Just remember, that if you put the internet in control of the mob then that mob includes not only all the government people you are trying to keep it away from in the first place, but also the entire population of 4chan.
In leaving central distribution we trust our government not to screw us, which is, I'll admit, a fairly big ask. Without central distribution we're trusting that every single person in our suburb/city/country/world isn't going to screw us. If you think that that's possible, then I've got a bridge to sell you.
Governments are inherently untrustworthy, but that's not because they're governments, it's because they're made up of people, and people are inherently untrustworthy. It's not like you become an elected or unelected official and you all of a sudden become self serving, greedy, and cruel. Elected officials are that way because people are that way. Your neighborhood is full of jerks, full of people who want to steal your bank details, get you arrested for CP, peep at nude photos of your partner. Trusting them is far more insane than trusting people that, at least in theory, you get to pick.
I can tell you, as a parent, seemingly legitimate studies are a lot more worrying than some nut. Yes other nuts already believed the nut, but while most parents, particularly of younger children are at least slightly irrational if only from lack of sleep, most of them are not stupid. If all the science points one way, it's reasonably easy to quell your fears and make the right decision. If we've got junk science confusing things it makes it really hard for parents. When you have a kid, especially your first kid, you haven't a damned clue what to do, and this sort of shit make life harder.
The problem with this is that it's not a knee jerk response. What it is is something worse, it's bullshit science which has been deliberately prepared to generate a particular result, a result which has caused deaths. I always thought it was bullshit, but it's totally understandable for parents to believe it. There was "scientific" proof. Personally I think Wakefield ought to be charged with murder for every one of those. Junk science is a huge threat in this world.
They just don't want to admit that it's "Liquidate my stock options and jump ship before the public finds out"
When Steve Jobs leaves, Apple stock will tank, at least in the short term. Apple knows it, and based on this request so do their shareholders. Apple can't admit that though.
When you bring out the guns on peaceful protesters it's pretty much a good indication your side is wrong. Whatever has happened now, that's how it started.
Actually all that really matters for any of those people is that the definition of a kilogram can be accurately reproduced, not what it actually is.
Of course any significant variation in the definition of a kilogram would involve a lot of expensive equipment being reordered, but a kilogram is an arbitrary definition and as such can be pretty much anything without affecting math or science all that much.
Note that when I say intellectual property, I mean ideas.
The US exports no significant amount of raw materials, or manufactured goods aside from those which are heavily subsidized or banned from being produced overseas like grain and military equipment. Neither of these things produces much of a net bonus to the US economy because the amount of money that must be paid to keep those industries viable is so high. The same is true of most western nations. We don't make iPhones, nor do we produce the materials they are made from. The same is largely true of most manufacturing. Clothes, electronic goods, even cars are usually only assembled locally at best. Hell a lot of our food is imported and that's with heavy government subsidies.
We do however produce idea, which is what something like an iPhone actually is.
If people stopped buying US music, US movies, or US video games, there would be no noticeable impact on the economy, but if the Chinese factory which makes iPhones, and Intel chips, and everything else you use could take the designs for those items and produce identical copies and sell them in the west it would be a very different matter.
Patents, trademarks, and copyrights are very important to our economies. They are what makes all the money we invest in education and higher living standards economically worthwhile. No US president, or UK prime minister, or German chancellor is going to risk upsetting that system too much with any kind of serious reform. Nor are they going to lapse in enforcement of that system, it is simply too important.
There's a law because intellectual property is the only major export most Western nations still have. However unpopular this sort of thing is they're all far too afraid to risk losing that economic base, so they don't want to change the equation too much. Hence laws to preserve the status quo.
Sharepoint is about bundling different kinds of information in a meaningful way, like every other portal product. I've been doing portals for a few years now and they can actually be really useful. Sure there's a lot of rather pointless bells and whistles, but trying to do the same thing with file systems is a bloody disaster.
Netware's time is up because Novell haven't done shit all with it for 10 years and now they're gone. It's done, for better or worse. OES was a nice try, but it was far too little and far too late.
