As a Dutch Web Developer I have had jobs and job offers with foreign companies and... they are not what they seemed. In Holland, we get a lot of extra's on top of our salaries. A 100% refund on public transport for instance that isn't (yet) taxed. 370 euro's is the max, for a small country, you can travel quite far with that and of course a subscription also allows you to travel for free on non-work trips. Since the price of a subscription goes down the further you travel, the point where you just buy a free travel pass for the entire country is easily reached and I have had one for years. Remember, that in Socialist Russia, public transport is somewhat usable (well except since the capitalist came into power, 2 years of VVD rules and more breakdowns then in the previous 100 years).
A Dutch salary also includes contributions to unemployment programs, pension, healthcare etc etc. So, if a Dutch person says he get 5k, that is NOT all the money flowing out of the employers bank account to benefit him and society. This is constantly changing because Dutch governments fall down quite a lot and we have had to have coalition governments for decades but it means that a job offer from a US based company and native Dutch one needs careful consideration. It gets especially interesting if the person making the offer hasn't got any experience with the Dutch labor market.
You need to take even more care if as a Dutch person you are thinking of working in the US. Be REALLY careful how the money is going to flow. It is not the same for all US states or even cities but simple things like if you get a house, how is garbage collected? Who pairs for public transport (often doesn't even exist), car, fuel, road charges? How is medical covered? No dutch job advertises with medical coverage because that is standardized. How many paid holidays do you get? How many mandatory holidays? How do you get paid if the company goes bellyup (hint, IN holland your pay is ensured with no fuss, no hazzle, you get your full salaray). How quickly can you be fired (Holland 1 months notice and there are a lot of safeguards for dismissal, not just unfair ones, just saying, we don't need him anymore is not enough).
Add it all up and I have turned down many an English over (for some reason, the English speaking world has really bad labor laws) because it just didn't make any sense. They wanted me to take a pay cut for less security while working more hours. How attractive!
But Americans believe in this system, presumable thinking that one day they too will be rich and they don't want to be paying their wage slaves a decent salary then. The American Dream consists of, if I ever become rich, I want to keep it all, even if I have so much I could never ever spend it and got to take it to the grave with me.
Simply put a 200% tariff on any product and service from a company that has left the US. Bam, instantly every company the ran for a tax heaven has to come back or see its product unable to compete with new local offerings.
As for "essential" products? Simply remove US protection from foreign products. See how MS likes it if it no longer is protected by the US copyright laws.
People forget that we created governments to be powerful opposition to the rich. Government is the one who can answer the question: "You and what army".
Capitalists like the wheeny above seem to think that companies and the rich can do whatever they want and the government and the people just have to sit back and take it. That is only the case if you let weenies run the country.
I am dutch, our politicians are taking the hint and have sold out en-mass to big media by ordering the blocking of The Pirate Bay despite wasting millions on a free internet project.
This means nothing, it is just a load of drivel enacted by politician who have spend the last 2 years one enacting and revoking a 130km/h speed increase, a ban on burka's now canceled again and the privatization off the rail roads now to be reversed and the admittance that the privatization of the post office was a mistake...
It is not like the economy is down the crapper, un-employment is rising and the Euro/EU is a stinking pile of crap or anything.
Be very careful what you wish for when looking at other countries, KPN, which set of the rush for this law is the company that wanted to charge extra for whatsapp recently announced with other mobile operators that they would introduce a limited business only roll out of LTE, just enough to satisfy the license demands so if you pay a premium, own a business and are in the right street, you can have modern tech before the end of the decade. The rest? Get stuffed, we are making to many millions of 3G still.
The real problem for most people is that advertising never ends, it never seems to be enough. For Americans it might just always have been there, I am old enough and European enough there are alternatives. Germany has a very odd mechanic where they seems to show all the ads on one TV station for about half an hour and that is it. Belgium occasionally has one. The BBC has none and Dutch TV didn't have to use any on Sunday so they had to add cartoons to make programs run a full hour. Battle Star Galactica (The original) followed by Bugs Bunny and then the news.
But if you watch some American TV (and may god have mercy on your soul) you will see ads EVERYWHERE, every five minutes, they have popups during the program, on the first seconds as the program comes back on after a commercial block and in the program itself. The logic seems to be that if 1 ad works, a 100 will work even better.
The reasoning when applied to sex (hey, I can't always use car anologies) would be that since your gf likes a small penis inside, she would REALLY like a big one so why not have her fucked by a whale and make her really happy. And then you wonder why she ain't happy, because you just make your gf explode into a thousand gooey bits from being banged by a volkswagen (oh okay, one car analogy) sized penis! HAPPY?
It as as when your gf asks you to spank her, what she means is that she wants you to make her hiny glow a nice pink color. NOT to beat her until she is a thin red paste on the wall and the cops are hauling you away, yet again (and now you know why on/. we use car analogies, because the other kind are just to revealing of the inner workings of the average analogy using slashdotter). There is a line between advanced sex play and first degree murder and there is a line between advertising that works and advertising that doesn't work because there is just to fucking much of it.
People are lazy, that can lead you to believe you can push them and stop until they start to react. The problem is that while people have a great deal of inertia, once they stop moving, they are unstoppable. Once people have started using time-shifting and ad-blockers, you can't get them to stop again. I started using ad blocking because a series of ads just pissed me off enough to take the effort and now all ads are blocks and screw you if your website dies because of it.
I think the real problem is that TV execs don't eat their own dog shit (calling TV food is just to ridiculous) they don't have to sit through their own ads to watch their own content. They don't get just how fucking annoying it gets and the people that stop watching don't show up on their statistics until suddenly, advertising on TV doesn't have as much effect in generating sales. You can see it in the advertising industry, they know they aren't reaching customers anymore but are at a loss of coming up with a solution. There are still viewers but they are the cattle that lack the income/knowledge to go elsewhere, the high income viewers are gone, unreachable. So... MORE ADS! That will get them back!
So basically, you replace 20 seconds of unskippable ads with about 20 minutes of them?
Smart.
Also, saying Green Lantern is crap when saying you watch Transformers a couple of times isn't going to impress anyone. It just says you won't every piece of dog shit shoveled in front of you. That does NOT make you a connoisseur, it just make you a finicky shit eater.
There is a Fox executive not yet ground into Executive Powder who is listening, he is listening to the caching of the cash register as your dollar votes come into the Fox bank account. You voted, in favor! Good for you and you can be sure he is listening and coming up with more ads for you to watch next time.
What has to be remembered is that customer relations is a very young field that is barely researched. For most businesses, they translate a sale to a positive customer experience. It is in reality possible for a customer to use a company time and time again, in fact to totally depend on them and STILL hate its guts. This goes anywhere from users of public transport to haters of big government using government handouts (is that you bankers?) and everything in between.
You buy their product, so they reason you must love them. You don't but how are they supposed to know? Nobody in their offices is going to tell the boss he is an idiot and that you a purchasing customer are hating the product you bought of your own free will with your hard earned money, they would look silly and not be in line for promotion and bonuses.
I have actually had to deal with these kinds of things as an underling, the disconnect is amazing. From transport companies that wanted people to give unfiltered twitter feedback on their home page, to advertising campaigns where the only message to reach the consumer would be that they are paying for ad support for things they hate on a product they have no choice to buy from that company whose prices have gone up (water companies in Europe).
