The privacy debate is already complex enough without nutters like you joining in. What the hell is a company supposed to do against someone uploading material about someone else? Ban the use of all names and photos? Demand written permission from every person mentioned, every person in any picture?
If other people publish information about you, then it is up to you to stop it, not facebook or any other company. Because that could never work short of shutting down all publishing everywhere.
What I am starting to notice is that when I talk about IT, I am talking about programmers, developers. But others are thinking about tech-support which I personally put closer to janitors and such. And no, I don't think low of janitors, but there is a difference between the person who keeps the building running and those who run it. Of course as a web developer lots of "real" developers consider me barely worth stepping on.
This show is probably funny if you are in a support role and have to deal with the endless clueless users. However if you are a user with a clue and you ever had to deal with clueless tech support not for support but to get them to do their bloody job, it is not so funny. And of course if you are a clueless user, then you will just find it offensive.
I think the show is "young". It tries to hard. It is like a teenager trying to impress girl by wearing ten different aftershaves at once and buying 100 red roses and a corsage the size of the rainforest. It lacks the flow of older series with more experienced staff. It tries so hard to create stereo-type characters that they lack any normality, any humanity that allows you to sympathize with them, see them as real people, not just caricatures.
Take the bit about the shoes that are to small. It is to extreme, size 8 in 5? And yet all her other clothes are normal. Certainly a woman that vain would also be putting herself through hell with other parts of her body? The gag doesn't fit in its make believe world. And the problem with that is that while the gag may be funny, gags should be short. We got it, the shoe is to small. Haha. NEXT! Stand-up comedians who do gags quickly switch subjets, think the late night tv monologues, it makes no sense for Jay Leno to whine about his pinto because he would never own one, so don't dwell on it.
Longer running comedy stories, need to make the world "believable". That is why Porridge and Only Fools and Horses work so well, the characters are not just a bunch of gags in half an hour, but human beings living a life. A funny one, an unlikely one, but "believable".
The IT Crowd tends to be liked by the kinda people who claim "Every geek's favourite non-sci-fi show" despite clear evidence to contrary.
It is funny, but funny is easy. Good lasting comedy, that is very very hard and the IT crowd ain't it. It is closer to that kids show you really really liked and then your grow up and wonder how you could every tolerate it.
Frankly, I am to old to still crack up about how stupid people can be with computers. Yeah yeah, they don't know how to operate a button. I know, the joke has been done. Move on.
Pennies add up. But to be fair, ALL those fake currencies are a huge scam and everyone does it.
MS, Nintendo and Sony, neither of them allow you to buy online with ordinary money, to scam people with left over credit and fake ideas about how much something costs.
At least EA allows you to buy the exact amount of points you need, but still, why the point system at all? Only reason to make you think it costs less then it really does.
Well, ALL my books are DRM free, because I buy them from a bookstore. No batteries needed. And who knows, if I am buried under an exploding volcano, some part of my bookcase might survive and provide researchers form the future with valuable insights in our society.
Future researcher: "God, what a bunch of weirdos".
You live in lala-land. A fantasy land you have constructed in your own head that has nothing to do with the real world.
If you are lucky, then as an average white middle aged guy you will have little to do with the police other then perhaps to have reported some crimes, that go typically unsolved. You think of the police as a bunch of semi-idiots who don't really matter all that much to you. As you get older, you might have your life saved by one of these semi-idiots, but young guys typically aren't self-aware enough to realize that when the shit happens, you need someone else to fix it because you will be a gibbering mess. (Just count the number of people that will protest this, but will be unable to deal with broken traffic lights on a busy intersection).
The "justive" system, of which police and border guards are part are the "parents" of society. And sometimes if you find two kids fighting, you just kick the shit out of both of them so they won't do it again. Bad parenting? Maybe, but law & order ain't so much about the two kids lying bleeding on the floor after some applied justice but about all of society, all the other kids on the playground who might get the idea to start fighting to.
Civilization is very very thin. If you look at places were Law & Order has broken down, most of Africa, New Orleans after Kathrina, then it shows that when people get it in to their head that their are no cops with sticks to beat them down, will get up to all kinds of nastyness. You might argue poverty and all such excuses for theft and robbery, but how does it excuse rape? "Oh I am poor and the system is against me, so I rape someone from my own class?"
But Law & Order ain't subtle or nice. We don't like police "brutality", which is the police doing what we think they should do to other people, not to us. Normally we can go about our business, closely following the rules blindly and being carefully regulated by years of training. Go ahead, drive the wrong side of traffic, walk against the stream of people. When you come to a double door, which door do you take? Wanna bet it is the same door as the side of traffic you drive on? Do you first let people out of the elevator before going in, arrange yourself so the person that has to go highest goes furthest to the back?
These are simple rules that are so ingrained in us, we don't even think about them, that make civilization work. They make it possible for a society to exist with more then two people getting constantly in each others way.
The BBC is airing a docu about India's railway. The people in India seem to have a careless disregard for what we in the west would see as simple basic unbreakable rules. Forget about crossing the lights, they think it is normal to cross the track anyplace, even on stations. Lots of people die and established official procedure is when a person gets killed for the driver and guard to pull the bits out, put them beside the track, drive on and leave a note at the next station that there is a body to collect!
THINK ABOUT IT. THINK ABOUT IT AND HOW WE DO THIS IN THE WEST.
