rendering or saving things in a compatible manner. (When I saved a doc from OpenOffice, I only saved as PDF, never doc - just couldn't trust it!)
4) UI. Who the hell came up with the color picker? Why are commonly used functions buried? Did anyone on the OpenOffice project ever sit down with someone who spends 8 hours a day cranking documents or did they just work off a list of matching features somewhere?
Not the "gap" crap again. Look up Kennedy's "missle gap" or "bomber gap" sometime to see how our overwhelming superiority in each area was successfully used to convince Congress to overspend on the same things even more.
(I wouldn't be surprised if we start hearing about a "carrier gap" soon now that China is poised to launch a group of their own.)
This is really a marketing decision based on the strength of the brand of the company offering the product.
A small company without a well-known brand may be more likely to keep a losing product alive (assuming it has other revenue streams) because there is no master brand to damage.
However, a "big name" company like Apple, HP or Microsoft can't afford to have losers in their portfolio because those technologies hurt the master brand. So...they yank badly received tech quickly. This happens in plenty of other consumer-facing industries too: think of "New Coke", the "Azteca" car, Zest trying to sell bath poufs to men, etc.
(Things sometimes work a little differently in business-to-business tech markets, BTW. I've seen tech products languish there for years before getting the ax due to long sales cycles or a cross-selling strategy that takes a while to test out.)
the people using Google Apps are not the people needed to popularize a social network platform
I don't know about that. I'll bet there's higher-than-average usage of Google Apps by Slashdot users (the typical "early adopters" of new technology in marketing speak) and we Slashdot users are seeing a lot of Google+ articles and other PR activity directed at us these days.
Furthermore...the "casual" Facebook users already have Facebook to do Facebook-like things. I don't think those are the people going to be the ones that popularize Google's Facebook clone either. Instead, it will be the folks like us who are trying to escape Facebook users who will drive Google+ acceptance. ("It's just like Facebook, but with fewer morons and none of those annoying game updates. Oops - check that.")
log into google+ using hello%mydomain.com@gtempemail.com
Er...no. I'll log into Google+ when it's ready to accept hello@mydomain.com.
I've been burned too many times already by odd Google merge conventions. (Thinking about lost email addresses created before I moved a domain to Google, having to wipe Android when switching the operating user, etc.)
Fix the large Google+ vs. Google Apps problem (the one where those of us using Google Apps cannot use Google+ - period) and a lot of your "lack of content" issues will be solved.
For now, we Google Apps users are stuck on Facebook, etc.
C'mon Google - you've got the developers, now get to work.
Slashdot Mirror
Adams has pledged if elected to delegate most of his decisions to people who know more than him, and flip-flop on any issue where new evidence causes him to modify his position
The problem with that is that there are millions of people who know more about X than any individual decision maker. The main issue is prioritizing what you want done, and that's where it all turns political.
Even if the group's ticket doesn't win, its impact will force Democrats and Republicans in the nation's capital to start bridging their cavernous ideological divide."
Did I miss the part about how Americans Elect will raise the billions of dollars necessary to get any particular issue noticed?
Or the part about what has changed since the second coming of Jimmy Carter took over from the second coming of James Buchanan in 2009?
More likely, its a PAC that formed for the intent of separating suckers from their money, but at least they're honest about not particularly caring about any particular issue - like other politicians they'll just follow the money.
>> the majority of such events held there are mostly vendor-driven and free for visitors.
What? Nearly all security conferences in the US are free for visitors. Even if there's a posted charge, you can almost always get free admission by promising to talk to a sponsoring vendor there. (Most sponsoring vendors either get a set number of free tickets to the event or consider a few hundred bucks to meet a real live prospect the price of doing business.)
Also, most security conferences in the US (e.g., RSA) are driven by vendors. The big vendors set the agenda, are encouraged to weave (non-overt) product pitches into the educational side of the conference and get priority access to attendee lists and attendee behavior so they can sell more effectively to those groups after the event.
Don't believe me? Make some friends in your company's marketing department and ask for yourself...
One thing you can count on SlashDot to be is just a few days behind The Register on tech or science articles.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/11/e_ink_display_squid/
1) Law enforcement sees product, laughs at the idea.
2) Manufacturer lobbies Congress to pass bill with massive federal grant for their new toy
3) Law enforcement brass around the country buy these with federal funds
4) Law enforcement rank-and-file take them home and give them to their kids
5) Repeat
They were turned down because the offer was too low
...and how did THAT work out for Netscape the Company? History suggests (Yahoo, ahem) that Microsoft is happy to overpay to remove competitors from the landscape.
imagine if Netscape had accepted: no browser wars, no open Web standards, no Mozilla, no Firefox
The browser wars would have still happened. Remember Opera goes all the way back to 1994 and it was possible to crank out your own web browser in less than a year at that time.
...why do I always plan to build a coffin with Bible-repelling magnetic lid and matching Bible, but never do?
Honestly, I have no idea. Am I missing a pop culture reference to coffin-repelling Bibles here?
