since the car can go off to find a space by itself, or simply drive around the block a few times.
Imagine the potential for gridlock if large numbers of vehicles are driving in holding patterns either looking for parking or attempting to avoid parking charges.
So just don't buy it if you value security or privacy
Or if you are part of the Slashdot audience just wait until the wearable device is being dumped on eBay by people upgrading to the latest shiny thing. Then if someone has written a library for the device you want that provides access to the data stream buy it at a significant discount. You can then allow it to only pair with a secure device at home, avoiding the manufacurers crapware and keeping your data private.
I think one of the reasons is that it is possible for fire fighters to manually move the winding drum in the event of a power failure to move the lift car to the nearest floor. Without a drum and cable any rescue attempt during a power loss would require lifting equipment and would involve climbing into the lift shaft to reach the car with all the related falling from height issues.
As someone who did not study math in higher education but now wants to learn more it is quite difficult to find out which math text books have the best content. Would someone please suggest some books and authors of great texts I can then search for?
I would ideally like to build up a bookshelf of great maths texts to go alongside the computing books I already have.
If the entity serving the content doesn't like what the user is doing, they're free to block the user.
If the entity serving the content does not refrain from allowing advertisers to annoy users then they are unlikely to have either users or revenue. I think that the key idea behind the browser extension I linked to in TFA is an interesting one. It could be used as a kind of RBL blocking the most unpopular advertising practices. In time advertisers might find this an important type of feedback when AB testing.
So as we, the Internet users, do everything in our power to slowly but surely starve you out and make your business model a thing of the past just remember, it didn't have to be this way
There still is another way, there always has been. If browser extensions such as the one I linked to take off perhaps it will occur to advertisers that their reputation is important. Despite running AdBlock I still do see ads, just not the attention seeking disruptive ones. I really do want the sites I like to make money. Real time black hole lists forced those using email to advertise to think again. I expect this browser extension idea will make online advertisers rethink their approach. Eventually. In the mean time break out the popcorn for the wailing and gnashing of teeth.
While I am not the developer of the extension in TFA I did find the idea interesting. Even if this implementation fails it seems likely to me that this idea is a logical escalation in the online ad arms race. If the idea gains traction it will be just a matter of time before a decent implementation emaerges. The reaction from Google should be interesting if a Chrome extension appears.
The basic idea here is that the http protocol doesn't mandate what to do with the information stored on a given URL. That is left to the user to decide.
The thing about this point is that advertisers seem not to have understood this basic concept yet. I have no idea of the quality of the browser extension I linked to in TFA. However the idea that an extension could be used to automate the deliberate poisoning of advertisers collected user data seems to be a powerful one. In my view this is a logical next step in the user vs advertiser arms race.
I'm entirely happy that drugs such as Flunitrazepam (AKA Rohypnol, roofies etc.) with limited use outside of hospital inpatients are restricted to prescription only. While it is reasonable to desire freedom to put what you want into your own body it is also reasonable for society to restrict some classes of drug that are often used to assist with date rape and other crimes. This is not statism and is quite different from the control of recreational drugs. Regardless of where the recreational drug debate ends up there will always be some restricted drugs.
So we have a number of issues that caused the problem. So we are working on improving them. Again, this is not some kind of disaster
I disagree this has all the makings of a PR disaster. As Gnome has of late not been winning any friends with it's treatment of end users and developers a cashflow issue caused by mismanagement is the last thing the foundation needs. Especially as this issue could easily be reported as wilful misuse of foundation funds by a misandrist board director regardless of the truth of the situation.
I can't give a complete explanation at the moment as what I tell the public should go through the board
I would advise explaining exactly what happend fully and frankly as soon as possible to prevent the public reaching the wrong conclusion
Yes, but we are only managing the program. We are not spending money on it.
Then why have you hit a cashflow crisis because of it?
The current situation is actually a borrowing situation because the OPW program was not getting payments consistency. Since GNOME foundation is running the program on behalf of OPW, they were on the hook to making sure the interns get paid.