You think some are getting the message but allowing you to skip it... NO THEY ARE NOT GETTING IT. If they got it, the ads wouldn't even be needed to be skipped, they would at most be an optional to the side extra. WHY do you think a company gets it if it thinks it can shove advertising on an already paid for product?
See how much you have been conditioned already? You are like a girl who thinks she found a new age modern man because he only beats her with his bare hands! Just because your new owner doesn't use the whip as often does not mean you are now free slave.
Are you graphic artists really that dense or do you love me so much you want to make sure everybody understands how valid my points are by proving me right?
Maybe you just don't understand the rather simplistic story of how to deal with sales people?
This is not about GIMP or anything else, it is about how YOU allowed YOUR means of an income to come to depend on a single supplier. Others have given other examples. Would you build your loading dock to allow only one model of car? Would you pack your packages so only one package company can deal with them? Would you reshape your body so you can only fit in one airliners seats? Would you change your digestive trackt so that you can only digest McD hamburgers?
No?
It is not up to me or anyone else to provide you alternatives. When you are that depended on a product, you ROLL YOUR OWN. Pixar does, why do you think they support GIMP anyway? Because they don't want THEIR production line to depend on someone elses. THAT is why companies support Opensource software, why Vavle is looking at Linux despite its tiny marketshare. Because once you are open, someone else doesn't control you.
Back in the days of DOS, there was Blue Isle and the Battle Island series of games. Then MS announced Windows 95 and Blue Isle announced a Windows 95 only game. And then Windows 95 got delayed and the game had to be held back because it could not launch without the OS. Blue Isle had tied themselves to another companies products and so became tied to another companies goals.
iD did not do the same, they launched Quake with both DOS and Windows support. Guess which company did better with there game?
Oh okay, it is not as simple an example as the car example. Car examples are clean and simple but since you are not getting them maybe a game one will strike closer to your heart.
Graphic artists have locked themselves into a company that has shown multiple times to not have the same goals. They can either SHUT THE FUCK up about it OR do something about it. Moan about it while keeping the lockin going on, is just going to result in ridicule.
There is an old story I will retell that should serve as a warning for all customers.
Once upon a time, there was a transport company employee charged with replacing a large segment of the companies trucks made by Volvo. The employee, being a bright individual called up a sales clerk from Ford that had been trying to get a foot in the door and asked him to send three Ford trucks for testing. The day the Volvo sales clerk came to make discuss the purchase of new Volvo trucks, these three Ford trucks happened to be parked on the lot. When the trucking company employee saw the Volvo sales clerk glance at them, he said "Yeah, the boss has been looking them, he seems to think they are an alternative worth looking into. But that is for later, lets discuss the deal you were going to offer us".
In another company far far away, an CTO who loved IBM hardware knew it was time to discuss the purchase of new hardware, so he ordered an underling to set up a trial project with HP servers, just to see what the competition was doing. When the IBM man came by he of course showed him the workfloor including the corner where the junior was working on those shiny new HP servers, "Got to give the kids their toys to play with " the CTO told the IBM sales clerk. "Btw, what was the price you were going to ask for again".
But in the dark and damp lands of Mordor, a very different tale was playing out. There the CTO invited the MS and Abobe sales clerk and proudly showed them how his entire business depended completely on their software product and how not only did they need the software to work flawlessly or they would be bankrupt in seconds, all the staff could only use the latest software and their customers demanded that they use the latest software. "BTW", The CTO asked, "what was that deal you wanted me to sign in my own blood again while bending over"? And there was much rejoicing among the Tribes of MS and Abobe, for they knew exactly who was calling the shots. One lockin to rule them all and in Eula bind them. For the users of MS and Abobe where greedy and feeble minded and could not break free of the spell.
---
Really, this is nothing new. In the land of NAS and control systems, this is par de course. You let a supplier control you, control you they will. Want to break free? Good luck, your company needs the new version, license or risk being unable to produce so you hand them the cash and lock yourself in just a little bit more.
Not a SINGLE Photoshop user will invest in his own freedom by making sure there are alternative methods to do his production. They will grind their teeth buy the latest version and invest yet more to make sure their production is entirely locked into Adobe clutches.
Cue countless protests about how there are no alternatives... no, there are none because any who dares to try is ridiculed for not instantly producting a 100% compatible product for free because freedom should be free of effort and cost.
You gave Adobe the control, enjoy it.
It is not as if you are alone. Governments often dictate that procurement must be regulated, meaning that once a procurement contract has been done, all interest in customer satisfaction goes out the window because the contract is fixed, can't be ended and renewal depends solely on the price offered (not charged) so fuck you peon.
I seen it to often in other industries, entire production line depended on one type of machine, fired your own maintenance team and anyone who could switch them out with other hardware. Goes, the "extra" charges sure went up a lot didn't they? Suddenly maintenance must be done by their certified team, at weekend charges.
My cat responds with an innocent expression if I ask if it ate the salmon I was preparing. My kitten looks proud stating "Yes I eated it, it was delicious, got some more". Same as kids, kids don't know how to lie when they are young. Then they learn it badly (lying when the evidence is right there) and then they learn deception.
A lot of this research is problematic. A fish eagle is known to be able to do all it needs to do in a day in few minutes, it is such an effective hunter. So... is it a dumb or smart animal? Evolution gave it the traits it does not need to hunt in packs or track a prey or wait in ambush. Is it very stupid or very smart?
Is a cat opening a door for which it does not have the appendage and for which it has no training by its parents as smart as a toddler who is both younger and older depending on how you count?
Do otters who carry a stone for the next meal plan? Is storing a prey, planning?
For that matter, I have spend weekends without doing anything really intelligent. Just eating and sleeping and my cats did it better. Intelligence is hard to tell if you don't need to display it.
Because all do the same thing for the same reason. Leaving your country to seek a fortune elsewhere is also the sign of a quitter, a person looking for an easy way out, or someone who did something so terrible back home, he has to run. Cue bleeding hearts sheltering war criminals because they can't see that someone fleeing prosecution might actually being prosecuted for the right reasons.
That is not even counting the ones who were trafficked with promises of a job and end up a sex-worker, those people make good entrepreneurs as well you think?
The idea that a very wide label as immigrant means every person labeled by it is the same is insane. It is the core of racism, doesn't matter if it is so called positive or negative racism.
The big question in the case is who picked a fight with who. The person who called the police and campaigned on behalf of a black homeless person against a white sheriff OR the self proclaimed gangsta nigga (his own nickname). I wouldn't trust the bleeding heart side with this one, they also make much that the HISPANIC guy lived in a gated community, but so did the black guy. Apparently white guy in gated community, racist. Black guy in gated community, victim.
I think it is even odds that Travor wanted to go crazy n* on the dudes as, thinking he could scare him off. In holland a group of youth immigrants formed a gang called the "crazy foreigners" operating on the same method, trying intimidation, knowing any white victim would be wary of standing up to them for fear of racist charges.
We shall see in the court case what both sides claim really happened.
And the price was only the US getting its ass kicked and the death of hundreds of young men fighting a superior force in obsolete planes. But hey, it is not you doing the dying is it, just someone elses son.
WW2 saw the US hopelessly unprepared and it wasn't the fat cats who paid the price for it. Afterwards, the US promised itself to never be caught unprepared again. Preparing your national defense for what is happening now is silly, it takes decades to prepare and nobody can predict even 5 years ahead. War is wasteful, being prepared so war can be avoided only seems wasteful. Until you get it wrong.
READ the snippet google gives for the first result.
