And why do we need to send anyone to Mars to develop those things. If in fact there is a need for such things(and I'm not disagreeing with you on this) then we can develop them here.
I'm all for space exploration, but a manned mission to Mars would be astronomically expensive and provide little to no benefit. By all means work out the technology to make it work, as that will probably ave practical value, but actually sending them, especially if we can't keep them there for very long, is really rather pointless.
That said, expensive exploration, without the means to capitalize on it, when the economy is in trouble and we're trying to cut our energy use probably doesn't have a whole lot.
Nothing wrong with sending more landers, probes, etc to mars, the moon, wherever else we can get em. It's expensive, but it's potentially valuable. Sending a person somewhere just to say you've sent them somewhere is really rather silly.
Acid 3 is not a web-standards test because the "standards"(html 5, css 3) that it tests are not yet standard.
If Microsoft sits on IE and doesn't continue to upgrade it then IE 8 failing ACID 3 is a problem, but as to the best of my knowledge neither of the proposed specifications has been ratified yet and very little of it is actually going to make it into web pages in the next year or so it's not that big a deal.
Passing ACID 2 is a big deal, passing ACID 3 is only a big deal if IE 9 doesn't do it.
Opera and webkit pass ACID 3, but that's because they've focused specifically on doing so. Personally I think that Apple would have been better off focusing on making safari not crap than trying to get webkit to pass ACID 3, and Chrome isn't much better. Opera is a different situation, but it's got its own problems and is really focused on a different market.
I'm a web developer. I want IE to support the current web standards correctly, and IE 8 appears to do that from what I've seen. I want to see IE 9 follow on soon after and I'd like to see that pass ACID 3. I really don't give a rats if IE 8 does because I don't need it to right now.
It may seem to be splitting hairs to you, but renting server space(and generally reducing the overall traffic on the internet at the same time) is not the same thing as changing packet priority, and does not violate net neutrality.
Net Neutrality isn't about ensuring that everyone's packets get there at the same speed(that's not even physically possible unless every ISP mirrors the entire internet locally), it's about ensuring that all packets are treated the same. Buying rack space will increase the response time for google services, but not at the expense of other services, which is the whole point.
How are you saying that Vista isn't worth using, but that I'm wrong saying you shouldn't put Vista on a 4 year old box because it's not worth the money.
You can buy a new PC with Vista(4 years is a pretty long lifespan for consumer electronics these days in any event), but that's about a new PC, not about Vista.
Unless you are independently wealthy(in which case you are not working) then your source of money will always place some requirement on you that would not be there for pure play. That requirement is what makes it work and it's never fun.
You can have fun at work, and you can produce great and wonderful things while playing, but work != play.
The Australian figures are vastly distorted by the nature of the country.
Urban Australia(where better than half the population lives) has very high broad band speeds(I get 24 Mbps for about $50 a month, true it's capped, but so is most of the world, and I live in one of the smallest major cities in the country in a place which is a 5 hour plane ride from anywhere of any substance.), most people in the major cities can get at least 12 Mbps.
The problem for Australia is that its non urban areas are very very very non urban(think of a country the size of the continental US with 20 million people and 12.5 of them live in 5 major cities. The rest of the place is very sparsely populated and really difficult to provide broad band of any kind to.
Taking into account the demographics of the US(pretty much the entire population lives in areas big enough to provide ROI for broadband infrastructure, its broadband availability is abysmal.
Yeah, and if you're actually the IT guy, and you upgraded your company to a new OS(or a new anything) without testing the hell out of it, then you suck.
Yes, but this isn't about whether you should upgrade your 4 year old dell to use Vista(you shouldn't, it's not worth the cash).
It's about whether you should pay $150 to downgrade your brand new PC(which realistically is going to be as powerful as the one in question) to XP. The Intel "Vista Ready" debacle has cost that OS a lot, but those PCs are all gone now. Pretty well everything you can currently buy has more than enough juice for Vista.
A whole bunch of older programs(and for that matter a whole bunch of newer programs) particularly games, do not run well under 64 bit, that doesn't change between Vista, XP, or Server 2008.
