Apparently it's the release after the next one, tentatively planned for 2013.
How they get to 15: They used version numbers through 4.x. Then somehow 5.x and 6.x were skipped (?) in the switch to year branding, and Office 95 was internally Office 7.0. Then it went sequentially for a bit: Office 97 was 8.0, Office 2000 was 9.0, Office XP was 10.0, Office 2003 was 11.0, and the current Office 2007 is 12.0.
Now they plan to skip 13 due to its negative superstition, and make Office 2010 be 14.0. Then the release after that, around 2013, will go back to non-year version numbers, and be Office 15.
The federal government of Australia, due to some sort of religious-conservative influence, has been really, really anti-euthanasia for some time now. The last major time the issue came to a head was in 1995-97, when the Northwest Territory passed the Rights of the Terminall Ill Act 1995, which allowed euthanasia for the terminally ill, under certain conditions and with a lengthy process. The federal government attempted to pressure NT into repealing the law, and when it refused to do so, in 1997, the federal parliament amended NT's territory charter to specifically remove its ability to pass laws relating to euthanasia (this was possible because NT is a territory, not a state, so its powers of self-government can be reduced by simple legislation).
Though that's true, the social aspect of "intellectual property" seems much deeper than the social aspect of tangible property. The social contract needed to enforce tangible property is essentially policing boundaries. The world is divvied up into piles of stuff, and nobody can take stuff from a pile that's labeled as someone else's.
But intellectual property requires society being able to regulate everything that anyone does anywhere, not just the boundaries. With intellectual property, society has a claim on what you can do with your own pen and paper in your own house: you cannot copy someone else's book onto it. It also has a claim on what you can do with your materials in general: you cannot implement a patented invention, even for personal use.
Yeah, I'd be willing to bet the investors had a big part in turning this down, too. (Actually, they probably had to; VC firms usually demand a say in these sorts of decisions.)
A bunch of major VCs bought in to Foursquare about a week or two ago at prices that value the company at $80 million on paper. Given those valuations at the buy-in, an $100m exit is simply not enough for the VCs to get the sort of return on their investment they have in mind.
Their investors already think it's worth that much currently, though: Foursquare just raised a round of venture capital at a valuation of around $90 million. Why would an investor who just bought in at a price that implies a $90 million valuation be keen to sell out at $100 million? Venture capitalists usually aren't too excited about 10% returns.
Now of course, you could argue that they were stupid for buying in at a $90m valuation to begin with. But a few weeks ago they thought that was a good deal, and I can't imagine they've changed their minds in the past few weeks.
Generally even early employees won't become millionaires in these sorts of deals.
Typically, VCs get paid back all their initial investment right off the top (usually part of a "liquidation preference"). In Foursquare's case, that's about $12 million, leaving an $88 million pot. Of the rest, typically VCs plus founders own almost all of it. A very early employee, if lucky, might own up to 0.5% or so of the company. That would give them $440,000 in this scenario. But that's something of a best case, too, because employees often own common stock, while investors and founders own preferred shares, and there are sometimes liquidation preferences for those payouts too.
It's on the outside realm of possibility that there exists an early Foursquare employees with the requisite ~1.2% or so of equity to actually make one million dollars from an exit like this. But there wouldn't be many, and it's quite possible there are none.
Oh, and unlike the VCs and founders, employees typically have a 2-to-4-year vesting period, so they don't get any of their money unless they stay with the post-acquisition company for multiple years, even if they hate their new boss.
I think the founders of Foursquare already are filthy rich from selling previous companies, though. So they don't have to sell this one unless for some reason they needed to be even more filthy rich.
That's true of the Dresden firebombing also. Actually, it was true of most large-scale WW2 bombings, which were inaccurate and indiscriminate, mostly killing civilians and destroying residential homes. If you want to focus on an atrocity committed against Japan, the Tokyo firebombings were actually considerably worse than the atomic bombings.
That's generally the sentiment of most people on the receiving side of wartime attacks. Many Germans are still pretty upset about the "Dresden disaster".
