Exactly. I really don't see the big issue with the droid store, other than that there are a lot similar-apps of varying levels-of-quality in the store. The rating system actually seems somewhat useful to me know, and I've download quite a few droid-apps and paid for others that I found useful.
Here in BC, the current government was re-voted amongst promises that they would not implement an HST (Harmonized Sales Tax, which combines the Provincial+Federal taxes and overall makes more things taxable at a higher bracket). Hell, no HST was one of their major promises.
Very soon after getting in, they went right away with implementing... the HST. It's been enough to motivate citizens so that they've collected a petition against it, which required signatures from at least 10% of every riding in the province. Keep in mind this wasn't a formal election or anything of the sort, it was ordinary citizens collecting petition signatures.
Despite this, remarks from MLA's and politicians in general have been to the effect of, "well, people seem upset about the HST right now. But they don't understand it, and I'm sure they'll be happy with it when it actually goes through"
Even with the petition, the current government holds enough of a majority that they can shove the tax through anyway, so as per the linked article that may hopefully lead to recall petitions against the MLA's who supported it.
This is at a provincial level, but the Federal level is much the same thing. The opinion seems to be "those opposed are uninformed, we know best and they'll like it when we force it upon them"
So yes, people do contact their politicians when they're unhappy with something. The politicians just don't give a flying f***. They happily take "donations", have fancy meetings at a cost of billions on fancy meetings with similar-minded world leaders, and happily go hundreds of times over budget estimates for events that only the rich/elite can really afford to attend.
It's a party at capitol hill. Guess whose paying for it?
Anybody remember this one? I don't know that it actually *DID* anything to the computer, but it got around faster than crabs on a $5 hooker.
Infected disk put in machine = infected machine.
Clean disk put in infected machine = infected disk
Back in high school, that thing was rampant until they get a decent TSR antivirus. It slowed the computer down a lot, but it did manage to spank the monkey before it infected the PC's.
There are iPhone and Droid apps both that can dial out. On either platform, my VOIP apps have access to my phonebook, and can dial out through the phone itself rather than just VOIP. The trick is though that in the "store" they do tell you what an app is capable of doing, although sometimes the info is a bit broad.
For apps that want root access, you must authorize them on the Droid (iPhone is supposed to be no-root in general, droid needs to be cracked fist).
For work I have an old blackberry, and when you launch an app it asks for permission to run or be whitelisted. I haven't found one that does dialing, but from what I've seen of the security layers it might need special permission for that.
When it comes to smartphones, the iPhones is still dominating entertainment, the Droid is growing quickly and becoming more versatile, but the blackberry really does seem to have started out-of-the-gate with a greater focus on security.
Foxconn also sells branded mainboards of their own, etc. How about they just increase the pay at their factories, and up prices a buck or two? Two bucks means nothing to me, if they want to pass that onto the consumer I'm willing to open my wallet.
Is that an absolute overall liability, or perhaps they can be hit with the "maximum" for several issues. First, $75m for the leak. $75m per safety issue/protocol ignored. $75m for every beach damaged. $75m for underwater ecoculture. $75m for each person whose livelyhood is gone for the next fifty+ years, etc
Or, just let them pay the max for the leak, and an uncapped amount for the negligence and/or blatant disregard for safety.
Actually, I haven't heard a lot of people complaining about CEO pay-rates. What I *have* heard them complaining about is how CEO's and upper-managers gave themselves big bonuses while their companies/etc were going down the toilet.
Part of the issues is that a CEO people should be one of great responsibility, but often it's the CEO's that float away on a "golden parachute" when things go wrong, escaping from legal issues that they were perfectly aware of (or should have been if doing their jobs), or they collect huge "performance bonuses" when there's actually very little performance and the company is going bankrupt...
If a truck driver falls asleep at the wheel, that's one thing. If the truck crashed because the company decides rather consistently to not service its fleet vehicles, or to actively ignore/subvert necessary safety measures on a regular basis, then yeah perhaps it *should* be on him. We need to send a message to the corporate world in general that this sort of crap is no longer acceptable. Perhaps it means establishing that CEO's should definitely *not* be ignoring safety for profit (and can be held accountable for doing so), but at the same time have power to enforce such without getting canned, etc.
Actually, if you take the time to talk to your team-mates etc, MA did a pretty good job of fleshing out their personalities, etc. There were also quite a number of offside jokes etc, though sometimes you had to think a bit to catch them.