All train traffic is stopped on the section and the emergency services are called and do their work and traffic be damned, first priority is to secure the scene and investigate what happened. And no way in hell is that train driver going to be allowed, let alone expected, to continue the journey. In India trains run with bits of human stuck to them! Law & Order broken down, no, not entirely, it ain't Africa. But a significant part of it doesn't work, the railway police has been unable to stop people from breaking the law and so they no longer can enforce the law and so the law is no longer followed.
And the effect goes further then just a lot of dead people (3000+ in Bombay). You can forget about running faster trains. And how many murders are going unnoticed? Who investigates whether that body was mangled before or after the train hit it? Nobody.
The US has borders that it wishes to control. There a
Steve Jobs and Apple were ALWAYS the same as Microsoft, just not as succesful. They are Musolini to Hitler (Godwin be damned). Both were vicious dictators who had people killed but Musolini just never got the same "success" in his nastyness as his ally. But only a fool would throw himself at the mercy of Musolini.
There are a lot of not so nice companies out there, typically the companies run by single individual for to long yet also a shareholder company. It is a mix of isolation and duty bound greed. Somebody like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson will never ever have been told. "You are wrong". If you rise in power, you tend to get surrounded by yes-men, people who tell you what you want to hear and because most people find that pleasing, you promote them with you so as you rise you leave the nay-sayers behind you.
And since you have share-holders you always have to grow, always find yet one more cent of profit to squeeze out of the company to please your share-holders. Who will then tell you "yes".
The idea that Steve "Disney" Jobs is somehow a savior battling Bill Gates is silly to the extreme. Human beings love to think in heroes vs baddies, and because real heroes are difficult to follow (Stallman) we tend to latch on the first baddie who isn't kicking puppies, at this very moment at least.
The move against Flash had nothing to do with Open vs Closed, but with dependency. Adobe has for years (and still) been extremely bad with support for non-windows platforms, Flash on Mac sucks. Flash on AMD64 linux is absent. BSD? That has hurt Apple, they had a hard time selling their Mac's for years for the lack of flash. Now there product happens to be popular enough they don't need flash, so why should they not use the opportunity to control the supply chain of their products? Remember, Vista failed partially because of the lack of 3rd party drivers. You NEVER want YOUR product to fail because a 3rd party doesn't supply for it. Electric cars face the same dillema, you can design all kinds of wonderful alternative fuel systems, but if their are no refueling stations out there, you are screwed. That is why car-makers are now developing re-fueling stations themselves, even starting to operate them, to break the dependency on 3rd parties (petrol companies).
But to get back to Apple. If Apple had been as succesful as MS, then we would have had no cheap Compaq clones making home computing affordable. Either we would still have the home computers (Amiga, Commodre, Sinclair) or computing would start with a Mac Pro. There would be far less opensource available (Stallman started his work on Unixes, machines that make even Apples seem cheap) (Oh and please note that this is not saying Apples are TO expensive, but that Apple does not sell cheapo computers) because there would be fewer people with a computer at home to mess around on.
DRM might be stronger, or absent. With fewer computers around and those who have one being richer, there would be less reason and less to file share.
But a dominant Apple would NOT be a beacon of light and reason and freedom. It would be just another MS, but controlling both hardware and the software.
Is this particular story genuine? It seems odd. Not because I think Steve Jobs is a nice guy but precisly because I don't think he is a nice guy. But he isn't a psycho. What is there in it for him to be AGAINST Theora? Nothing.
So unless he has gone mental, I doubt he is going to be involved in an attack on an open codec. There simply is nothing to gain and a to lose. He might not want openess but he certainly doesn't want to be perceived as being against it and Theora doesn't really threathen him. If it becomes the dominant video codec, then so what? No big loss.
The only thing I could imagine if Apples.mov format and quicktime player were not just accidents but willfull attempts to create a video codec that is annoying as hell to deal with. Could be the reason why it is so hard to get just the codec, without a
I propose a new law, no citizen shall be allowed to vote until he can recite Yes Minister (and its sequel) from memory, word perfect and discuss each episode in detail.
for the uneducated:
Humphrey: You know what happens: nice young
lady comes up to you. Obviously you want to create a
good impression, you don't want to look a fool, do
you? So she starts asking you some questions:
" Mr.
Woolley, are you worried about the number of young
people without jobs?" Bernard: Yes Humphrey: "Are you worried about the rise in
crime among teenagers?" Bernard: Yes Humphrey: "Do you think there is a lack of
discipline in our Comprehensive schools?" Bernard: Yes Humphrey: "Do you think young people welcome
some authority and leadership in their lives?" Bernard: Yes Humphrey: "Do you think they respond to a
challenge?" Bernard: Yes Humphrey: "Would you be in favour of
reintroducing National Service?" Bernard: Oh...well, I suppose I might
be. Humphrey: "Yes or no?" Bernard: Yes Humphrey: Of course you would, Bernard.
After all you told her you can't say no to that. So they don't mention the first five questions and they
publish the last one. Bernard: Is that really what they
do? Humphrey: Well, not the reputable ones no,
but there aren't many of those. So alternatively the
young lady can get the opposite result. Bernard: How? Humphrey: "Mr. Woolley, are you worried
about the danger of war?" Bernard: Yes Humphrey: "Are you worried about the growth
of armaments?" Bernard: Yes Humphrey: "Do you think there is a danger in
giving young people guns and teaching them how to
kill?" Bernard: Yes Humphrey: "Do you think it is wrong to force
people to take up arms against their will?" Bernard: Yes Humphrey: "Would you oppose the
reintroduction of National Service?" Bernard: Yes Humphrey: There you are, you see Bernard.
The perfect balanced sample.