Back then, every rails fan tried to wave the massive by default security flaw as being unimportant. This PHP thing only affects those running CGI which is pretty are and BAM, it is a massive flaw and the end of the world.
Pieces of software and hardware are sometimes design with the wrong assumptions, it happens. Follow the industries best practices, or become a fanboy and burry your head in the sand when it is your pipelines turn to be ridiculed.
This guy is nothing but a fat rich cat looking to skip on paying taxes. So. now he sees what happens when everyone does that. You might think the IRS is a though one to deal with but they got to respect the law. In fantasy lands like Belize, not so much.
That has always been the risk when the police take a more pro-active approach. There is a famous story (real or not) about a US fire chief who managed to create laws in his city that forced the installation of sprinkler installations in residential homes. It worked and it made the fire service pro-active rather then re-active. They prevented fires, rather then fighting fires. Since a fire is a bad thing, this is desirable.
Would you want the army to focus on fighting wars or on preventing wars?
What about the cops, should they just look away UNTIL a crime has happened or act to prevent one if they can?
Holland recently had Queens day, the day we prove we are even below Americans in our reference for a whore who doesn't pay taxes on a million Euro income and still claims every benefit intended for poor people. But that aside, the Mayor of Amsterdam decided that no large parties would be allowed in the city center, instead they would be held on the outskirts of the city. It worked, it was a peaceful day. The police (Mayor is head of the police) acted to prevent crime, rather then wait until the shit hit the fan.
BUT in doing so, it labelled EVERY single attendee as a hooligan bound to cause trouble and in need of police control to keep things inline. Silly? Yes, but that is one side of the coin of police acting to prevent things.
Entrapment is the other. We want the police to do the "good" preventing not the bad but where the line is drawn, that is hard to say.
A repeating story is that of the would be murderer by proxy trying to hire a killer, the police being tipped off and posing as a hired killer and the person being arrested. IF the police had ignored it, nothing might have happened. No killer might have shown up and it might have all blown over. On the other hand, something might have happened and would the police then be called out on not having done anything?
You betcha! Often by the same people screaming entrapment.
It is rather well known that the 9/11 attackers were known about but the FBI ignored the warnings. Would the same people screaming conspiracy scream entrapment if the FBI had acted and setup up a trap to capture them? You betcha. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Part of the failing of democracy is that it is power without responsibility. Not of the politicians but of the voters. The average voter thinks nothing (doesn't think at all in many cases) of demanding completely opposite things,at the same time. Having your cake and eat it doesn't even begin to describe not just bankers who want low taxes, no government oversight, strict laws on competitors and welfare for needy banks. You can't have it all except when it comes to voting in a democracy. And it ain't just the super rich.
"The FBI should have acted on warnings before 9/11 and stopped it"
"The FBI shouldn't act on warnings of people planning attacks and stopping them".
Politics ain't a division between left and right, between bleeding hearts and hard-liners, between capitalists and socialists. It is a melting pot of multi-personality disorders were the same voters votes multiple ways on the same issue and expects all of them to heard.
Want to prove me wrong? Prove how a fire-chief insisting on sprinklers to be installed in private homes had saved any lives over a fire-chief who has bravely rescued a single person in the last decade alive while hundreds died in flames? None of the people in private homes with sprinklers needed a daring rescue. The man is a coward! Somewhere a tax payer is arguing just this. For real.
The B-Ark idea was done centuries ago, however it was decided two were needed to get rid of all the undesirables. One was named Australia, the other America.
There they would die an agonizing dead, removed from all culture essential to any human. Who knew the dregs would adapt to do without culture?
Google now knows my IP. It used to be that if you googled "what is my ip" you had to go to a site that was at the top of the search results. Now the Google answers it for you, god knows how, it must be magic!
Same with conversions, phrase it in natural language and Google answers it for you, rather then forcing you to find a conversion site.
BUT these things are easy. Answering: gosh like I need to knows the thingy for my thingy so I can do thingy... that is a bit harder. It can tell me what my IP is because it knows what I mean with IP. IF however I was a lame artist and was asking what Intellectual Property belonged to me, I could go very confused by thinking those digits belonged to me.
What is stockprice X doing is easy. As long as you can regonize "stockprize" and the ticket ID, you got a simple search. But people don't often search like that outside of commercials. Who cares what the stock price is doing. Most people don't have stocks.
The real problem with search is that A: People often don't know what they are searching for and B: scammers want to get people to visit their website regardless of relevance.
Take "review". It is a nearly useless term to search for when looking for a review. Most sites that come up don't even have a revue. Then their are the endless link spammers so that if you combine search terms, they just show up because they have links to all the terms but not related. "Linux squeezebox" should NOT find pages that discuss a Linux distro and link to a boombox ad. But they do.
And SIRI isn't any better at it. Apart from the fact that it often doesn't understand what you are saying, it also can't combine languages. As a dutch person, I am used to use english for the produkt but dutch for "price/prijs" so that I get the product but with dutch sellers. It often works, SIRI can't grasp the concept.
If search is going to improve, we need a company that is going to brutally cull pages that break searches. All the link farms, GONE. Simply not indexed. Any review site, each review page ONLY carries one keyword, the product reviewed, not indexed for all the other link spam. No review yet available for this product? Then it MUST carry the keyword "NO_REVIEW".
And that is never going to happen because keywords WERE invented to accomplish this and they just became a spammers tool. Google is a spammers tool and the moment another search engine becomes a worthy SEO target, it too will become a spammers tool.
The only way to solve it is to let humans review each found site and brutally cull it. A single keyword wrong? A single suspect link? BANNED, the entire domain, for at least a year. Only then might SEO die.
They might not hurt each other but they hurt everyone else in the process. This has shown how the future might turn out, with everyone using patents to keep the other side from competing and ultimately making sure that any new comer either has to buy a lot of patents OR has to spend a fortune licensing up front of any actual earnings making it again impossible for a small startup to get started.
Steve Jobs showed himself to be a really bad apple, in human society, you got to learn not to take afront of every slight against you. Imagine that every tiny little mishap in traffic was to be settled in court, we would all be in court for eternity. Often you just have to let it go and accept that shit happens. The supposed sameness of the iPad and Galaxy Tab devices showed just how far Jobs was gone. There is only so much you can do with design and Apple was NOT itself original with either its design OR in spending effort on designing the packaging. Hell, if you buy higher end products, you would have long since gotten used to the fact that not all products come in brows boxes with white styrofoam.
That they looked similar? Yes? Have you looked at other items where design plays a role? In most industries this is not just accpeted, historians and art experts point to specific periods when EVERYONE did EVERYTHING in the same style. Sometimes one person leads and the rest follows. Imagine if Picasso was to have sued every other painter who copied his style of Cubism. Unthinkable right? And it is not like in paintings that design is dictated by functionality. You can paint any style you want. Just how many shapes can you make a tablet before you end up with something unusable?
And that was Jobs entire plan, to stop ANYONE else from making a tablet without having to make a device because sooner that could function. Oops, no rectangular screen for you. Rounding of the corners? no no. It would be fine if Jobs had designed the very first tablet or made it unique but the iPad was far from the first and hardly original in its design.
For the average civilian out there, competition is not just a good thing, it is essential. We have seen what happens in IT land without competition. IE and Intel are prime examples. MS did nothing with the browser when they had no competition and Intel just stopped innovating until AMD kicked their asses and forced them to get serious again.
Perhaps what is needed is something kind of law similar to FRAND patents but now for design. The official regoniztion that sometimes function influences design to such a degree that it is silly to award a single design to a single company.