I could be wrong, but I think there's some gray area. Many states consider an organized group of employees who're armed by the company to provide security for the company (as opposed to just employees who carry personal guns) to be "security guards", and some have extensive regulations on them. For example, in California, armed security guards have to obtain a license after passing a state-mandated training course--- so Google couldn't just arm all its engineers, unless it also got them all security-guard licenses.
That's certainly true, as a description of current law. What I was wondering is whether there are constitutional limits on how the government could change those laws. If a state wanted to outlaw armed private security forces, could it do so?
(Half-joking, but I believe the question is actually not settled, and not really litigated. The government can probably regulate how corporations may arm their employees and deploy those armed employees, but it's not clear what the limits on that power are.)
"Cyber-" is from the Greek root for "steersman" (kybernetikos). Norbert Wiener coined the term "cybernetics" for anything which used feedback to correct things, in the way that you continually steer to left or right to correct the direction of a bicycle or a car. So "cybernetics" really refers to control linkages, the way things are connected to control things.
Because he was writing in the nineteen-forties, and all of this was new, Wiener believed that computers would be principally used for control linkages-- which is if course one area of their use.
But the term "cybernetics" has caused hopeless confusion, as it was used by the uninformed to refer to every area of computers. And people would coin silly words beginning with "cyber-" to expand ideas they did not understand. Words like "cyberware", "cyberculture", "cyberlife" hardly mean anything. In general, then, words beginning with "cyber-" mean "either I do not know what I am talking about, or I am trying to fool and confuse you" (as in my suggested cybercrud).
I think "activist games" aren't really the future, but games that make people think about interrelationships are. Even Sim City has a lot of subtle elements to it, and it wasn't even intended as a "serious" game.
I sort of research in this area (only sorta, but enough to keep up and know about half the people in it). So I can't help but throw out some additional resources, which you can interpret as "stuff I like".
FWIW, the general idea is usually referred to as "serious games", with a bunch of terms like "persuasive games", "games for change", "games with a purpose", "political games", "news games", etc. having more specific meanings.
I personally rather like Ian Bogost'sbook on the subject, which, contrary to a lot of stuff in this space, is more measured in talking about both the possible benefits and likely pitfalls. Although I love the idea and think it has a lot of promise, I've got to admit most attempts to make "serious" or "political" or "world-changing" games fall flat. Anyone played McCain's 2004 campaign game, "John Kerry Tax Invaders"? It's exactly what you think it is: a space-invaders clone with John Kerry tax bills coming down at you, in place of aliens. Hilarious, but kind of stupid. So I think it's important to not be fan-boyish about it, and figure out what would make the medium actually flourish for these sorts of purposes. (FWIW, Bogost also has a former blog on "games with an agenda", and a interesting Colbert appearance).
An interesting precursor is Chris Crawford's 1980s games, which tackled subjects like the Cold War and the environment in interesting ways. He's now giving away a.txt of a book describing the design behind Balance of Power (1986), still something of a high-water mark in combining the simulation genre with attempts to really make people think about the real world.
For more recent games, specifically in response to news events, some of which have activist content and some of which are just commentary, there's also a newsgame index. In addition, there's a recent paper discussing whether and how newsgames might become the 21st century's equivalent of political cartoons.
Yes, but empirically they don't. Even OpenBSD has had multiple remote-root holes in the default install (and many more remote-root holes in any actually working install).
All this article seems to claim is that some people are making them. And most of the ones the article mentions aren't even out yet. It remains to be seen if they'll "get traction".
The overall trajectory of hyper-realistic computer versions of traditional games reminds me of an old SNL parody of virtual reality: you put on a headset, and engage in an immersive story world, consisting of a 3d-rendered room exactly like the one you're sitting in. You pick up a 3d-rendered book from the 3d-rendered table beside you, and can read it, turning the pages in beautiful virtual reality. Unfortunately only about 5 words fit per page, due to technical limitations.
It is a website on the internet, where you can post reviews of things. Mostly restaurants, but apparently also hospitals. It's gotten popular enough that businesses care what their Yelp reviews are like, because it can meaningfully impact business. There are allegations that Yelp takes advantage of this to "suggest" that businesses become paying advertisers, if they'd like their reviews page to look good.