Come on, at least try. They created chart2 because WoW makes everyone else a brown line at the bottom. CHART 1, that is the secret to success.
Eve does alright but it the typical niche MMO. Nothing wrong with that, but Guild Wars aspires to more and has done more (although unfair to compare since GW is free after you buy the box). I do NOT dislike Eve, I just get upset when people try to pretend it is a contender to AAA titles. Respect it for what it is but accept that if gameplay of Eve was really what people want, it would have more subscribers.
My point is that subscription figures show that people do not like open PvP (PK) and twitch, at least not enough to pay for the games that provide it.
You can tell I don't follow MS much because I thought "In a world with walls or fences, who needs windows or gates." was just a clever joke. Turns out that it is paraphrasing an actual MS slogan. "For a world without walls, Windows".
That tells you everything you need to know about Microsoft. They don't even get the concept of basic construction. Either you have no wall and therefor nothing to place the window in, OR you create a big window and it becomes the wall itself. A window cannot exist without a wall.
You got an upstart sysadmin who went on a powertrip and thought he was smarter then anyone else and therefor above any laws that only apply to lesser people.
This is not uncommon with people who are highly intelligent but not to well versed in social skills. Not so much nerds but Mensa people. Like that reiserfs guy, thought he could get away with murder because he was smart and the police is dumb, they must be because they ain't him.
Your assessment is 100% right and he had no call to judge the people asking for access to be unsuitable. His opinion simply did not matter at that time. It is like when a cop with a dog tells you to get down on the floor. That is not the time to start an argument. That is the time to get down on the floor and become part of how the justice system works, injustices included and part of the system, sucks to have it happen to you.
If you ever find yourself in the same position as Childs, document EVERYTHING, in paper, print all emails and insist on written instructions, never verbal, and then do as you are told and get the fuck out of there.
Do not argue with the system, you are not smarter. Do you know how you are not smarter then the system? If you think arguing with the system is a good idea.
Childs is an idiot and yes, idiots go to jail. lets see him argue with Bubba about access to his ass.
It is argued that both communism and capitalism relies on the goodness of people. In communism, the people must be good so they work hard regardless of lack of financial reward. In capitalism people must be good, so that the wealth of a few is not abused to the point the have nots have nothing whatsoever including freedom.
The people who believe in personal responsibility dream that people will handle their responsibility responsible. The people who believe in government regulation, believe the government will handle the responsibilities responsible.
If there was no speed limit, people would drive 200 miles per hour accross a school play ground and the fining speeders is at the same time a good source of income while the government does nothing to actually stop the speeding (by removing the speeders from the roads, preverably in my personal opinion by using the in accident simulations).
Meanwhile moderate people are caught between a rock and a hard place. Must you sit in between smokers who give others cancer for their addiction or ban all smoking everywhere because else no smoker will consider anyone else around them?
there simply is no balanced answer. People suck at living in a modern world were everything is possible but lots can't be done because there is no space in a million+ city.
Why not the entire series where both parents fail to parent at any time. And the viewers of that show have mistaken a parody/satire of bad families as a rolemodel. Homer is NOT a guide, he is a warning.
Sounds like a great idea, and I wonder if they push it all the way through. Does rare loot also spawn for everyone? Or does everyone get their own "chest" with their own drop? Could be intresting but what are mobs going to be like that might be attacked by 500 low levels at once? There is a reason most games don't encourage grouping like this, it upsets the game balance. 500 lvl 1's could team up to defeat a lvl 10 monster and all get lvl 10 drops?
Mind you, I don't see that as a problem, that is smart thinking and the individual risk would be high because if you are the one stomped on... bye bye.
It is about time MMO's get a breath of fresh air and not just more twitch, more pk and more PvP because that has been proven to be a financial death end. Enough games tried and not a single one of them has managed to break the 1 million player barrier that is the line between success and being just another game that survives from month to month only to dwindle when players get fed up with slow updates because their is no money to pay for them.
GW's was/is a lot of fun, but in PvE its combat is to simple, if they can truly make something intresting out of this AND create a TRUE MMO (GW, is a hub game), then I am certainly buying it.
Eve is tiny, on any chart it rides the bottom. Oh, it gets a LOT of attention but that is in no relation to its financial success.
Most MMO's aspire to higher subscription ratings with 1 million being considered the line between success and an "also ran".
I always find it amusing to see PK and PvP and twitch fans scream that their genre's are OH SO POPULAR and yet not a single game that gives them what they want is a success. Odd that. Why are PK and PvP and Twitch fans not playing the games aimed at them?
Meanwhile, the closest to WoW is Lotro and that is a distinct PvE game of the old mold.
It is like saying people LOVE FPS, when Quake sells 10 copies. The figures would not support the claims.
Are you an Indian? No? Then you are an illegal immigrant yourself and your ancestors killed millions of natives to steal their land.
Always funny to see a immigrant complaining about immigrants.
And your whole story sounds more like your legal system is a mess. And maybe if you didn't deny healthcare to people you wouldn't have such problems. What civilized society denies healthcare to anyone?
I don't think in all fairness that anyone could have predicted that Microsoft would not only break compatibility with other browsers, but also break compatibility with their own.
You are supposed to DRINK the koolaid, NOT replace your blood with it.
Anyone who did NOT see this coming must have been deaf, dumb and blind. IE6 broke EVERY standard and added lots of proprietary crap. MS does this ALWAYS. It is how they got big.
How you could code a website in the days of IE1 2 3 4 5 6 and NOT see that the things you were doing were not standard boggles the mind.
