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I have ghostery installed,a plugin for all browsers that blocks not ads themselves so much as all these trackers.
This particular site isn't even that bad, mostly all the social crap that tends to get everywhere like the scum it is. But there are worse sites.
Do I mind being tracked? Not really no... the main reason I installed ghostery was to get rid of all those annoying scripts that make the net just a little bit slower with each and everyone of them.
But what about the free content I consume? Once the internet was a non-profit area and frankly I think it was better for it. Using google becomes more and more a pain as companies that try to sell something I don't want outrank information sites. I feel like I finally got rid of the deluge of paper ads on my doormat everyday and now it insteads gets delivered by the truck load through the wires in my home. I do not have an answer as to how sites like Slashdot would survive without advertising but frankly, I don't care. The internet would adapt, go back to privately run sites on private funds for the hell of it and only post articles that are intresting, not just to attract the most eyeballs.
Advertisers keep pushing the limits and users are pushing back. If one day we users push back so hard that advertisers starve to dead (preverably a miserable and painful one) then... MISSION FUCKING ACCOMPLISHED!
In Holland we had the referendum, the voters (across all parties) rejected it and it got passed regardless. The D66 which claims to want more referundum couldn't ditch the results of the first referendum ever in Hollland fast enough. Democracy sucks for politicians because those silly voters just don't know how to vote correctly.
It must be a highly annoying job. You as a politician clearly know what is right but can the plebs see it? No!
It isn't just copyright, see the whole EU debate, the Greek debt crisis, immigration. Democracy by a lot of politicians is seen as some holy grail that will make everything alright. Pity it allows grubby mean spirited selfish people to vote who are tired of paying through the nose for content, tired of constantly paying for more EU nations who are corrupt as hell and whose only contribution is a new load of ciminals, tired of paying for Greece a country that hasn't contributed a single penny to the EU in its entire history, tired of boat loads of immigrants who don't want to live among their own culture anymore for whatever reason and then try to establish the same culture in their new country.
Not nice? Not PC? Well, that is how the common voter thinks, don't like any of those things? Then you don't like democracy. Democracy ain't good, democracy is the dictatorship of the common man and the common man ain't all that nice.
Either you have full democractic rule and risk the majority voting to re-open the gas chambers OR you have ACTA and the EU constitution. Choose wisely... oops there is that democracy thing again, better hope everyone chooses wisely, or at least a majority. And sucks to be you if the majority thinks different.
It took them years to even acknowledge the existence of the rest of the world let alone cater for non-credit card users and when they finally did, they used one of the most maligned payment providers in existence.
Also, a dollar per song, how does that translate to a euro per song? Where are all the cost savings going? And am I buying a license (argued by the content industry so I can't sell the tracks 2nd hand) or a copy (argued by the content industry since this means they have to pay artists less? And what about breakage fees? Why are artists selling through iTunes still charged breakage fees (not brokage fees, breakage as in broken LP/CD's).
If you think iTunes is a good reasonable offering, you have been taken it up the ass as a good little consumer a bit to long. Give your sphincter a rest and grow a backbone.
iTunes is a ripoff, it is basically saying, we pass the gigantic cost savings on to the credit card companies, the content industry and Apple and the customer and the artist can go screw themselves, after all, they are used to getting screwed.
So your protection against the holocaust would be to have refused to do fill in the census report as a Jew. Yeah, that would have worked really well.
The defense against tyranny is not to hide from lists but to prevent tyrans from rising to power. Basically you are saying "I am not on any lists (as far as you know) so I am safe". First they came for the people on the list and you did nothing but vote for the tyrant since he offered you a tax cut.
Fight for a better future so that if your data chances hands, it can't make a difference because those involved would go to jail.
I have done this myself, early on I had the choice between going MS or Unix at a large ISP and I went the Unix route and never looked back. A few years ago I worked at a small sub division of a large telecom that was merged back in and saw the writing on the wall and quit.
The people who say you got to roll with things are those with no backbone who are suffering from the economy. Not going to make friends with this but if you are worried about your job in this economy, then you fucking suck at it. Granted, i do live in Holland whose economy isn't as down the drain as the one in the US but I have been getting recruitment offers from the US and US companies. They still are looking for skilled people.
Mind you, I don't know if the OP is one. He doesn't actually mention what the hell his job is? He might be an accountant or a painter or a jet pilot.
For me, it is easy, I am a web developer and the intresting stuff is being done with open source tools. If you want a steady non-intresting job on projects that take years for the government where the latest craze is those new fangled animated gif's, then you go ASP but for startups and the like, the opensource LAMP stack just beats everything else on performance, costs, availability of knowledge and personel and general acceptance. But is this guy suitable for that kind of job?
There are still jobs out there. In my experience, what you need most is to hit the right note with the interview. That has nothing to do with something you can measure objectively. I submitted a piece of code where I tried something out. I have had responses ranging from "you suck" to "this is wonderful, just what we are looking for". Job hunting is like dating, if you can't handle being utterly humiliated and have your ego ground in the dirt while they laugh at your penis... eh cv... then you just ain't suited for it. Stick to that go-no-where job, swallow it all and lash out against anyone who dares to break free (see a lot of the above posts for examples).
Or ask yourself, where is the cutting edge considered old hat, has opensource been accepted for over a decade as not so much an option but the norm and people care about results not certificates or fud? Then go web development. Granted, if you are old office tech, it will take some adjustment.
If you believe in something you got to fight for it, or be just another sheep. Nobody said it was going to be easy, just because you refuse to bend in one direction doesn't mean you don't have to bend at all. Look further afield for jobs where MS is not even dirty name anymore but rather just the maker of a rather bad browser a small percentage of customers still use. (One intresting result I found with one niche webshop is that while MS browsers were still in the high percentage for visitors, for actual buyers, it didn't even reach into the double digits and then it was version 9, I have been developing the opinion that people still on IE6 and such are also not likely to buy costly racing bikes, odd that eh?)
The majority of human beings have managed just fine without dating sites, that means the norm is not to use them, therefor if you use them, you are outside the norm.
And since you are outside the norm, you should probably examine why. Not being able to meet someone during normal social activities is outside the norm. Dare I take a guess that you are not someone who is socially active? That is not within the norm, knowing this and accepting therefor that it limits your choice and who you should look for will make you much more successful.
It is no doubt sexist but girls who reach puberty are very attractive to a large age range of men. Boys of the same age, only to Catholic priests. For women, it is looks that count. For men, it is success, power, confidence. Not saying that all women are gold diggers only after a wallet but confidence is something you gain overtime, with success, with power, with age. And when you couldn't get a 18yr old at 18, why would you date that girl who is now 40 when she has been used up and now desperate when with your status gain, you can get a nice young girl?
Dating sites reflect this. I have worked on two and the database clearly showed that the women tended to be more experienced (read: many failed relationships) and fed up with it and now trying to find something more longterm. Generally these women show little self-awareness of why they are this situation, 30 something with just as many boyfriends and nothing permanent.
Men are slightly more realistic but to negative. A lot of 30yr old men who now feel they have power/money to pretend to be confident are really hateful to women who they believe are now only interested because of their cash.
When these two groups meet, mis-communication is rife, a lot of men are simply not prepared to accept that a women their own age has more experience, they don't want second hand goods or even 30th hand goods. The women on the other hand don't quite get why men they turned down for years are not falling over themselves like all the guys that came before. They don't see that the guys they had before were only there for the sex and nothing else.
The men might not have much experience with relationships but neither do the women. Being used as a booty call is after all not a relationship. The only thing these women are good at is failed relationships. Think of it like this: If you try a race circuit a thousand time and crash everytime at the first corner you are NOT more experienced at racing at that circuit then someone who never even been there. It is a complex concept but an essential one if you want to understand the dating scene. A one-night stand when he never calls again does NOT teach you how to make a relationship work. In fact, if that is your history for the last decade, it seems likely you will never learn.
A lot of people approach online-dating and other dating aids with this screwed up mind set, men who hate all women because they never had the guts so ask them out, girls who been used all their life thinking it is the fault of men that none of them saw how wonderful a person she really is, people with expectation that just don't exist in this world.
