Let me second this sentiment. As a smart person - you should go outside your comfort zone, work with the locals and try to come up with innovative and sustainable solution to whatever problem they have (access to water, sharing access to the internet, getting their goods to the market). You will gain a meaningful experience (and possibly skills) out of it and so will they. I have been working on projects throughout Africa for the past 3 years and can assure you that they need smart people to complement the local knowledge.
I currently live in and have been working in one of those 'hot' countries for several years. First, your concerns about privacy seem misplaced to people who live around here. Tracking is for the general plebes who live there and have nowhere else to go. As a foreigner, your behaviors doesn't matter as much so long as you are not part of the problem. If you are a problem, forget about your supposed rights and privacy that you believe that you are entitled to.
First, the government/state/security/police can just break into your house whenever it wants, and your only recourse is that you are important enough that your embassy or company will raise a big enough fuss. Otherwise, you are out of luck. Unless, you want to carry around your laptop with you all the time, you can assume that they can get physical access to your computers when they really want. Same for your phone.
The government/state/security/police will question your building security, maid, nanny and almost certainly obtain their cooperation in tracking your movements and rumaging through your personal belongings. They also have access to all your financial transactions within the country, and all cross-border movements.
Is it your financial privacy that matters to you? Or is it that you do not want your phones or computers seized? In the latter case, just keep a low profile and don't cause trouble.
Each state in which Amazon is located also benefits from the jobs, both direct (employed by Amazon) and indirect (e.g. transport services and power generation) which Amazon pays for. These workers in turn pay income taxes and sales taxes (when they purchase goods and services) which pay for the roads and infrastructure. Corporate and sales taxes directly paid by the company are usually not the primary means by which a company contributes to a government's tax revenues. It may well be argued that if Amazon is expected to contribute towards its consumption of infrastructure, then it should be some of its taxes back in many states.
will exist just as banking and tax havens abound now. There is a great demand (meaning high willingness and ability to pay by a small set of individuals) for online anonymity. Else connecting to your offshore bank account will be pretty meaningless if they know you just connected with your 'internet passport'.
Old games can still be played on today's pc's (starcraft comes to mind). If you bought an older game for the previous generations of gaming consoles, it will not probably play on the latest generation of consoles.
I still buy pc games that I don't have time to play today in the expectation that I will be able to play them in the future when I have more time. That said, I am buying almost exclusively stand-alone games that don't need to connect to a server with thousands of other players.
as it is a restriction (or extreme discrimination against imports) of trade which is not allowed under the current version of the WTO to which the US is a signatory. Hence the 'harmed' nations with affect internet poker sites will be entitled to discriminate against US trade.
The US can always choose to ignore the ruling since it is a powerful nation. But that will only encourage smaller nations to set up internet poker sites and obtain compensatory damages - preferably calculated by the RIAA lawyers. Then the fun begins where the compensatory damages can be in the form of ignoring US intellectual property 'rights' in the host country.
This should be a slashdot poll. When will we have an AI that can debug VB better than humans:
(1) Wha, VB can never be truly debugged!
(2) Soon. April 1, 2010.
(3) Within 5 years when I am old enough to move out of my parents' basement and go to college.
(4) 2112 and two minutes later, the AI will become smart enough to know better and outsource the job to low productivity humans.
Coventry is only 86 miles from London. Living in London, I have come to realize that the English are a little touchy about the glorious little towns of their country and have that distorted European sense of distance. For instance, look at a map of Africa (or centered on Africa), Europe is a little patch of land to the north that looks a little larger than the Congo and Mauritania combined. Also this distorted sense of distance seems to explain why the French and English kept trying to build cross continent railways in Africa that ended in utter failure.
It is not clear how much money you want/need and how much you think your company can make in 2 years, in 5 years and what it takes to get there. From your post, it sounds as though you lack many basic business knowledge. What does the market for venture/seed capital look like?
If you have a savvy investor who can provide something more than money such as a network of expertise or investors, they will want to know what your answers are to key questions. Who are your expected customers? How do you address their needs? What is the competition and how do you expect to mitigate competition risk?
Making public the emails of any large organization (e.g. US Dept of Transportation, Sierra Club, Red Cross/Red Cresent, Google) will mostly be fodder for the trolls and pundits. Any large organization will have some (stupid) individual employees or contractors who expresses racially or sexually offensive views, or make threats or talk smack.