Then I go back to my prior point "The GNOME Foundation will work to further the goal of the GNOME project: to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is completely free software" Funding gender outreach activities has nothing to do with creating, supporting or promoting free software. If your outreach activities cause a cashflow crisis for your main reason for existence then perhaps they are ill advised. Perhaps the Gnome organisation should simplifiy it's activities to concentrate on the software which is it's sole reason for existing.
But it's not normal tha GNOME is paying OPW interns
Yet it is doing just that which seems to have caused the funding issue
Being part of OPW is just as good as being part of GSOC
Which ignores that GSOC that is funded by a rich multinational company and not a software foundation that sought donations for the stated aim of developing software and not outreach programs.
Yes there is. Quoting the Gnome foundation charter from the wiki "The GNOME Foundation will work to further the goal of the GNOME project: to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is completely free software" Funding gender outreach activities has nothing to do with creating, supporting or promoting free software. Despite having heavily used Gnome software in the past I would not now be willing to provide funds to an organisation which spends at least a quarter of its revenue on activites which are irrelevant to its stated aims.
But not GNOME. Sorry guys. I guess this is what happens when you alienate your users and let "user experience"-crap-level developers infiltrate your project.
I think this is what happens when a project lets directors with an axe to grind onto the board. While I hated Gnome three throughout the couple of months I used it I would like to see the project continue. I currently use E17 and will probably compile a newer Enlightenment build sometime in my copious spare time. I abandoned Enlightenment a decade ago but it seems to be going through a resurgence at the moment. Gnome might be passing through a rough patch right now but it may be great again at some point in the future.
Like the parent poster I could easily donate these days but I won't if the project wastes money on an activist directors pet project. If I am going to donate money to a free software project I would much prefer to see the money spent on software development, software support, and software promotion.
I wonder how you come to this conclusion. We live in a world where users don't want to be interrupted with mindless things like updating software. Combined with Microsoft's militant approach to harassing users if their computers aren't configured to auto update, and the general consensus that many user facing apps now auto update and the trend is moving towards doing it silently I don't see this affecting Chrome's user base one bit.
If this isn't rapidly nipped in the bud Chrome will soon be known as a hotbed of Malware, credit card fraud, bank fraud and porn ads to general users. Once it has this reputation it will be very difficult to get users to continue using it.
And compared to CFLs, LEDs are superior - instant on (80% brightness instantly, 100% within a few seconds), no mercury, practically solid state (the only hard part is a switching power supply).
I am part way through renovating a property in the UK and have used LED fittings thoughout. The switching power supply does seem to be the difficult part for manufacurers of LED lighting in the UK, and is also the main difference between the expensive fittings and the cheap ones. Most of the lights available have broadly similar LED light units consiting of one or more high power LEDs attached to a large heat sink. Power supply quality varies wildly with some manufacturers using what looks like the smallest cheapest PSU they could find on AliExpress. With more and more companies introducing products into the market I would recommend going to actually look at a light in a shop making sure you take one out of the box to see if a decent PSU is attached before buying anything. PSU failure will probably be the largest cause of LED light mortality.
Yeah, actually, just google for "battery powered printer". Amazon sells them. But I strongly suggest you fix your infrastructure problem (reliable power) before you increase your reliance on it as you are proposing...
I have had to support battery powered printers on building sites. They all suck in this environment as dusty environments damage the print engine mechanism and printheads. Most models of battery powered printer are inkjets designed to be lightweight and portable. The print engine is generally not designed for a high lifetime page count and is unlikely to last in OP's situation even without dust. Consumables will be expensive for this type of printer and availabilty is unlikely to be long term as manufacturers do not expect these devices to last. These printers are also extremely sensitive to paper condition and quality. In my experience paper cockled by humidity will not feed. Dusty environments cause feed rollers to fail sooner than usual. Feed roller spares for short lifespan printers are often difficult to obtain even from the specialist suppliers I have access to.