All slab phones will look similar simply because they are a rectangular screen with a speaker, a mic and a button. About the only thing you can change is the font of the logo. Yes, putting a lighted pear symbol on the back is a bit to far but rounded corners? Dimensions? Why not try to trademark a screen resolution and be done with it.
Sometimes the world needs innovators who push things and are filled with fire to get things done. And then the suits need to take over to avoid everyone constantly challenging everyone else to duels. It is the reason diplomacy is done by diplomats, NOT politicians. Diplomats are generally soft spoken individuals who think in decades rather then next weeks poll. And they mostly spend their time trying to downplay the latest politicians gaff. Steve Jobs put Apple in a bad position. Did he really think he was going to fucking bury Android? He did it before and he can do it again? Gosh, someone else said something very similar and HE is a figure of ridicule in IT and especially on this site.
Not everyone is equally good at everything and Apple should just have left this to a suit who knows spreadsheets. The spreadsheet after all shows clearly that copy or not, the galaxy tab is no threat. Why ruin your good name and risk legal battles that could (and have) gone against you when the boring sales figures show that there is no reason to fight. The only reason f
Ten to one this delusional paranoid schizophrenic has absolutely NO problem running closed source OS on closed source hardware put together in China.
But ooooh, the uploader on closed hardware and a closed OS to unknown servers, now that uploader, THAT is the bit to worry about.
You are broadcasting an IP and I can't monitor the glow from your monitor and the radiation of your CPU to read your mind. Booga booga!
Just go hide in a hole and line it with lead. That should keep you safe.
Oh and has been pointed out, the API is open and available, write your own client if you must. Oops, how are you going to make certain the compiler can be trusted?
What always strikes me as funny is how "local" computing was in those days. There are entire countries were people never heard of computer brand X or model Y because they used brand W and model V. Commodore, Amiga, Sinclair, Apple and god knows what else. The Sinclair I seem to reclass was available in Holland but it was the commodore that got used. The BBC even had their own computer! Imagine that, that would be MS-NBC getting into the OS market, you just would not think that was at all likely would you?
It is just amusing to see such local snobbery when a few years later, computing would be "the internet" which is the ultimate global product.
I have to laugh at this because the other side of the story is that once, I thought of this kinda of hardware as an upgrade... god I am old. When you still think of Unix as the new kid on the block, you know the grim reaper can't be far behind.
Who cares for a gold asteroid, we got enough of the stuff, 500 ton of it arriving on the market would only make its true values (practically nothing) even more obvious.
Now how about some rare earth materials? No idea if they exist in asteroids but these materials don't just cost a lot, they are also in low supply and difficult to get at because of environmental concerns. IF, they can be found in space, the mere fact that getting them would break China's gridlock without having to tire up wild life reserves might be worth the high price.
It would be intresting to see the US doing something again. Although to be honest, I got my doubts these guy can pull it off. At least it means money is being spend on doing something rather then on stock swapping. That got to be worth something. If you don't try the impossible when it is impossible, it never becomes possible. Always waiting for the right moment just doesn't work.
It speaks badly of gamers that so many are so totally opposed to the idea of referees and club rules. Every sport has them. Oh wait, what do FPS multiplayer gamers do the moment they got a tiny bit of resources to spend? Oh yeah, set up private servers.
Don't want to play by anyone's rules? Then play alone. Anytime you are in a group, there are rules and if you break them, you are soon kicked out of that group. Doesn't matter whether it is the rule of society, law, a relationship or the soccer association. People need rules. Those who don't are either totally unaware of how life works or complete and utter sociopaths.
Mind you, I am not surprised that a lot of people in this sector don't get it. One of things about Autism is that the victims just don't get social interaction. An autist, functional or not who breaks the rules of society isn't being an asshole, he/she (mostly he because it affects males far more often) just doesn't get the rules or even that their are rules and how they sometimes apply and sometimes do not. Why is it okay to turn the music on hard on friday but not on monday? Why not when someone else in the office is on the phone? Why during a personal call but not a call with an angry client?
"Normal" people get this. Some don't. Some don't because they don't think the rules apply to them and some because they don't "see" the rules.
BUT the rest, when they are trying to do something, just don't want to hassle of dealing with others. We live increadibly close to each other and the only way to cope for most is to pass each other by with the minimum of hassle which means the minimum of interaction. Cause no hassle, suffer no hassle.
Who REALLY wants to share an office with a Touret patient? A train with a loud speaker on the phone? A flight with a crying baby? Would you, if the option exists limit your "group" to people that follow the rules, rules you agree with?
It isn't even really about being an asshole or not. I was once part of a group that exercised together. But we weren't fanatics about it. Nobody watched calories for instance, if only because what is the point in counting how much you burned when you celebrate with a "health" drink that is double the calories? And you need a burger to give you some energy! I have been known to run... walk briskly... stroll... gasping for breath on those running machines with a milkshake in one hand and a burger in the other. But hey, I was of my fat ass. Which counts for something right? But then another co-worker wanted to join for the fun but she was a fanatic about it. She actually followed a strategy instead of picking whatever machine looked the least taxing... not so much in effort in doing the routine as in getting to it from the bar. It didn't work. Our rules, didn't match hers.
I have been in MMORPG guilds as raid leader where I knew if X wanted to come, not to invite Y. Depending on my own mood and those who signed up early, I knew it was going to be either a noob run (actually a lot more fun as leader) or a speed run. And taking along a speed only player on a noob run is hell on earth so, you don't.
People who are incapable of playing outside their own rule set often call others who have their own rule set elitist or assholes. They never see that the problem really is with them. The answer is for the finicky to just play amongst themselves. Don't want rules, then play on an unregulated server. Nobody wants to play there or pay for them? Well, that says something doesn't it? Run your own then, advertise it as a no rules server and enjoy! I guarantee you that within a day, you will have crafted more rules then the UN.
In Holland a child molestor is currently on trial. His major griefance? That people don't appreciate the camera work he put into his video's of him raping kids that he then put on the internet. Serious.
Hij vindt ook dat sommigen met wie hij het materiaal deelde, hem niet genoeg waardeerden voor zijn 'werk'.
He finds that some of who he shared the material with, didn't appreciate him enough for his 'work'.
As the commenter below says, this is how sociopath thinks, see the complete mind fuck of Breivik's testimony this week in Norway. People can get some really strange idea's in their head. Like software wants to be free! Mwahahahaha! I am not insane, the voices tell me I am not!
You are eating someone's shit, breathing someone's farts, eating someone's rotting corpse and drinking someone's pee. Welcome to the wonderful world of nature. (Plants grow on fertilizer (shit), oxygen is the bad breath of plants, meat and plants are dead bodies, and every bit of water has been through someone's digestive track).
Always strikes me as funny that people who would happily pay a fortune for the right to drink from a spring that a bear shat in but refuse to drink tap water that has been filtered and monitored to hell and back. You were made from dirt, eat dirt and will become the dirt in someone elses cycle of life. Enjoy!
Slashdot Mirror
As a Dutch Web Developer I have had jobs and job offers with foreign companies and... they are not what they seemed. In Holland, we get a lot of extra's on top of our salaries. A 100% refund on public transport for instance that isn't (yet) taxed. 370 euro's is the max, for a small country, you can travel quite far with that and of course a subscription also allows you to travel for free on non-work trips. Since the price of a subscription goes down the further you travel, the point where you just buy a free travel pass for the entire country is easily reached and I have had one for years. Remember, that in Socialist Russia, public transport is somewhat usable (well except since the capitalist came into power, 2 years of VVD rules and more breakdowns then in the previous 100 years).