I've been using Firefox 4 since beta 1 and have not had any significant issues with it, I'm not saying they don't exist, merely that it's not exactly the awful thing it's made out to be. It runs on a lot of platforms and has a whole bunch of new features(including HTML 5 which isn't entirely implemented anywhere) as well as hardware rendering. Considering all that it's going fairly well.
There's a reason those benchmarks are in there, it's because google wrote those benchmarks and only google bothered optimizing for them. If you actually run your browser through the benchmark you'll find it probably competes fairly well except on the crazy why in the hell would I do this with javascript test, which is where it falls down and google wins.
The fundamental problem with iOS development is that it's a huge pain in the ass. The language isn't used on any other platforms, the developer licenses are relatively expensive and you're subject entirely to the whims of a madman when it comes to what kinds of software you can release, and what kinds of features you can use in it. Pretty much everyone who programs for it in any serious way is doing it for the money, and the money is based entirely around the iPad/Pod/Phone being the hot thing right now. If sales figures for iPhones start dropping significantly the app store will become a ghost town, no one is doing that shit for fun.
That said this whole article is bullshit, we're not going to replace our computers with tablets because tablets are shockingly unfit for a large number of purposes. Most of the space taken up by your PC is the keyboard, mouse, and monitors. Keyboards and mice aren't going anywhere and monitors are going to get bigger, not smaller. Our desire for content is also going to keep increasing past the point where wireless can possibly keep up, and it will simply never be possible to provide the same kind of power or cost efficiency in a tiny handheld device as in a tower.
Someday there will be a revolutionary change in the way we use computers which will wipe out Wintel, but it's not going to be a touch screen.
Well, they don't "have" to reimburse you, but conversely you don't "have" to spend your own money either.
If they want people to be reachable 24/7 they need to provide the tools for them to be reachable 24/7. There's no legal requirement for staff to own a mobile phone or for that matter any kind of phone at all, and I wouldn't be surprised if any terms within a contract specifying that you do would be enforceable.
The reason companies pay for these things isn't because they're generous it's because if your data centre goes down and all your techs got their phones cut off because they didn't pay the bill you're pretty much fucked.
HTML5 video is not a replacement for flash video. It provides a limited subset of the functionality flash currently provides, and that's all it will ever provide. Most importantly for most producers of online video it has absolutely zero capabilities for DRM. I know everyone on slashdot hates DRM, but content providers don't. Youtube may get rid of Flash entirely some day, but it won't be replaced by HTML5. Despite the prognostications of Lord Steve, HTML5 video(and for that matter HTML5 as a whole) isn't really going to have any kind of significant impact on the web, and so it doesn't really matter what codecs the browsers bitch and moan about. Hell Firefox is already using the OS for 3d rendering in Firefox 4, so there's no reason to suspect they won't cave on using OS codecs for playback anyway.
They could charge an import tax, the same as they already do for imports over $AU 1000.
The problem with doing this, aside from pissing off consumers, is that, unless you want to go for voluntary declarations the way out of state online purchases in the US (don't) work, it costs more money to collect the import tax on a $100 order than it actually generates. That would mean that this whole thing would turn into a government subsidy for Australian retailers. Nothing necessarily wrong with that governments subsidize industries all the time. What they don't tend to do is piss off voters for no real reason. People are sufficiently pissed about this idea that Gerry Harvey who is one of the biggest loud mouths on the planet is trying to lower his profile. The government might take the hit to make cash like they did on GST, but doing this would be a huge loss of both cash and public support, not going to happen.
I'd also say there's a whole bunch of "back in the day we just called those kid's weird". I know lots of people of varying ages who if they were kids today would have been diagnosed with some form of autism spectrum disorder, it's not that these people weren't here, most of us grew up with them, hell a lot of us are them, that's just not what people like that were called back then.
A breathalyzer measures on a scale not positive or negative, you can have a margin of error, but that's not the same thing as a false positive or negative.
They don't need to suspect you of anything, you waived that right. Don't people read what they sign? They can ask you to blow into the machine any time they like, and if you refuse you lose your license forever(at least in your current state).