The reason this development happened is that a lot of companies thought... no. That is wrong. A lot of people didn't think.
But frankly, the reason for this is simple. All the good developers got the hell out of such companies. Why do you think upstarts have no problem finding talented people willing to work for peanuts? Because anyone with talent will take any salary rather then work for a shop that does IE6.
Binged "Opera" and "Chrome" and "Firefox". Good results too. 3 out of 3 = 100% succes rate, and highly likely to remain like that.
I think there is also a very simple reason for Bing to "fail". Wether it is as good as google does not matter. It isn't any better. So why change? I know google and how to tune it. No, it isn't perfect. Why do I far to often get ancient results on subjects google should know recent entries might be more relevant (if I google "ubunutu ati driver" what do I want, results from 2001 or 2010?) and why can I only pick "last week" or "last year". Don't months exist in google land?
But Bing doesn't do it any better, so why bother?
Hey MS! INNOVATE! Do something NEW, IMPROVE searching. It is like the "dock" in Windows 7. Come on, a bad rip off of OSX, that I should pay 200 euro for? Think not.
Like the danger of finding out that he was a Nazi.
Like the danger of finding out that countless priests and higher ups are child rapists.
Like the danger of finding out a nazi pope re-instated a holocaust denier.
Like the danger of finding out the pope has ignored and promoted known child rapists.
Like the danger of finding out bishops blaim the scandal on Jews.
Like the danger of finding that that bishops blame the rape of FEMALE children on homosexuality.
Like the danger of finding out that the Mafia is NOT fabrication of Communist enemies but really does exist.
Like the danger of finding out that the Catholic church is evil to the core.
No doubt some Catholic will mod this down, because no Catholic wants to hear that he/she is part of all this. Were do you think these people get paid from? How much of you donation goes to pay for child raping?
And you can see how deep the corruption goes because not a single arrest has been made. Wonder why.
We had war-torn countries before. Europe was in a bad mess after WW2. My own country, Holland had to build up from mass starvation in the last winter of the war to a modern western nation. But that did NOT happen at once. Dutch living standards took decades to reach American living standards. And in those decades, people did NOT have huge American cars or huge American style homes or living on credit. The post war years were spend working hard and saving lots and then buying modest AND domestic.
And that seems to be missing in your story. Granted, the working hard is there, but then they buy a iPhone and a big car... understandable, everyone else in the world has it, but it means local industry can't develop. If you buy a Chinese clock radio instead of an african windup clock, then that African factory can never develop to build clock radio's. Why do you think the tiger economies were so hot on producing cars, their own cars? Because if they had just bought American, they would never have developed their own economy long term.
The African economies/cultures seem to be close to cargo-cults.
A lot is made of the fact that Africa is skipping the landline and a lot of westerners think this is a great thing. WRONG.
What pacified the west? The telegraph. Telegraph lines were an essential part of conquering America, they had to be kept safe and so as a side result, any land with a line on it became safe. Same with the rail lines. As the network spread, the lands around them were made safer and became safer.
If landlines can't be installed in Africa because it is not safe, then installing a wireless network is NOT dealing with this safety issue. It doesn't matter wheter you attribute the taming of the west to train, the postal service or the telegraph. The building of these networks and the need to protect this network protected the lands around it.
When something is beyond the pale. What does that mean? Hignfy refreshed my mind on the recently, it refers to the old european punishment of putting wrong do'ers beyond the city limits. Not so long ago, being outside a city and its protection was a serious form of punishment.
If you can understand the difference that has come over europe were we can't even see why that would be a bad thing, we leave the city for FUN!!!!!, then you can't understand how Africa where lawlessness reigns is missing an essential foundation, an infrastructure for its development.
It is like building a skycraper on sand. It might look the part, but an essential part is missing, the foundation.
While this new service might sound like a good idea, I think it is very wrong indeed. It is shipping in western goods and skipping the development of the local economy, industry, infrastructure to truly support it. That you mention you need to use FOREIGN postal services to ship anything is telling enough.
The postal service is the most fundemental service of any country. Without it, nothing else can function. There is not a single developed country that did not have its own postal service and most still do.
Skip it and you are a cargo-cult, completly dependent on a foreign entity, who may bear you no malice but simply might one day not come around anymore. An African buying an iPhone at inflated prices is NOT a sign of progress.
This whole situation just is part of human nature, if we delay the inevitable we just delay dealing with it.
It has been known for the longest time that ip4 addresses will run out, this is as well known as that telephone numbers have and will again run out. In Holland at least we went from 9 digits to 10 in my life time. And right now we are running out of mobile numbers as well.
If the deadline for ip4 was in ten years, then ten years from now people would go, "well if only we can delay it for another year, then we can deal with it then".
It is just how human's work. We never act until it is to late. IP6 has been around for a bloody long time by now and in fact most hardware and software already supports it. It is just that we don't want to change until we are drowning.
Just read the responses to this story, just like you, countless people suggesting all kind of measures to NOT deal with the problem now. Same as they did for year after year before.
Or as Terry Pratchett said. "Human beings are the only species to watch huge blocks of ice slam into another planet that in space terms is right next door and do absolutely nothing about it."
Slashdot Mirror
The privacy debate is already complex enough without nutters like you joining in. What the hell is a company supposed to do against someone uploading material about someone else? Ban the use of all names and photos? Demand written permission from every person mentioned, every person in any picture?
If other people publish information about you, then it is up to you to stop it, not facebook or any other company. Because that could never work short of shutting down all publishing everywhere.