A Dutch salary also includes contributions to unemployment programs, pension, healthcare etc etc. So, if a Dutch person says he get 5k, that is NOT all the money flowing out of the employers bank account to benefit him and society. This is constantly changing because Dutch governments fall down quite a lot and we have had to have coalition governments for decades but it means that a job offer from a US based company and native Dutch one needs careful consideration. It gets especially interesting if the person making the offer hasn't got any experience with the Dutch labor market.
You need to take even more care if as a Dutch person you are thinking of working in the US. Be REALLY careful how the money is going to flow. It is not the same for all US states or even cities but simple things like if you get a house, how is garbage collected? Who pairs for public transport (often doesn't even exist), car, fuel, road charges? How is medical covered? No dutch job advertises with medical coverage because that is standardized. How many paid holidays do you get? How many mandatory holidays? How do you get paid if the company goes bellyup (hint, IN holland your pay is ensured with no fuss, no hazzle, you get your full salaray). How quickly can you be fired (Holland 1 months notice and there are a lot of safeguards for dismissal, not just unfair ones, just saying, we don't need him anymore is not enough).
Add it all up and I have turned down many an English over (for some reason, the English speaking world has really bad labor laws) because it just didn't make any sense. They wanted me to take a pay cut for less security while working more hours. How attractive!
But Americans believe in this system, presumable thinking that one day they too will be rich and they don't want to be paying their wage slaves a decent salary then. The American Dream consists of, if I ever become rich, I want to keep it all, even if I have so much I could never ever spend it and got to take it to the grave with me.
Simply put a 200% tariff on any product and service from a company that has left the US. Bam, instantly every company the ran for a tax heaven has to come back or see its product unable to compete with new local offerings.
As for "essential" products? Simply remove US protection from foreign products. See how MS likes it if it no longer is protected by the US copyright laws.
People forget that we created governments to be powerful opposition to the rich. Government is the one who can answer the question: "You and what army".
Capitalists like the wheeny above seem to think that companies and the rich can do whatever they want and the government and the people just have to sit back and take it. That is only the case if you let weenies run the country.
I am dutch, our politicians are taking the hint and have sold out en-mass to big media by ordering the blocking of The Pirate Bay despite wasting millions on a free internet project.
This means nothing, it is just a load of drivel enacted by politician who have spend the last 2 years one enacting and revoking a 130km/h speed increase, a ban on burka's now canceled again and the privatization off the rail roads now to be reversed and the admittance that the privatization of the post office was a mistake...
It is not like the economy is down the crapper, un-employment is rising and the Euro/EU is a stinking pile of crap or anything.
Be very careful what you wish for when looking at other countries, KPN, which set of the rush for this law is the company that wanted to charge extra for whatsapp recently announced with other mobile operators that they would introduce a limited business only roll out of LTE, just enough to satisfy the license demands so if you pay a premium, own a business and are in the right street, you can have modern tech before the end of the decade. The rest? Get stuffed, we are making to many millions of 3G still.
The real problem for most people is that advertising never ends, it never seems to be enough. For Americans it might just always have been there, I am old enough and European enough there are alternatives. Germany has a very odd mechanic where they seems to show all the ads on one TV station for about half an hour and that is it. Belgium occasionally has one. The BBC has none and Dutch TV didn't have to use any on Sunday so they had to add cartoons to make programs run a full hour. Battle Star Galactica (The original) followed by Bugs Bunny and then the news.
But if you watch some American TV (and may god have mercy on your soul) you will see ads EVERYWHERE, every five minutes, they have popups during the program, on the first seconds as the program comes back on after a commercial block and in the program itself. The logic seems to be that if 1 ad works, a 100 will work even better.
The reasoning when applied to sex (hey, I can't always use car anologies) would be that since your gf likes a small penis inside, she would REALLY like a big one so why not have her fucked by a whale and make her really happy. And then you wonder why she ain't happy, because you just make your gf explode into a thousand gooey bits from being banged by a volkswagen (oh okay, one car analogy) sized penis! HAPPY?
It as as when your gf asks you to spank her, what she means is that she wants you to make her hiny glow a nice pink color. NOT to beat her until she is a thin red paste on the wall and the cops are hauling you away, yet again (and now you know why on /. we use car analogies, because the other kind are just to revealing of the inner workings of the average analogy using slashdotter). There is a line between advanced sex play and first degree murder and there is a line between advertising that works and advertising that doesn't work because there is just to fucking much of it.
People are lazy, that can lead you to believe you can push them and stop until they start to react. The problem is that while people have a great deal of inertia, once they stop moving, they are unstoppable. Once people have started using time-shifting and ad-blockers, you can't get them to stop again. I started using ad blocking because a series of ads just pissed me off enough to take the effort and now all ads are blocks and screw you if your website dies because of it.
I think the real problem is that TV execs don't eat their own dog shit (calling TV food is just to ridiculous) they don't have to sit through their own ads to watch their own content. They don't get just how fucking annoying it gets and the people that stop watching don't show up on their statistics until suddenly, advertising on TV doesn't have as much effect in generating sales. You can see it in the advertising industry, they know they aren't reaching customers anymore but are at a loss of coming up with a solution. There are still viewers but they are the cattle that lack the income/knowledge to go elsewhere, the high income viewers are gone, unreachable. So... MORE ADS! That will get them back!
So basically, you replace 20 seconds of unskippable ads with about 20 minutes of them?
Smart.
Also, saying Green Lantern is crap when saying you watch Transformers a couple of times isn't going to impress anyone. It just says you won't every piece of dog shit shoveled in front of you. That does NOT make you a connoisseur, it just make you a finicky shit eater.
There is a Fox executive not yet ground into Executive Powder who is listening, he is listening to the caching of the cash register as your dollar votes come into the Fox bank account. You voted, in favor! Good for you and you can be sure he is listening and coming up with more ads for you to watch next time.
What has to be remembered is that customer relations is a very young field that is barely researched. For most businesses, they translate a sale to a positive customer experience. It is in reality possible for a customer to use a company time and time again, in fact to totally depend on them and STILL hate its guts. This goes anywhere from users of public transport to haters of big government using government handouts (is that you bankers?) and everything in between.
You buy their product, so they reason you must love them. You don't but how are they supposed to know? Nobody in their offices is going to tell the boss he is an idiot and that you a purchasing customer are hating the product you bought of your own free will with your hard earned money, they would look silly and not be in line for promotion and bonuses.
I have actually had to deal with these kinds of things as an underling, the disconnect is amazing. From transport companies that wanted people to give unfiltered twitter feedback on their home page, to advertising campaigns where the only message to reach the consumer would be that they are paying for ad support for things they hate on a product they have no choice to buy from that company whose prices have gone up (water companies in Europe).
You think some are getting the message but allowing you to skip it... NO THEY ARE NOT GETTING IT. If they got it, the ads wouldn't even be needed to be skipped, they would at most be an optional to the side extra. WHY do you think a company gets it if it thinks it can shove advertising on an already paid for product?
See how much you have been conditioned already? You are like a girl who thinks she found a new age modern man because he only beats her with his bare hands! Just because your new owner doesn't use the whip as often does not mean you are now free slave.