Another important factor is that the poliferation of blogging and sources of news (facebook? twitter?) means that there is a great deal more noise out there.
Secrecy does benefit from secrecy by obscurity within the noise. For example, mac tablet rumors have been around for 4 - 5 years even then there is already a tablet made by a 3rd party. Maybe they will finally come true this year. Or maybe next year.
Large organizations have strategic research going on all the time, looking into potential product lines and new lines of business, it can be easy to mistake these sources of 'official' interest for something that may actually materialize into a product.
I have experienced the US, Canadian and the UK system. Disclosure, I use to work as an advisor to the UK Dept of Health. It suffices to say that the variation in the quality of care you receive is high. In many cases, many of us who do work for the Dept of Health prefer to have private insurance because in some cases, it is significantly better than the care you would receive in the public system. In general, private care is better if you can afford it. However for most people, it would probably not be worth it.
The private health care system is unfair, if you have a pre-existing condition, you would basically be charged the (expected) full cost for that condition or not be covered at all. From a business perspective, this makes perfect sense. Otherwise, the business will lose money on selling you the insurance.
Finally, there is waste galore in the public system. There is a reason that there is only about 40 economists in the whole department while it spends 110 Billion UK pounds per yea (2009 expenditure plan). The economists are frequently coming with reports and analysis that states how poorly (i.e. inefficiently) the money is spent. For example, all measures of productivity including controling for changes in the quality of care shows a steady fall in the UK public health sector productivity since 2000.
The study of art does not take place in a vacuum. So to appreciate/study a work, you end up comparing it to something else, perhaps other mediums of art or other works in the same medium that preceded it. Or you examine how it speaks about a comtemporary situation in an innovative way... why it captures a moment or vision better than other works. This inevitably means situating the work in a socio-historical context. Even if you believe that it is all a matter of taste and preferences, studying art and understanding art means to understand the language, method, or device that makes a particular painting, novel or work of art more effective, more immediate or deeper than other works. I can go on (eg how does a particular work build or borrow from previous works and why the product is more than the sum of its borrowed parts) but the central idea is that it does not take place in a vacuum. You can call it a historical context but history is just a short-hand for past societies and their many subcultures and how it sees its past, its present and its future.
Several friends of mine teach art history at a large university and in my conversations with them, I came to appreciate that the study and appreciation of art is similar to that of the study of literature or film. For example, throughout history, there are innovations in story telling, eg Shakespear introduced the device of a character speaking aloud to himself exploring his own inner thoughts and conflicts or eg Griffith's camera work in Birth of a Nation and shooting in 'natural' not studio settings. At another level, looking at works of art as a reflection of social structure and myths and understanding how innovations in aesthetics and story telling accompanies social changes and transformations. For example, prior to the Renaissance, much of art was iconography (the representation of icons of religion and pivotal moments in the story of Christianity) whence the Renaisannce introduced the human subject into art. More recently, cubism and modernism movements in art and architecture reflects the rise of industrial society and the capture of the imagination of the cultural elites by marxist ideologies. Hence the change in materials in housing and furniture and crafts from arnate woods to then modern materials such as glass, concrete and steel and the mass production of quality housing and furniture.
Another strand of the study revolves about the construction of a social canon (the 'great' works of genius and orginality) and how it reflects the social shifts in power. One way of understanding this is the common complaint amongst film afficiandos that the academy awards are a popularity contest and that, over and above the wonderful movies, Speilberg has been a brand and is a socio-economic construction.
In short, the appreciation of art is much more than aesthetics and more than meets the eye. In fact, it engages the intellect and a deep appreciation involves a broad understanding of the social historical context.
There are several advantages to treating bankwidth like any other utility. Yes, your monthly charges will vary. So does your electricity bill and gas bill. But at the same time, this will provide pressure from consumers for software companies to declare how often their software calls home and how much bandwidth their application uses. In turn, this provides impetus for Congress to pass legislation whereby stealth phoning home will be illegal. Yeah, this last bit is probably wishful thinking.
On the other hand, if you are uploading/downloading tons of stuff on p2p, then the costs of providing service to you probably exceeds what you are paying. Nevertheless, there is a large incentive for segmenting market between casual and heavy users.
Going to a bar often doesn't mean much in of itself. There are too many other factors and exceptions involved. Restaurants and sporting events both sell alcohol. Or I used to go out to bars and restaurants several times/week with friends after work... although I usually don't drink any alcohol even at a bar.
