True, but the GPL doesn't help you with patents either. It can(at least in version 3) technically restrict you from distributing anything which is patent encumbered, but it doesn't magically make the patents go away.
Linus does indeed seem to be the ultimate pragmatist, as far as I can tell, the prime zealot in the kernel team is Andrew Morton(who despite his zealotry has contributed an incredibly amount to the kernel and whose work I, for the most part, greatly appreciate).
That said, kernel APIs, as well as all sorts of other things, change quite often. Sometimes the APIs have been broken deliberately(somewhere around 2.6.13 or so can't remember exactly when, Morton put code into the APIs to block any modules which didn't have a GPL compatible license), sometimes they've been broken to massively improve system performance(both of these types of changes are of course perfectly within the rights of the kernel developers).
Generally speaking the kernel is very stable(in the sense that it doesn't crash much) and very unstable(in the sense that how it works can change dramatically between point releases) at the same time. It's also somewhat difficult, unless you want to maintain your own kernel patch set, to avoid these changes in APIs without keeping your kernel at an older version, which has a number of consequences.
Backwards compatibility in Linux is basically based around the idea that if the software is open source you can always go into the old software and fix it to work with the new system. This is great for the enhancement of individual software(bad code can be eliminated entirely), but not so great for the overal ecosystem(otherwise perfectly functional software requires a lot more updates than would be the case with more stable APIs).
Of course the fundamental issue with free software is and always has been the fact that 99.9999% of people don't care about most of the freedoms because they can't modify the software themselves, and, with certain exceptions, paying someone to fix it is more expensive than buying a product which does what you want in the first place.
That's not really what signed certs are for though.
You don't really use your signed cert to encrypt your data(for data encryption you don't need a signed cert, and additional information is used within the SSL procedure to generate temporary keys. I can get a copy of the signed cert for your bank, but that doesn't mean I can read the transaction you're making. You don't even have to have a signed certificate to have secure transmission of data.
Signed certs are about validating "who" someone is, they are pretty much exactly like a drivers license of passport, and that's a perfectly valid place for government to be in. That doesn't mean that doing S/MIME through a government agency is necessarily a good idea(at least not for all things), but having the government be the issuer of the certificate used to identify you is a totally different kettle of fish.
Things change, sometimes because society changes, sometimes because technology changes, sometimes for the very same slippery slope argument you've raised.
In 1908 they didn't have planes, they didn't have the television, they didn't have the internet. In 1908 well over half the population didn't have the right to vote(women, and most southern African Americans). In 1908 the Model T had just been invented. A few decades later they interned the majority of the Japanese American population in camps.
Things change, some for the better, some for the worse. I think you'd be surprised to find that historically Americans have been even less concered with civil liberties than they are now, the 1908 list might be a lot less stringent than mine. Certainly the folks in the 50's were willing to charge people for thought crime, and John Adams(one of the founding fathers) signed the Alien and Sedition acts(which make the Patriot act pretty tame) in 1798.
Every time you put someone elses rights over your own you are compromising, but that compromise is the root of civilization.
This technology can be used badly, it could be used to harass innocent people, it could be totally ineffective, but it's not anything new. If you look particularly dodgy now, any reasonably competent airport security(which I'll admit there isn't very much of) will tag you for further questioning, which is all the machine is doing. The big difference is that the machine, if it works at all, should at least be filtering you on reasonable criteria as opposed to the random prejudices of the security guards.
Well, even presuming that any individual can believe so absolutely as to not have any fears or doubts when he or she is about to die, how often have you seen anyone at an airport who was that absolutely serene.
Testing for people boaring a plane who are absolutely happy, calm, and confident would probably have far fewer false positives than testing for people who are stressed, angry, or generally unhappy. Flying isn't exactly a wild party for anyone. Most folks who have never done it are at least a little nervous, and most folks who have done it a lot know how much of a PITA it is, and aren't particularly thrilled either.
I'm not saying the current security theatre is effective, or a good idea, but actually there's a rather big difference between being strip searched and having a remote polygraph or a infrared camera, and it has everything to do with your awareness of the incident.
Being strip searched is demeaning, embarassing, and generally fairly traumatic for most of the people who have to undergo it. Cavity searches are worse. They single an individual out and make them feel a certain way.
The awareness of what is going on is what makes it a terrible experience, as well as the way it is carried out, not the actual result.
There's also a very big difference between "papers please" and "photo id please" at least at the moment. Despite all the general libertarian quoting, the systems are very different. The USSR required papers to travel anywhere, by any means, they were more than identification they were also permits to travel. They issued said papers to almost no one(because they didn't want people travelling).
The US on the other hand, despite all its failings, does not require permits to travel within the country(only identification and even then only for certain forms of travel such as driving a car or flying on a plane), and does not use the issuance(or lack thereof) of this identification to control population movement.
The US government is taking away the people's freedoms, some of this loss of freedom is indeed extremely worrying, but having to identify yourself and submit to some reasonable inspection to board an aircraft is far from the most worrying example.