What I am starting to notice is that when I talk about IT, I am talking about programmers, developers. But others are thinking about tech-support which I personally put closer to janitors and such. And no, I don't think low of janitors, but there is a difference between the person who keeps the building running and those who run it. Of course as a web developer lots of "real" developers consider me barely worth stepping on.
This show is probably funny if you are in a support role and have to deal with the endless clueless users. However if you are a user with a clue and you ever had to deal with clueless tech support not for support but to get them to do their bloody job, it is not so funny. And of course if you are a clueless user, then you will just find it offensive.
I think the show is "young". It tries to hard. It is like a teenager trying to impress girl by wearing ten different aftershaves at once and buying 100 red roses and a corsage the size of the rainforest. It lacks the flow of older series with more experienced staff. It tries so hard to create stereo-type characters that they lack any normality, any humanity that allows you to sympathize with them, see them as real people, not just caricatures.
Take the bit about the shoes that are to small. It is to extreme, size 8 in 5? And yet all her other clothes are normal. Certainly a woman that vain would also be putting herself through hell with other parts of her body? The gag doesn't fit in its make believe world. And the problem with that is that while the gag may be funny, gags should be short. We got it, the shoe is to small. Haha. NEXT! Stand-up comedians who do gags quickly switch subjets, think the late night tv monologues, it makes no sense for Jay Leno to whine about his pinto because he would never own one, so don't dwell on it.
Longer running comedy stories, need to make the world "believable". That is why Porridge and Only Fools and Horses work so well, the characters are not just a bunch of gags in half an hour, but human beings living a life. A funny one, an unlikely one, but "believable".
The IT Crowd tends to be liked by the kinda people who claim "Every geek's favourite non-sci-fi show" despite clear evidence to contrary.
It is funny, but funny is easy. Good lasting comedy, that is very very hard and the IT crowd ain't it. It is closer to that kids show you really really liked and then your grow up and wonder how you could every tolerate it.
Frankly, I am to old to still crack up about how stupid people can be with computers. Yeah yeah, they don't know how to operate a button. I know, the joke has been done. Move on.
Pennies add up. But to be fair, ALL those fake currencies are a huge scam and everyone does it.
MS, Nintendo and Sony, neither of them allow you to buy online with ordinary money, to scam people with left over credit and fake ideas about how much something costs.
At least EA allows you to buy the exact amount of points you need, but still, why the point system at all? Only reason to make you think it costs less then it really does.
Well, ALL my books are DRM free, because I buy them from a bookstore. No batteries needed. And who knows, if I am buried under an exploding volcano, some part of my bookcase might survive and provide researchers form the future with valuable insights in our society.
Future researcher: "God, what a bunch of weirdos".
You live in lala-land. A fantasy land you have constructed in your own head that has nothing to do with the real world.
If you are lucky, then as an average white middle aged guy you will have little to do with the police other then perhaps to have reported some crimes, that go typically unsolved. You think of the police as a bunch of semi-idiots who don't really matter all that much to you. As you get older, you might have your life saved by one of these semi-idiots, but young guys typically aren't self-aware enough to realize that when the shit happens, you need someone else to fix it because you will be a gibbering mess. (Just count the number of people that will protest this, but will be unable to deal with broken traffic lights on a busy intersection).
The "justive" system, of which police and border guards are part are the "parents" of society. And sometimes if you find two kids fighting, you just kick the shit out of both of them so they won't do it again. Bad parenting? Maybe, but law & order ain't so much about the two kids lying bleeding on the floor after some applied justice but about all of society, all the other kids on the playground who might get the idea to start fighting to.
Civilization is very very thin. If you look at places were Law & Order has broken down, most of Africa, New Orleans after Kathrina, then it shows that when people get it in to their head that their are no cops with sticks to beat them down, will get up to all kinds of nastyness. You might argue poverty and all such excuses for theft and robbery, but how does it excuse rape? "Oh I am poor and the system is against me, so I rape someone from my own class?"
But Law & Order ain't subtle or nice. We don't like police "brutality", which is the police doing what we think they should do to other people, not to us. Normally we can go about our business, closely following the rules blindly and being carefully regulated by years of training. Go ahead, drive the wrong side of traffic, walk against the stream of people. When you come to a double door, which door do you take? Wanna bet it is the same door as the side of traffic you drive on? Do you first let people out of the elevator before going in, arrange yourself so the person that has to go highest goes furthest to the back?
These are simple rules that are so ingrained in us, we don't even think about them, that make civilization work. They make it possible for a society to exist with more then two people getting constantly in each others way.
The BBC is airing a docu about India's railway. The people in India seem to have a careless disregard for what we in the west would see as simple basic unbreakable rules. Forget about crossing the lights, they think it is normal to cross the track anyplace, even on stations. Lots of people die and established official procedure is when a person gets killed for the driver and guard to pull the bits out, put them beside the track, drive on and leave a note at the next station that there is a body to collect!
THINK ABOUT IT. THINK ABOUT IT AND HOW WE DO THIS IN THE WEST.
All train traffic is stopped on the section and the emergency services are called and do their work and traffic be damned, first priority is to secure the scene and investigate what happened. And no way in hell is that train driver going to be allowed, let alone expected, to continue the journey. In India trains run with bits of human stuck to them! Law & Order broken down, no, not entirely, it ain't Africa. But a significant part of it doesn't work, the railway police has been unable to stop people from breaking the law and so they no longer can enforce the law and so the law is no longer followed.