32 bit Vista will run nearly anything I've thrown at it, it's got the same compatibility modes as XP plus some extras.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, Vista is exactly like XP was when it first came out. It's not worth shelling out to buy a copy to upgrade your current PC unless you have a really good reason to(or are curious like I was), but it is an improvement and if you're buying a new PC that comes with a windows license anyway there is no reason(unless you really need some specific piece of software which does not work with Vista) to pay to downgrade either, and there is absolutely no reason to pay extra money(for business which isn't designed for home use, or ultimate which is quite nice but more expensive and then for the downgrade license) to avoid it.
Vista is the next Microsoft OS, it's a little bit better than the old Microsoft OS, not enough to rush out and grab it, but enough that it's fine if you end up with it. Nearly all the hardware incompatibilities are gone(and most of those were either creative thinking they can get their own way or printer manufacturers simply refusing to upgrade the drivers for their low end stuff), the copy bug wasn't a bug in the first place(or more precisely it was a bug in XP not a bug in Vista), it's not, for the most part, software incompatible(unless you're trying to run software that won't work in 64 bit in a 64 bit environment which isn't vista anyway).
Howard was a tool, especially towards the end. He'd have sold his own mother for a vote, took 8 years of good financial governance and flushed it down the toilet by throwing money at any marginal seat he could find.
His government(along with every labor state government) also spectacularly failed to take advantage of the boom to do anything even remotely useful.
He needed to go.
True, Nanna Rudd has turned out to be a bit useless, spending most of his time trying to go after people's vices(drinking, porn, etc) and a lot less time going after real improvements, but Howard was just as bad.
You're also a little bit confused as to which of his policies are stupid and which ones are not. The laptops thing isn't a terribly bad idea, kids do need to know how to use computers, and laptops aren't all that expensive really. If you want to criticize Rudd's education policy I'd start with his continuation of the farce that is school funding in this country where public schools end up shockingly underfunded and wealthy private schools get more than their fair share.
The Christmas presents bonus isn't all that bad either. There are sound economic rationales for doing what they're doing. I don't like it much more than you do, but giving a grand to folks who will spend it will help prime the economy and maybe keep the retail sector going for a few more months saving everyone's necks. The fact that it does a little vote buying for labor is just a side perk for the government.
This current government has made a lot of mistakes, enough that I'm considering voting for Turnbull in the next election, but the last 3 years of the Howard government weren't any better, and at least so far Rudd hasn't sold us out to the bloody one nation nutters as well as the bible thumpers.
Well some of it is tarrifs, and some of it is substantially higher retail wages, but most of it is just the fact that they can.
Distributors(particularly American distributors) can sell stuff to Australia for a higher price than they would at home. Local stores can sell stuff for a higher price because people will pay it.
The free market(if it were even really free) doesn't really tend towards the lowest possible price(though it does tend towards the company with the lowest marginal cost) because at the end of that road is exactly the same situation everyone is in now, but with lower profits.
Mind you with competition from the US, things are getting a bit cheaper, but even iTunes costs more here than it does over there, and always has, even when the currency rates were near parity.
Yes, the stuff is made in Taiwan or somewhere else in South East Asia, and yes, that's closer to Australia, than it is to most of the US, but we still pay more for everything.
It's just the way things are. Just about everything is more expensive here.
Hopefully not, as most people will tell you, learning yourself doesn't always teach you the "right" way to do things, and no amount of ridiculous starts ups and bad debt is going to take the place of having someone with experience share that experience.
The general and fundamental problem that both Microsoft and Google are having(along with everyone else) is that no one wants to be the person who has to train the newbies.
No one, not even CS folks who have generally been spending at least some of their free time practicing what they're learning, comes out of uni knowing much of anything about anything. You have to train your graduates, and you have to accept that that's going to cost you some money you probably won't immediately recoup. They might even bugger off somewhere else when they've finally been trained up, and you'll have spent all that money for nothing.
Someone still has to do it, and no one wants to. Look around at job ads in any field that doesn't have a massive shortage of staff, see how many positions you'll see for "graduate ______" or "junior ________" or "assistant _________". Better training in high school and University will help, but expecting 22 year olds to be great at anything is probably a bit unrealistic and both Google and Microsoft might find it worth their while to expend some of their vast pool of knowledge in doing some of that training themselves.