As a former security auditor myself, I'd attack the voice response units. Quite frequently those boxes (often standalone towers covered with a quarter inch of dust) were neglected in the corner, with no IDS, no one checking logs and frequently no automatic lockouts. Routed through Skype and/or Google Voice...
Slashdot - where nerds get their news - a day late
Even TFA says "Oct 26". C'mon, have your coffee already!
It's called "the enterprise", and sometimes the year can be turned back to 1996 or so. (e.g., Lotus Notes - really?)
Typical government initiative - the nationwide system is finally ready 22 years after the end of the cold war, and 60 years after the threat was established.
Can we please cancel this program (we have the CNN and the Internet now) and take the useless TSA with it too?
Where's the link to the transcript?
This is SlashDot, not CNN.com. We don't have an hour of free time to blow - we scan, pick out the important bits and GTF on with our day.
When I voted for him in 2008, I never thought Obama would turn out to be the black George W. Bush.
> What private corporation is going to do what the US Geological Survey does?
Which is what, exactly?
In terms of mapping rocks and whatnot, there are great incentives for energy and mineral companies to perform this kind of research internally.
On earthquake research, there are a number of universities (many of which claim to be privately funded/endowed) that compete with each other on prestige that would likely continue this research.
It's nice to have a federal agency with a nice web site, but at some point in the past we may have hit a point of diminishing returns on additional spend here.
1) Simple things like "copy one row to another" regularly crash OpenOffice for many users. The reaction on the forums? "Dink around with Java for a few hours, tweak some clipboard settings and pray, etc." That's not the mark of a product ready for office consumers.
2) GoogleDocs. Where's the "share this with my colleagues and let them make updates" function in OpenOffice?
3) Poor formatting of Microsoft Office documents. Sure, you can read incoming Microsoft Office documents, but OpenOffice has a way of uglifying them by not quite rendering or saving things in a compatible manner. (When I saved a doc from OpenOffice, I only saved as PDF, never doc - just couldn't trust it!)
4) UI. Who the hell came up with the color picker? Why are commonly used functions buried? Did anyone on the OpenOffice project ever sit down with someone who spends 8 hours a day cranking documents or did they just work off a list of matching features somewhere?
a goal of getting Obama to acknowledge the wealth gap and appointing a commission to recommend actions for dealing with it
Who gets to be Marie Antoinette?
"manned spaceflight gap"
Not the "gap" crap again. Look up Kennedy's "missle gap" or "bomber gap" sometime to see how our overwhelming superiority in each area was successfully used to convince Congress to overspend on the same things even more.
(I wouldn't be surprised if we start hearing about a "carrier gap" soon now that China is poised to launch a group of their own.)
Do these things come with a stun setting?
Only if you're a pilot.
watch out for the simulated fog
Wouldn't that just be "fog"...'cause the whole thing's a simulation...
This is really a marketing decision based on the strength of the brand of the company offering the product.
A small company without a well-known brand may be more likely to keep a losing product alive (assuming it has other revenue streams) because there is no master brand to damage.
However, a "big name" company like Apple, HP or Microsoft can't afford to have losers in their portfolio because those technologies hurt the master brand. So...they yank badly received tech quickly. This happens in plenty of other consumer-facing industries too: think of "New Coke", the "Azteca" car, Zest trying to sell bath poufs to men, etc.
(Things sometimes work a little differently in business-to-business tech markets, BTW. I've seen tech products languish there for years before getting the ax due to long sales cycles or a cross-selling strategy that takes a while to test out.)
the people using Google Apps are not the people needed to popularize a social network platform
I don't know about that. I'll bet there's higher-than-average usage of Google Apps by Slashdot users (the typical "early adopters" of new technology in marketing speak) and we Slashdot users are seeing a lot of Google+ articles and other PR activity directed at us these days.
Furthermore...the "casual" Facebook users already have Facebook to do Facebook-like things. I don't think those are the people going to be the ones that popularize Google's Facebook clone either. Instead, it will be the folks like us who are trying to escape Facebook users who will drive Google+ acceptance. ("It's just like Facebook, but with fewer morons and none of those annoying game updates. Oops - check that.")
log into google+ using hello%mydomain.com@gtempemail.com
Er...no. I'll log into Google+ when it's ready to accept hello@mydomain.com.
I've been burned too many times already by odd Google merge conventions. (Thinking about lost email addresses created before I moved a domain to Google, having to wipe Android when switching the operating user, etc.)
Fix the large Google+ vs. Google Apps problem (the one where those of us using Google Apps cannot use Google+ - period) and a lot of your "lack of content" issues will be solved.
For now, we Google Apps users are stuck on Facebook, etc.
C'mon Google - you've got the developers, now get to work.
"Eighth-million patent" -> "eight millionth patent"
Yeesh - true geeks would say the editor's off by a factor of 2^5.
On the whole it achieves this but is occasionally let down by overly simplistic content and shoddy editing.
Are you talking about the book, the audio mashups people build with Audacity or SlashDot itself? ;)