And the effect goes further then just a lot of dead people (3000+ in Bombay). You can forget about running faster trains. And how many murders are going unnoticed? Who investigates whether that body was mangled before or after the train hit it? Nobody.
The US has borders that it wishes to control. There a
Steve Jobs and Apple were ALWAYS the same as Microsoft, just not as succesful. They are Musolini to Hitler (Godwin be damned). Both were vicious dictators who had people killed but Musolini just never got the same "success" in his nastyness as his ally. But only a fool would throw himself at the mercy of Musolini.
There are a lot of not so nice companies out there, typically the companies run by single individual for to long yet also a shareholder company. It is a mix of isolation and duty bound greed. Somebody like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson will never ever have been told. "You are wrong". If you rise in power, you tend to get surrounded by yes-men, people who tell you what you want to hear and because most people find that pleasing, you promote them with you so as you rise you leave the nay-sayers behind you.
And since you have share-holders you always have to grow, always find yet one more cent of profit to squeeze out of the company to please your share-holders. Who will then tell you "yes".
The idea that Steve "Disney" Jobs is somehow a savior battling Bill Gates is silly to the extreme. Human beings love to think in heroes vs baddies, and because real heroes are difficult to follow (Stallman) we tend to latch on the first baddie who isn't kicking puppies, at this very moment at least.
The move against Flash had nothing to do with Open vs Closed, but with dependency. Adobe has for years (and still) been extremely bad with support for non-windows platforms, Flash on Mac sucks. Flash on AMD64 linux is absent. BSD? That has hurt Apple, they had a hard time selling their Mac's for years for the lack of flash. Now there product happens to be popular enough they don't need flash, so why should they not use the opportunity to control the supply chain of their products? Remember, Vista failed partially because of the lack of 3rd party drivers. You NEVER want YOUR product to fail because a 3rd party doesn't supply for it. Electric cars face the same dillema, you can design all kinds of wonderful alternative fuel systems, but if their are no refueling stations out there, you are screwed. That is why car-makers are now developing re-fueling stations themselves, even starting to operate them, to break the dependency on 3rd parties (petrol companies).
But to get back to Apple. If Apple had been as succesful as MS, then we would have had no cheap Compaq clones making home computing affordable. Either we would still have the home computers (Amiga, Commodre, Sinclair) or computing would start with a Mac Pro. There would be far less opensource available (Stallman started his work on Unixes, machines that make even Apples seem cheap) (Oh and please note that this is not saying Apples are TO expensive, but that Apple does not sell cheapo computers) because there would be fewer people with a computer at home to mess around on.
DRM might be stronger, or absent. With fewer computers around and those who have one being richer, there would be less reason and less to file share.
But a dominant Apple would NOT be a beacon of light and reason and freedom. It would be just another MS, but controlling both hardware and the software.
Is this particular story genuine? It seems odd. Not because I think Steve Jobs is a nice guy but precisly because I don't think he is a nice guy. But he isn't a psycho. What is there in it for him to be AGAINST Theora? Nothing.
So unless he has gone mental, I doubt he is going to be involved in an attack on an open codec. There simply is nothing to gain and a to lose. He might not want openess but he certainly doesn't want to be perceived as being against it and Theora doesn't really threathen him. If it becomes the dominant video codec, then so what? No big loss.
The only thing I could imagine if Apples .mov format and quicktime player were not just accidents but willfull attempts to create a video codec that is annoying as hell to deal with. Could be the reason why it is so hard to get just the codec, without a
I propose a new law, no citizen shall be allowed to vote until he can recite Yes Minister (and its sequel) from memory, word perfect and discuss each episode in detail.
for the uneducated:
Humphrey: You know what happens: nice young lady comes up to you. Obviously you want to create a good impression, you don't want to look a fool, do you? So she starts asking you some questions: " Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the number of young people without jobs?"
Bernard: Yes
Humphrey: "Are you worried about the rise in crime among teenagers?"
Bernard: Yes
Humphrey: "Do you think there is a lack of discipline in our Comprehensive schools?"
Bernard: Yes
Humphrey: "Do you think young people welcome some authority and leadership in their lives?"
Bernard: Yes
Humphrey: "Do you think they respond to a challenge?"
Bernard: Yes
Humphrey: "Would you be in favour of reintroducing National Service?"
Bernard: Oh...well, I suppose I might be.
Humphrey: "Yes or no?"
Bernard: Yes
Humphrey: Of course you would, Bernard. After all you told her you can't say no to that. So they don't mention the first five questions and they publish the last one.
Bernard: Is that really what they do?
Humphrey: Well, not the reputable ones no, but there aren't many of those. So alternatively the young lady can get the opposite result.
Bernard: How?
Humphrey: "Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the danger of war?"
Bernard: Yes
Humphrey: "Are you worried about the growth of armaments?"
Bernard: Yes
Humphrey: "Do you think there is a danger in giving young people guns and teaching them how to kill?"
Bernard: Yes
Humphrey: "Do you think it is wrong to force people to take up arms against their will?"
Bernard: Yes
Humphrey: "Would you oppose the reintroduction of National Service?"
Bernard: Yes
Humphrey: There you are, you see Bernard. The perfect balanced sample.
Come on, at least try. They created chart2 because WoW makes everyone else a brown line at the bottom. CHART 1, that is the secret to success.
Eve does alright but it the typical niche MMO. Nothing wrong with that, but Guild Wars aspires to more and has done more (although unfair to compare since GW is free after you buy the box). I do NOT dislike Eve, I just get upset when people try to pretend it is a contender to AAA titles. Respect it for what it is but accept that if gameplay of Eve was really what people want, it would have more subscribers.