Free speech zones, illegal wiretapping, or as a more applicable example no-fly lists are all much more worrying and much more unreasonable.
The world is a big place, and the vast majority of modern prosperity is a direct result of cooperation between individuals on a large scale. Cooperation between individuals sometimes requires compromise, sometimes compromise you don't like. It's important to recognize the difference between necessary compromise and true loss of freedoms. The days where you could ride off into the sunset and create a brand new identity are long over, but their passing has come along with a large number of very important benefits.
To play devils advocate, there's a difference between letting a guitly man escape jail and letting a man with a bomb blow up a plane.
Whether false positives are a problem depends entirely on how they handle positives. If setting this thing off means you immediately go to jail, get a cavity search, or end up getting shot, then it's most definitely a problem. If on the other hand they have a secondary process to weed out more false positives which isn't overly invasive, then it's probably perfectly alright.
Airport security doesn't immediately jump on you and do a cavity search if you set off the metal detector, they use a hand held scanner first to determine whether it's just something silly.
Doing tests like this isn't fundamentally bad, it's not even really all that different than what's going on now. Experienced folks will still pull you up if you look suspicious now, the only major difference is that suspicious at the moment can mean "the wrong colour".
The gain is really a matter of opinion and depends a lot on your tv, but it would sell at that price, especially since you get a games console as well.
The games division is sinking because, as I said, the console is too expensive. They made it powerful, but they can't make it for a price people will pay, so people don't pay it, and they generally screw themselves.
Both the Wii and the XBox360 are less powerful than the PS3, substantially so, but Nintendo can sell the Wii at an impulse buy price point and make a profit and Microsoft can, presumably, afford to sell the Xbox360 at a price point which is, while not impulse buy territory, still affordable.
Well that sort of shows that the PS3 costs too much to manufacture because as a games console it's pretty much a dismal failure.
It also doesn't really matter because the PS3 isn't, for all intents and purposes, a games console. The attach rate on games isn't all that high, certainly not enough to make up a couple of hundred dollars worth of loss per unit. The attach rate on movies however, is huge and it appears that Blu-Ray has a pretty solid profit margin.
The PS3 is still the best value for money Blu-Ray player on the market as far as I can tell. Drop the price to $299 and it might be cheap enough to actually sell. This in turn might help Blu-Ray actually win the format war(they've beaten HD-DVD, but they're still losing to DVD) and might make Sony some serious money.
Doubtful, something like this is just too dangerous. World of Warcraft generates subscription fees from 10 million subscribers, even if they're offering licensing at a pittance now, letting this patent stand subjects them to tremendous risk. Sony has a whole bunch of MMOs and wants to continue to produce them, again the risk inherent in this is too high.
Realistically what the CEOs are contemplating is whether a license agreement from NCSoft will screw them, and whether NCSoft can fight these vultures off on their own. They won't want to shell out cash if they can help it, but the potential risks are far too high.
They chose NCSoft because their alternatives are Sony who probably have an entire building full of high priced land sharks avaiable for their defense, or going after WoW which generates enough revenue to purchase a couple of congress critters.
Patent trolling either company isn't for the faint of heart and you'd have to be damned sure you had a convincing case to try either.
NCSoft by comparison was one of the weakest of the pack(not in terms of quality of MMO's or anything like that, merely in terms of how suicidal it would be to sue them) well before their recent troubles.
I don't get the hate for Media Center keys, I really don't.
I mean don't get me wrong, they're useless as all get out 99% of the time, but they don't make a good keyboard bad.
I used to try and avoid media center keys too, but realistically, I'd rather have a good keyboard with media keys than a bad one without, and I'm sure as hell not willing to pay extra to get rid of them.
If they offer this subscription model instead of the current boxed model, and they offer it at the prices currently being suggested, then the only thing in it for the consumer is the grief of switching to a new office suite. Consumers simply will not pay that kind of pricing if they are heavy users of said products, even at the ludicrous prices Microsoft charges for the full versions of Office Professional(which is more than most people need), even a user who upgraded with every single version(office versions are usually about 3 years apart with the exception of 2k->XP), it would only really take 230 hours a year(or about 5 hours a week) to pay for the boxed copy.
On the other hand, if they offer this method alongside their boxed sales system for people who use word or games very rarely, then it might be quite a good deal. If I had to pay a couple of bucks per hour for Office, over the last 3 years I'd have probably paid substantially less than $50, which compared to even a student copy of Office, would be quite a good deal. Realistically most games are currently priced at about $2/hour of fun anyhoo, so that might work even easier.
It's still true that you should ignore anyone starts spouting off that SAAS will be the wave of the future(they're either raving nutters, or marketing whackjobs), but there are valid uses for the subscription model. MMO's work because they provides more fun per dollar than most single purchase games for a lot of the people who play them. You may disagree with this, but that's why they work.