Real romances? Try this, do a poll among married couples for valentine gifts and on a dating site. The results might be very different, the married couples are realistic, the dating site will have stuff that even Spielberg couldn't make up.
It is true after all, normal people don't need dating sites. That does NOT mean you will only find freaks on dating sites. It means if you are using one, you are a freak. Accept this, take a long hard look in the mirror and ask yourself: "What is wrong with me that I have to use this". It is not wrong to use dating sites but if you think you are perfect when you have to use one... you are in for a disappointment.
Utility services? I PAY for my utilities, and the phone companies especially charged through the nose. You PAY, you are the customer. You get it for free, you are the product.
So unless you propose paying a monthly fee and a usage fee and a signup fee and a rental fee for your facebook usage, shut the fuck up with your idiotic notion that you companies got to provide you with free services and not make a single penny of you.
And if you don't like facebook, DON'T use it. It is not hard, I am not using it right now and still have time to insult your feeble self-entitled mind.
If people need daily standups to know what is going on, then your communication sucks. But hey, you first forced them to do this then when they realized that the person doing their performance review thinks that these wastes of their time are a good idea, they don't say "yes sir, your ideas suck and you are a moron sir!" but agree with your forced policy.
Good anecdote.
Really, if you need standups to get problems solved... you got far far bigger issues. One reason I often hear for bringing up blockers during a standup is that it is faster to get a reply that way... THINK (if your feeble mind can) about that... isn't that a RED FLAG that the communication in your company is messed up because if you do NOT expose a problem in front of everyone, it doesn't get solved?
I have seen this happen, the only way to get things done was to air them in front off everyone so the slacker had no option not to do it... that is great. That is like saying "going over someone's head" is a good policy to get things done as well. Have experienced this too, the only way to get a sysadmin to do anything is to go straight to the boss and get him to lean on him... is that going to be part of your management style too?
FIX you goddamn internal communication so that problems can be reported WHEN they occur and not hours if not a day later and are dealt with ASAP not hours or a day later.
Daily standups are a fix for bad management, fix management and you don't need them anymore.
You don't get the point of the standup meeting. Why is it standup, it is to keep the meeting short, and to the point. Where otherwise it will be an hour long sit down meeting once a week.
The daily meeting has other advantages. 1. It puts everyone in the same room at the same time and they know what is going on daily. This can stop duplication of effort as sometimes you get multiple requirements across many people but the work is actually nearly the same.
Guess your team lead sucks, if your need daily meetings to avoid two people working on the same thing you need to stop having so many open lines to your developers. This is dealing with the symtoms of your messed up management rather then dealing with the course of it.
2. It helps focus on what your tasks are for the day. Let's face it, there are days that you slack off on not because you don't have enough work but because your daily goal wasn't there. A quick meeting where you need to state your goal keeps you honest and helps you know your goal is for the day.
Your fired. Really, you need to do this to just do your fucking job? Here's some motivation for you, your paycheck.
3. It is informal and no notes, nothing gets fixed in stone, allows for more of an honest assessment.
So... you are kept more honest as long as their is no evidence? And what is the point of communication if nobody records it. What if something is forgotten? The entire point of holding a meeting and communicating is to get data to the surface, record it so action can be taken without relying on peoples faint memories.
4. Team lead is informed on what is going on, and when pressed by management he has the answer.
He already should be knowing, if your teamlead doesn't know this throughout the day, he isn't doing his job. If he thinks he can know for his entire team with just a few lines what is going on, he has no idea what is going on.
5. Simple problems can get solved easier. After the meeting people's schedules can disconnect and it could take days to answer a simple question.
Again, just dealing with the results of your messed up company structure, questions should not take days to answer. Deal with the causes not the symptoms.
6. It keeps your team together.
Oh boy... you work together all day, in the same building often the same room. Just how much hugging do you need before you start crying?
I have done standups both as a teamlead and as a developer and in both cases they suck. I like to think of myself as a pretty good teamlead but I work by adjusting my monitoring to the skills of the individual develop and their current task. Some people work great if you just let them be and others need to be "unstuck" if they are working on something complex or be kept on track as they tend to wander off. One size of leadership definitely does not suit all.
So, as a team lead I KNOW already what the fuck everyone else is doing and during standups, especially in this companies that like to share and get everyone from cross-projects to come join the circle I find myself listening to stuff I already know or don't give a rats ass about.
As a developer, this is even worse, I know what I did, I know what I am going to do, I know what my issues are... why do I need to know this for a dozen or more other people as well? And if I get an issue, I deal with it then and there not wait for a standup where I can only speak for a short time and not have any papers or screenshots handy. Do people ever get an issue resolved from a standup they didn't already address before it? Then get you to a class on communication ASAP.
But what if you got some problem that someone else might know a solution too... THIS NEVER HAPPENS. In some dweebs fantasy land this daily standups should result in brainstorms where one guys problem is solved by someone else by magic... the rules of the standup (short) prohibit anyone detailing a problem they are having and inviting others to think about a better way to solve it... and basic nature of the adult male does the rest. Have you EVER said during a meeting or standup "gosh, I have this project and it asks me to do X and I wondered if any of you could think with me on this"? Yes, you did? Then hand over you man card right now, you balls will be collected later.
Standups only have room for blocks, not requests for brainstorms. Brainstorms should be done while comfortable and with plenty of data available and a place to write things down (another fucking idiotic thing about standing up, how are you supposed to make good readable notes, oh wait most never bother with that, so everything is forgotten and you got to mention it again after the standup).
Management often feels the need to be kept informed the problem is that they want all the information without all the information. Either a meeting only contains abstract monkey babble that confuses developers, or it becomes techno babble that confuses anyone who ever had a date. Often "when will it be finished" really means "I want it finished yesterday and don't bother me about the laws of causality".
Ideally, a good team lead can solve all this. In Dutch the term is "meewerkend voorman" basically the person on a shopfloor who both works and manages it. It is most common in blue collar type jobs but that is just because white collar jobs tend to require anyone doing management to loose any other usable set of skills.
He doesn't have to be the best coder, and with this I mean that he can code fairly well but he is not a die hard code monkey like a John Carmack from Id, but he knows the job and has done it himself. He does know about management but is not a manager rather he is a coder who then became a developer (a coder writes code, a developer creates an application) and has then learned how to do the development part of coding for other people. The talking to management, the assignment of priorities, the overview of the entire project, the dangers of regression, why security is an issue, etc etc. He then sits as a barrier and a filter between management (the customer) and his team.
Think of it as building a brick house. A foreman doesn't need to be the best brick layer ever and a brick layer he is managing might well be far better then him but if he can lay a good wall himself then he is all the better at supervising this. Because he knows about the job at hand, he can alter the amount of supervising depending
We have to use laws which never catch all the exceptions because we can't behave. I don't care if you have the right or not, if you want to watch porn in a public area, try not to be so fucking obvious about it. And if you are in a public area, you don't have to stare at what everyone else is doing.
There are now laws about which side of the sidewalk you got to walk on but it is just so much easier if basic left/right rules are followed. But I am a free individual, yes and so are the thousands around you and if everyone wanted to do their own thing their own way regardless of anyone else it would be a gigantic fucking mess.
The sad thing is that this asshole who can't just select a quiet area where there is no traffic to watch his porn is providing the fuel needed to put filters in place, he is showing that unfiltered access is to much for some to handle.
A lot of the laws that guide our lives were introduced because of assholes like this. Why do you think there are anti-smoking laws? Because for decades SOME smokers were unable to curb their own behavior. Not all smokers, I have worked with smokers who long before any of the laws were even discussed did NOT smoke if they gave ME a lift in THEIR car. But a percentage could simply not function as a member of society, smoked where ever they wanted regardless of other people and BAM, anti-smoking laws.
Positive discrimination laws are the same, you might not see the need but there are enough employers who really would filter on race/sex/etc if they could get away with it AND did it when there were no laws about it.
The best way to loose freedom is to totally abuse it at the cost of everyone else. But my freedom! Is not a battle cry that works when you pissed off the majority. Democracy is just the dictatorship of the masses, real freedom... well that is this guy watching porn in the kiddy book area whacking off. Someone somewhere will see his freedom as overriding everyone elses and be the cause of restricted freedoms.