The old "portal to a dimension of baddies" has been used before, but there's plenty of other plot in there. Aliens preventing human conception. Traitors/Quislings. The combine. Headcrabs with headcrab zombines. A wacky scientist in the resistance. Ravenholm...
There's plenty of stuff in there for a good movie.
With an earthquake, though, you may end up in the hole yourself. With tornados and hurricanes there is usually some forewarnings so you can batten down and then get outta there. Depending on the flooding it can be rather sudden, but it tends to be more destructive-to-property than fatal, unless you live in New Orleans.
Of course, with an earthquake on a coastline you can get a triple whammy. Earthquake causes tidal-wave/hurricane which causes flooding...
In many cases, the *potential* for a fast connection may be there, but the ISP is constantly throttling and shaping traffic so that you don't reach anywhere close to that potential except very special cases.
For speed tests, ISP's have been known to give the more well known ones a very high priority. That means that when you go to speedtest.net, you'll see uber-fast speeds. However when you're browsing elsewhere or doing something that actually requires such speed (especially torrenting, etc), you're throttled back and actually get only a small portion of the speed.
Maybe the speed test sites should add an option where they open a torrent connection to a bunch of fixed seeds and see how fast you can download/upload, then compare it against other traffic. Now *that* would be an interesting test.
a) This is an employee who consistently pushes the line, and had reached a critical point
b) This is an employee who is being singled out, and they're nailing her wherever and for whatever the can in hopes of building enough case to have her terminated
The case in (b) is not entirely unlikely, especially given the question "why is her employer taking the time to look at her facebook, at all?"
Nowadays we're hearing about a lot of cases that are more than "Bob who lives in the dirty trailer down the road." Molestation by priests has gained a lot of coverage, as has abuse by those in other power position (educators, etc).
I wonder though, how many actually end up going to jail. It seems that it becomes big news, dies down, and then they manage to get a fairly low sentence or none at all.
Pervs in jail seem to fall under the same category as many, too ill-educated and/or poor to afford a good enough lawyer. However, in terms of the media focus I think it's gone a bit beyond the "drooling pervert" model and has put more view on the "sophisticated immoral abuse of a position-of-power" types.
I went to bed and heard her moaning and groaning in the next room, and figured that she was just having some fun with her BF. When I got up in the morning, I found her in the living room, doubled over in pain, and still moaning (with the useless BF just watching). I called in that I would be late to work, and took her to the hospital/emergency. We waited for a long time in the (empty) waiting room, to see some nurses (and one person who may or may not have been a doctor) who took a quick look at her and came up with the conclusion that as she'd recently had a period they were just menstrual cramps, that she was being overly complaintive, and told me to take her home.
Luckily we ignored that advice, waited around a bit longer and a doctor who knew what he was doing. After a quick X-ray, it turned out she had an ectopic (sp?) pregnancy. Essentially sperm and egg had met in-tube during her period, and it was then developing in her tubes rather than the uterus. It's a dangerous, and potentially fatal, condition. She was rushed to a bigger hospital, and they were able to take care of things.
If we had gone home straight off as told, she might have ended up dead or at least severely damaged and/or unable to have children in the future.
You're lucky. One issue I've had since switching to my Droid is that I can't count on it to work as an alarm clock (seems there's an issue with the sleep-wake interrupt in the current kernel).
No, it's about the same as when a government says: "funding Project X will cost Y."
Because there's no accountability for bullshitting in parliament, most people I know now just assume that the government is full of shit, and that Y costs somewhere between 10x and 100x the actual estimate. For a good example, look at the initial estimates for the Olympics in various areas. The initial estimates are always lowballed, and then costs start pumping up and up and up once things get going.
If I stop by a motorcycle shop to buy some oil and they sold that information to other distributors
And when did you "buy" access to facebook? Essentially, it's paid for using advertising and or scraping your details for advertising purposes. I wholly agree that there should be limitations, but comparing it to buying a physical product is somewhat different. Then again, plenty of stores have "loyalty cards", etc which will similarly track your purposes and share details for advertising purposes, so the only unique thing about facebook is the number of users and the breadth of information they've decided to share.
Android is linux-based, but that's somewhat like saying OSX is BSD. In many ways that is true, but in others it's an incomplete truth. I'd actually like it more if Android *did* use more of 'nix, but it appears to mainly be the kernel base and some tools. The graphic system doesn't seem to be X-based, and there are a lot of things added/removed compared to a standard linux Distro.