A term of your drivers license in every state I've ever been to is that you must consent to a breathalyzer test or your license will be revoked forever. You explicitly waive that right in writing when you get your drivers license and every single time that you renew it. You may not like that particular fact, but that's the agreement you make in order to drive. If you don't like it, don't sign the form and don't drive.
Give that, you can be an idiot about it and ask for a far more invasive blood test which will involve going down to the local police station and spending the next few hours in a holding cell while they process the results of your test, you can take the breathalyzer, and presuming you aren't over the legal limit, go about your merry business, or you can lose your license forever.
Despite all the claims about their lack of accuracy, I've never actually heard of any real person who got a false positive, and the few examples I've seen of things which screw up the test tend to give results which are sufficiently out of normal range that the police would have to retest you. They're sure as hell not perfect, but they're used all over the world, often in places with much lower BAC limits than the US and I've never heard of anyone who hadn't been drinking say they came back positive. I've heard of plenty of people who insist they weren't over.08, but going by that is presuming that a human can determine their BAC better than the breathalyzer which is unlikely.
If you can show me documented evidence of a large number of people who had a breathalyzer come back with a significantly higher number than their blood test(not.079 vs.08) then I'll reconsider, but you won't have that evidence because it doesn't exist. A very small number of people may get caught who were nowhere near the legal limit, but if some idiot sitting at.07 has to get a DUI every now and then in order to at least attempt to keep dangerous people off the roads, then so be it.
Except you only have 3 options when the cop stops you, take the test, hold out for a blood test, or lose your license forever.
Most of the things which cause a false positive give results which make no sense so get retested, if you know that you're likely to trigger one of the other ones it's probably worth spending 3 hours going down to the station for a blood test, otherwise you're going to have to suck it up. Most of the people who trying to avoid the test know they're over the limit and are just trying to get a free pass.
Slashdot Mirror
Just remember, that if you put the internet in control of the mob then that mob includes not only all the government people you are trying to keep it away from in the first place, but also the entire population of 4chan.
In leaving central distribution we trust our government not to screw us, which is, I'll admit, a fairly big ask. Without central distribution we're trusting that every single person in our suburb/city/country/world isn't going to screw us. If you think that that's possible, then I've got a bridge to sell you.
Governments are inherently untrustworthy, but that's not because they're governments, it's because they're made up of people, and people are inherently untrustworthy. It's not like you become an elected or unelected official and you all of a sudden become self serving, greedy, and cruel. Elected officials are that way because people are that way. Your neighborhood is full of jerks, full of people who want to steal your bank details, get you arrested for CP, peep at nude photos of your partner. Trusting them is far more insane than trusting people that, at least in theory, you get to pick.
I can tell you, as a parent, seemingly legitimate studies are a lot more worrying than some nut. Yes other nuts already believed the nut, but while most parents, particularly of younger children are at least slightly irrational if only from lack of sleep, most of them are not stupid. If all the science points one way, it's reasonably easy to quell your fears and make the right decision. If we've got junk science confusing things it makes it really hard for parents. When you have a kid, especially your first kid, you haven't a damned clue what to do, and this sort of shit make life harder.
The problem with this is that it's not a knee jerk response. What it is is something worse, it's bullshit science which has been deliberately prepared to generate a particular result, a result which has caused deaths. I always thought it was bullshit, but it's totally understandable for parents to believe it. There was "scientific" proof. Personally I think Wakefield ought to be charged with murder for every one of those. Junk science is a huge threat in this world.
They just don't want to admit that it's "Liquidate my stock options and jump ship before the public finds out"
When Steve Jobs leaves, Apple stock will tank, at least in the short term. Apple knows it, and based on this request so do their shareholders. Apple can't admit that though.
My personal guess would be low fat, cruelty free.
When you bring out the guns on peaceful protesters it's pretty much a good indication your side is wrong. Whatever has happened now, that's how it started.
And MySQL is a steaming pile.