So... you are saying this as a person who drooled while he watched these actors play super humans as part of a unique American culture (The rest of the world does not have super-hero style comics) and elected actors in the highest positions in government.
Kim Jong and his family are insane, but American movie goers have been worshipping this kind of grandstanding for decades... what is sadder? Kim Jong's delusions or MacGuyver, A-Team, Stallone and god knows who else going into Vietnam to show that the US didn't really get its ass kicked out (because throwing your helicopters overboard to make space for more fleeing soldiers eh, retreating (at as great a speed as possible) makes perfect sense) and one man can win the war after all even if it is only on the silver screen.
Got the feeling that Americans making fun of North Korean leaders is like two insane persons in a napoleon outfit laughing at each other since they know the other must be insane since they are the real thing.
Ubisoft knows its DRM is unpopular as hell, so they got to make a server and they take the choice of how to do it that has them deny their paying customer access to bought games for a very long period of time due to no other fault by the customer then being stupid enough to buy a Ubisoft game.
Do they simply not care that Ubisoft has now given an entire new argument against DRM? Not just that servers will go down at the end of live of a game or due to a attack or due to a bug or due to an accident but due to any server movement or other server maintenance?
The difference between faith and science is simple, faith only has stories, science you can keep drilling down to facts if the story is not enough.
I once wrote a story about a mouse in a factory we had visited at school, presenting the factory as an old mouse explaining it to a young. It wasn't a hundred percent scientific but it did not lie. I got a perfect score both for writing and from the subject class itself. The teacher explained to another student who complained that my story did not go as deep as their dry report by stating that anyone who read my story and wanted to do dig deeper could.
Religion is a story that tells you to stop digging further. No why's or but's. This is it, believe!
Just because you cannot dig further in the story science tells doesn't make it the end. You CAN research as far as you want in science papers and learn everything you want about string theory or quantum mechanics or micro-biology or nanotech or whatever else you can think of.
If you go to a science museum it might only tell the story to a certain level but they would be happy to refer you to places where you can find out the rest. If you go to that creationist exhibit (stop calling it a museum) they do NOT do the same. They don't answer questions, just tell you, these are the facts as we tell you, swallow them whole and stop asking.
An example? The liver... how does it actually work? I know what it does but not how it does it. You could say I take its functioning on faith but I am pretty confident doctors know how it works and I that if I wanted I could go to the icky bits section of a library and research it... that is a LOT different then the religous view that "it is magic" end of story.
The debate is not about DNS or filesharing or freedom of speech or right to privacy or US law being enforced beyond its borders.
The basic discussion should be about whether a business model that benefits a few should be protected against the interests of they many AND on whether society needs commercial art.
When cars were first introduced, the horse industry did not just accept it, this led to the extreme that in England a car had to be preceded by a man on foot carrying a red flag. Because cars were so dangerous. Of course horses being insane animals never bolted and never killed anyone (they killed many) and weren't a severe pollution factor (what do horses do to busy roads and this is not one horse on a parade but thousands and thousands of horses all day long).
As a society we can certainly see the benefit of one industry and its business models (if you travel through Amsterdam and can look away from the red light district for just one second, you might notice quite a few old houses with stables build in, places you could park your horse and have it taken care off) being replaced by a new one. Business selling food stuffs were replaced by chemists selling petrol and later of course gas stations.
Would we tolerate it today if Electric cars had to have special measures to be tolerated by the petrol industry... gosh... didn't we have a few stories about how electric cars were to silent and need special laws? Being silent was never a problem for Rolls Royce, why all of a sudden would it apply to electric cars which really aren't all that silent?
So, we had the car anology, now for the content industry. With digital media, it has become possible to share files with no loss in quality and thanks to the internet that file can be shared by anyone. In itself, sharing content is nothing new. When the Dutch traded with Japan, the Japanese copied many a Dutch text book and boosted that countries tech level with all the western advances. This was an extreem example but before the invention of the book press, the only way to get copies of a book was for other people then the author to make copies. Painstakingly copying them by hand one letter at a time. It was the only way to pass on knowledge and before writing was available, passing the stories on by word of mouth was the default... none of this would have been possible with current copyright laws... NOR has the need for this ceased.
The BBC itself has violated encouraged copyright violation when it asked for people who had recorded old TV episodes to give them back for restoration because the BBC had DESTROYED the nation cultural heritage! But the content industry at the time of those recordings was arguing in court that recording programs was a copyright violation. HANG the BBC for using these blatant criminals!
--- That doesn't work does it... but it shows just how silly copyright laws are, the ones we have on the books now are there so content presses (CD's, sheet music, etc) can do so without anyone else being able to do it as well for a specific piece of content. It is NOT about protecting artists who have done just fine for thousands of years without. Current copyright was for a long time used to pay the author a small fee, then have the right to print that work for decades with no balance between what the author was paid and the printing company made from it (copyright started with sheet music, not recorded music).
As with the car, new tech has come along which made a business model based on old tech obsolete. It would have been trivial to force a law that forced car makers to only include small gastanks so that the inns that serviced horses could continue to do business. We didn't because the advance of technology was considered more important then the lively hood of thousands upon thousands of people.
We could have mandated that electricity is delivered by battery only to your house so the coalman would still have a route to run... we didn't.
So why are we so intent on keeping the music industry distribut
My own ISP Ziggo fought a courtcase with XS4ALL and lost. KPN is the owner of XS4ALL but they operate independtly. KPN and T-Mobile only got a request from Brein (Brain, although in dutch it is more the word for thought process then the lump of meat) and KPN basically said, after some deliberation and back-tracking that they wouldn't respond to a voluntary request.
KPN and T-Mobile are by now means heroes but have realized that doing such a thing without a court order is opening a can of worms. KPN is the formers monopolist goverment landline company, so they have experience with common carrier dillema's and are a bit to big to be easily intimidated. Go ahead, sue KPN, they will see you in court for the next century. Not because they are nice but simply because they know their business.
Ziggo currently has a page up explaining they have to comply for now with the order but are fighting it.
This is a real dillema in Holland, it was one of the countries that fought to get a Freedom on the Internet thing going and donated a large sum of money to it, just as this story breaks. The current government really doesn't need this right now as a right wing government is being beaten in the polls by a very left wing party who is now according to some, the largest party if elections were to be held. And this is not Labour left wing, this is real hardcore left, left of even UNIONS! *sound of American readers crapping their pants*
Nobody right now wants to be associated with Brein restricting the peoples access to their bread and circusses. The SP (the upcoming protest party) is against the ending of the tax on blank CD's that goes to artists. You might think this is a bad thing but the tax is fairly light. It is the content industry that wants it torn down IN exchange for removing the right to download and make personal copies etc etc. The SP is saying, "no, we keep the low tax on an outdated format and won't make any changes to the copyright laws in Holland until the content industry chances". And these guys are winning right now, oh not just on these policies but the old parties hardly want to give them even more ammo to fight on.
Mostly right now the situation is that Brein is making everyone in power extremely uncomfortable. It doesn't help their case that a famous dutch singer supposedly went bankrupt (awh, poor artists) and then it was found he had millions stashed away through tax freud... doesn't help the image of the struggling artist. The right wing government one success story with the middle class is the cutting of benefits to artists, the starving artist angle of Brein isn't being swallowed anymore by anyone. The right hates them for living on handouts and the left hates them for wanting to restrict freedoms to feed the rich... caught between a rock and a hard place.
The piratebay story has been playing for a long time and this is by no means the end of it. For now, the politicians have tried to ignore it but the problem with that is that it keeps getting bigger and bigger... all it needs is the right story of a minister promoting freedom on the internet and the link to said minister doing nothing to stop said freedom in his own country when there isn't a soccer match on TV.
Mega factories... one of them focuses on Coca-Cola. One canning factory in the US and a bottling plant in Italy. The canning factory is run by less then a dozen people who put out about 1 million cans per person during a shift. That is a LOT of manufacturing but not a lot of jobs. Somewhere a lot of money is being earned but this massive factory is not keeping an entire city fed through job creation.
Meanwhile the Italian plant is very inefficient, far more workers in every shot... it still makes a profit and at the end of the shift more workers take a pay-packet home to their family.
So... how do you count manufacturing power? For that matter, where does a Dell computer count as being manufactured?