Personally, I'd love it if my Droid did incorporate more of a standard linux desktop. For example,the GUI system doesn't seem to be X-based. It would be very nice so that it were because then I could perhaps run remote SSH apps, or things like an xmms2 client to control my music system, etc.
They probably have enough high-priced lawyers to fight a suit like this, but I wonder if this could lead to a nice big class-action lawsuit when they release buggy fricking discs of sh** that don't work properly for the first 6-12 months (and then get some bugfixes so they work somewhat better just before they're replaced by the next version POS with more bugs).
I seem to remember one case where it was tried under "animal cruelty" type laws, and the basis of the defence (which I believe won) was "the sheep liked it"
I am willing to pay the same per-month as I used to pay for cable. With some key differences from cable:
a) No commercials. Or few commercials, with the ability to **RATE them, and prevent duplicates.
b) I get to choose what I watch, when. Maybe I'm limited to "X" simultaneous downloads/viewings. That's fine. Heck, if it's one and then a slight increase for >1, I can live with that
c) No DRM. And yes, my cable had DRM, that's why I cancelled it (oooo, but digital is sooooo much better... except I can't fecking use it with my tuner)
That way, I don't have to be home at 7:00 on Friday night to see "show X". Once a show or episode it released, it should be available for me to watch.
And as for commercials and ratings... I don't mind all commercials. I do mind loud, intrusive, repetitive, and lame commercials. Heck, I have *DOWNLOADED* some of the funnier commercials (often Beer ads). As long as I'm not seeing the same damn thing every time, or a commercial more than every 20-30 minutes, and it doesn't SUCK, then I don't mind them. Heck, sometimes it helps me keep in touch with what products/services/movies/etc are coming.
If companies learn what people like for commercials, or - heck - learn what to advertise to specific people, then maybe we can all get most of what we want.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. I really don't see the big issue with the droid store, other than that there are a lot similar-apps of varying levels-of-quality in the store. The rating system actually seems somewhat useful to me know, and I've download quite a few droid-apps and paid for others that I found useful.
Here in BC, the current government was re-voted amongst promises that they would not implement an HST (Harmonized Sales Tax, which combines the Provincial+Federal taxes and overall makes more things taxable at a higher bracket). Hell, no HST was one of their major promises.
Very soon after getting in, they went right away with implementing ... the HST. It's been enough to motivate citizens so that they've collected a petition against it, which required signatures from at least 10% of every riding in the province. Keep in mind this wasn't a formal election or anything of the sort, it was ordinary citizens collecting petition signatures.
Despite this, remarks from MLA's and politicians in general have been to the effect of, "well, people seem upset about the HST right now. But they don't understand it, and I'm sure they'll be happy with it when it actually goes through"
Even with the petition, the current government holds enough of a majority that they can shove the tax through anyway, so as per the linked article that may hopefully lead to recall petitions against the MLA's who supported it.
This is at a provincial level, but the Federal level is much the same thing. The opinion seems to be "those opposed are uninformed, we know best and they'll like it when we force it upon them"
So yes, people do contact their politicians when they're unhappy with something. The politicians just don't give a flying f***. They happily take "donations", have fancy meetings at a cost of billions on fancy meetings with similar-minded world leaders, and happily go hundreds of times over budget estimates for events that only the rich/elite can really afford to attend.
It's a party at capitol hill. Guess whose paying for it?
Anybody remember this one? I don't know that it actually *DID* anything to the computer, but it got around faster than crabs on a $5 hooker.
Infected disk put in machine = infected machine.
Clean disk put in infected machine = infected disk
Back in high school, that thing was rampant until they get a decent TSR antivirus. It slowed the computer down a lot, but it did manage to spank the monkey before it infected the PC's.
There are iPhone and Droid apps both that can dial out. On either platform, my VOIP apps have access to my phonebook, and can dial out through the phone itself rather than just VOIP. The trick is though that in the "store" they do tell you what an app is capable of doing, although sometimes the info is a bit broad.
For apps that want root access, you must authorize them on the Droid (iPhone is supposed to be no-root in general, droid needs to be cracked fist).
For work I have an old blackberry, and when you launch an app it asks for permission to run or be whitelisted. I haven't found one that does dialing, but from what I've seen of the security layers it might need special permission for that.
When it comes to smartphones, the iPhones is still dominating entertainment, the Droid is growing quickly and becoming more versatile, but the blackberry really does seem to have started out-of-the-gate with a greater focus on security.