My point is that subscription figures show that people do not like open PvP (PK) and twitch, at least not enough to pay for the games that provide it.
You can tell I don't follow MS much because I thought "In a world with walls or fences, who needs windows or gates." was just a clever joke. Turns out that it is paraphrasing an actual MS slogan. "For a world without walls, Windows".
That tells you everything you need to know about Microsoft. They don't even get the concept of basic construction. Either you have no wall and therefor nothing to place the window in, OR you create a big window and it becomes the wall itself. A window cannot exist without a wall.
They drink the koolaid deeply in Redmond.
First it is "the iPad won't sell".
Then when it is selling, the claim is "it ain't running out" when figures show Apple just ordered more then at previous introductions.
then when it sells half a million, it won't last...
Oh and lack of flash will kill it despite more and more sites ditching it.
Face it, Jobs has done it again. Move on and start predicting his fall for the next gadget.
You got an upstart sysadmin who went on a powertrip and thought he was smarter then anyone else and therefor above any laws that only apply to lesser people.
This is not uncommon with people who are highly intelligent but not to well versed in social skills. Not so much nerds but Mensa people. Like that reiserfs guy, thought he could get away with murder because he was smart and the police is dumb, they must be because they ain't him.
Your assessment is 100% right and he had no call to judge the people asking for access to be unsuitable. His opinion simply did not matter at that time. It is like when a cop with a dog tells you to get down on the floor. That is not the time to start an argument. That is the time to get down on the floor and become part of how the justice system works, injustices included and part of the system, sucks to have it happen to you.
If you ever find yourself in the same position as Childs, document EVERYTHING, in paper, print all emails and insist on written instructions, never verbal, and then do as you are told and get the fuck out of there.
Do not argue with the system, you are not smarter. Do you know how you are not smarter then the system? If you think arguing with the system is a good idea.
Childs is an idiot and yes, idiots go to jail. lets see him argue with Bubba about access to his ass.
It is argued that both communism and capitalism relies on the goodness of people. In communism, the people must be good so they work hard regardless of lack of financial reward. In capitalism people must be good, so that the wealth of a few is not abused to the point the have nots have nothing whatsoever including freedom.
The people who believe in personal responsibility dream that people will handle their responsibility responsible. The people who believe in government regulation, believe the government will handle the responsibilities responsible.
If there was no speed limit, people would drive 200 miles per hour accross a school play ground and the fining speeders is at the same time a good source of income while the government does nothing to actually stop the speeding (by removing the speeders from the roads, preverably in my personal opinion by using the in accident simulations).
Meanwhile moderate people are caught between a rock and a hard place. Must you sit in between smokers who give others cancer for their addiction or ban all smoking everywhere because else no smoker will consider anyone else around them?
there simply is no balanced answer. People suck at living in a modern world were everything is possible but lots can't be done because there is no space in a million+ city.
Why not the entire series where both parents fail to parent at any time. And the viewers of that show have mistaken a parody/satire of bad families as a rolemodel. Homer is NOT a guide, he is a warning.
Sounds like a great idea, and I wonder if they push it all the way through. Does rare loot also spawn for everyone? Or does everyone get their own "chest" with their own drop? Could be intresting but what are mobs going to be like that might be attacked by 500 low levels at once? There is a reason most games don't encourage grouping like this, it upsets the game balance. 500 lvl 1's could team up to defeat a lvl 10 monster and all get lvl 10 drops?
Mind you, I don't see that as a problem, that is smart thinking and the individual risk would be high because if you are the one stomped on... bye bye.
It is about time MMO's get a breath of fresh air and not just more twitch, more pk and more PvP because that has been proven to be a financial death end. Enough games tried and not a single one of them has managed to break the 1 million player barrier that is the line between success and being just another game that survives from month to month only to dwindle when players get fed up with slow updates because their is no money to pay for them.
GW's was/is a lot of fun, but in PvE its combat is to simple, if they can truly make something intresting out of this AND create a TRUE MMO (GW, is a hub game), then I am certainly buying it.
Oh, and boob jiggle, that is important too.
Eve is tiny, on any chart it rides the bottom. Oh, it gets a LOT of attention but that is in no relation to its financial success.
Most MMO's aspire to higher subscription ratings with 1 million being considered the line between success and an "also ran".
I always find it amusing to see PK and PvP and twitch fans scream that their genre's are OH SO POPULAR and yet not a single game that gives them what they want is a success. Odd that. Why are PK and PvP and Twitch fans not playing the games aimed at them?
Meanwhile, the closest to WoW is Lotro and that is a distinct PvE game of the old mold.
It is like saying people LOVE FPS, when Quake sells 10 copies. The figures would not support the claims.
Are you an Indian? No? Then you are an illegal immigrant yourself and your ancestors killed millions of natives to steal their land.
Always funny to see a immigrant complaining about immigrants.
And your whole story sounds more like your legal system is a mess. And maybe if you didn't deny healthcare to people you wouldn't have such problems. What civilized society denies healthcare to anyone?
I don't think in all fairness that anyone could have predicted that Microsoft would not only break compatibility with other browsers, but also break compatibility with their own.
You are supposed to DRINK the koolaid, NOT replace your blood with it.
Anyone who did NOT see this coming must have been deaf, dumb and blind. IE6 broke EVERY standard and added lots of proprietary crap. MS does this ALWAYS. It is how they got big.
How you could code a website in the days of IE1 2 3 4 5 6 and NOT see that the things you were doing were not standard boggles the mind.