Are you graphic artists really that dense or do you love me so much you want to make sure everybody understands how valid my points are by proving me right?
Maybe you just don't understand the rather simplistic story of how to deal with sales people?
This is not about GIMP or anything else, it is about how YOU allowed YOUR means of an income to come to depend on a single supplier. Others have given other examples. Would you build your loading dock to allow only one model of car? Would you pack your packages so only one package company can deal with them? Would you reshape your body so you can only fit in one airliners seats? Would you change your digestive trackt so that you can only digest McD hamburgers?
No?
It is not up to me or anyone else to provide you alternatives. When you are that depended on a product, you ROLL YOUR OWN. Pixar does, why do you think they support GIMP anyway? Because they don't want THEIR production line to depend on someone elses. THAT is why companies support Opensource software, why Vavle is looking at Linux despite its tiny marketshare. Because once you are open, someone else doesn't control you.
Back in the days of DOS, there was Blue Isle and the Battle Island series of games. Then MS announced Windows 95 and Blue Isle announced a Windows 95 only game. And then Windows 95 got delayed and the game had to be held back because it could not launch without the OS. Blue Isle had tied themselves to another companies products and so became tied to another companies goals.
iD did not do the same, they launched Quake with both DOS and Windows support. Guess which company did better with there game?
Oh okay, it is not as simple an example as the car example. Car examples are clean and simple but since you are not getting them maybe a game one will strike closer to your heart.
Graphic artists have locked themselves into a company that has shown multiple times to not have the same goals. They can either SHUT THE FUCK up about it OR do something about it. Moan about it while keeping the lockin going on, is just going to result in ridicule.
Ready? Okay, HAHA!
There is an old story I will retell that should serve as a warning for all customers.
Once upon a time, there was a transport company employee charged with replacing a large segment of the companies trucks made by Volvo. The employee, being a bright individual called up a sales clerk from Ford that had been trying to get a foot in the door and asked him to send three Ford trucks for testing. The day the Volvo sales clerk came to make discuss the purchase of new Volvo trucks, these three Ford trucks happened to be parked on the lot. When the trucking company employee saw the Volvo sales clerk glance at them, he said "Yeah, the boss has been looking them, he seems to think they are an alternative worth looking into. But that is for later, lets discuss the deal you were going to offer us".
In another company far far away, an CTO who loved IBM hardware knew it was time to discuss the purchase of new hardware, so he ordered an underling to set up a trial project with HP servers, just to see what the competition was doing. When the IBM man came by he of course showed him the workfloor including the corner where the junior was working on those shiny new HP servers, "Got to give the kids their toys to play with " the CTO told the IBM sales clerk. "Btw, what was the price you were going to ask for again".
But in the dark and damp lands of Mordor, a very different tale was playing out. There the CTO invited the MS and Abobe sales clerk and proudly showed them how his entire business depended completely on their software product and how not only did they need the software to work flawlessly or they would be bankrupt in seconds, all the staff could only use the latest software and their customers demanded that they use the latest software. "BTW", The CTO asked, "what was that deal you wanted me to sign in my own blood again while bending over"? And there was much rejoicing among the Tribes of MS and Abobe, for they knew exactly who was calling the shots. One lockin to rule them all and in Eula bind them. For the users of MS and Abobe where greedy and feeble minded and could not break free of the spell.
---
Really, this is nothing new. In the land of NAS and control systems, this is par de course. You let a supplier control you, control you they will. Want to break free? Good luck, your company needs the new version, license or risk being unable to produce so you hand them the cash and lock yourself in just a little bit more.
Not a SINGLE Photoshop user will invest in his own freedom by making sure there are alternative methods to do his production. They will grind their teeth buy the latest version and invest yet more to make sure their production is entirely locked into Adobe clutches.
Cue countless protests about how there are no alternatives... no, there are none because any who dares to try is ridiculed for not instantly producting a 100% compatible product for free because freedom should be free of effort and cost.
You gave Adobe the control, enjoy it.
It is not as if you are alone. Governments often dictate that procurement must be regulated, meaning that once a procurement contract has been done, all interest in customer satisfaction goes out the window because the contract is fixed, can't be ended and renewal depends solely on the price offered (not charged) so fuck you peon.
I seen it to often in other industries, entire production line depended on one type of machine, fired your own maintenance team and anyone who could switch them out with other hardware. Goes, the "extra" charges sure went up a lot didn't they? Suddenly maintenance must be done by their certified team, at weekend charges.
Lockin, avoid it or pay the price.
My cat responds with an innocent expression if I ask if it ate the salmon I was preparing. My kitten looks proud stating "Yes I eated it, it was delicious, got some more". Same as kids, kids don't know how to lie when they are young. Then they learn it badly (lying when the evidence is right there) and then they learn deception.
A lot of this research is problematic. A fish eagle is known to be able to do all it needs to do in a day in few minutes, it is such an effective hunter. So... is it a dumb or smart animal? Evolution gave it the traits it does not need to hunt in packs or track a prey or wait in ambush. Is it very stupid or very smart?
Is a cat opening a door for which it does not have the appendage and for which it has no training by its parents as smart as a toddler who is both younger and older depending on how you count?
Do otters who carry a stone for the next meal plan? Is storing a prey, planning?
For that matter, I have spend weekends without doing anything really intelligent. Just eating and sleeping and my cats did it better. Intelligence is hard to tell if you don't need to display it.
Because all do the same thing for the same reason. Leaving your country to seek a fortune elsewhere is also the sign of a quitter, a person looking for an easy way out, or someone who did something so terrible back home, he has to run. Cue bleeding hearts sheltering war criminals because they can't see that someone fleeing prosecution might actually being prosecuted for the right reasons.
That is not even counting the ones who were trafficked with promises of a job and end up a sex-worker, those people make good entrepreneurs as well you think?
The idea that a very wide label as immigrant means every person labeled by it is the same is insane. It is the core of racism, doesn't matter if it is so called positive or negative racism.
The big question in the case is who picked a fight with who. The person who called the police and campaigned on behalf of a black homeless person against a white sheriff OR the self proclaimed gangsta nigga (his own nickname). I wouldn't trust the bleeding heart side with this one, they also make much that the HISPANIC guy lived in a gated community, but so did the black guy. Apparently white guy in gated community, racist. Black guy in gated community, victim.
I think it is even odds that Travor wanted to go crazy n* on the dudes as, thinking he could scare him off. In holland a group of youth immigrants formed a gang called the "crazy foreigners" operating on the same method, trying intimidation, knowing any white victim would be wary of standing up to them for fear of racist charges.
We shall see in the court case what both sides claim really happened.
And the price was only the US getting its ass kicked and the death of hundreds of young men fighting a superior force in obsolete planes. But hey, it is not you doing the dying is it, just someone elses son.
WW2 saw the US hopelessly unprepared and it wasn't the fat cats who paid the price for it. Afterwards, the US promised itself to never be caught unprepared again. Preparing your national defense for what is happening now is silly, it takes decades to prepare and nobody can predict even 5 years ahead. War is wasteful, being prepared so war can be avoided only seems wasteful. Until you get it wrong.
https://www.google.nl/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=massive+security+hole+ruby&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&channel=suggest#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&safe=off&client=opera&hs=7y2&rls=en&channel=suggest&q=security+hole+rails&oq=security+hole+rails&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_l=serp.3...11909.11909.2.12120.1.1.0.0.0.0.171.171.0j1.1.0...0.0.M8PkiUtwDPo&psj=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&fp=81cfb75de4601914&biw=1725&bih=1037
READ the snippet google gives for the first result.