Except they didn't work for free: they worked for the salvage value. I can't really see how the low value of the contract proves fault.
I can. I have quoted for this type of work in the UK before. I went to have a look at the kit first before quoting and did so knowing that the job was more complicated that it initially appeared. The people wanting to dispose of the equipment wanted to dispose of it through an auction house specialising in selling unwanted corporate assets in bulk. They wanted to get rid of it quickly and as they did not understand what needed to be done thought the job would be fast and cheap.
I found racks of working servers, disk arrays, standard PC's as well as lots of dead equipment, individual drives and older UNIX equipment. Most of the kit could be wiped with standard utilities, but the UNIX equipment and dismantled kit would take much more time so my quote allowed for this. The company chose to go with a very cheap data deletion specialist who used a minimum wage employee armed with a PC wiping CD. Of course this would not boot anything not running an Intel processor so they simply didn't bother with that kit. It didn't have drivers for disk arrays so these were missed too. As the amount paid didn't allow sufficient time to connect up to all of the drives not in a PC they didn't bother with these either. All of the kit went straight to auction from there.
I read the report from the company wiping the machines which stated that their deletion routines were successful in the summary then went on to explain in highly technical language what had not been done and why in the rest of the report. Managers would be highly unlikely to understand what had not been done from this, but would probably assume that the kit was sent out in a clean state. The contractor had actually stated what had been wiped and what had been missed, just not in an understandable format and so were probably not liable for a data breach. I pointed out that they had not wiped any of the UNIX kit and had sent a complete readable set of financial data to be sold at auction. I have yet to hear back from them.
Managers simply don't understand this area and are easy prey for the unscrupulous. They will usually choose the cheapest quote.
Why bother defending the launch ship? If you buy a container ship near the end of it's life and fill it with ISO containers with a couple of missile containers on top you can easily get close enough to a target without looking suspicious. Once you have fired all the missiles at a target it doesn't matter if someone sinks the expendable container ship. If you can afford to buy a modern missile system the cost of an old expendable container ship should not pose any real problems. You even get plausible deniability as a bonus.
Why? Who are you realistically going to strike with it.
This is an interesting question.
It seems unlikely that the US is going to face an opponent of equivalent size and military capability in the foreseeable future. States such as Iraq that fight the US in a conventional war will be rapidly beaten by the US military, however the US faces the possibility of war with non state enemies in the near to medium future. The failure to defeat Al Qaeda can be seen as an example of this. If future foes are not affiliated with any one obvious state just what is the US going to fire missiles at? If future enemies are operating from several countries at once is the US going to start wars with all of them?
Combatants from the last century were easy to spot because they mainly dressed in combat fatigues and used equipment and vehicles that were obviously military in nature. Now the US faces asymmetric warfare techniques such as IED's, car bombs, suicidal aircraft hijacks and crude biological attacks their military seems more and more impotent. The development of missile systems such as the new Club K container missile system is going to make it much harder for the US to find a target for these new fast missile systems as it will not be obvious who launched them.
The problem comes when your colonists refuse to pay your outrageous taxes which are paying for all those wars, dump your tea into a harbour and declare independence. Your colonists are likely to be at a similar military level to you and difficult to defeat.
Yeah, when I was a kid, flying was an adventure and a lot of fun. Now it's a PITA. It's been several years since I seriously considered a vacation that involved flying. I'd rather drive. If I have to fly to do it, odds are I'm not going to do it.
I feel the same way and I live in Europe. Driving from London to the French Alps, crossing the English channel on a ferry takes about the same time as flying there does. This is despite the actual flying bit lasting only an hour or so. The airline industry and governments have taken a fast and efficient form of travel and comprehensively fucked it over the years with security theatre and air industry processes. The cost is roughly equivalent to driving there even with European road fuel tax!
Driving has the advantage that you can choose to go stop where you like and travel via places you simply would not go when travelling by air. From my perspective driving offers lots more benefits for European journeys than air travel.