On the other hand, I am already paying for my food and drinks with a credit or debit card anyway. Unless you are willing to put up with the hassle of paying for most things in cash, chances are that there is an accessible record of your eating, drinking and entertainment habits. Not public but accessible and there is probably a market already for such data on people with spending patterns or consumption habits matching x .
Apple's lawyers threatened the welfare of the guy and his family and proceeded to list his assets and their value:
Their lists includes my home address, most recent assessed value of my house and all the information about my mortgage; a rental property that we own; my bank accounts and investment accounts, including the college funds for our kids, whose names are used; and our boat and two cars.
Aren't US Banks and financial institutions legally obligated to protect your private information such as the terms of your mortgage and the details of your bank and investment accounts?
Cui said that a patent application has been filed. He is considering formation of a company or an agreement with a battery manufacturer. Manufacturing the nanowire batteries would require "one or two different steps, but the process can certainly be scaled up," he added. "It's a well understood process."
I guess the two relevant question are: (i) whether such research would have been conducted in the 1st place if there were no such economic incentives, and (ii) would a patent system increase or decrease the research in the further development of this technology?
such as world of warcraft or the madden football sequels or civilization. How much value could a hollywood writer add to the storyline?
Or consider games such as halo 3, crysis or the grand theft auto series where the storyline is important. But it is the design of the game that is ultimately more important and provides a framework within which the writers work. In other words, the value-added of a hollywood writer in this case seems limited.
In each of the above examples, I see the involvement of sit-com and action-movie writers as a big negative. The story line in games can be silly at times... but never as stupid or lame as in the vast majority of tv shows and movies out of hollywood.
A friend of mine is teaches at a major university in the UK and is in charge of graduate studies in her program this year. After receiving a package for a graduate student who seemed very bright and enthusiastic at the interview, she later received an email that the student will not be coming for reasons the student could not state. Meanwhile there was a large mysterious package for the student that was sent by the same person who had previously sent packages to the department. My friend opened the package and it turns out the person was a stalker. She left a message with the student and was contacted by...
some arm of the US government in charge of protecting US campuses. She was shocked when they repeated back to her all her phone calls trying to find out the source of the mysterious package. The officer who called my friend also had access to her email correspondence with the stalker who had initially presented himself as a philanthropist. The student is American but the stalker is based neither in the US or UK but the officer claimed that they also managed to tap all his phones at several residences in Canada and in the UK. Moreover, the officer told my friend of other related phone calls and emails from other members of her department.
The extent to which the wiretapping powers has been extended from fighting terrorists who would kill thousands of people to a single crazed stalker is shocking.
Google has a relatively good reputation when it comes to privacy. Primarily, while they may provide aggregated data and statistics, they do not pass my personal data on to 3rd parties (e.g. advertisers or the government). Gmail produces context sensitive (and often humorous) ads while hotmail produces annoying flashing banners. Moreover, Microsoft has a poor record when it comes to protecting my privacy (e.g. WGA, DRM with Vista).
Slashdot Mirror
Let me second this sentiment. As a smart person - you should go outside your comfort zone, work with the locals and try to come up with innovative and sustainable solution to whatever problem they have (access to water, sharing access to the internet, getting their goods to the market). You will gain a meaningful experience (and possibly skills) out of it and so will they. I have been working on projects throughout Africa for the past 3 years and can assure you that they need smart people to complement the local knowledge.
I currently live in and have been working in one of those 'hot' countries for several years. First, your concerns about privacy seem misplaced to people who live around here. Tracking is for the general plebes who live there and have nowhere else to go. As a foreigner, your behaviors doesn't matter as much so long as you are not part of the problem. If you are a problem, forget about your supposed rights and privacy that you believe that you are entitled to.
First, the government/state/security/police can just break into your house whenever it wants, and your only recourse is that you are important enough that your embassy or company will raise a big enough fuss. Otherwise, you are out of luck. Unless, you want to carry around your laptop with you all the time, you can assume that they can get physical access to your computers when they really want. Same for your phone.
The government/state/security/police will question your building security, maid, nanny and almost certainly obtain their cooperation in tracking your movements and rumaging through your personal belongings. They also have access to all your financial transactions within the country, and all cross-border movements.