To sum up, it is possible for subscription models to provide better value for money for certain market segments than traditional purchase models. These market segments are also often ones which companies have a hard time selling to. A good subscription model that provides value for money to this segment, combined with either the normal boxed model, or a decent scaling/capped system for heavy users, can benefit both consumers and companies.
A bad subscription model is not something we really have to worry about because people simply won't stand for it.
Some would argue that people are stupid, or sheep, especially(at least on slashdot) if those people use Microsoft products, but there's only so deep people can reach into someone elses pockets with impunity. People have rejected business models like this before, and even TPM wouldn't save Microsoft Office if they tried it.
Users with 20 plus years of experience use keyboard shortcuts and those haven't changed.
Office 2007 isn't a problem for real power users, and it's not a problem for novice users.
It's a problem for people, like nearly everyone in IT, who know it well enough to get around, but not well enough to be really good at it, and who, generally hate using it because they only use it to do things they don't want to do(fill in paperwork, do presentations, etc).
I've only used it a couple of times, but you have to admit that the current menuing system doesn't make much sense, formatting options are spread through a number of different top menus(edit and format being two obvious examples), and the current shortcut buttons are essentially useless because, as they're not context sensitive you need about a hundred to do anything with.
There's a learning curve on Office 2007(I to couldn't find print and had to go the old ctrl-P route when I used it), but to reorganize and consolidate what was becoming a mess of legacy locations(edit was presumably created to hold functions originally done by editors) was really quite clever and will, in the long term, probably provide real value to the people who actually have to use the wretched software(I only use office to do things I don't like doing so I too hate it).
Lying under oath about anything whatsoever is purjury. Note that it's not lying if you believe you are telling the truth but are mistaken. Remember the oath is "The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth".
There does admitedly appear to be some wiggle room within the "the whole truth" thing, which is to say you are only required to completely answer the question put to you as opposed to telling truths you know but haven't been asked, but lying under oath is still illegal as far as I know no matter what.
Perhaps the defendent's lawyer should have objected, but if she's an expert in the field it would have been a fairly gray area and probably a quite applicable question and would likely have been overruled.
On the other hand, to play devil's advocate, while copyright infringement is not stealing, it's sort of hard to come up with a laymans term for what it is that correctly explains what it is to a non technical jury. Realistically it's a breach of contract, but contracts you don't explicitly sign, verbally agree, or make any explicit acknowldgement of contract, don't make a lot of sense to the average person(which one might argue is why the case is flawed to begin with).
It's not actually a rip off, it's just a different way of charging.
If the UK is anything like Australia(which I'm guessing it is since we share some of the same mobile carriers), then calling a mobile phone from a land line incurs additional costs compared to calling another land line.
In the US this is not the case, from the perspective of the caller, a mobile phone is no different than any other phone and so they get charged as if the mobile phone were a static land line located in whatever area code the phone number is located in.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods, but all the UK really does is pass the cost of a mobile phone call onto the person doing the calling as opposed to the person being called. Someone still pays in the end. Of course the US system sometimes double dips because you can call someone down the road who has a phone from a different city and you get charged long distance and they get charged to receive, but generally it means that for people calling you there's no extra cost to them if you don't have a land line.
UAC had a lot of problems, not least of which was the fact that there was no way to explicitly grant certain applications the right to do certain things that they were going to do, whether they should have done them or not, anyway. I turned it off for that very reason after only a few months with Vista.
The biggest problem with UAC is the same problem which faces most Operating Systems, the fact that people(including the developers themselves) don't really understand what is and isn't dangerous modification of the system and instead try to class to much into that category.
It doesn't really matter, on a system with a single user or a single data set(like most windows systems) whether you are admin or not. A non admin user on linux can still run an smtp server(on a non standard port), the user still has access to all the data that's important to them(because it's their data), and the user still has the ability to run applications automatically on startup. The only thing that a non admin linux user can't do is corrupt the core system, but if you're the only user of the system, corrupting your own user is realistically enough damage.
Windows doesn't allow you to do most of those things as a non admin user(you can still auto run programs though), but because it doesn't, you need to be able to elevate your rights in order to do things, and that ability to elevate adds the same security holes that running as admin does. The only data which really matters is the data of the user(s), if there's only one user, or if all users are sharing access to the same core data, then the difference between hosing an OS and hosing the data on that OS(which a normal user can do) is that hosing the data is actually worse. Reinstalling windows, or linux, or presumably OSX is a couple of hours work, and everyone knows someone who can be cajoled, bribed, or paid to do it. Getting back data you have lost can sometimes be impossible.
If you want a secure system, what you really need is to design a system where an application has to designate what resources it is going to use when it is installed, the user explicitly grants permission to those resources and the OS blocks it from accessing anything else and alerts the user if it attempts to do so.
This would be a pretty massive change in the way computers work though, and would be extremely limiting to both developers and users, but it's really the only thing that would work. Everything else is a farse.
No one is saying that you shouldn't make money off your work(well no one worth listening to).
No one is even saying that you should lose your copyright the second you die.