The reason this development happened is that a lot of companies thought... no. That is wrong. A lot of people didn't think.
But frankly, the reason for this is simple. All the good developers got the hell out of such companies. Why do you think upstarts have no problem finding talented people willing to work for peanuts? Because anyone with talent will take any salary rather then work for a shop that does IE6.
Binged "Opera" and "Chrome" and "Firefox". Good results too. 3 out of 3 = 100% succes rate, and highly likely to remain like that.
I think there is also a very simple reason for Bing to "fail". Wether it is as good as google does not matter. It isn't any better. So why change? I know google and how to tune it. No, it isn't perfect. Why do I far to often get ancient results on subjects google should know recent entries might be more relevant (if I google "ubunutu ati driver" what do I want, results from 2001 or 2010?) and why can I only pick "last week" or "last year". Don't months exist in google land?
But Bing doesn't do it any better, so why bother?
Hey MS! INNOVATE! Do something NEW, IMPROVE searching. It is like the "dock" in Windows 7. Come on, a bad rip off of OSX, that I should pay 200 euro for? Think not.
Idiot.
Like the danger of finding out that he was a Nazi.
Like the danger of finding out that countless priests and higher ups are child rapists.
Like the danger of finding out a nazi pope re-instated a holocaust denier.
Like the danger of finding out the pope has ignored and promoted known child rapists.
Like the danger of finding out bishops blaim the scandal on Jews.
Like the danger of finding that that bishops blame the rape of FEMALE children on homosexuality.
Like the danger of finding out that the Mafia is NOT fabrication of Communist enemies but really does exist.
Like the danger of finding out that the Catholic church is evil to the core.
No doubt some Catholic will mod this down, because no Catholic wants to hear that he/she is part of all this. Were do you think these people get paid from? How much of you donation goes to pay for child raping?
And you can see how deep the corruption goes because not a single arrest has been made. Wonder why.
Sony: Oh yes we can... oh wait. No we can't. That is right. So rootkits on our floppies at all. No sirree. Wouldn't fit see. Yeah.
If you take a soldering iron, and you create a hole in it, it doubles in size!
We had war-torn countries before. Europe was in a bad mess after WW2. My own country, Holland had to build up from mass starvation in the last winter of the war to a modern western nation. But that did NOT happen at once. Dutch living standards took decades to reach American living standards. And in those decades, people did NOT have huge American cars or huge American style homes or living on credit. The post war years were spend working hard and saving lots and then buying modest AND domestic.
And that seems to be missing in your story. Granted, the working hard is there, but then they buy a iPhone and a big car... understandable, everyone else in the world has it, but it means local industry can't develop. If you buy a Chinese clock radio instead of an african windup clock, then that African factory can never develop to build clock radio's. Why do you think the tiger economies were so hot on producing cars, their own cars? Because if they had just bought American, they would never have developed their own economy long term.
The African economies/cultures seem to be close to cargo-cults.
A lot is made of the fact that Africa is skipping the landline and a lot of westerners think this is a great thing. WRONG.
What pacified the west? The telegraph. Telegraph lines were an essential part of conquering America, they had to be kept safe and so as a side result, any land with a line on it became safe. Same with the rail lines. As the network spread, the lands around them were made safer and became safer.
If landlines can't be installed in Africa because it is not safe, then installing a wireless network is NOT dealing with this safety issue. It doesn't matter wheter you attribute the taming of the west to train, the postal service or the telegraph. The building of these networks and the need to protect this network protected the lands around it.
When something is beyond the pale. What does that mean? Hignfy refreshed my mind on the recently, it refers to the old european punishment of putting wrong do'ers beyond the city limits. Not so long ago, being outside a city and its protection was a serious form of punishment.
If you can understand the difference that has come over europe were we can't even see why that would be a bad thing, we leave the city for FUN!!!!!, then you can't understand how Africa where lawlessness reigns is missing an essential foundation, an infrastructure for its development.
It is like building a skycraper on sand. It might look the part, but an essential part is missing, the foundation.
While this new service might sound like a good idea, I think it is very wrong indeed. It is shipping in western goods and skipping the development of the local economy, industry, infrastructure to truly support it. That you mention you need to use FOREIGN postal services to ship anything is telling enough.
The postal service is the most fundemental service of any country. Without it, nothing else can function. There is not a single developed country that did not have its own postal service and most still do.
Skip it and you are a cargo-cult, completly dependent on a foreign entity, who may bear you no malice but simply might one day not come around anymore. An African buying an iPhone at inflated prices is NOT a sign of progress.
You ship your goods from your small story to Africa then and just take the 100% fraud as the cost of doing ethical business. See how long you survive.
This whole situation just is part of human nature, if we delay the inevitable we just delay dealing with it.
It has been known for the longest time that ip4 addresses will run out, this is as well known as that telephone numbers have and will again run out. In Holland at least we went from 9 digits to 10 in my life time. And right now we are running out of mobile numbers as well.
If the deadline for ip4 was in ten years, then ten years from now people would go, "well if only we can delay it for another year, then we can deal with it then".
It is just how human's work. We never act until it is to late. IP6 has been around for a bloody long time by now and in fact most hardware and software already supports it. It is just that we don't want to change until we are drowning.
Just read the responses to this story, just like you, countless people suggesting all kind of measures to NOT deal with the problem now. Same as they did for year after year before.
Or as Terry Pratchett said. "Human beings are the only species to watch huge blocks of ice slam into another planet that in space terms is right next door and do absolutely nothing about it."