How long will it before the airlines worldwide are lobbying for security restrictions to be removed as it affects business?
In the end, it is not just merely displaying the ads that makes money, but the complex dynamics of the market, its interaction with potential customers, and the ability to influence their behaviour.
Which makes the advertisers insistence on displaying blinking noisy crap on a technical site whose audience has a hair trigger on Adblock all the more bizarre. While the article is mainly Ars whining, most commentary on this issue misses the point that both the advertisers and Ars would make more money if the advertisers were a little more intelligent about what type of ad they display to specific audiences. I keep hearing about the death of online advertising, but as Google has shown the market can be very healthy indeed if one pays attention to the audience.
Perhaps the next few successful ad startups will be those that can place ads while resisting the natural proclivities of the ad agency and client to gravitate towards garish and overbearing. I can only hope so.
I've been thinking a lot recently about whether predatory / monopolistic behaviour is *ever* a good idea.
Monopolistic behavior is a great idea if you are the CEO of a public company. All your average CEO has to do is really push short term results hard to keep quarterly earnings obsessed Wall Street happy. The CEO usually has an exit strategy of quit with a large golden handshake plus large pension, then rinse and repeat until retirement in the Bahamas. If the company goes tits up because of this strategy who cares. Wall street will have sold the shares at a high price to suckers long before the share price collapses and the CEO will be working elsewhere with a track record of large profits during his/her past employment. Employees and customers are just collateral damage.
None of those articles talk seriously about the Labour party splitting in two, only some MPs defecting. I doubt much will come of it though, as defecting to the Lib Dems is basically ensuring you have no place in the next or any government in the foreseeable future. Ashdown's speculation is just that.
You are correct that none of the articles provide any evidence that Labour will fragment into separate factions, I simply wanted to point out that the suggestion originated in the broadsheets. It is possible that some Labour MP's will defect to the Liberals if Labour lose at the next general election. Labour defections have happened in the past.
This is classic newspaper tactics. The Mail is by far the worst for it. Every edition has reader's letters starting "If the government does such-and-such..." when the government has no plans to do such-and-such, and has often never even hinted at even considering such-and-such.
Indeed. With Gordon Brown appearing to be both unpopular and ineffective this is behaviour that all the UK newspapers are indulging in, not just the Daily Mail. I will concede that the Mail is one of the worst at this and should not be considered a quality news source.
More hyperbole. Before the credit crunch spending was fairly low compared to other nations, and now it's being done to lessen the effects of the recession by stimulating the economy with cash injections (e.g. car scappage scheme) and government projects (building contracts etc). Of course a lot went to prop up the banks, but people talk about that as if it was a free hand-out. We own those banks now and it's hard to imagine a situation so catastrophic that we wouldn't get out investment back with interest at some point in the medium term.
Hyperbole, really?. I think I was being quite restrained. Comparing UK government spending levels to other nations is not useful. Others have different population levels, GDP and citizen expectations. What is useful is comparing spending to GDP, the good old fashioned can we afford it metric. Why not take a look at the ever amusing (and full of hyperbole) Buring our Money blog. The articles in the debt category should convey a sense of the debt disaster Labours spending has built up with far more eloquence than I have time for here. In case you were wondering where it all goes here is the handy Guardian (PDF) chart of government spending.
The government could have handled the bank bailouts considerably better. I really liked the good bank idea I read about in the FT. This idea would have left the UK with a much smaller debt problem and several profitable banks to sell off in a few years time.
If you think that's "like a drunken sailor" you clearly have no understanding of even basic economics. I'll spell it out for you: in a recession the problem is people stop spending, so work dries up and businesses find it hard to get loans or credit (and they all rely on that). The only way you can lessen the effect is to put money into the economy by spending and making sure banks still offer loans.
We are going to have to disagree here, the fastest way back to a healthy economy is to cut tax, regulation and the public sector. The government is now starting to find it difficult to open new lines of credit. We may be close to the time when there are no buyers of government debt. If this happens expect the government to have to go cap in hand to the IMF. It is unlikely that Alistair Darlings spend our way out of the recession plan is going to be an option.