What they're saying is that you shouldn't be able to make money in perpetuity off of one piece of work. I have to keep working to make money and so should you.
It's not tremendously common, usually happens on hills, and can largely be prevented by not sitting 3 inches behind the person in front of you, but it can happen and be totally not your fault.
In a lot of places, the police do indeed issue fines without human involvement(beyond setting up the camera in the case of portables). The photograph is taken, and the fine is automatically sent to the person registered to that plate. That's not AI, it's a speed measurement, a specialized image analysis, a database entry, and an automated mailer. None of those things require particularly complex AI and all are currently possible.
If your goal is to catch speeders then sure they work fine, but if your goal is to make the roads safer they do two tenths of stuff all. Documenting speeding isn't a worthwhile goal if it doesn't actually reduce speeding.
I live in a place that's had speed cameras for a long while, at first they slowed people down, now they don't, folks get caught going through three in a row because even if they see the flash at night they're already done so they keep going.
If getting fines deterred speeding we'd see a decrease in speeding, we don't, we also, more importantly don't see reductions in road fatalities which is the whole point of speeding tickets in the first place(at least supposedly). Again, people don't slow down after they get done by a speed camera, they don't stop speeding generally, and even draconian fines do nothing to eliminate speeding.
Catching people breaking the law is pointless if in doing so you don't get the outcome the law was designed to achieve(better road safety). I don't object to ticketing people, I'm all for police on the roads. I object to speed cameras because when you use speed cameras you lose an awful lot of the benefits you derive from having police on the roads when all the cameras do is raise money.
I've never gotten a speeding ticket in my life, but speed cameras cost me because they make the streets I drive on, and the neighbourhood I live in more dangerous. I would gladly pay higher taxes(and trust me I already pay higher taxes than you probably do) to have more police patrolling the streets keeping me and everyone else safer, than have a camera which can only pick up speeders, doesn't really deter anyone, just to save a few dollars in taxes.
The thing is, most people can't work that way. You spend an awful lot of your life at work, and most people like to think that their employer appreciates the work they do.
That appreciation(when sincere) generally has a greater impact on workplace morale than would a higher salary and is, generally speaking, cheaper for the employer over the long term.
I highly doubt that google paid their employees 20-30k as a Christmas bonus(that's a huge amount for anything not tied to some sort of performance metric and would be the kind of devastating loss which would cause mass resignations.) It's been posted by others that the Christmas bonuses are closer to 1k, which is far more reasonable.
That said, even though a free phone is better than a lot of people get, this is a fairly major policy shift for Google, even if the normal amount is only around a grand. Google generally hires only the best(by whatever subjective version of the best they choose to use) and they expect an awful lot of work hours out of their employees. They make up for this mainly through perks as opposed to salaries, and cutting those perks could have a major impact on their business model.
In one version yes, but that version doesn't have the bit under discussion.
The movie does not follow the plot of the books, which do not follow the plot of the tv series which does not follow the plot of the radio series.
Douglas Adams only really required that the earth be destroyed and that Arthur be Arthur between different incarnations, pretty much every other character changes pretty drastically between different versions.
This is not a prank. It's fraud, identity theft, harassment, and essentially falsifying a police report.
This isn't some sort of minor thing like ringing someone's doorbell and running off, or spraying their car with silly string(though that can have long term consequences too). It's not even something like when people cause accidents because they steal traffic signs(which is also stupid and criminal, but you can argue that the consequences were not intended).
This is deliberately impersonating someone with the intent of getting that individual into trouble with law enforcement. Traffic tickets have real consequences, not just $40, at the very least you're going to be out serious amounts of time and potentially money fighting the ticket(if you can fight it at all), but you're looking at a potential loss of someone's license and all the costs associated with that depending on how often it was done or if the victim had previous fines.
This is a fairly serious offense, akin to calling the police and accusing someone of a crime. People who do this kind of shit, even if they're stupid teenagers should face jail time. If the judge decides to be lenient and let them off with community service that's lucky for them, it might not even be an unreasonable outcome, but kids need to learn the consequences of their actions and giving them a slap on the wrist and saying "oh it was just a prank" won't teach them that.
Circumstances and intent have to be taken into account in all crimes, but so do consequences, and saying the consequences don't matter, especially when the perpetrators intended them(even if they didn't think it through) is a worse perversion of justice than excessive punishment.
The IRS doesn't audit you without having a human involved in the process, nor do intelligence agencies leave the processing of flagged individuals up to computers. The moral responsibility is to make sure that someone at some point is using human judgment, even if that judgment is basically some monkey in an office taking a quick 5 second look at the photo of the speeding ticket, and the DMV photo of the registered owner and comparing the two.
That said, the fundamental problem with speed cameras is that they don't work. A cop on the road with a speed gun slows everyone down, he or she can pick people up for other dangerous behaviors, spot drunks, and provide additional deterrence to other criminals in the immediate area enhancing general safety.
Speed cameras on the other hand, only pick up speeders, don't accurately identify the driver, don't deter the driver from further speeding, and after a while provide minimal real measurable impact on road safety.