Actually all that really matters for any of those people is that the definition of a kilogram can be accurately reproduced, not what it actually is.
Of course any significant variation in the definition of a kilogram would involve a lot of expensive equipment being reordered, but a kilogram is an arbitrary definition and as such can be pretty much anything without affecting math or science all that much.
Note that when I say intellectual property, I mean ideas.
The US exports no significant amount of raw materials, or manufactured goods aside from those which are heavily subsidized or banned from being produced overseas like grain and military equipment. Neither of these things produces much of a net bonus to the US economy because the amount of money that must be paid to keep those industries viable is so high. The same is true of most western nations. We don't make iPhones, nor do we produce the materials they are made from. The same is largely true of most manufacturing. Clothes, electronic goods, even cars are usually only assembled locally at best. Hell a lot of our food is imported and that's with heavy government subsidies.
We do however produce idea, which is what something like an iPhone actually is.
If people stopped buying US music, US movies, or US video games, there would be no noticeable impact on the economy, but if the Chinese factory which makes iPhones, and Intel chips, and everything else you use could take the designs for those items and produce identical copies and sell them in the west it would be a very different matter.
Patents, trademarks, and copyrights are very important to our economies. They are what makes all the money we invest in education and higher living standards economically worthwhile. No US president, or UK prime minister, or German chancellor is going to risk upsetting that system too much with any kind of serious reform. Nor are they going to lapse in enforcement of that system, it is simply too important.
There's a law because intellectual property is the only major export most Western nations still have. However unpopular this sort of thing is they're all far too afraid to risk losing that economic base, so they don't want to change the equation too much. Hence laws to preserve the status quo.
And again, write a better one, and I don't mean a better e-mail server, I mean a better exchange.
Sharepoint is about bundling different kinds of information in a meaningful way, like every other portal product. I've been doing portals for a few years now and they can actually be really useful. Sure there's a lot of rather pointless bells and whistles, but trying to do the same thing with file systems is a bloody disaster.
Sharepoint is a PITA, but I've used some of it's competitors and they're worse.
Netware's time is up because Novell haven't done shit all with it for 10 years and now they're gone. It's done, for better or worse. OES was a nice try, but it was far too little and far too late.
I've been using Firefox 4 since beta 1 and have not had any significant issues with it, I'm not saying they don't exist, merely that it's not exactly the awful thing it's made out to be. It runs on a lot of platforms and has a whole bunch of new features(including HTML 5 which isn't entirely implemented anywhere) as well as hardware rendering. Considering all that it's going fairly well.
There's a reason those benchmarks are in there, it's because google wrote those benchmarks and only google bothered optimizing for them. If you actually run your browser through the benchmark you'll find it probably competes fairly well except on the crazy why in the hell would I do this with javascript test, which is where it falls down and google wins.
The fundamental problem with iOS development is that it's a huge pain in the ass. The language isn't used on any other platforms, the developer licenses are relatively expensive and you're subject entirely to the whims of a madman when it comes to what kinds of software you can release, and what kinds of features you can use in it. Pretty much everyone who programs for it in any serious way is doing it for the money, and the money is based entirely around the iPad/Pod/Phone being the hot thing right now. If sales figures for iPhones start dropping significantly the app store will become a ghost town, no one is doing that shit for fun.
That said this whole article is bullshit, we're not going to replace our computers with tablets because tablets are shockingly unfit for a large number of purposes. Most of the space taken up by your PC is the keyboard, mouse, and monitors. Keyboards and mice aren't going anywhere and monitors are going to get bigger, not smaller. Our desire for content is also going to keep increasing past the point where wireless can possibly keep up, and it will simply never be possible to provide the same kind of power or cost efficiency in a tiny handheld device as in a tower.
Someday there will be a revolutionary change in the way we use computers which will wipe out Wintel, but it's not going to be a touch screen.
Well, they don't "have" to reimburse you, but conversely you don't "have" to spend your own money either.
If they want people to be reachable 24/7 they need to provide the tools for them to be reachable 24/7. There's no legal requirement for staff to own a mobile phone or for that matter any kind of phone at all, and I wouldn't be surprised if any terms within a contract specifying that you do would be enforceable.