Slashdot Mirror
since the car can go off to find a space by itself, or simply drive around the block a few times.
Imagine the potential for gridlock if large numbers of vehicles are driving in holding patterns either looking for parking or attempting to avoid parking charges.
Or if you are part of the Slashdot audience just wait until the wearable device is being dumped on eBay by people upgrading to the latest shiny thing. Then if someone has written a library for the device you want that provides access to the data stream buy it at a significant discount. You can then allow it to only pair with a secure device at home, avoiding the manufacurers crapware and keeping your data private.
I think one of the reasons is that it is possible for fire fighters to manually move the winding drum in the event of a power failure to move the lift car to the nearest floor. Without a drum and cable any rescue attempt during a power loss would require lifting equipment and would involve climbing into the lift shaft to reach the car with all the related falling from height issues.
As someone who did not study math in higher education but now wants to learn more it is quite difficult to find out which math text books have the best content. Would someone please suggest some books and authors of great texts I can then search for?
I would ideally like to build up a bookshelf of great maths texts to go alongside the computing books I already have.
If the entity serving the content doesn't like what the user is doing, they're free to block the user.
If the entity serving the content does not refrain from allowing advertisers to annoy users then they are unlikely to have either users or revenue. I think that the key idea behind the browser extension I linked to in TFA is an interesting one. It could be used as a kind of RBL blocking the most unpopular advertising practices. In time advertisers might find this an important type of feedback when AB testing.
So as we, the Internet users, do everything in our power to slowly but surely starve you out and make your business model a thing of the past just remember, it didn't have to be this way
There still is another way, there always has been. If browser extensions such as the one I linked to take off perhaps it will occur to advertisers that their reputation is important. Despite running AdBlock I still do see ads, just not the attention seeking disruptive ones. I really do want the sites I like to make money. Real time black hole lists forced those using email to advertise to think again. I expect this browser extension idea will make online advertisers rethink their approach. Eventually. In the mean time break out the popcorn for the wailing and gnashing of teeth.
While I am not the developer of the extension in TFA I did find the idea interesting. Even if this implementation fails it seems likely to me that this idea is a logical escalation in the online ad arms race. If the idea gains traction it will be just a matter of time before a decent implementation emaerges. The reaction from Google should be interesting if a Chrome extension appears.
Agreed.
The basic idea here is that the http protocol doesn't mandate what to do with the information stored on a given URL. That is left to the user to decide.
The thing about this point is that advertisers seem not to have understood this basic concept yet. I have no idea of the quality of the browser extension I linked to in TFA. However the idea that an extension could be used to automate the deliberate poisoning of advertisers collected user data seems to be a powerful one. In my view this is a logical next step in the user vs advertiser arms race.
I'm entirely happy that drugs such as Flunitrazepam (AKA Rohypnol, roofies etc.) with limited use outside of hospital inpatients are restricted to prescription only. While it is reasonable to desire freedom to put what you want into your own body it is also reasonable for society to restrict some classes of drug that are often used to assist with date rape and other crimes. This is not statism and is quite different from the control of recreational drugs. Regardless of where the recreational drug debate ends up there will always be some restricted drugs.
So we have a number of issues that caused the problem. So we are working on improving them. Again, this is not some kind of disaster
I disagree this has all the makings of a PR disaster. As Gnome has of late not been winning any friends with it's treatment of end users and developers a cashflow issue caused by mismanagement is the last thing the foundation needs. Especially as this issue could easily be reported as wilful misuse of foundation funds by a misandrist board director regardless of the truth of the situation.
I can't give a complete explanation at the moment as what I tell the public should go through the board
I would advise explaining exactly what happend fully and frankly as soon as possible to prevent the public reaching the wrong conclusion
Yes, but we are only managing the program. We are not spending money on it.
Then why have you hit a cashflow crisis because of it?