The one and only thing that speed cameras do well is generate revenue.
I don't mind red light cameras so much, going through a red is stupid and dangerous, and the proper behaviour when you see an amber light is to slow down to stop, you're only supposed to go through if you can't stop safely. If there are lots of rear collision accidents because people aren't running ambers then either people can't estimate the distance to stop safely, or the impatient idiots behind them are tailgating, not paying attention, and/or speeding.
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True, but the GPL doesn't help you with patents either. It can(at least in version 3) technically restrict you from distributing anything which is patent encumbered, but it doesn't magically make the patents go away.
That said, kernel APIs, as well as all sorts of other things, change quite often. Sometimes the APIs have been broken deliberately(somewhere around 2.6.13 or so can't remember exactly when, Morton put code into the APIs to block any modules which didn't have a GPL compatible license), sometimes they've been broken to massively improve system performance(both of these types of changes are of course perfectly within the rights of the kernel developers).
Generally speaking the kernel is very stable(in the sense that it doesn't crash much) and very unstable(in the sense that how it works can change dramatically between point releases) at the same time. It's also somewhat difficult, unless you want to maintain your own kernel patch set, to avoid these changes in APIs without keeping your kernel at an older version, which has a number of consequences.
Backwards compatibility in Linux is basically based around the idea that if the software is open source you can always go into the old software and fix it to work with the new system. This is great for the enhancement of individual software(bad code can be eliminated entirely), but not so great for the overal ecosystem(otherwise perfectly functional software requires a lot more updates than would be the case with more stable APIs).
Of course the fundamental issue with free software is and always has been the fact that 99.9999% of people don't care about most of the freedoms because they can't modify the software themselves, and, with certain exceptions, paying someone to fix it is more expensive than buying a product which does what you want in the first place.
That's not really what signed certs are for though.
You don't really use your signed cert to encrypt your data(for data encryption you don't need a signed cert, and additional information is used within the SSL procedure to generate temporary keys. I can get a copy of the signed cert for your bank, but that doesn't mean I can read the transaction you're making. You don't even have to have a signed certificate to have secure transmission of data.
Signed certs are about validating "who" someone is, they are pretty much exactly like a drivers license of passport, and that's a perfectly valid place for government to be in. That doesn't mean that doing S/MIME through a government agency is necessarily a good idea(at least not for all things), but having the government be the issuer of the certificate used to identify you is a totally different kettle of fish.
In 1908 they didn't have planes, they didn't have the television, they didn't have the internet. In 1908 well over half the population didn't have the right to vote(women, and most southern African Americans). In 1908 the Model T had just been invented. A few decades later they interned the majority of the Japanese American population in camps.
Things change, some for the better, some for the worse. I think you'd be surprised to find that historically Americans have been even less concered with civil liberties than they are now, the 1908 list might be a lot less stringent than mine. Certainly the folks in the 50's were willing to charge people for thought crime, and John Adams(one of the founding fathers) signed the Alien and Sedition acts(which make the Patriot act pretty tame) in 1798.
Every time you put someone elses rights over your own you are compromising, but that compromise is the root of civilization.
This technology can be used badly, it could be used to harass innocent people, it could be totally ineffective, but it's not anything new. If you look particularly dodgy now, any reasonably competent airport security(which I'll admit there isn't very much of) will tag you for further questioning, which is all the machine is doing. The big difference is that the machine, if it works at all, should at least be filtering you on reasonable criteria as opposed to the random prejudices of the security guards.
Testing for people boaring a plane who are absolutely happy, calm, and confident would probably have far fewer false positives than testing for people who are stressed, angry, or generally unhappy. Flying isn't exactly a wild party for anyone. Most folks who have never done it are at least a little nervous, and most folks who have done it a lot know how much of a PITA it is, and aren't particularly thrilled either.
I'm not saying the current security theatre is effective, or a good idea, but actually there's a rather big difference between being strip searched and having a remote polygraph or a infrared camera, and it has everything to do with your awareness of the incident.
Being strip searched is demeaning, embarassing, and generally fairly traumatic for most of the people who have to undergo it. Cavity searches are worse. They single an individual out and make them feel a certain way.
The awareness of what is going on is what makes it a terrible experience, as well as the way it is carried out, not the actual result.
There's also a very big difference between "papers please" and "photo id please" at least at the moment. Despite all the general libertarian quoting, the systems are very different. The USSR required papers to travel anywhere, by any means, they were more than identification they were also permits to travel. They issued said papers to almost no one(because they didn't want people travelling).
The US on the other hand, despite all its failings, does not require permits to travel within the country(only identification and even then only for certain forms of travel such as driving a car or flying on a plane), and does not use the issuance(or lack thereof) of this identification to control population movement.
The US government is taking away the people's freedoms, some of this loss of freedom is indeed extremely worrying, but having to identify yourself and submit to some reasonable inspection to board an aircraft is far from the most worrying example.