Statistics are great ways for lying. If 99% of a product is made in China and then 1% of combining the parts is done in the US, statistics tend to claim the entire product as being produced in the US. Car makers have used this to avoid tariffs for a long time but it is just statistical bullshit.
Yes, a lot of stuff is still made in the US and the west, stuff like shampoo and toothpaste because moving a factory that is making a profit often makes no sense and such low value items don't justify shipping. But they are highly automated and just don't employ enough people.
The dutch wanna-be tech site tweakers.net ran this figure a day or two ago... and you had fanboy after fanboy proudly proclaiming that 1 million sales to vendors showed just how this was the end of Android and iPhone and the full victory of MS and Windows Phone 7... ignoring quite easily that Android has 700.000 activations a DAY and that the latest iPhone does something like 4 million in a weekend.
MS market share on the mobile market has always been and continues to be laughable but being outsold by a Linux phone that has no marketting and isn't available in the west? That is just beyond sad, it might even be time for shareholders to start questioning if Nokia is upholding its duty as a publicly traded company to maximize shareholder value.
Missing from this story is that MS is funding Nokia for quite a lot of money, I believe it came down to about 150 or so dollars per sold MS phone IS they actually sold 1 million (185 million subsidy).
Some MS fanboys already admit that 7 and 7.5 are already duds but surely 8 will be the lucky numbers (actually a far higher version number but who can keep track when failure comes so fast and reliable) but without any real claims.
The sad part is that MS doing so badly isn't helping the market any, competion is good for the customer and right now there just isn't any from MS.
Elop should just be fired by the shareholders, how can you claim with a straight face that your phone doesn't sell through the fault of the shops when the phone you won't put in the shops outsells it by a gigantic margin?
If any Nokia shares are still in private hands, I would be highly suprised if this story won't have a tail (shares owned by MS and MS friends don't count of course).
The A-team had stories like this all time, small nice family company being muscled out of business by big evil company.
The US constitution provisions for protection of the individual are NOT as many think to get the guilty off but to protect the average innocent citizen from being bullied into submission.
The principle is simple, if I want to stop you, I can have you arrested and your crops will rot on your farm, your will unable to supply your customers, you will run out of cash and bam, I can buy your farm cheap... I don't need to have you found guilty as long as I can keep you under arrest for long enough. There are plenty of variants on this, in corrupt countriest the way to get a bribe as a custom officer is to hold up the goods of a company for inspection until they either pay or go out of business for being unable to deliver.
This is even done on a country scale. Romania did not like that The Netherlands is blocking Romania becoming part of the EU free labor traffic, they claim this is racist (Romania is one of the worsed human rights abusers in the EU with their treatment of gypsies) and so they blocked dutch product at the border trying to put pressure on the Dutch government. Didn't really work since it only re-inforced the view that Romania is not yet ready to fully join the EU.
But the tactic itself remains, get the police to smash your opponents goods during a search and force them out of business.
Megaupload itself is shady enough but then the content industry has many accusations against it as well, just that he who pays the piper determines who ends up in court or not. How many settlements has the content industry agreed to to avoid being found guilty in open court? Quite a few in the last couple of decades.
There are lots of filesharing methods, the error Megaupload made was trying to go semi-legit... artists had publicly voiced their support for a new scheme Megaupload wanted to introduce... coincidence that the very next week they are put out of operation by the rent-a-cop FBI? Maybe and Saddam considering selling oil in Euro's just a bit before being removed from power had nothing to do with it... first Iraq war was over the conquering and subjegation of another nation and he was left in power unharmed. He considers undermining the dollar and BAM, he swings.
And gosh, all the oil nations that consider dealing in euro's are on the danger list to... how amazing a coincidence.
You can destroy someone in the courts without ever needing to find them guilty. But if history has shown us anything, their will be 10 megauploads to take this ones place and they will be harder to take down. And they will not bother trying to go legit or try to work with artists. They will just copy all and damn the rest. Want to download files right now and not deal with filetubes with endless vapor ware? Go russian. I tried to find some old ebooks, go west and it all leads to overpriced book sellers, go russian and you find entire libraries with no popups, no spam, no search bars, just simple downloads. Because nobody in Russia gives a fuck. If the FBI tried the same as they did in New Zealand their officers would come back in body bags and asking the former KGB to investigate would be very ironic indeed.
They took down napster which led to the demise of cutemx on which anime was shared... and all that happened is that you now got anime torrent sites that are run so smoothly they release automatic updates and actually have an rating system telling if there is a better version out there for series 10-20 years old (torrents for new stuff are easy but finding a very old series with 20-30+ seeders and only leeching... that is class).
It is like stomping ants, only these don't just come back in greater number, they come back stronger and fiercer... and if I am a typical person, their users come back a little bit more reluctant to buy from the RIAA/MPAA every again. It ain't just being cheap anymore, now it is a case of principle!
The UK still likes to think of itself as a powerful country but it has a debt crisis that is worse then the Greek are facing while their spending is far higher and with a "need/want" to defend pieces of land on the other side of the globe. Yes, the Falkland conflict is back and the UK just had to sell of half its fleet but don't worry, they shall never be slaves or something.
The UK believed for a long time that the country side need not be ruined by efficient farms, the real food production could be shifted offshore and manufacturing followed soon after. The country that started the industrial revolution (according to the brits and who is going to doubt them) is now an industrial reject. Does it really matter if a sailing nation has its port cranes and ships made in China? No, surely not, all those workers can find different jobs, in service industries... any day now... jobs are bound to arrive in Manchester and Liverpool to replace those dirty smelly jobs with nice burger flipping and insurance sellling jobs... just give it a decade or two more, they already been waiting for half a century so a bit more can't hurt.
The economy is like a jenga puzzle with a time delay build in, so you start pulling blocks and think, wow I can remove whole sections and the tower doesn't fall over so it must be okay... and then the time delay kicks in and BOOM, it all comes crumbling down.
Take the Apple/Foxconn boycott discussion below, some posters actually excuse Apple for doing this because there are no factories left in the west that can do this kind of production... they might be right... so they are defending outsourcing as the right thing to do because outsourcing ripped production capacity that once existed from the west... godwin be damned but the nazi's put jews in ghetto's and then used the fact that jews lived in ghetto's as justification for the holocaust.
To far? The same story ALSO had people supporting Apple by saying that American workers no longer had the skills for that type of work... so you remove the jobs and then claim that since no Americans are doing those jobs, they can't do them anymore... NICE!
The UK still invents stuff but if someone then wants to produce it, China is the place to go and what is produced in China is copied in China. The top talent certainly still exists but the support base is gone. It can still be found in isolated places, that metal shop that can produce any spare part just from looking at the broken parts. That painter who can restore a 500 year old house... I seen them work. They are old men, old men working alone because nobody young takes it up anymore. But these are the kind of people that once could have produced the first steam engines, or build rocket engines from scratch. The Space Shuttle had plenty of production line work, just with workers who through the years became really good at their individual tasks. Now they are gone. Some retired, some finding other work but their skills are lost and no new kids are replacing the old farts, learning on the job.
The problem is that the economy is to fragile and small changes take to long to show their effect to leave it to the market. Or for that matter to politicians who can only see to the next election. There is a reason high speed trains were neither a commerical NOR a political project but rather the work of civil engineers. Goverment workers who could see beyond the next quarter and the next election and look for the long term benefits.
Leave it up to business or the politicians and you get Amtrak and British Rail... both disasters. A businessman asks"does it make a profit next yet" and public rail is about how it benefits the entire country (make the workforce more mobile, relieve congestion on the roads) not pure profit margins. The politician asks "if we delay maintence now, can I offer a tax cut to my voters" and that happens then for 2 decades until people start dying.
Move the factory and you can not longer produce locally, the workers will loose the skills and kids will seek
If that was true, then the only real users of telescope (those spying on their neighbours 16 year old daughter) would be seeing that the moonlandings occured on a pure pristine and squishy moon before said moons were a twinkle in the mailman's eye.
Everyday flowers are send around the world by airfreight... and last time I checked buying a dutch flower in the USA was not as expensive as buying a moon rock.
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I have ghostery installed,a plugin for all browsers that blocks not ads themselves so much as all these trackers.