Foxconn also sells branded mainboards of their own, etc. How about they just increase the pay at their factories, and up prices a buck or two? Two bucks means nothing to me, if they want to pass that onto the consumer I'm willing to open my wallet.
Is that an absolute overall liability, or perhaps they can be hit with the "maximum" for several issues. First, $75m for the leak. $75m per safety issue/protocol ignored. $75m for every beach damaged. $75m for underwater ecoculture. $75m for each person whose livelyhood is gone for the next fifty+ years, etc
Or, just let them pay the max for the leak, and an uncapped amount for the negligence and/or blatant disregard for safety.
Hmmm. Now who might you cast as Gordon? Perhaps William Petersen
Actually, I haven't heard a lot of people complaining about CEO pay-rates. What I *have* heard them complaining about is how CEO's and upper-managers gave themselves big bonuses while their companies/etc were going down the toilet.
Part of the issues is that a CEO people should be one of great responsibility, but often it's the CEO's that float away on a "golden parachute" when things go wrong, escaping from legal issues that they were perfectly aware of (or should have been if doing their jobs), or they collect huge "performance bonuses" when there's actually very little performance and the company is going bankrupt...
If a truck driver falls asleep at the wheel, that's one thing. If the truck crashed because the company decides rather consistently to not service its fleet vehicles, or to actively ignore/subvert necessary safety measures on a regular basis, then yeah perhaps it *should* be on him. We need to send a message to the corporate world in general that this sort of crap is no longer acceptable. Perhaps it means establishing that CEO's should definitely *not* be ignoring safety for profit (and can be held accountable for doing so), but at the same time have power to enforce such without getting canned, etc.
A typo. It should be "ME", hopefully not to be confused with the OS-that-shall-not-be-named.
Actually, if you take the time to talk to your team-mates etc, MA did a pretty good job of fleshing out their personalities, etc. There were also quite a number of offside jokes etc, though sometimes you had to think a bit to catch them.
For example, the bit on "Krogan Testicles"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05Nl4KmGxYQ ...
"Why would anyone want Krogan testicles"
"They'll pay up to 10000cr each, that's 40000 for a full set"
How about Half Life + HL2?
The old "portal to a dimension of baddies" has been used before, but there's plenty of other plot in there. Aliens preventing human conception. Traitors/Quislings. The combine. Headcrabs with headcrab zombines. A wacky scientist in the resistance. Ravenholm...
There's plenty of stuff in there for a good movie.
Sorry, Tsunami. Effects may be similar though.
With an earthquake, though, you may end up in the hole yourself. With tornados and hurricanes there is usually some forewarnings so you can batten down and then get outta there. Depending on the flooding it can be rather sudden, but it tends to be more destructive-to-property than fatal, unless you live in New Orleans.
Of course, with an earthquake on a coastline you can get a triple whammy. Earthquake causes tidal-wave/hurricane which causes flooding...
In many cases, the *potential* for a fast connection may be there, but the ISP is constantly throttling and shaping traffic so that you don't reach anywhere close to that potential except very special cases.
For speed tests, ISP's have been known to give the more well known ones a very high priority. That means that when you go to speedtest.net, you'll see uber-fast speeds. However when you're browsing elsewhere or doing something that actually requires such speed (especially torrenting, etc), you're throttled back and actually get only a small portion of the speed.
Maybe the speed test sites should add an option where they open a torrent connection to a bunch of fixed seeds and see how fast you can download/upload, then compare it against other traffic. Now *that* would be an interesting test.
I can see at least two major possibilities:
a) This is an employee who consistently pushes the line, and had reached a critical point
b) This is an employee who is being singled out, and they're nailing her wherever and for whatever the can in hopes of building enough case to have her terminated
The case in (b) is not entirely unlikely, especially given the question "why is her employer taking the time to look at her facebook, at all?"
Nowadays we're hearing about a lot of cases that are more than "Bob who lives in the dirty trailer down the road." Molestation by priests has gained a lot of coverage, as has abuse by those in other power position (educators, etc).
I wonder though, how many actually end up going to jail. It seems that it becomes big news, dies down, and then they manage to get a fairly low sentence or none at all.
Pervs in jail seem to fall under the same category as many, too ill-educated and/or poor to afford a good enough lawyer. However, in terms of the media focus I think it's gone a bit beyond the "drooling pervert" model and has put more view on the "sophisticated immoral abuse of a position-of-power" types.