Free speech zones, illegal wiretapping, or as a more applicable example no-fly lists are all much more worrying and much more unreasonable.
The world is a big place, and the vast majority of modern prosperity is a direct result of cooperation between individuals on a large scale. Cooperation between individuals sometimes requires compromise, sometimes compromise you don't like. It's important to recognize the difference between necessary compromise and true loss of freedoms. The days where you could ride off into the sunset and create a brand new identity are long over, but their passing has come along with a large number of very important benefits.
To play devils advocate, there's a difference between letting a guitly man escape jail and letting a man with a bomb blow up a plane.
Whether false positives are a problem depends entirely on how they handle positives. If setting this thing off means you immediately go to jail, get a cavity search, or end up getting shot, then it's most definitely a problem. If on the other hand they have a secondary process to weed out more false positives which isn't overly invasive, then it's probably perfectly alright.
Airport security doesn't immediately jump on you and do a cavity search if you set off the metal detector, they use a hand held scanner first to determine whether it's just something silly.
Doing tests like this isn't fundamentally bad, it's not even really all that different than what's going on now. Experienced folks will still pull you up if you look suspicious now, the only major difference is that suspicious at the moment can mean "the wrong colour".
The gain is really a matter of opinion and depends a lot on your tv, but it would sell at that price, especially since you get a games console as well.
The games division is sinking because, as I said, the console is too expensive. They made it powerful, but they can't make it for a price people will pay, so people don't pay it, and they generally screw themselves.
Both the Wii and the XBox360 are less powerful than the PS3, substantially so, but Nintendo can sell the Wii at an impulse buy price point and make a profit and Microsoft can, presumably, afford to sell the Xbox360 at a price point which is, while not impulse buy territory, still affordable.
Both are doing better than the PS3.
Well that sort of shows that the PS3 costs too much to manufacture because as a games console it's pretty much a dismal failure.
It also doesn't really matter because the PS3 isn't, for all intents and purposes, a games console. The attach rate on games isn't all that high, certainly not enough to make up a couple of hundred dollars worth of loss per unit. The attach rate on movies however, is huge and it appears that Blu-Ray has a pretty solid profit margin.
The PS3 is still the best value for money Blu-Ray player on the market as far as I can tell. Drop the price to $299 and it might be cheap enough to actually sell. This in turn might help Blu-Ray actually win the format war(they've beaten HD-DVD, but they're still losing to DVD) and might make Sony some serious money.
Realistically what the CEOs are contemplating is whether a license agreement from NCSoft will screw them, and whether NCSoft can fight these vultures off on their own. They won't want to shell out cash if they can help it, but the potential risks are far too high.
That would be the ideal situation for everyone concerned(except the patent troll).
They chose NCSoft because their alternatives are Sony who probably have an entire building full of high priced land sharks avaiable for their defense, or going after WoW which generates enough revenue to purchase a couple of congress critters.
Patent trolling either company isn't for the faint of heart and you'd have to be damned sure you had a convincing case to try either.
NCSoft by comparison was one of the weakest of the pack(not in terms of quality of MMO's or anything like that, merely in terms of how suicidal it would be to sue them) well before their recent troubles.
I don't get the hate for Media Center keys, I really don't.
I mean don't get me wrong, they're useless as all get out 99% of the time, but they don't make a good keyboard bad.
I used to try and avoid media center keys too, but realistically, I'd rather have a good keyboard with media keys than a bad one without, and I'm sure as hell not willing to pay extra to get rid of them.
If they offer this subscription model instead of the current boxed model, and they offer it at the prices currently being suggested, then the only thing in it for the consumer is the grief of switching to a new office suite. Consumers simply will not pay that kind of pricing if they are heavy users of said products, even at the ludicrous prices Microsoft charges for the full versions of Office Professional(which is more than most people need), even a user who upgraded with every single version(office versions are usually about 3 years apart with the exception of 2k->XP), it would only really take 230 hours a year(or about 5 hours a week) to pay for the boxed copy.
On the other hand, if they offer this method alongside their boxed sales system for people who use word or games very rarely, then it might be quite a good deal. If I had to pay a couple of bucks per hour for Office, over the last 3 years I'd have probably paid substantially less than $50, which compared to even a student copy of Office, would be quite a good deal. Realistically most games are currently priced at about $2/hour of fun anyhoo, so that might work even easier.
It's still true that you should ignore anyone starts spouting off that SAAS will be the wave of the future(they're either raving nutters, or marketing whackjobs), but there are valid uses for the subscription model. MMO's work because they provides more fun per dollar than most single purchase games for a lot of the people who play them. You may disagree with this, but that's why they work.
To sum up, it is possible for subscription models to provide better value for money for certain market segments than traditional purchase models. These market segments are also often ones which companies have a hard time selling to. A good subscription model that provides value for money to this segment, combined with either the normal boxed model, or a decent scaling/capped system for heavy users, can benefit both consumers and companies.
A bad subscription model is not something we really have to worry about because people simply won't stand for it.