This particular site isn't even that bad, mostly all the social crap that tends to get everywhere like the scum it is. But there are worse sites.
Do I mind being tracked? Not really no... the main reason I installed ghostery was to get rid of all those annoying scripts that make the net just a little bit slower with each and everyone of them.
But what about the free content I consume? Once the internet was a non-profit area and frankly I think it was better for it. Using google becomes more and more a pain as companies that try to sell something I don't want outrank information sites. I feel like I finally got rid of the deluge of paper ads on my doormat everyday and now it insteads gets delivered by the truck load through the wires in my home. I do not have an answer as to how sites like Slashdot would survive without advertising but frankly, I don't care. The internet would adapt, go back to privately run sites on private funds for the hell of it and only post articles that are intresting, not just to attract the most eyeballs.
Advertisers keep pushing the limits and users are pushing back. If one day we users push back so hard that advertisers starve to dead (preverably a miserable and painful one) then... MISSION FUCKING ACCOMPLISHED!
In Holland we had the referendum, the voters (across all parties) rejected it and it got passed regardless. The D66 which claims to want more referundum couldn't ditch the results of the first referendum ever in Hollland fast enough. Democracy sucks for politicians because those silly voters just don't know how to vote correctly.
It must be a highly annoying job. You as a politician clearly know what is right but can the plebs see it? No!
It isn't just copyright, see the whole EU debate, the Greek debt crisis, immigration. Democracy by a lot of politicians is seen as some holy grail that will make everything alright. Pity it allows grubby mean spirited selfish people to vote who are tired of paying through the nose for content, tired of constantly paying for more EU nations who are corrupt as hell and whose only contribution is a new load of ciminals, tired of paying for Greece a country that hasn't contributed a single penny to the EU in its entire history, tired of boat loads of immigrants who don't want to live among their own culture anymore for whatever reason and then try to establish the same culture in their new country.
Not nice? Not PC? Well, that is how the common voter thinks, don't like any of those things? Then you don't like democracy. Democracy ain't good, democracy is the dictatorship of the common man and the common man ain't all that nice.
Either you have full democractic rule and risk the majority voting to re-open the gas chambers OR you have ACTA and the EU constitution. Choose wisely... oops there is that democracy thing again, better hope everyone chooses wisely, or at least a majority. And sucks to be you if the majority thinks different.
It took them years to even acknowledge the existence of the rest of the world let alone cater for non-credit card users and when they finally did, they used one of the most maligned payment providers in existence.
Also, a dollar per song, how does that translate to a euro per song? Where are all the cost savings going? And am I buying a license (argued by the content industry so I can't sell the tracks 2nd hand) or a copy (argued by the content industry since this means they have to pay artists less? And what about breakage fees? Why are artists selling through iTunes still charged breakage fees (not brokage fees, breakage as in broken LP/CD's).
If you think iTunes is a good reasonable offering, you have been taken it up the ass as a good little consumer a bit to long. Give your sphincter a rest and grow a backbone.
iTunes is a ripoff, it is basically saying, we pass the gigantic cost savings on to the credit card companies, the content industry and Apple and the customer and the artist can go screw themselves, after all, they are used to getting screwed.
So your protection against the holocaust would be to have refused to do fill in the census report as a Jew. Yeah, that would have worked really well.
The defense against tyranny is not to hide from lists but to prevent tyrans from rising to power. Basically you are saying "I am not on any lists (as far as you know) so I am safe". First they came for the people on the list and you did nothing but vote for the tyrant since he offered you a tax cut.
Fight for a better future so that if your data chances hands, it can't make a difference because those involved would go to jail.
I have done this myself, early on I had the choice between going MS or Unix at a large ISP and I went the Unix route and never looked back. A few years ago I worked at a small sub division of a large telecom that was merged back in and saw the writing on the wall and quit.
The people who say you got to roll with things are those with no backbone who are suffering from the economy. Not going to make friends with this but if you are worried about your job in this economy, then you fucking suck at it. Granted, i do live in Holland whose economy isn't as down the drain as the one in the US but I have been getting recruitment offers from the US and US companies. They still are looking for skilled people.
Mind you, I don't know if the OP is one. He doesn't actually mention what the hell his job is? He might be an accountant or a painter or a jet pilot.
For me, it is easy, I am a web developer and the intresting stuff is being done with open source tools. If you want a steady non-intresting job on projects that take years for the government where the latest craze is those new fangled animated gif's, then you go ASP but for startups and the like, the opensource LAMP stack just beats everything else on performance, costs, availability of knowledge and personel and general acceptance. But is this guy suitable for that kind of job?
There are still jobs out there. In my experience, what you need most is to hit the right note with the interview. That has nothing to do with something you can measure objectively. I submitted a piece of code where I tried something out. I have had responses ranging from "you suck" to "this is wonderful, just what we are looking for". Job hunting is like dating, if you can't handle being utterly humiliated and have your ego ground in the dirt while they laugh at your penis... eh cv... then you just ain't suited for it. Stick to that go-no-where job, swallow it all and lash out against anyone who dares to break free (see a lot of the above posts for examples).
Or ask yourself, where is the cutting edge considered old hat, has opensource been accepted for over a decade as not so much an option but the norm and people care about results not certificates or fud? Then go web development. Granted, if you are old office tech, it will take some adjustment.
If you believe in something you got to fight for it, or be just another sheep. Nobody said it was going to be easy, just because you refuse to bend in one direction doesn't mean you don't have to bend at all. Look further afield for jobs where MS is not even dirty name anymore but rather just the maker of a rather bad browser a small percentage of customers still use. (One intresting result I found with one niche webshop is that while MS browsers were still in the high percentage for visitors, for actual buyers, it didn't even reach into the double digits and then it was version 9, I have been developing the opinion that people still on IE6 and such are also not likely to buy costly racing bikes, odd that eh?)
The majority of human beings have managed just fine without dating sites, that means the norm is not to use them, therefor if you use them, you are outside the norm.
And since you are outside the norm, you should probably examine why. Not being able to meet someone during normal social activities is outside the norm. Dare I take a guess that you are not someone who is socially active? That is not within the norm, knowing this and accepting therefor that it limits your choice and who you should look for will make you much more successful.
Only on slashdot would a guy complain about finding easy sex.
It is no doubt sexist but girls who reach puberty are very attractive to a large age range of men. Boys of the same age, only to Catholic priests. For women, it is looks that count. For men, it is success, power, confidence. Not saying that all women are gold diggers only after a wallet but confidence is something you gain overtime, with success, with power, with age. And when you couldn't get a 18yr old at 18, why would you date that girl who is now 40 when she has been used up and now desperate when with your status gain, you can get a nice young girl?
Dating sites reflect this. I have worked on two and the database clearly showed that the women tended to be more experienced (read: many failed relationships) and fed up with it and now trying to find something more longterm. Generally these women show little self-awareness of why they are this situation, 30 something with just as many boyfriends and nothing permanent.
Men are slightly more realistic but to negative. A lot of 30yr old men who now feel they have power/money to pretend to be confident are really hateful to women who they believe are now only interested because of their cash.
When these two groups meet, mis-communication is rife, a lot of men are simply not prepared to accept that a women their own age has more experience, they don't want second hand goods or even 30th hand goods. The women on the other hand don't quite get why men they turned down for years are not falling over themselves like all the guys that came before. They don't see that the guys they had before were only there for the sex and nothing else.
The men might not have much experience with relationships but neither do the women. Being used as a booty call is after all not a relationship. The only thing these women are good at is failed relationships. Think of it like this: If you try a race circuit a thousand time and crash everytime at the first corner you are NOT more experienced at racing at that circuit then someone who never even been there. It is a complex concept but an essential one if you want to understand the dating scene. A one-night stand when he never calls again does NOT teach you how to make a relationship work. In fact, if that is your history for the last decade, it seems likely you will never learn.
A lot of people approach online-dating and other dating aids with this screwed up mind set, men who hate all women because they never had the guts so ask them out, girls who been used all their life thinking it is the fault of men that none of them saw how wonderful a person she really is, people with expectation that just don't exist in this world.
Real romances? Try this, do a poll among married couples for valentine gifts and on a dating site. The results might be very different, the married couples are realistic, the dating site will have stuff that even Spielberg couldn't make up.