The reason companies pay for these things isn't because they're generous it's because if your data centre goes down and all your techs got their phones cut off because they didn't pay the bill you're pretty much fucked.
HTML5 video is not a replacement for flash video. It provides a limited subset of the functionality flash currently provides, and that's all it will ever provide. Most importantly for most producers of online video it has absolutely zero capabilities for DRM. I know everyone on slashdot hates DRM, but content providers don't. Youtube may get rid of Flash entirely some day, but it won't be replaced by HTML5. Despite the prognostications of Lord Steve, HTML5 video(and for that matter HTML5 as a whole) isn't really going to have any kind of significant impact on the web, and so it doesn't really matter what codecs the browsers bitch and moan about. Hell Firefox is already using the OS for 3d rendering in Firefox 4, so there's no reason to suspect they won't cave on using OS codecs for playback anyway.
They could charge an import tax, the same as they already do for imports over $AU 1000.
The problem with doing this, aside from pissing off consumers, is that, unless you want to go for voluntary declarations the way out of state online purchases in the US (don't) work, it costs more money to collect the import tax on a $100 order than it actually generates. That would mean that this whole thing would turn into a government subsidy for Australian retailers. Nothing necessarily wrong with that governments subsidize industries all the time. What they don't tend to do is piss off voters for no real reason. People are sufficiently pissed about this idea that Gerry Harvey who is one of the biggest loud mouths on the planet is trying to lower his profile. The government might take the hit to make cash like they did on GST, but doing this would be a huge loss of both cash and public support, not going to happen.
I'd also say there's a whole bunch of "back in the day we just called those kid's weird". I know lots of people of varying ages who if they were kids today would have been diagnosed with some form of autism spectrum disorder, it's not that these people weren't here, most of us grew up with them, hell a lot of us are them, that's just not what people like that were called back then.
A breathalyzer measures on a scale not positive or negative, you can have a margin of error, but that's not the same thing as a false positive or negative.
They don't need to suspect you of anything, you waived that right. Don't people read what they sign? They can ask you to blow into the machine any time they like, and if you refuse you lose your license forever(at least in your current state).
A term of your drivers license in every state I've ever been to is that you must consent to a breathalyzer test or your license will be revoked forever. You explicitly waive that right in writing when you get your drivers license and every single time that you renew it. You may not like that particular fact, but that's the agreement you make in order to drive. If you don't like it, don't sign the form and don't drive.
Give that, you can be an idiot about it and ask for a far more invasive blood test which will involve going down to the local police station and spending the next few hours in a holding cell while they process the results of your test, you can take the breathalyzer, and presuming you aren't over the legal limit, go about your merry business, or you can lose your license forever.
Despite all the claims about their lack of accuracy, I've never actually heard of any real person who got a false positive, and the few examples I've seen of things which screw up the test tend to give results which are sufficiently out of normal range that the police would have to retest you. They're sure as hell not perfect, but they're used all over the world, often in places with much lower BAC limits than the US and I've never heard of anyone who hadn't been drinking say they came back positive. I've heard of plenty of people who insist they weren't over .08, but going by that is presuming that a human can determine their BAC better than the breathalyzer which is unlikely.
If you can show me documented evidence of a large number of people who had a breathalyzer come back with a significantly higher number than their blood test(not .079 vs .08) then I'll reconsider, but you won't have that evidence because it doesn't exist. A very small number of people may get caught who were nowhere near the legal limit, but if some idiot sitting at .07 has to get a DUI every now and then in order to at least attempt to keep dangerous people off the roads, then so be it.
Except you only have 3 options when the cop stops you, take the test, hold out for a blood test, or lose your license forever.
Most of the things which cause a false positive give results which make no sense so get retested, if you know that you're likely to trigger one of the other ones it's probably worth spending 3 hours going down to the station for a blood test, otherwise you're going to have to suck it up. Most of the people who trying to avoid the test know they're over the limit and are just trying to get a free pass.