Some would argue that people are stupid, or sheep, especially(at least on slashdot) if those people use Microsoft products, but there's only so deep people can reach into someone elses pockets with impunity. People have rejected business models like this before, and even TPM wouldn't save Microsoft Office if they tried it.
Users with 20 plus years of experience use keyboard shortcuts and those haven't changed.
Office 2007 isn't a problem for real power users, and it's not a problem for novice users.
It's a problem for people, like nearly everyone in IT, who know it well enough to get around, but not well enough to be really good at it, and who, generally hate using it because they only use it to do things they don't want to do(fill in paperwork, do presentations, etc).
I've only used it a couple of times, but you have to admit that the current menuing system doesn't make much sense, formatting options are spread through a number of different top menus(edit and format being two obvious examples), and the current shortcut buttons are essentially useless because, as they're not context sensitive you need about a hundred to do anything with.
There's a learning curve on Office 2007(I to couldn't find print and had to go the old ctrl-P route when I used it), but to reorganize and consolidate what was becoming a mess of legacy locations(edit was presumably created to hold functions originally done by editors) was really quite clever and will, in the long term, probably provide real value to the people who actually have to use the wretched software(I only use office to do things I don't like doing so I too hate it).
There does admitedly appear to be some wiggle room within the "the whole truth" thing, which is to say you are only required to completely answer the question put to you as opposed to telling truths you know but haven't been asked, but lying under oath is still illegal as far as I know no matter what.
Perhaps the defendent's lawyer should have objected, but if she's an expert in the field it would have been a fairly gray area and probably a quite applicable question and would likely have been overruled.
On the other hand, to play devil's advocate, while copyright infringement is not stealing, it's sort of hard to come up with a laymans term for what it is that correctly explains what it is to a non technical jury. Realistically it's a breach of contract, but contracts you don't explicitly sign, verbally agree, or make any explicit acknowldgement of contract, don't make a lot of sense to the average person(which one might argue is why the case is flawed to begin with).
It's not actually a rip off, it's just a different way of charging.
If the UK is anything like Australia(which I'm guessing it is since we share some of the same mobile carriers), then calling a mobile phone from a land line incurs additional costs compared to calling another land line.
In the US this is not the case, from the perspective of the caller, a mobile phone is no different than any other phone and so they get charged as if the mobile phone were a static land line located in whatever area code the phone number is located in.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods, but all the UK really does is pass the cost of a mobile phone call onto the person doing the calling as opposed to the person being called. Someone still pays in the end. Of course the US system sometimes double dips because you can call someone down the road who has a phone from a different city and you get charged long distance and they get charged to receive, but generally it means that for people calling you there's no extra cost to them if you don't have a land line.
UAC had a lot of problems, not least of which was the fact that there was no way to explicitly grant certain applications the right to do certain things that they were going to do, whether they should have done them or not, anyway. I turned it off for that very reason after only a few months with Vista.
The biggest problem with UAC is the same problem which faces most Operating Systems, the fact that people(including the developers themselves) don't really understand what is and isn't dangerous modification of the system and instead try to class to much into that category.
It doesn't really matter, on a system with a single user or a single data set(like most windows systems) whether you are admin or not. A non admin user on linux can still run an smtp server(on a non standard port), the user still has access to all the data that's important to them(because it's their data), and the user still has the ability to run applications automatically on startup. The only thing that a non admin linux user can't do is corrupt the core system, but if you're the only user of the system, corrupting your own user is realistically enough damage.
Windows doesn't allow you to do most of those things as a non admin user(you can still auto run programs though), but because it doesn't, you need to be able to elevate your rights in order to do things, and that ability to elevate adds the same security holes that running as admin does. The only data which really matters is the data of the user(s), if there's only one user, or if all users are sharing access to the same core data, then the difference between hosing an OS and hosing the data on that OS(which a normal user can do) is that hosing the data is actually worse. Reinstalling windows, or linux, or presumably OSX is a couple of hours work, and everyone knows someone who can be cajoled, bribed, or paid to do it. Getting back data you have lost can sometimes be impossible.
If you want a secure system, what you really need is to design a system where an application has to designate what resources it is going to use when it is installed, the user explicitly grants permission to those resources and the OS blocks it from accessing anything else and alerts the user if it attempts to do so.
This would be a pretty massive change in the way computers work though, and would be extremely limiting to both developers and users, but it's really the only thing that would work. Everything else is a farse.
No one is saying that you shouldn't make money off your work(well no one worth listening to).
No one is even saying that you should lose your copyright the second you die.
What they're saying is that you shouldn't be able to make money in perpetuity off of one piece of work. I have to keep working to make money and so should you.
It's not tremendously common, usually happens on hills, and can largely be prevented by not sitting 3 inches behind the person in front of you, but it can happen and be totally not your fault.