I went to bed and heard her moaning and groaning in the next room, and figured that she was just having some fun with her BF. When I got up in the morning, I found her in the living room, doubled over in pain, and still moaning (with the useless BF just watching). I called in that I would be late to work, and took her to the hospital/emergency. We waited for a long time in the (empty) waiting room, to see some nurses (and one person who may or may not have been a doctor) who took a quick look at her and came up with the conclusion that as she'd recently had a period they were just menstrual cramps, that she was being overly complaintive, and told me to take her home.
Luckily we ignored that advice, waited around a bit longer and a doctor who knew what he was doing. After a quick X-ray, it turned out she had an ectopic (sp?) pregnancy. Essentially sperm and egg had met in-tube during her period, and it was then developing in her tubes rather than the uterus. It's a dangerous, and potentially fatal, condition. She was rushed to a bigger hospital, and they were able to take care of things.
If we had gone home straight off as told, she might have ended up dead or at least severely damaged and/or unable to have children in the future.
5. "underage porn sex girl with horse and dog"
Even if you WERE looking for filthy, illegal porn you'd have to be an idiot to download that. But man, there are a lot of files with names like that.
They're just trying to hide their music from the RIAA. It's probably easier to fight a KP accusation than the trial-by-money in RIAA court these days.
They'd be in *real* trouble if that file ended in Mp3, as it would likely infringe on the work of a half dozen rappers.
You're lucky. One issue I've had since switching to my Droid is that I can't count on it to work as an alarm clock (seems there's an issue with the sleep-wake interrupt in the current kernel).
No, it's about the same as when a government says: "funding Project X will cost Y."
Because there's no accountability for bullshitting in parliament, most people I know now just assume that the government is full of shit, and that Y costs somewhere between 10x and 100x the actual estimate. For a good example, look at the initial estimates for the Olympics in various areas. The initial estimates are always lowballed, and then costs start pumping up and up and up once things get going.
If I stop by a motorcycle shop to buy some oil and they sold that information to other distributors
And when did you "buy" access to facebook? Essentially, it's paid for using advertising and or scraping your details for advertising purposes. I wholly agree that there should be limitations, but comparing it to buying a physical product is somewhat different. Then again, plenty of stores have "loyalty cards", etc which will similarly track your purposes and share details for advertising purposes, so the only unique thing about facebook is the number of users and the breadth of information they've decided to share.
Android is linux-based, but that's somewhat like saying OSX is BSD. In many ways that is true, but in others it's an incomplete truth. I'd actually like it more if Android *did* use more of 'nix, but it appears to mainly be the kernel base and some tools. The graphic system doesn't seem to be X-based, and there are a lot of things added/removed compared to a standard linux Distro.
Personally, I'd love it if my Droid did incorporate more of a standard linux desktop. For example,the GUI system doesn't seem to be X-based. It would be very nice so that it were because then I could perhaps run remote SSH apps, or things like an xmms2 client to control my music system, etc.
They probably have enough high-priced lawyers to fight a suit like this, but I wonder if this could lead to a nice big class-action lawsuit when they release buggy fricking discs of sh** that don't work properly for the first 6-12 months (and then get some bugfixes so they work somewhat better just before they're replaced by the next version POS with more bugs).
we already have laws that prevent animal cruelty
I seem to remember one case where it was tried under "animal cruelty" type laws, and the basis of the defence (which I believe won) was "the sheep liked it"
Icky. But hard to prove or disprove, really.
I am willing to pay the same per-month as I used to pay for cable. With some key differences from cable:
a) No commercials. Or few commercials, with the ability to **RATE them, and prevent duplicates.
b) I get to choose what I watch, when. Maybe I'm limited to "X" simultaneous downloads/viewings. That's fine. Heck, if it's one and then a slight increase for >1, I can live with that
c) No DRM. And yes, my cable had DRM, that's why I cancelled it (oooo, but digital is sooooo much better... except I can't fecking use it with my tuner)
That way, I don't have to be home at 7:00 on Friday night to see "show X". Once a show or episode it released, it should be available for me to watch.
And as for commercials and ratings... I don't mind all commercials. I do mind loud, intrusive, repetitive, and lame commercials. Heck, I have *DOWNLOADED* some of the funnier commercials (often Beer ads). As long as I'm not seeing the same damn thing every time, or a commercial more than every 20-30 minutes, and it doesn't SUCK, then I don't mind them. Heck, sometimes it helps me keep in touch with what products/services/movies/etc are coming.
If companies learn what people like for commercials, or - heck - learn what to advertise to specific people, then maybe we can all get most of what we want.