It is true after all, normal people don't need dating sites. That does NOT mean you will only find freaks on dating sites. It means if you are using one, you are a freak. Accept this, take a long hard look in the mirror and ask yourself: "What is wrong with me that I have to use this". It is not wrong to use dating sites but if you think you are perfect when you have to use one... you are in for a disappointment.
Utility services? I PAY for my utilities, and the phone companies especially charged through the nose. You PAY, you are the customer. You get it for free, you are the product.
So unless you propose paying a monthly fee and a usage fee and a signup fee and a rental fee for your facebook usage, shut the fuck up with your idiotic notion that you companies got to provide you with free services and not make a single penny of you.
And if you don't like facebook, DON'T use it. It is not hard, I am not using it right now and still have time to insult your feeble self-entitled mind.
If people need daily standups to know what is going on, then your communication sucks. But hey, you first forced them to do this then when they realized that the person doing their performance review thinks that these wastes of their time are a good idea, they don't say "yes sir, your ideas suck and you are a moron sir!" but agree with your forced policy.
Good anecdote.
Really, if you need standups to get problems solved... you got far far bigger issues. One reason I often hear for bringing up blockers during a standup is that it is faster to get a reply that way... THINK (if your feeble mind can) about that... isn't that a RED FLAG that the communication in your company is messed up because if you do NOT expose a problem in front of everyone, it doesn't get solved?
I have seen this happen, the only way to get things done was to air them in front off everyone so the slacker had no option not to do it... that is great. That is like saying "going over someone's head" is a good policy to get things done as well. Have experienced this too, the only way to get a sysadmin to do anything is to go straight to the boss and get him to lean on him... is that going to be part of your management style too?
FIX you goddamn internal communication so that problems can be reported WHEN they occur and not hours if not a day later and are dealt with ASAP not hours or a day later.
Daily standups are a fix for bad management, fix management and you don't need them anymore.
You don't get the point of the standup meeting. Why is it standup, it is to keep the meeting short, and to the point. Where otherwise it will be an hour long sit down meeting once a week.
The daily meeting has other advantages.
1. It puts everyone in the same room at the same time and they know what is going on daily. This can stop duplication of effort as sometimes you get multiple requirements across many people but the work is actually nearly the same.
Guess your team lead sucks, if your need daily meetings to avoid two people working on the same thing you need to stop having so many open lines to your developers. This is dealing with the symtoms of your messed up management rather then dealing with the course of it.
2. It helps focus on what your tasks are for the day. Let's face it, there are days that you slack off on not because you don't have enough work but because your daily goal wasn't there. A quick meeting where you need to state your goal keeps you honest and helps you know your goal is for the day.
Your fired. Really, you need to do this to just do your fucking job? Here's some motivation for you, your paycheck.
3. It is informal and no notes, nothing gets fixed in stone, allows for more of an honest assessment.
So... you are kept more honest as long as their is no evidence? And what is the point of communication if nobody records it. What if something is forgotten? The entire point of holding a meeting and communicating is to get data to the surface, record it so action can be taken without relying on peoples faint memories.
4. Team lead is informed on what is going on, and when pressed by management he has the answer.
He already should be knowing, if your teamlead doesn't know this throughout the day, he isn't doing his job. If he thinks he can know for his entire team with just a few lines what is going on, he has no idea what is going on.
5. Simple problems can get solved easier. After the meeting people's schedules can disconnect and it could take days to answer a simple question.
Again, just dealing with the results of your messed up company structure, questions should not take days to answer. Deal with the causes not the symptoms.
6. It keeps your team together.
Oh boy... you work together all day, in the same building often the same room. Just how much hugging do you need before you start crying?
I have done standups both as a teamlead and as a developer and in both cases they suck. I like to think of myself as a pretty good teamlead but I work by adjusting my monitoring to the skills of the individual develop and their current task. Some people work great if you just let them be and others need to be "unstuck" if they are working on something complex or be kept on track as they tend to wander off. One size of leadership definitely does not suit all.
So, as a team lead I KNOW already what the fuck everyone else is doing and during standups, especially in this companies that like to share and get everyone from cross-projects to come join the circle I find myself listening to stuff I already know or don't give a rats ass about.
As a developer, this is even worse, I know what I did, I know what I am going to do, I know what my issues are... why do I need to know this for a dozen or more other people as well? And if I get an issue, I deal with it then and there not wait for a standup where I can only speak for a short time and not have any papers or screenshots handy. Do people ever get an issue resolved from a standup they didn't already address before it? Then get you to a class on communication ASAP.
But what if you got some problem that someone else might know a solution too... THIS NEVER HAPPENS. In some dweebs fantasy land this daily standups should result in brainstorms where one guys problem is solved by someone else by magic... the rules of the standup (short) prohibit anyone detailing a problem they are having and inviting others to think about a better way to solve it... and basic nature of the adult male does the rest. Have you EVER said during a meeting or standup "gosh, I have this project and it asks me to do X and I wondered if any of you could think with me on this"? Yes, you did? Then hand over you man card right now, you balls will be collected later.
Standups only have room for blocks, not requests for brainstorms. Brainstorms should be done while comfortable and with plenty of data available and a place to write things down (another fucking idiotic thing about standing up, how are you supposed to make good readable notes, oh wait most never bother with that, so everything is forgotten and you got to mention it again after the standup).
Management often feels the need to be kept informed the problem is that they want all the information without all the information. Either a meeting only contains abstract monkey babble that confuses developers, or it becomes techno babble that confuses anyone who ever had a date. Often "when will it be finished" really means "I want it finished yesterday and don't bother me about the laws of causality".
Ideally, a good team lead can solve all this. In Dutch the term is "meewerkend voorman" basically the person on a shopfloor who both works and manages it. It is most common in blue collar type jobs but that is just because white collar jobs tend to require anyone doing management to loose any other usable set of skills.
He doesn't have to be the best coder, and with this I mean that he can code fairly well but he is not a die hard code monkey like a John Carmack from Id, but he knows the job and has done it himself. He does know about management but is not a manager rather he is a coder who then became a developer (a coder writes code, a developer creates an application) and has then learned how to do the development part of coding for other people. The talking to management, the assignment of priorities, the overview of the entire project, the dangers of regression, why security is an issue, etc etc. He then sits as a barrier and a filter between management (the customer) and his team.
Think of it as building a brick house. A foreman doesn't need to be the best brick layer ever and a brick layer he is managing might well be far better then him but if he can lay a good wall himself then he is all the better at supervising this. Because he knows about the job at hand, he can alter the amount of supervising depending
We have to use laws which never catch all the exceptions because we can't behave. I don't care if you have the right or not, if you want to watch porn in a public area, try not to be so fucking obvious about it. And if you are in a public area, you don't have to stare at what everyone else is doing.
There are now laws about which side of the sidewalk you got to walk on but it is just so much easier if basic left/right rules are followed. But I am a free individual, yes and so are the thousands around you and if everyone wanted to do their own thing their own way regardless of anyone else it would be a gigantic fucking mess.
The sad thing is that this asshole who can't just select a quiet area where there is no traffic to watch his porn is providing the fuel needed to put filters in place, he is showing that unfiltered access is to much for some to handle.
A lot of the laws that guide our lives were introduced because of assholes like this. Why do you think there are anti-smoking laws? Because for decades SOME smokers were unable to curb their own behavior. Not all smokers, I have worked with smokers who long before any of the laws were even discussed did NOT smoke if they gave ME a lift in THEIR car. But a percentage could simply not function as a member of society, smoked where ever they wanted regardless of other people and BAM, anti-smoking laws.
Positive discrimination laws are the same, you might not see the need but there are enough employers who really would filter on race/sex/etc if they could get away with it AND did it when there were no laws about it.
The best way to loose freedom is to totally abuse it at the cost of everyone else. But my freedom! Is not a battle cry that works when you pissed off the majority. Democracy is just the dictatorship of the masses, real freedom... well that is this guy watching porn in the kiddy book area whacking off. Someone somewhere will see his freedom as overriding everyone elses and be the cause of restricted freedoms.
So... you are saying this as a person who drooled while he watched these actors play super humans as part of a unique American culture (The rest of the world does not have super-hero style comics) and elected actors in the highest positions in government.