The current situation is actually a borrowing situation because the OPW program was not getting payments consistency. Since GNOME foundation is running the program on behalf of OPW, they were on the hook to making sure the interns get paid.
Then I go back to my prior point "The GNOME Foundation will work to further the goal of the GNOME project: to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is completely free software" Funding gender outreach activities has nothing to do with creating, supporting or promoting free software. If your outreach activities cause a cashflow crisis for your main reason for existence then perhaps they are ill advised. Perhaps the Gnome organisation should simplifiy it's activities to concentrate on the software which is it's sole reason for existing.
But it's not normal tha GNOME is paying OPW interns
Yet it is doing just that which seems to have caused the funding issue
Being part of OPW is just as good as being part of GSOC
Which ignores that GSOC that is funded by a rich multinational company and not a software foundation that sought donations for the stated aim of developing software and not outreach programs.
There is nothing wrong with our priorities.
Yes there is. Quoting the Gnome foundation charter from the wiki "The GNOME Foundation will work to further the goal of the GNOME project: to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is completely free software" Funding gender outreach activities has nothing to do with creating, supporting or promoting free software. Despite having heavily used Gnome software in the past I would not now be willing to provide funds to an organisation which spends at least a quarter of its revenue on activites which are irrelevant to its stated aims.
But not GNOME. Sorry guys. I guess this is what happens when you alienate your users and let "user experience"-crap-level developers infiltrate your project.
I think this is what happens when a project lets directors with an axe to grind onto the board. While I hated Gnome three throughout the couple of months I used it I would like to see the project continue. I currently use E17 and will probably compile a newer Enlightenment build sometime in my copious spare time. I abandoned Enlightenment a decade ago but it seems to be going through a resurgence at the moment. Gnome might be passing through a rough patch right now but it may be great again at some point in the future.
Like the parent poster I could easily donate these days but I won't if the project wastes money on an activist directors pet project. If I am going to donate money to a free software project I would much prefer to see the money spent on software development, software support, and software promotion.
Otherwise, Chrome is dead in the water.
I wonder how you come to this conclusion. We live in a world where users don't want to be interrupted with mindless things like updating software. Combined with Microsoft's militant approach to harassing users if their computers aren't configured to auto update, and the general consensus that many user facing apps now auto update and the trend is moving towards doing it silently I don't see this affecting Chrome's user base one bit.
If this isn't rapidly nipped in the bud Chrome will soon be known as a hotbed of Malware, credit card fraud, bank fraud and porn ads to general users. Once it has this reputation it will be very difficult to get users to continue using it.
And compared to CFLs, LEDs are superior - instant on (80% brightness instantly, 100% within a few seconds), no mercury, practically solid state (the only hard part is a switching power supply).
I am part way through renovating a property in the UK and have used LED fittings thoughout. The switching power supply does seem to be the difficult part for manufacurers of LED lighting in the UK, and is also the main difference between the expensive fittings and the cheap ones. Most of the lights available have broadly similar LED light units consiting of one or more high power LEDs attached to a large heat sink. Power supply quality varies wildly with some manufacturers using what looks like the smallest cheapest PSU they could find on AliExpress. With more and more companies introducing products into the market I would recommend going to actually look at a light in a shop making sure you take one out of the box to see if a decent PSU is attached before buying anything. PSU failure will probably be the largest cause of LED light mortality.
Yeah, actually, just google for "battery powered printer". Amazon sells them. But I strongly suggest you fix your infrastructure problem (reliable power) before you increase your reliance on it as you are proposing...
I have had to support battery powered printers on building sites. They all suck in this environment as dusty environments damage the print engine mechanism and printheads. Most models of battery powered printer are inkjets designed to be lightweight and portable. The print engine is generally not designed for a high lifetime page count and is unlikely to last in OP's situation even without dust. Consumables will be expensive for this type of printer and availabilty is unlikely to be long term as manufacturers do not expect these devices to last. These printers are also extremely sensitive to paper condition and quality. In my experience paper cockled by humidity will not feed. Dusty environments cause feed rollers to fail sooner than usual. Feed roller spares for short lifespan printers are often difficult to obtain even from the specialist suppliers I have access to.