Is it your financial privacy that matters to you? Or is it that you do not want your phones or computers seized? In the latter case, just keep a low profile and don't cause trouble.
Each state in which Amazon is located also benefits from the jobs, both direct (employed by Amazon) and indirect (e.g. transport services and power generation) which Amazon pays for. These workers in turn pay income taxes and sales taxes (when they purchase goods and services) which pay for the roads and infrastructure. Corporate and sales taxes directly paid by the company are usually not the primary means by which a company contributes to a government's tax revenues. It may well be argued that if Amazon is expected to contribute towards its consumption of infrastructure, then it should be some of its taxes back in many states.
will exist just as banking and tax havens abound now. There is a great demand (meaning high willingness and ability to pay by a small set of individuals) for online anonymity. Else connecting to your offshore bank account will be pretty meaningless if they know you just connected with your 'internet passport'.
Old games can still be played on today's pc's (starcraft comes to mind). If you bought an older game for the previous generations of gaming consoles, it will not probably play on the latest generation of consoles.
I still buy pc games that I don't have time to play today in the expectation that I will be able to play them in the future when I have more time. That said, I am buying almost exclusively stand-alone games that don't need to connect to a server with thousands of other players.
as it is a restriction (or extreme discrimination against imports) of trade which is not allowed under the current version of the WTO to which the US is a signatory. Hence the 'harmed' nations with affect internet poker sites will be entitled to discriminate against US trade.
The US can always choose to ignore the ruling since it is a powerful nation. But that will only encourage smaller nations to set up internet poker sites and obtain compensatory damages - preferably calculated by the RIAA lawyers. Then the fun begins where the compensatory damages can be in the form of ignoring US intellectual property 'rights' in the host country.
This should be a slashdot poll. When will we have an AI that can debug VB better than humans: (1) Wha, VB can never be truly debugged! (2) Soon. April 1, 2010. (3) Within 5 years when I am old enough to move out of my parents' basement and go to college. (4) 2112 and two minutes later, the AI will become smart enough to know better and outsource the job to low productivity humans.
Coventry is only 86 miles from London. Living in London, I have come to realize that the English are a little touchy about the glorious little towns of their country and have that distorted European sense of distance. For instance, look at a map of Africa (or centered on Africa), Europe is a little patch of land to the north that looks a little larger than the Congo and Mauritania combined. Also this distorted sense of distance seems to explain why the French and English kept trying to build cross continent railways in Africa that ended in utter failure.
It is not clear how much money you want/need and how much you think your company can make in 2 years, in 5 years and what it takes to get there. From your post, it sounds as though you lack many basic business knowledge. What does the market for venture/seed capital look like?
If you have a savvy investor who can provide something more than money such as a network of expertise or investors, they will want to know what your answers are to key questions. Who are your expected customers? How do you address their needs? What is the competition and how do you expect to mitigate competition risk?
Making public the emails of any large organization (e.g. US Dept of Transportation, Sierra Club, Red Cross/Red Cresent, Google) will mostly be fodder for the trolls and pundits. Any large organization will have some (stupid) individual employees or contractors who expresses racially or sexually offensive views, or make threats or talk smack.
This was covered in a recent episode of the Security Now podcast http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm. See episode 80 from Nov 19 "A security vulnerability in SSL". The transcript is also available http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-223.pdf.
One of the biggest weakness of Bing is that when I type in a search for an address (in London,UK), it does not bring up google maps http://www.bing.com/search?q=1+exchange+square+london+uk&go=&form=QBLH&filt=all. With google maps, I can see nearly transport options and I can quickly see nearby candidate restaurants and coffeeshops after an event http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=1+exchange+square+london+uk&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a.
Another important factor is that the poliferation of blogging and sources of news (facebook? twitter?) means that there is a great deal more noise out there. Secrecy does benefit from secrecy by obscurity within the noise. For example, mac tablet rumors have been around for 4 - 5 years even then there is already a tablet made by a 3rd party. Maybe they will finally come true this year. Or maybe next year. Large organizations have strategic research going on all the time, looking into potential product lines and new lines of business, it can be easy to mistake these sources of 'official' interest for something that may actually materialize into a product.
People who wear glasses are terrorists.
People who read are terrorists.
People who have independent thoughts are terrorists.
Well that means that the anti-terrorist good guys are illtrate ... well my money is on the guys that wear glasses.