Back then, every rails fan tried to wave the massive by default security flaw as being unimportant. This PHP thing only affects those running CGI which is pretty are and BAM, it is a massive flaw and the end of the world.
Pieces of software and hardware are sometimes design with the wrong assumptions, it happens. Follow the industries best practices, or become a fanboy and burry your head in the sand when it is your pipelines turn to be ridiculed.
This guy is nothing but a fat rich cat looking to skip on paying taxes. So. now he sees what happens when everyone does that. You might think the IRS is a though one to deal with but they got to respect the law. In fantasy lands like Belize, not so much.
This guy deserves no sympathy, only ridicule.
That has always been the risk when the police take a more pro-active approach. There is a famous story (real or not) about a US fire chief who managed to create laws in his city that forced the installation of sprinkler installations in residential homes. It worked and it made the fire service pro-active rather then re-active. They prevented fires, rather then fighting fires. Since a fire is a bad thing, this is desirable.
Would you want the army to focus on fighting wars or on preventing wars?
What about the cops, should they just look away UNTIL a crime has happened or act to prevent one if they can?
Holland recently had Queens day, the day we prove we are even below Americans in our reference for a whore who doesn't pay taxes on a million Euro income and still claims every benefit intended for poor people. But that aside, the Mayor of Amsterdam decided that no large parties would be allowed in the city center, instead they would be held on the outskirts of the city. It worked, it was a peaceful day. The police (Mayor is head of the police) acted to prevent crime, rather then wait until the shit hit the fan.
BUT in doing so, it labelled EVERY single attendee as a hooligan bound to cause trouble and in need of police control to keep things inline. Silly? Yes, but that is one side of the coin of police acting to prevent things.
Entrapment is the other. We want the police to do the "good" preventing not the bad but where the line is drawn, that is hard to say.
A repeating story is that of the would be murderer by proxy trying to hire a killer, the police being tipped off and posing as a hired killer and the person being arrested. IF the police had ignored it, nothing might have happened. No killer might have shown up and it might have all blown over. On the other hand, something might have happened and would the police then be called out on not having done anything?
You betcha! Often by the same people screaming entrapment.
It is rather well known that the 9/11 attackers were known about but the FBI ignored the warnings. Would the same people screaming conspiracy scream entrapment if the FBI had acted and setup up a trap to capture them? You betcha. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Part of the failing of democracy is that it is power without responsibility. Not of the politicians but of the voters. The average voter thinks nothing (doesn't think at all in many cases) of demanding completely opposite things,at the same time. Having your cake and eat it doesn't even begin to describe not just bankers who want low taxes, no government oversight, strict laws on competitors and welfare for needy banks. You can't have it all except when it comes to voting in a democracy. And it ain't just the super rich.
"The FBI should have acted on warnings before 9/11 and stopped it"
"The FBI shouldn't act on warnings of people planning attacks and stopping them".
Politics ain't a division between left and right, between bleeding hearts and hard-liners, between capitalists and socialists. It is a melting pot of multi-personality disorders were the same voters votes multiple ways on the same issue and expects all of them to heard.
Want to prove me wrong? Prove how a fire-chief insisting on sprinklers to be installed in private homes had saved any lives over a fire-chief who has bravely rescued a single person in the last decade alive while hundreds died in flames? None of the people in private homes with sprinklers needed a daring rescue. The man is a coward! Somewhere a tax payer is arguing just this. For real.
The B-Ark idea was done centuries ago, however it was decided two were needed to get rid of all the undesirables. One was named Australia, the other America.
There they would die an agonizing dead, removed from all culture essential to any human. Who knew the dregs would adapt to do without culture?
They should just embed a microphone, if they hear "ouch", they found life... well... alive up till then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_2
Google now knows my IP. It used to be that if you googled "what is my ip" you had to go to a site that was at the top of the search results. Now the Google answers it for you, god knows how, it must be magic!
Same with conversions, phrase it in natural language and Google answers it for you, rather then forcing you to find a conversion site.
BUT these things are easy. Answering: gosh like I need to knows the thingy for my thingy so I can do thingy... that is a bit harder. It can tell me what my IP is because it knows what I mean with IP. IF however I was a lame artist and was asking what Intellectual Property belonged to me, I could go very confused by thinking those digits belonged to me.
What is stockprice X doing is easy. As long as you can regonize "stockprize" and the ticket ID, you got a simple search. But people don't often search like that outside of commercials. Who cares what the stock price is doing. Most people don't have stocks.
The real problem with search is that A: People often don't know what they are searching for and B: scammers want to get people to visit their website regardless of relevance.
Take "review". It is a nearly useless term to search for when looking for a review. Most sites that come up don't even have a revue. Then their are the endless link spammers so that if you combine search terms, they just show up because they have links to all the terms but not related. "Linux squeezebox" should NOT find pages that discuss a Linux distro and link to a boombox ad. But they do.
And SIRI isn't any better at it. Apart from the fact that it often doesn't understand what you are saying, it also can't combine languages. As a dutch person, I am used to use english for the produkt but dutch for "price/prijs" so that I get the product but with dutch sellers. It often works, SIRI can't grasp the concept.
If search is going to improve, we need a company that is going to brutally cull pages that break searches. All the link farms, GONE. Simply not indexed. Any review site, each review page ONLY carries one keyword, the product reviewed, not indexed for all the other link spam. No review yet available for this product? Then it MUST carry the keyword "NO_REVIEW".
And that is never going to happen because keywords WERE invented to accomplish this and they just became a spammers tool. Google is a spammers tool and the moment another search engine becomes a worthy SEO target, it too will become a spammers tool.
The only way to solve it is to let humans review each found site and brutally cull it. A single keyword wrong? A single suspect link? BANNED, the entire domain, for at least a year. Only then might SEO die.
They might not hurt each other but they hurt everyone else in the process. This has shown how the future might turn out, with everyone using patents to keep the other side from competing and ultimately making sure that any new comer either has to buy a lot of patents OR has to spend a fortune licensing up front of any actual earnings making it again impossible for a small startup to get started.
Steve Jobs showed himself to be a really bad apple, in human society, you got to learn not to take afront of every slight against you. Imagine that every tiny little mishap in traffic was to be settled in court, we would all be in court for eternity. Often you just have to let it go and accept that shit happens. The supposed sameness of the iPad and Galaxy Tab devices showed just how far Jobs was gone. There is only so much you can do with design and Apple was NOT itself original with either its design OR in spending effort on designing the packaging. Hell, if you buy higher end products, you would have long since gotten used to the fact that not all products come in brows boxes with white styrofoam.
That they looked similar? Yes? Have you looked at other items where design plays a role? In most industries this is not just accpeted, historians and art experts point to specific periods when EVERYONE did EVERYTHING in the same style. Sometimes one person leads and the rest follows. Imagine if Picasso was to have sued every other painter who copied his style of Cubism. Unthinkable right? And it is not like in paintings that design is dictated by functionality. You can paint any style you want. Just how many shapes can you make a tablet before you end up with something unusable?
And that was Jobs entire plan, to stop ANYONE else from making a tablet without having to make a device because sooner that could function. Oops, no rectangular screen for you. Rounding of the corners? no no. It would be fine if Jobs had designed the very first tablet or made it unique but the iPad was far from the first and hardly original in its design.