Except they didn't work for free: they worked for the salvage value. I can't really see how the low value of the contract proves fault.
I can. I have quoted for this type of work in the UK before. I went to have a look at the kit first before quoting and did so knowing that the job was more complicated that it initially appeared. The people wanting to dispose of the equipment wanted to dispose of it through an auction house specialising in selling unwanted corporate assets in bulk. They wanted to get rid of it quickly and as they did not understand what needed to be done thought the job would be fast and cheap.
I found racks of working servers, disk arrays, standard PC's as well as lots of dead equipment, individual drives and older UNIX equipment. Most of the kit could be wiped with standard utilities, but the UNIX equipment and dismantled kit would take much more time so my quote allowed for this. The company chose to go with a very cheap data deletion specialist who used a minimum wage employee armed with a PC wiping CD. Of course this would not boot anything not running an Intel processor so they simply didn't bother with that kit. It didn't have drivers for disk arrays so these were missed too. As the amount paid didn't allow sufficient time to connect up to all of the drives not in a PC they didn't bother with these either. All of the kit went straight to auction from there.
I read the report from the company wiping the machines which stated that their deletion routines were successful in the summary then went on to explain in highly technical language what had not been done and why in the rest of the report. Managers would be highly unlikely to understand what had not been done from this, but would probably assume that the kit was sent out in a clean state. The contractor had actually stated what had been wiped and what had been missed, just not in an understandable format and so were probably not liable for a data breach. I pointed out that they had not wiped any of the UNIX kit and had sent a complete readable set of financial data to be sold at auction. I have yet to hear back from them.
Managers simply don't understand this area and are easy prey for the unscrupulous. They will usually choose the cheapest quote.
Why bother defending the launch ship? If you buy a container ship near the end of it's life and fill it with ISO containers with a couple of missile containers on top you can easily get close enough to a target without looking suspicious. Once you have fired all the missiles at a target it doesn't matter if someone sinks the expendable container ship. If you can afford to buy a modern missile system the cost of an old expendable container ship should not pose any real problems. You even get plausible deniability as a bonus.
This is an interesting question.
It seems unlikely that the US is going to face an opponent of equivalent size and military capability in the foreseeable future. States such as Iraq that fight the US in a conventional war will be rapidly beaten by the US military, however the US faces the possibility of war with non state enemies in the near to medium future. The failure to defeat Al Qaeda can be seen as an example of this. If future foes are not affiliated with any one obvious state just what is the US going to fire missiles at? If future enemies are operating from several countries at once is the US going to start wars with all of them?
Combatants from the last century were easy to spot because they mainly dressed in combat fatigues and used equipment and vehicles that were obviously military in nature. Now the US faces asymmetric warfare techniques such as IED's, car bombs, suicidal aircraft hijacks and crude biological attacks their military seems more and more impotent. The development of missile systems such as the new Club K container missile system is going to make it much harder for the US to find a target for these new fast missile systems as it will not be obvious who launched them.
The problem comes when your colonists refuse to pay your outrageous taxes which are paying for all those wars, dump your tea into a harbour and declare independence. Your colonists are likely to be at a similar military level to you and difficult to defeat.
I feel the same way and I live in Europe. Driving from London to the French Alps, crossing the English channel on a ferry takes about the same time as flying there does. This is despite the actual flying bit lasting only an hour or so. The airline industry and governments have taken a fast and efficient form of travel and comprehensively fucked it over the years with security theatre and air industry processes. The cost is roughly equivalent to driving there even with European road fuel tax!
Driving has the advantage that you can choose to go stop where you like and travel via places you simply would not go when travelling by air. From my perspective driving offers lots more benefits for European journeys than air travel.
How long will it before the airlines worldwide are lobbying for security restrictions to be removed as it affects business?