Kim Jong and his family are insane, but American movie goers have been worshipping this kind of grandstanding for decades... what is sadder? Kim Jong's delusions or MacGuyver, A-Team, Stallone and god knows who else going into Vietnam to show that the US didn't really get its ass kicked out (because throwing your helicopters overboard to make space for more fleeing soldiers eh, retreating (at as great a speed as possible) makes perfect sense) and one man can win the war after all even if it is only on the silver screen.
Got the feeling that Americans making fun of North Korean leaders is like two insane persons in a napoleon outfit laughing at each other since they know the other must be insane since they are the real thing.
Ubisoft knows its DRM is unpopular as hell, so they got to make a server and they take the choice of how to do it that has them deny their paying customer access to bought games for a very long period of time due to no other fault by the customer then being stupid enough to buy a Ubisoft game.
Do they simply not care that Ubisoft has now given an entire new argument against DRM? Not just that servers will go down at the end of live of a game or due to a attack or due to a bug or due to an accident but due to any server movement or other server maintenance?
The difference between faith and science is simple, faith only has stories, science you can keep drilling down to facts if the story is not enough.
I once wrote a story about a mouse in a factory we had visited at school, presenting the factory as an old mouse explaining it to a young. It wasn't a hundred percent scientific but it did not lie. I got a perfect score both for writing and from the subject class itself. The teacher explained to another student who complained that my story did not go as deep as their dry report by stating that anyone who read my story and wanted to do dig deeper could.
Religion is a story that tells you to stop digging further. No why's or but's. This is it, believe!
Just because you cannot dig further in the story science tells doesn't make it the end. You CAN research as far as you want in science papers and learn everything you want about string theory or quantum mechanics or micro-biology or nanotech or whatever else you can think of.
If you go to a science museum it might only tell the story to a certain level but they would be happy to refer you to places where you can find out the rest. If you go to that creationist exhibit (stop calling it a museum) they do NOT do the same. They don't answer questions, just tell you, these are the facts as we tell you, swallow them whole and stop asking.
An example? The liver... how does it actually work? I know what it does but not how it does it. You could say I take its functioning on faith but I am pretty confident doctors know how it works and I that if I wanted I could go to the icky bits section of a library and research it... that is a LOT different then the religous view that "it is magic" end of story.
The debate is not about DNS or filesharing or freedom of speech or right to privacy or US law being enforced beyond its borders.
The basic discussion should be about whether a business model that benefits a few should be protected against the interests of they many AND on whether society needs commercial art.
When cars were first introduced, the horse industry did not just accept it, this led to the extreme that in England a car had to be preceded by a man on foot carrying a red flag. Because cars were so dangerous. Of course horses being insane animals never bolted and never killed anyone (they killed many) and weren't a severe pollution factor (what do horses do to busy roads and this is not one horse on a parade but thousands and thousands of horses all day long).
As a society we can certainly see the benefit of one industry and its business models (if you travel through Amsterdam and can look away from the red light district for just one second, you might notice quite a few old houses with stables build in, places you could park your horse and have it taken care off) being replaced by a new one. Business selling food stuffs were replaced by chemists selling petrol and later of course gas stations.
Would we tolerate it today if Electric cars had to have special measures to be tolerated by the petrol industry... gosh... didn't we have a few stories about how electric cars were to silent and need special laws? Being silent was never a problem for Rolls Royce, why all of a sudden would it apply to electric cars which really aren't all that silent?
So, we had the car anology, now for the content industry. With digital media, it has become possible to share files with no loss in quality and thanks to the internet that file can be shared by anyone. In itself, sharing content is nothing new. When the Dutch traded with Japan, the Japanese copied many a Dutch text book and boosted that countries tech level with all the western advances. This was an extreem example but before the invention of the book press, the only way to get copies of a book was for other people then the author to make copies. Painstakingly copying them by hand one letter at a time. It was the only way to pass on knowledge and before writing was available, passing the stories on by word of mouth was the default... none of this would have been possible with current copyright laws... NOR has the need for this ceased.
The BBC itself has violated encouraged copyright violation when it asked for people who had recorded old TV episodes to give them back for restoration because the BBC had DESTROYED the nation cultural heritage! But the content industry at the time of those recordings was arguing in court that recording programs was a copyright violation. HANG the BBC for using these blatant criminals!
--- That doesn't work does it... but it shows just how silly copyright laws are, the ones we have on the books now are there so content presses (CD's, sheet music, etc) can do so without anyone else being able to do it as well for a specific piece of content. It is NOT about protecting artists who have done just fine for thousands of years without. Current copyright was for a long time used to pay the author a small fee, then have the right to print that work for decades with no balance between what the author was paid and the printing company made from it (copyright started with sheet music, not recorded music).
As with the car, new tech has come along which made a business model based on old tech obsolete. It would have been trivial to force a law that forced car makers to only include small gastanks so that the inns that serviced horses could continue to do business. We didn't because the advance of technology was considered more important then the lively hood of thousands upon thousands of people.
We could have mandated that electricity is delivered by battery only to your house so the coalman would still have a route to run... we didn't.
So why are we so intent on keeping the music industry distribut
My own ISP Ziggo fought a courtcase with XS4ALL and lost. KPN is the owner of XS4ALL but they operate independtly. KPN and T-Mobile only got a request from Brein (Brain, although in dutch it is more the word for thought process then the lump of meat) and KPN basically said, after some deliberation and back-tracking that they wouldn't respond to a voluntary request.
KPN and T-Mobile are by now means heroes but have realized that doing such a thing without a court order is opening a can of worms. KPN is the formers monopolist goverment landline company, so they have experience with common carrier dillema's and are a bit to big to be easily intimidated. Go ahead, sue KPN, they will see you in court for the next century. Not because they are nice but simply because they know their business.
Ziggo currently has a page up explaining they have to comply for now with the order but are fighting it.
This is a real dillema in Holland, it was one of the countries that fought to get a Freedom on the Internet thing going and donated a large sum of money to it, just as this story breaks. The current government really doesn't need this right now as a right wing government is being beaten in the polls by a very left wing party who is now according to some, the largest party if elections were to be held. And this is not Labour left wing, this is real hardcore left, left of even UNIONS! *sound of American readers crapping their pants*
Nobody right now wants to be associated with Brein restricting the peoples access to their bread and circusses. The SP (the upcoming protest party) is against the ending of the tax on blank CD's that goes to artists. You might think this is a bad thing but the tax is fairly light. It is the content industry that wants it torn down IN exchange for removing the right to download and make personal copies etc etc. The SP is saying, "no, we keep the low tax on an outdated format and won't make any changes to the copyright laws in Holland until the content industry chances". And these guys are winning right now, oh not just on these policies but the old parties hardly want to give them even more ammo to fight on.
Mostly right now the situation is that Brein is making everyone in power extremely uncomfortable. It doesn't help their case that a famous dutch singer supposedly went bankrupt (awh, poor artists) and then it was found he had millions stashed away through tax freud... doesn't help the image of the struggling artist. The right wing government one success story with the middle class is the cutting of benefits to artists, the starving artist angle of Brein isn't being swallowed anymore by anyone. The right hates them for living on handouts and the left hates them for wanting to restrict freedoms to feed the rich... caught between a rock and a hard place.
The piratebay story has been playing for a long time and this is by no means the end of it. For now, the politicians have tried to ignore it but the problem with that is that it keeps getting bigger and bigger... all it needs is the right story of a minister promoting freedom on the internet and the link to said minister doing nothing to stop said freedom in his own country when there isn't a soccer match on TV.
Stay tuned for further developments.
Mega factories... one of them focuses on Coca-Cola. One canning factory in the US and a bottling plant in Italy. The canning factory is run by less then a dozen people who put out about 1 million cans per person during a shift. That is a LOT of manufacturing but not a lot of jobs. Somewhere a lot of money is being earned but this massive factory is not keeping an entire city fed through job creation.
Meanwhile the Italian plant is very inefficient, far more workers in every shot... it still makes a profit and at the end of the shift more workers take a pay-packet home to their family.
So... how do you count manufacturing power? For that matter, where does a Dell computer count as being manufactured?