Where I went to university, at least in some of the earlier classes, proper commenting was half the grade. You could almost pass if your program compiled and was commented using the right formatting even if it didn't actually do any of the things it was supposed to.
Conversely if your program was perfect and brilliant but contained no comments you could fail.
That's not quite the same as proper coding style, but it was covered.
We also did interesting projects like hacking ns to implement a tcp congestion control algorithm from a white paper, and building an, admitedly fully simulated, interrupt system in my OS class.
One of my friends at a different university had to actually modify the linux kernel as part of his OS course. Not all CS programs are crap, just some of them, same as everything else.
We did team projects too, and had to plan and work together, build different parts of the system based on a shared interface and put it together.
I'm mostly a web guy now, and like most people I sometimes get a little sloppy when deadlines are tight, but that doesn't mean I didn't learn it, in Java, C, C++, and MIPS/RISC assembler.
Yes, that's true, however on the grounds that both Bart and Lisa Simpson are in actual fact cartoon characters, voiced by middle aged women, that's where this is silly.
I'll buy the don't create a market for child abuse argument for the real photos(at least the ones with sexual content), but as for this case, half the internet has seen this shit, they're not real kids, they're not even people.
No one was harmed here, and if he is a pedo I'd rather he looks at the simpsons than at real kids.
Being poor and/or sick is not a defense against a criminal charge, copyright infringement is not a criminal charge(at least not at the moment) and if it were the RIAA would never be able to achieve the level of proof required for one so this would not be an issue.
It is not unheard of for the state not to prosecute(or at least not imprison) people who are likely to die before the punishment can be carried out, you also cannot execute someone who is sick(which is an odd one). Not attempting to sue someone who has no money to pay you and in addition is sick, is a perfectly valid moral choice. The only result from such a case is to punish someone beyond their means to provide restitution.
Yes, but the entire point of the legalization argument has nothing to do with that.
Drugs are bad. They're bad to varying degrees, and for varying reasons, and are worse for some people than for others, but no one here is arguing that drugs are good for everyone or that there isn't a cost with legalising them.
What people are arguing is that making drugs illegal has done very little to stop people from taking them. Pretty much everyone knows someone they could get drugs from if they were so inclined and realistically you're probably not going to get caught, so essentially we're already paying that cost.
In addition we're paying the cost of jailing drug users(both in terms of their actual incarceration and in terms of lost productivity since they probably won't be rehabilitated in there. We're also paying the cost inherent in the fact that when legal entities can't sell something which people want then illegal ones will. Yes, in reality if we legalised all drugs tomorrow, the folks selling them would be the same folks selling them now, but the drugs would be worth a whole lot less, and there would be alternatives.
If prohibition worked, it would be a good thing, but it doesn't. The only way in which prohibition works is when the vast majority of people agree with it to the point that they will assist in its enforcement. If 99.99% of people believed drugs/alcohol were bad to the point where they'd rat out their friends, then we wouldn't need prohibition because peer pressure would take care of drugs for us.
I don't do drugs, I don't smoke, and I very rarely consume alcohol and then nearly always in moderation. I don't really think it's a good thing for people to be drinking heavily, doing drugs, or smoking. I'm not however stupid enough to not see the writing on the wall.
That might be true, but isn't google "paying" for that bandwidth by providing content? I mean it's not like I go to google because google forced me to or anything(excluding the firefox homepage), I went there because they provide me with something of value, which is why I have internet access in the firat place isn't it?
Isn't that why we pay for ISP's to get content and information as opposed to because we like paying money to random corporations?
Well you can probably manage to avoid torrent throttling.
Bandwidth caps are however, probably a sure thing. Most of the rest of the world does it, and with all the new services and the changes to internet usage going on, it's likely a matter of time for the US.
Don't worry it's not so bad, I live in Australia now, I'm capped, but I get a 24 Mbit download for about $50 a month(with admitedly a 10 gig/month peak download cap) you can get substantially more for not a whole lot of money(100 gig caps are in the region of slightly more than $100 a month). Personally I'd rather have a cap and get what I pay for than have no cap and an ISP who can't afford to give me what I wanted.
Caps(at least proper ones which are explicit in the contract) are a good thing really, they allow ISPs to actually make a profit while avoiding all this throttling garbage.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless the car in front is moving backwards :).