In a lot of places, the police do indeed issue fines without human involvement(beyond setting up the camera in the case of portables). The photograph is taken, and the fine is automatically sent to the person registered to that plate. That's not AI, it's a speed measurement, a specialized image analysis, a database entry, and an automated mailer. None of those things require particularly complex AI and all are currently possible.
If your goal is to catch speeders then sure they work fine, but if your goal is to make the roads safer they do two tenths of stuff all. Documenting speeding isn't a worthwhile goal if it doesn't actually reduce speeding.
I live in a place that's had speed cameras for a long while, at first they slowed people down, now they don't, folks get caught going through three in a row because even if they see the flash at night they're already done so they keep going.
If getting fines deterred speeding we'd see a decrease in speeding, we don't, we also, more importantly don't see reductions in road fatalities which is the whole point of speeding tickets in the first place(at least supposedly). Again, people don't slow down after they get done by a speed camera, they don't stop speeding generally, and even draconian fines do nothing to eliminate speeding.
Catching people breaking the law is pointless if in doing so you don't get the outcome the law was designed to achieve(better road safety). I don't object to ticketing people, I'm all for police on the roads. I object to speed cameras because when you use speed cameras you lose an awful lot of the benefits you derive from having police on the roads when all the cameras do is raise money.
I've never gotten a speeding ticket in my life, but speed cameras cost me because they make the streets I drive on, and the neighbourhood I live in more dangerous. I would gladly pay higher taxes(and trust me I already pay higher taxes than you probably do) to have more police patrolling the streets keeping me and everyone else safer, than have a camera which can only pick up speeders, doesn't really deter anyone, just to save a few dollars in taxes.
The thing is, most people can't work that way. You spend an awful lot of your life at work, and most people like to think that their employer appreciates the work they do.
That appreciation(when sincere) generally has a greater impact on workplace morale than would a higher salary and is, generally speaking, cheaper for the employer over the long term.
I highly doubt that google paid their employees 20-30k as a Christmas bonus(that's a huge amount for anything not tied to some sort of performance metric and would be the kind of devastating loss which would cause mass resignations.) It's been posted by others that the Christmas bonuses are closer to 1k, which is far more reasonable.
That said, even though a free phone is better than a lot of people get, this is a fairly major policy shift for Google, even if the normal amount is only around a grand. Google generally hires only the best(by whatever subjective version of the best they choose to use) and they expect an awful lot of work hours out of their employees. They make up for this mainly through perks as opposed to salaries, and cutting those perks could have a major impact on their business model.
In one version yes, but that version doesn't have the bit under discussion.
The movie does not follow the plot of the books, which do not follow the plot of the tv series which does not follow the plot of the radio series.
Douglas Adams only really required that the earth be destroyed and that Arthur be Arthur between different incarnations, pretty much every other character changes pretty drastically between different versions.
This isn't some sort of minor thing like ringing someone's doorbell and running off, or spraying their car with silly string(though that can have long term consequences too). It's not even something like when people cause accidents because they steal traffic signs(which is also stupid and criminal, but you can argue that the consequences were not intended).
This is deliberately impersonating someone with the intent of getting that individual into trouble with law enforcement. Traffic tickets have real consequences, not just $40, at the very least you're going to be out serious amounts of time and potentially money fighting the ticket(if you can fight it at all), but you're looking at a potential loss of someone's license and all the costs associated with that depending on how often it was done or if the victim had previous fines.
This is a fairly serious offense, akin to calling the police and accusing someone of a crime. People who do this kind of shit, even if they're stupid teenagers should face jail time. If the judge decides to be lenient and let them off with community service that's lucky for them, it might not even be an unreasonable outcome, but kids need to learn the consequences of their actions and giving them a slap on the wrist and saying "oh it was just a prank" won't teach them that.
Circumstances and intent have to be taken into account in all crimes, but so do consequences, and saying the consequences don't matter, especially when the perpetrators intended them(even if they didn't think it through) is a worse perversion of justice than excessive punishment.
The IRS doesn't audit you without having a human involved in the process, nor do intelligence agencies leave the processing of flagged individuals up to computers. The moral responsibility is to make sure that someone at some point is using human judgment, even if that judgment is basically some monkey in an office taking a quick 5 second look at the photo of the speeding ticket, and the DMV photo of the registered owner and comparing the two.
That said, the fundamental problem with speed cameras is that they don't work. A cop on the road with a speed gun slows everyone down, he or she can pick people up for other dangerous behaviors, spot drunks, and provide additional deterrence to other criminals in the immediate area enhancing general safety.
Speed cameras on the other hand, only pick up speeders, don't accurately identify the driver, don't deter the driver from further speeding, and after a while provide minimal real measurable impact on road safety.
The one and only thing that speed cameras do well is generate revenue.
I don't mind red light cameras so much, going through a red is stupid and dangerous, and the proper behaviour when you see an amber light is to slow down to stop, you're only supposed to go through if you can't stop safely. If there are lots of rear collision accidents because people aren't running ambers then either people can't estimate the distance to stop safely, or the impatient idiots behind them are tailgating, not paying attention, and/or speeding.