For the average civilian out there, competition is not just a good thing, it is essential. We have seen what happens in IT land without competition. IE and Intel are prime examples. MS did nothing with the browser when they had no competition and Intel just stopped innovating until AMD kicked their asses and forced them to get serious again.
Perhaps what is needed is something kind of law similar to FRAND patents but now for design. The official regoniztion that sometimes function influences design to such a degree that it is silly to award a single design to a single company.
All slab phones will look similar simply because they are a rectangular screen with a speaker, a mic and a button. About the only thing you can change is the font of the logo. Yes, putting a lighted pear symbol on the back is a bit to far but rounded corners? Dimensions? Why not try to trademark a screen resolution and be done with it.
Sometimes the world needs innovators who push things and are filled with fire to get things done. And then the suits need to take over to avoid everyone constantly challenging everyone else to duels. It is the reason diplomacy is done by diplomats, NOT politicians. Diplomats are generally soft spoken individuals who think in decades rather then next weeks poll. And they mostly spend their time trying to downplay the latest politicians gaff. Steve Jobs put Apple in a bad position. Did he really think he was going to fucking bury Android? He did it before and he can do it again? Gosh, someone else said something very similar and HE is a figure of ridicule in IT and especially on this site.
Not everyone is equally good at everything and Apple should just have left this to a suit who knows spreadsheets. The spreadsheet after all shows clearly that copy or not, the galaxy tab is no threat. Why ruin your good name and risk legal battles that could (and have) gone against you when the boring sales figures show that there is no reason to fight. The only reason f
Ten to one this delusional paranoid schizophrenic has absolutely NO problem running closed source OS on closed source hardware put together in China.
But ooooh, the uploader on closed hardware and a closed OS to unknown servers, now that uploader, THAT is the bit to worry about.
You are broadcasting an IP and I can't monitor the glow from your monitor and the radiation of your CPU to read your mind. Booga booga!
Just go hide in a hole and line it with lead. That should keep you safe.
Oh and has been pointed out, the API is open and available, write your own client if you must. Oops, how are you going to make certain the compiler can be trusted?
What always strikes me as funny is how "local" computing was in those days. There are entire countries were people never heard of computer brand X or model Y because they used brand W and model V. Commodore, Amiga, Sinclair, Apple and god knows what else. The Sinclair I seem to reclass was available in Holland but it was the commodore that got used. The BBC even had their own computer! Imagine that, that would be MS-NBC getting into the OS market, you just would not think that was at all likely would you?
It is just amusing to see such local snobbery when a few years later, computing would be "the internet" which is the ultimate global product.
I have to laugh at this because the other side of the story is that once, I thought of this kinda of hardware as an upgrade... god I am old. When you still think of Unix as the new kid on the block, you know the grim reaper can't be far behind.
Who cares for a gold asteroid, we got enough of the stuff, 500 ton of it arriving on the market would only make its true values (practically nothing) even more obvious.
Now how about some rare earth materials? No idea if they exist in asteroids but these materials don't just cost a lot, they are also in low supply and difficult to get at because of environmental concerns. IF, they can be found in space, the mere fact that getting them would break China's gridlock without having to tire up wild life reserves might be worth the high price.
It would be intresting to see the US doing something again. Although to be honest, I got my doubts these guy can pull it off. At least it means money is being spend on doing something rather then on stock swapping. That got to be worth something. If you don't try the impossible when it is impossible, it never becomes possible. Always waiting for the right moment just doesn't work.
It speaks badly of gamers that so many are so totally opposed to the idea of referees and club rules. Every sport has them. Oh wait, what do FPS multiplayer gamers do the moment they got a tiny bit of resources to spend? Oh yeah, set up private servers.
Don't want to play by anyone's rules? Then play alone. Anytime you are in a group, there are rules and if you break them, you are soon kicked out of that group. Doesn't matter whether it is the rule of society, law, a relationship or the soccer association. People need rules. Those who don't are either totally unaware of how life works or complete and utter sociopaths.
Mind you, I am not surprised that a lot of people in this sector don't get it. One of things about Autism is that the victims just don't get social interaction. An autist, functional or not who breaks the rules of society isn't being an asshole, he/she (mostly he because it affects males far more often) just doesn't get the rules or even that their are rules and how they sometimes apply and sometimes do not. Why is it okay to turn the music on hard on friday but not on monday? Why not when someone else in the office is on the phone? Why during a personal call but not a call with an angry client?
"Normal" people get this. Some don't. Some don't because they don't think the rules apply to them and some because they don't "see" the rules.
BUT the rest, when they are trying to do something, just don't want to hassle of dealing with others. We live increadibly close to each other and the only way to cope for most is to pass each other by with the minimum of hassle which means the minimum of interaction. Cause no hassle, suffer no hassle.
Who REALLY wants to share an office with a Touret patient? A train with a loud speaker on the phone? A flight with a crying baby? Would you, if the option exists limit your "group" to people that follow the rules, rules you agree with?
It isn't even really about being an asshole or not. I was once part of a group that exercised together. But we weren't fanatics about it. Nobody watched calories for instance, if only because what is the point in counting how much you burned when you celebrate with a "health" drink that is double the calories? And you need a burger to give you some energy! I have been known to run... walk briskly... stroll... gasping for breath on those running machines with a milkshake in one hand and a burger in the other. But hey, I was of my fat ass. Which counts for something right? But then another co-worker wanted to join for the fun but she was a fanatic about it. She actually followed a strategy instead of picking whatever machine looked the least taxing... not so much in effort in doing the routine as in getting to it from the bar. It didn't work. Our rules, didn't match hers.
I have been in MMORPG guilds as raid leader where I knew if X wanted to come, not to invite Y. Depending on my own mood and those who signed up early, I knew it was going to be either a noob run (actually a lot more fun as leader) or a speed run. And taking along a speed only player on a noob run is hell on earth so, you don't.
People who are incapable of playing outside their own rule set often call others who have their own rule set elitist or assholes. They never see that the problem really is with them. The answer is for the finicky to just play amongst themselves. Don't want rules, then play on an unregulated server. Nobody wants to play there or pay for them? Well, that says something doesn't it? Run your own then, advertise it as a no rules server and enjoy! I guarantee you that within a day, you will have crafted more rules then the UN.
In Holland a child molestor is currently on trial. His major griefance? That people don't appreciate the camera work he put into his video's of him raping kids that he then put on the internet. Serious.
In dutch http://nos.nl/artikel/357245-robert-m-toont-twee-gezichten.html but hey, all the cool kids speak dutch!
Hij vindt ook dat sommigen met wie hij het materiaal deelde, hem niet genoeg waardeerden voor zijn 'werk'.
He finds that some of who he shared the material with, didn't appreciate him enough for his 'work'.
As the commenter below says, this is how sociopath thinks, see the complete mind fuck of Breivik's testimony this week in Norway. People can get some really strange idea's in their head. Like software wants to be free! Mwahahahaha! I am not insane, the voices tell me I am not!
You are eating someone's shit, breathing someone's farts, eating someone's rotting corpse and drinking someone's pee. Welcome to the wonderful world of nature. (Plants grow on fertilizer (shit), oxygen is the bad breath of plants, meat and plants are dead bodies, and every bit of water has been through someone's digestive track).
Always strikes me as funny that people who would happily pay a fortune for the right to drink from a spring that a bear shat in but refuse to drink tap water that has been filtered and monitored to hell and back. You were made from dirt, eat dirt and will become the dirt in someone elses cycle of life. Enjoy!