I'm all for space exploration, but a manned mission to Mars would be astronomically expensive and provide little to no benefit. By all means work out the technology to make it work, as that will probably ave practical value, but actually sending them, especially if we can't keep them there for very long, is really rather pointless.
Exploration most certainly does have value.
That said, expensive exploration, without the means to capitalize on it, when the economy is in trouble and we're trying to cut our energy use probably doesn't have a whole lot.
Nothing wrong with sending more landers, probes, etc to mars, the moon, wherever else we can get em. It's expensive, but it's potentially valuable. Sending a person somewhere just to say you've sent them somewhere is really rather silly.
No, it doesn't.
But IE 8 does. So it's a good thing they're getting ready to release it.
Acid 3 is not a web-standards test because the "standards"(html 5, css 3) that it tests are not yet standard.
If Microsoft sits on IE and doesn't continue to upgrade it then IE 8 failing ACID 3 is a problem, but as to the best of my knowledge neither of the proposed specifications has been ratified yet and very little of it is actually going to make it into web pages in the next year or so it's not that big a deal.
Passing ACID 2 is a big deal, passing ACID 3 is only a big deal if IE 9 doesn't do it.
Opera and webkit pass ACID 3, but that's because they've focused specifically on doing so. Personally I think that Apple would have been better off focusing on making safari not crap than trying to get webkit to pass ACID 3, and Chrome isn't much better. Opera is a different situation, but it's got its own problems and is really focused on a different market.
I'm a web developer. I want IE to support the current web standards correctly, and IE 8 appears to do that from what I've seen. I want to see IE 9 follow on soon after and I'd like to see that pass ACID 3. I really don't give a rats if IE 8 does because I don't need it to right now.
It's not even remotely the same thing.
It may seem to be splitting hairs to you, but renting server space(and generally reducing the overall traffic on the internet at the same time) is not the same thing as changing packet priority, and does not violate net neutrality.
Net Neutrality isn't about ensuring that everyone's packets get there at the same speed(that's not even physically possible unless every ISP mirrors the entire internet locally), it's about ensuring that all packets are treated the same. Buying rack space will increase the response time for google services, but not at the expense of other services, which is the whole point.
You can buy a new PC with Vista(4 years is a pretty long lifespan for consumer electronics these days in any event), but that's about a new PC, not about Vista.
Unless you are independently wealthy(in which case you are not working) then your source of money will always place some requirement on you that would not be there for pure play. That requirement is what makes it work and it's never fun.
You can have fun at work, and you can produce great and wonderful things while playing, but work != play.
The Australian figures are vastly distorted by the nature of the country.
Urban Australia(where better than half the population lives) has very high broad band speeds(I get 24 Mbps for about $50 a month, true it's capped, but so is most of the world, and I live in one of the smallest major cities in the country in a place which is a 5 hour plane ride from anywhere of any substance.), most people in the major cities can get at least 12 Mbps.
The problem for Australia is that its non urban areas are very very very non urban(think of a country the size of the continental US with 20 million people and 12.5 of them live in 5 major cities. The rest of the place is very sparsely populated and really difficult to provide broad band of any kind to.
Taking into account the demographics of the US(pretty much the entire population lives in areas big enough to provide ROI for broadband infrastructure, its broadband availability is abysmal.
Yeah, and if you're actually the IT guy, and you upgraded your company to a new OS(or a new anything) without testing the hell out of it, then you suck.
OEM versions of software are cheaper because support is provided by the OEM, instead of Microsoft(at least direct consumer support).
It doesn't cost Dell any more to stuff a different image on, but it does cost them more to support Windows XP, which is why they charge you.
It's about whether you should pay $150 to downgrade your brand new PC(which realistically is going to be as powerful as the one in question) to XP. The Intel "Vista Ready" debacle has cost that OS a lot, but those PCs are all gone now. Pretty well everything you can currently buy has more than enough juice for Vista.
A whole bunch of older programs(and for that matter a whole bunch of newer programs) particularly games, do not run well under 64 bit, that doesn't change between Vista, XP, or Server 2008.