In the end, it is not just merely displaying the ads that makes money, but the complex dynamics of the market, its interaction with potential customers, and the ability to influence their behaviour.
Which makes the advertisers insistence on displaying blinking noisy crap on a technical site whose audience has a hair trigger on Adblock all the more bizarre. While the article is mainly Ars whining, most commentary on this issue misses the point that both the advertisers and Ars would make more money if the advertisers were a little more intelligent about what type of ad they display to specific audiences. I keep hearing about the death of online advertising, but as Google has shown the market can be very healthy indeed if one pays attention to the audience.
Perhaps the next few successful ad startups will be those that can place ads while resisting the natural proclivities of the ad agency and client to gravitate towards garish and overbearing. I can only hope so.
Monopolistic behavior is a great idea if you are the CEO of a public company. All your average CEO has to do is really push short term results hard to keep quarterly earnings obsessed Wall Street happy. The CEO usually has an exit strategy of quit with a large golden handshake plus large pension, then rinse and repeat until retirement in the Bahamas. If the company goes tits up because of this strategy who cares. Wall street will have sold the shares at a high price to suckers long before the share price collapses and the CEO will be working elsewhere with a track record of large profits during his/her past employment. Employees and customers are just collateral damage.
Should we recreate the award given to Slartibartfast for Norway too?
None of those articles talk seriously about the Labour party splitting in two, only some MPs defecting. I doubt much will come of it though, as defecting to the Lib Dems is basically ensuring you have no place in the next or any government in the foreseeable future. Ashdown's speculation is just that.
You are correct that none of the articles provide any evidence that Labour will fragment into separate factions, I simply wanted to point out that the suggestion originated in the broadsheets. It is possible that some Labour MP's will defect to the Liberals if Labour lose at the next general election. Labour defections have happened in the past.
This is classic newspaper tactics. The Mail is by far the worst for it. Every edition has reader's letters starting "If the government does such-and-such..." when the government has no plans to do such-and-such, and has often never even hinted at even considering such-and-such.
Indeed. With Gordon Brown appearing to be both unpopular and ineffective this is behaviour that all the UK newspapers are indulging in, not just the Daily Mail. I will concede that the Mail is one of the worst at this and should not be considered a quality news source.
More hyperbole. Before the credit crunch spending was fairly low compared to other nations, and now it's being done to lessen the effects of the recession by stimulating the economy with cash injections (e.g. car scappage scheme) and government projects (building contracts etc). Of course a lot went to prop up the banks, but people talk about that as if it was a free hand-out. We own those banks now and it's hard to imagine a situation so catastrophic that we wouldn't get out investment back with interest at some point in the medium term.
Hyperbole, really?. I think I was being quite restrained. Comparing UK government spending levels to other nations is not useful. Others have different population levels, GDP and citizen expectations. What is useful is comparing spending to GDP, the good old fashioned can we afford it metric. Why not take a look at the ever amusing (and full of hyperbole) Buring our Money blog. The articles in the debt category should convey a sense of the debt disaster Labours spending has built up with far more eloquence than I have time for here. In case you were wondering where it all goes here is the handy Guardian (PDF) chart of government spending.
The government could have handled the bank bailouts considerably better. I really liked the good bank idea I read about in the FT. This idea would have left the UK with a much smaller debt problem and several profitable banks to sell off in a few years time.
If you think that's "like a drunken sailor" you clearly have no understanding of even basic economics. I'll spell it out for you: in a recession the problem is people stop spending, so work dries up and businesses find it hard to get loans or credit (and they all rely on that). The only way you can lessen the effect is to put money into the economy by spending and making sure banks still offer loans.
We are going to have to disagree here, the fastest way back to a healthy economy is to cut tax, regulation and the public sector. The government is now starting to find it difficult to open new lines of credit. We may be close to the time when there are no buyers of government debt. If this happens expect the government to have to go cap in hand to the IMF. It is unlikely that Alistair Darlings spend our way out of the recession plan is going to be an option.
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