Statistics are great ways for lying. If 99% of a product is made in China and then 1% of combining the parts is done in the US, statistics tend to claim the entire product as being produced in the US. Car makers have used this to avoid tariffs for a long time but it is just statistical bullshit.
Yes, a lot of stuff is still made in the US and the west, stuff like shampoo and toothpaste because moving a factory that is making a profit often makes no sense and such low value items don't justify shipping. But they are highly automated and just don't employ enough people.
Explain the N9 then, actively crippled by Nokia itself, not for sale in shops in many countries AND still it sells more.
Also, how does webshop push you to another phone then the one you are searching for?
The dutch wanna-be tech site tweakers.net ran this figure a day or two ago... and you had fanboy after fanboy proudly proclaiming that 1 million sales to vendors showed just how this was the end of Android and iPhone and the full victory of MS and Windows Phone 7... ignoring quite easily that Android has 700.000 activations a DAY and that the latest iPhone does something like 4 million in a weekend.
MS market share on the mobile market has always been and continues to be laughable but being outsold by a Linux phone that has no marketting and isn't available in the west? That is just beyond sad, it might even be time for shareholders to start questioning if Nokia is upholding its duty as a publicly traded company to maximize shareholder value.
Missing from this story is that MS is funding Nokia for quite a lot of money, I believe it came down to about 150 or so dollars per sold MS phone IS they actually sold 1 million (185 million subsidy).
Some MS fanboys already admit that 7 and 7.5 are already duds but surely 8 will be the lucky numbers (actually a far higher version number but who can keep track when failure comes so fast and reliable) but without any real claims.
The sad part is that MS doing so badly isn't helping the market any, competion is good for the customer and right now there just isn't any from MS.
Elop should just be fired by the shareholders, how can you claim with a straight face that your phone doesn't sell through the fault of the shops when the phone you won't put in the shops outsells it by a gigantic margin?
If any Nokia shares are still in private hands, I would be highly suprised if this story won't have a tail (shares owned by MS and MS friends don't count of course).
The A-team had stories like this all time, small nice family company being muscled out of business by big evil company.
The US constitution provisions for protection of the individual are NOT as many think to get the guilty off but to protect the average innocent citizen from being bullied into submission.
The principle is simple, if I want to stop you, I can have you arrested and your crops will rot on your farm, your will unable to supply your customers, you will run out of cash and bam, I can buy your farm cheap... I don't need to have you found guilty as long as I can keep you under arrest for long enough. There are plenty of variants on this, in corrupt countriest the way to get a bribe as a custom officer is to hold up the goods of a company for inspection until they either pay or go out of business for being unable to deliver.
This is even done on a country scale. Romania did not like that The Netherlands is blocking Romania becoming part of the EU free labor traffic, they claim this is racist (Romania is one of the worsed human rights abusers in the EU with their treatment of gypsies) and so they blocked dutch product at the border trying to put pressure on the Dutch government. Didn't really work since it only re-inforced the view that Romania is not yet ready to fully join the EU.
But the tactic itself remains, get the police to smash your opponents goods during a search and force them out of business.
Megaupload itself is shady enough but then the content industry has many accusations against it as well, just that he who pays the piper determines who ends up in court or not. How many settlements has the content industry agreed to to avoid being found guilty in open court? Quite a few in the last couple of decades.
There are lots of filesharing methods, the error Megaupload made was trying to go semi-legit... artists had publicly voiced their support for a new scheme Megaupload wanted to introduce... coincidence that the very next week they are put out of operation by the rent-a-cop FBI? Maybe and Saddam considering selling oil in Euro's just a bit before being removed from power had nothing to do with it... first Iraq war was over the conquering and subjegation of another nation and he was left in power unharmed. He considers undermining the dollar and BAM, he swings.
And gosh, all the oil nations that consider dealing in euro's are on the danger list to... how amazing a coincidence.
You can destroy someone in the courts without ever needing to find them guilty. But if history has shown us anything, their will be 10 megauploads to take this ones place and they will be harder to take down. And they will not bother trying to go legit or try to work with artists. They will just copy all and damn the rest. Want to download files right now and not deal with filetubes with endless vapor ware? Go russian. I tried to find some old ebooks, go west and it all leads to overpriced book sellers, go russian and you find entire libraries with no popups, no spam, no search bars, just simple downloads. Because nobody in Russia gives a fuck. If the FBI tried the same as they did in New Zealand their officers would come back in body bags and asking the former KGB to investigate would be very ironic indeed.
They took down napster which led to the demise of cutemx on which anime was shared... and all that happened is that you now got anime torrent sites that are run so smoothly they release automatic updates and actually have an rating system telling if there is a better version out there for series 10-20 years old (torrents for new stuff are easy but finding a very old series with 20-30+ seeders and only leeching... that is class).
It is like stomping ants, only these don't just come back in greater number, they come back stronger and fiercer... and if I am a typical person, their users come back a little bit more reluctant to buy from the RIAA/MPAA every again. It ain't just being cheap anymore, now it is a case of principle!
The UK still likes to think of itself as a powerful country but it has a debt crisis that is worse then the Greek are facing while their spending is far higher and with a "need/want" to defend pieces of land on the other side of the globe. Yes, the Falkland conflict is back and the UK just had to sell of half its fleet but don't worry, they shall never be slaves or something.
The UK believed for a long time that the country side need not be ruined by efficient farms, the real food production could be shifted offshore and manufacturing followed soon after. The country that started the industrial revolution (according to the brits and who is going to doubt them) is now an industrial reject. Does it really matter if a sailing nation has its port cranes and ships made in China? No, surely not, all those workers can find different jobs, in service industries... any day now... jobs are bound to arrive in Manchester and Liverpool to replace those dirty smelly jobs with nice burger flipping and insurance sellling jobs... just give it a decade or two more, they already been waiting for half a century so a bit more can't hurt.
The economy is like a jenga puzzle with a time delay build in, so you start pulling blocks and think, wow I can remove whole sections and the tower doesn't fall over so it must be okay... and then the time delay kicks in and BOOM, it all comes crumbling down.
Take the Apple/Foxconn boycott discussion below, some posters actually excuse Apple for doing this because there are no factories left in the west that can do this kind of production... they might be right... so they are defending outsourcing as the right thing to do because outsourcing ripped production capacity that once existed from the west... godwin be damned but the nazi's put jews in ghetto's and then used the fact that jews lived in ghetto's as justification for the holocaust.
To far? The same story ALSO had people supporting Apple by saying that American workers no longer had the skills for that type of work... so you remove the jobs and then claim that since no Americans are doing those jobs, they can't do them anymore... NICE!
The UK still invents stuff but if someone then wants to produce it, China is the place to go and what is produced in China is copied in China. The top talent certainly still exists but the support base is gone. It can still be found in isolated places, that metal shop that can produce any spare part just from looking at the broken parts. That painter who can restore a 500 year old house... I seen them work. They are old men, old men working alone because nobody young takes it up anymore. But these are the kind of people that once could have produced the first steam engines, or build rocket engines from scratch. The Space Shuttle had plenty of production line work, just with workers who through the years became really good at their individual tasks. Now they are gone. Some retired, some finding other work but their skills are lost and no new kids are replacing the old farts, learning on the job.
The problem is that the economy is to fragile and small changes take to long to show their effect to leave it to the market. Or for that matter to politicians who can only see to the next election. There is a reason high speed trains were neither a commerical NOR a political project but rather the work of civil engineers. Goverment workers who could see beyond the next quarter and the next election and look for the long term benefits.
Leave it up to business or the politicians and you get Amtrak and British Rail... both disasters. A businessman asks"does it make a profit next yet" and public rail is about how it benefits the entire country (make the workforce more mobile, relieve congestion on the roads) not pure profit margins. The politician asks "if we delay maintence now, can I offer a tax cut to my voters" and that happens then for 2 decades until people start dying.
Move the factory and you can not longer produce locally, the workers will loose the skills and kids will seek
If that was true, then the only real users of telescope (those spying on their neighbours 16 year old daughter) would be seeing that the moonlandings occured on a pure pristine and squishy moon before said moons were a twinkle in the mailman's eye.
Everyday flowers are send around the world by airfreight... and last time I checked buying a dutch flower in the USA was not as expensive as buying a moon rock.