32 bit Vista will run nearly anything I've thrown at it, it's got the same compatibility modes as XP plus some extras.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, Vista is exactly like XP was when it first came out. It's not worth shelling out to buy a copy to upgrade your current PC unless you have a really good reason to(or are curious like I was), but it is an improvement and if you're buying a new PC that comes with a windows license anyway there is no reason(unless you really need some specific piece of software which does not work with Vista) to pay to downgrade either, and there is absolutely no reason to pay extra money(for business which isn't designed for home use, or ultimate which is quite nice but more expensive and then for the downgrade license) to avoid it.
Vista is the next Microsoft OS, it's a little bit better than the old Microsoft OS, not enough to rush out and grab it, but enough that it's fine if you end up with it. Nearly all the hardware incompatibilities are gone(and most of those were either creative thinking they can get their own way or printer manufacturers simply refusing to upgrade the drivers for their low end stuff), the copy bug wasn't a bug in the first place(or more precisely it was a bug in XP not a bug in Vista), it's not, for the most part, software incompatible(unless you're trying to run software that won't work in 64 bit in a 64 bit environment which isn't vista anyway).
Howard was a tool, especially towards the end. He'd have sold his own mother for a vote, took 8 years of good financial governance and flushed it down the toilet by throwing money at any marginal seat he could find.
His government(along with every labor state government) also spectacularly failed to take advantage of the boom to do anything even remotely useful.
He needed to go.
True, Nanna Rudd has turned out to be a bit useless, spending most of his time trying to go after people's vices(drinking, porn, etc) and a lot less time going after real improvements, but Howard was just as bad.
You're also a little bit confused as to which of his policies are stupid and which ones are not. The laptops thing isn't a terribly bad idea, kids do need to know how to use computers, and laptops aren't all that expensive really. If you want to criticize Rudd's education policy I'd start with his continuation of the farce that is school funding in this country where public schools end up shockingly underfunded and wealthy private schools get more than their fair share.
The Christmas presents bonus isn't all that bad either. There are sound economic rationales for doing what they're doing. I don't like it much more than you do, but giving a grand to folks who will spend it will help prime the economy and maybe keep the retail sector going for a few more months saving everyone's necks. The fact that it does a little vote buying for labor is just a side perk for the government.
This current government has made a lot of mistakes, enough that I'm considering voting for Turnbull in the next election, but the last 3 years of the Howard government weren't any better, and at least so far Rudd hasn't sold us out to the bloody one nation nutters as well as the bible thumpers.
Well some of it is tarrifs, and some of it is substantially higher retail wages, but most of it is just the fact that they can.
Distributors(particularly American distributors) can sell stuff to Australia for a higher price than they would at home. Local stores can sell stuff for a higher price because people will pay it.
The free market(if it were even really free) doesn't really tend towards the lowest possible price(though it does tend towards the company with the lowest marginal cost) because at the end of that road is exactly the same situation everyone is in now, but with lower profits.
Mind you with competition from the US, things are getting a bit cheaper, but even iTunes costs more here than it does over there, and always has, even when the currency rates were near parity.
Unfortunately it doesn't work that way.
Yes, the stuff is made in Taiwan or somewhere else in South East Asia, and yes, that's closer to Australia, than it is to most of the US, but we still pay more for everything.
It's just the way things are. Just about everything is more expensive here.
Hopefully not, as most people will tell you, learning yourself doesn't always teach you the "right" way to do things, and no amount of ridiculous starts ups and bad debt is going to take the place of having someone with experience share that experience.
Actually, it was the UW-Madison CS course.
The general and fundamental problem that both Microsoft and Google are having(along with everyone else) is that no one wants to be the person who has to train the newbies.
No one, not even CS folks who have generally been spending at least some of their free time practicing what they're learning, comes out of uni knowing much of anything about anything. You have to train your graduates, and you have to accept that that's going to cost you some money you probably won't immediately recoup. They might even bugger off somewhere else when they've finally been trained up, and you'll have spent all that money for nothing.
Someone still has to do it, and no one wants to. Look around at job ads in any field that doesn't have a massive shortage of staff, see how many positions you'll see for "graduate ______" or "junior ________" or "assistant _________". Better training in high school and University will help, but expecting 22 year olds to be great at anything is probably a bit unrealistic and both Google and Microsoft might find it worth their while to expend some of their vast pool of knowledge in doing some of that training themselves.