The private health care system is unfair, if you have a pre-existing condition, you would basically be charged the (expected) full cost for that condition or not be covered at all. From a business perspective, this makes perfect sense. Otherwise, the business will lose money on selling you the insurance.
Finally, there is waste galore in the public system. There is a reason that there is only about 40 economists in the whole department while it spends 110 Billion UK pounds per yea (2009 expenditure plan). The economists are frequently coming with reports and analysis that states how poorly (i.e. inefficiently) the money is spent. For example, all measures of productivity including controling for changes in the quality of care shows a steady fall in the UK public health sector productivity since 2000.
The study of art does not take place in a vacuum. So to appreciate/study a work, you end up comparing it to something else, perhaps other mediums of art or other works in the same medium that preceded it. Or you examine how it speaks about a comtemporary situation in an innovative way... why it captures a moment or vision better than other works. This inevitably means situating the work in a socio-historical context. Even if you believe that it is all a matter of taste and preferences, studying art and understanding art means to understand the language, method, or device that makes a particular painting, novel or work of art more effective, more immediate or deeper than other works. I can go on (eg how does a particular work build or borrow from previous works and why the product is more than the sum of its borrowed parts) but the central idea is that it does not take place in a vacuum. You can call it a historical context but history is just a short-hand for past societies and their many subcultures and how it sees its past, its present and its future.
Another strand of the study revolves about the construction of a social canon (the 'great' works of genius and orginality) and how it reflects the social shifts in power. One way of understanding this is the common complaint amongst film afficiandos that the academy awards are a popularity contest and that, over and above the wonderful movies, Speilberg has been a brand and is a socio-economic construction.
In short, the appreciation of art is much more than aesthetics and more than meets the eye. In fact, it engages the intellect and a deep appreciation involves a broad understanding of the social historical context.
There are several advantages to treating bankwidth like any other utility. Yes, your monthly charges will vary. So does your electricity bill and gas bill. But at the same time, this will provide pressure from consumers for software companies to declare how often their software calls home and how much bandwidth their application uses. In turn, this provides impetus for Congress to pass legislation whereby stealth phoning home will be illegal. Yeah, this last bit is probably wishful thinking. On the other hand, if you are uploading/downloading tons of stuff on p2p, then the costs of providing service to you probably exceeds what you are paying. Nevertheless, there is a large incentive for segmenting market between casual and heavy users.
On the other hand, I am already paying for my food and drinks with a credit or debit card anyway. Unless you are willing to put up with the hassle of paying for most things in cash, chances are that there is an accessible record of your eating, drinking and entertainment habits. Not public but accessible and there is probably a market already for such data on people with spending patterns or consumption habits matching x .
Aren't US Banks and financial institutions legally obligated to protect your private information such as the terms of your mortgage and the details of your bank and investment accounts?
I guess the two relevant question are: (i) whether such research would have been conducted in the 1st place if there were no such economic incentives, and (ii) would a patent system increase or decrease the research in the further development of this technology?
is through a national health care plan that would provide free penis enlargement, viagra and breast implants to all Americans
Or consider games such as halo 3, crysis or the grand theft auto series where the storyline is important. But it is the design of the game that is ultimately more important and provides a framework within which the writers work. In other words, the value-added of a hollywood writer in this case seems limited.
In each of the above examples, I see the involvement of sit-com and action-movie writers as a big negative. The story line in games can be silly at times ... but never as stupid or lame as in the vast majority of tv shows and movies out of hollywood.
some arm of the US government in charge of protecting US campuses. She was shocked when they repeated back to her all her phone calls trying to find out the source of the mysterious package. The officer who called my friend also had access to her email correspondence with the stalker who had initially presented himself as a philanthropist. The student is American but the stalker is based neither in the US or UK but the officer claimed that they also managed to tap all his phones at several residences in Canada and in the UK. Moreover, the officer told my friend of other related phone calls and emails from other members of her department.
The extent to which the wiretapping powers has been extended from fighting terrorists who would kill thousands of people to a single crazed stalker is shocking.
Google has a relatively good reputation when it comes to privacy. Primarily, while they may provide aggregated data and statistics, they do not pass my personal data on to 3rd parties (e.g. advertisers or the government). Gmail produces context sensitive (and often humorous) ads while hotmail produces annoying flashing banners. Moreover, Microsoft has a poor record when it comes to protecting my privacy (e.g. WGA, DRM with Vista).