Where I went to university, at least in some of the earlier classes, proper commenting was half the grade. You could almost pass if your program compiled and was commented using the right formatting even if it didn't actually do any of the things it was supposed to.
Conversely if your program was perfect and brilliant but contained no comments you could fail.
That's not quite the same as proper coding style, but it was covered.
We also did interesting projects like hacking ns to implement a tcp congestion control algorithm from a white paper, and building an, admitedly fully simulated, interrupt system in my OS class.
One of my friends at a different university had to actually modify the linux kernel as part of his OS course. Not all CS programs are crap, just some of them, same as everything else.
We did team projects too, and had to plan and work together, build different parts of the system based on a shared interface and put it together.
I'm mostly a web guy now, and like most people I sometimes get a little sloppy when deadlines are tight, but that doesn't mean I didn't learn it, in Java, C, C++, and MIPS/RISC assembler.
Yes, that's true, however on the grounds that both Bart and Lisa Simpson are in actual fact cartoon characters, voiced by middle aged women, that's where this is silly.
I'll buy the don't create a market for child abuse argument for the real photos(at least the ones with sexual content), but as for this case, half the internet has seen this shit, they're not real kids, they're not even people.
No one was harmed here, and if he is a pedo I'd rather he looks at the simpsons than at real kids.
Murder != Copyright infringement.
Being poor and/or sick is not a defense against a criminal charge, copyright infringement is not a criminal charge(at least not at the moment) and if it were the RIAA would never be able to achieve the level of proof required for one so this would not be an issue.
It is not unheard of for the state not to prosecute(or at least not imprison) people who are likely to die before the punishment can be carried out, you also cannot execute someone who is sick(which is an odd one). Not attempting to sue someone who has no money to pay you and in addition is sick, is a perfectly valid moral choice. The only result from such a case is to punish someone beyond their means to provide restitution.
Yes, but the entire point of the legalization argument has nothing to do with that.
Drugs are bad. They're bad to varying degrees, and for varying reasons, and are worse for some people than for others, but no one here is arguing that drugs are good for everyone or that there isn't a cost with legalising them.
What people are arguing is that making drugs illegal has done very little to stop people from taking them. Pretty much everyone knows someone they could get drugs from if they were so inclined and realistically you're probably not going to get caught, so essentially we're already paying that cost.
In addition we're paying the cost of jailing drug users(both in terms of their actual incarceration and in terms of lost productivity since they probably won't be rehabilitated in there. We're also paying the cost inherent in the fact that when legal entities can't sell something which people want then illegal ones will. Yes, in reality if we legalised all drugs tomorrow, the folks selling them would be the same folks selling them now, but the drugs would be worth a whole lot less, and there would be alternatives.
If prohibition worked, it would be a good thing, but it doesn't. The only way in which prohibition works is when the vast majority of people agree with it to the point that they will assist in its enforcement. If 99.99% of people believed drugs/alcohol were bad to the point where they'd rat out their friends, then we wouldn't need prohibition because peer pressure would take care of drugs for us.
I don't do drugs, I don't smoke, and I very rarely consume alcohol and then nearly always in moderation. I don't really think it's a good thing for people to be drinking heavily, doing drugs, or smoking. I'm not however stupid enough to not see the writing on the wall.
That might be true, but isn't google "paying" for that bandwidth by providing content? I mean it's not like I go to google because google forced me to or anything(excluding the firefox homepage), I went there because they provide me with something of value, which is why I have internet access in the firat place isn't it?
Isn't that why we pay for ISP's to get content and information as opposed to because we like paying money to random corporations?
Well you can probably manage to avoid torrent throttling.
Bandwidth caps are however, probably a sure thing. Most of the rest of the world does it, and with all the new services and the changes to internet usage going on, it's likely a matter of time for the US.
Don't worry it's not so bad, I live in Australia now, I'm capped, but I get a 24 Mbit download for about $50 a month(with admitedly a 10 gig/month peak download cap) you can get substantially more for not a whole lot of money(100 gig caps are in the region of slightly more than $100 a month). Personally I'd rather have a cap and get what I pay for than have no cap and an ISP who can't afford to give me what I wanted.
Caps(at least proper ones which are explicit in the contract) are a good thing really, they allow ISPs to actually make a profit while avoiding all this throttling garbage.