One of the mentioned changes --- giving a link to see the reviews that Yelp's filtered out --- addresses some of the concerns, by at least making it possible to research what Yelp is filtering / not filtering (assuming they really show all reviews in the unfiltered view). The other change the article mentions seems totally besides the point though: the fact that businesses who paid could choose a review to always appear first was never the problem, because that was up-front and part of the advertising package. Removing that feature doesn't even seem necessary.
What the controversy is over is: did or didn't Yelp modify its filtering for particular entries based on whether they were advertisers, and did or didn't they get people (employees or associates) to add positive or negative reviews based on whether they were advertisers? And, separately from that, did their sales staff offer or threaten to do any of those things as part of the attempt to sell ads (and if they did, was that Yelp policy)?
In some cases even quantum-mechanical methods fail to describe heavier elements, for example gold wouldn't have gold color if not treated relativistically.
Wow, for some reason I never knew that. Mercury being a liquid at room temperature is apparently also a relativistic effect. Interesting stuff.
Signatories to the NPT are required to sign a "safeguards agreement" with the IAEA, which lays out how the IAEA will monitor the country's compliance with the NPT. Iran did so, and then in 2005 the IAEA, after several warnings, concluded that Iran was not in compliance with its safeguards agreement.
According to the Chairman of IAEA Standing Advisory Group on Safeguards Implementation, this is in effect a declaration of NPT violation:
Formally IAEA Board of Governors (BOG) decisions concern compliance with safeguards agreements, rather than the NPT as such, but in practical terms non-compliance with a safeguards agreement constitutes non-compliance with the NPT.
Iran was then referred to the UN Security Council for the violation, as provided for in the NPT. Incidentally, as a signatory of the UN Charter, Iran also agrees to abide by all decisions of the UN Security Council. Security Council resolution 1696 demanded that Iran halt its uranium enrichment program; resolutions 1737 and 1747 have followed up and imposed sanctions for noncompliance (the two follow-up resolutions passed unanimously). Iran has so far violated all three resolutions.
I think the grandparent post was commenting on kdawson using "early adapter" instead of "early adopter" in the post. Presumably, an early adapter is someone who is among the first to adapt to the revolutionary new world that the Jesus Tablet brings us.
Haha yeah, it's pretty inappropriate in this case. This was a causational study, not simply a measurement of correlation in the wild: they varied a variable in a laboratory setting, and measured how varying it changed the response variable.
There are of course many ways the study could be flawed, but it's not a case of measuring a correlation and then inferring a causation from it.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently it's the release after the next one, tentatively planned for 2013.
How they get to 15: They used version numbers through 4.x. Then somehow 5.x and 6.x were skipped (?) in the switch to year branding, and Office 95 was internally Office 7.0. Then it went sequentially for a bit: Office 97 was 8.0, Office 2000 was 9.0, Office XP was 10.0, Office 2003 was 11.0, and the current Office 2007 is 12.0.
Now they plan to skip 13 due to its negative superstition, and make Office 2010 be 14.0. Then the release after that, around 2013, will go back to non-year version numbers, and be Office 15.
In fact, it's such a heinous crime against the moral compass of society, it should probably carry the death penalty.
The federal government of Australia, due to some sort of religious-conservative influence, has been really, really anti-euthanasia for some time now. The last major time the issue came to a head was in 1995-97, when the Northwest Territory passed the Rights of the Terminall Ill Act 1995, which allowed euthanasia for the terminally ill, under certain conditions and with a lengthy process. The federal government attempted to pressure NT into repealing the law, and when it refused to do so, in 1997, the federal parliament amended NT's territory charter to specifically remove its ability to pass laws relating to euthanasia (this was possible because NT is a territory, not a state, so its powers of self-government can be reduced by simple legislation).
Though that's true, the social aspect of "intellectual property" seems much deeper than the social aspect of tangible property. The social contract needed to enforce tangible property is essentially policing boundaries. The world is divvied up into piles of stuff, and nobody can take stuff from a pile that's labeled as someone else's.
But intellectual property requires society being able to regulate everything that anyone does anywhere, not just the boundaries. With intellectual property, society has a claim on what you can do with your own pen and paper in your own house: you cannot copy someone else's book onto it. It also has a claim on what you can do with your materials in general: you cannot implement a patented invention, even for personal use.
Yeah, I'd be willing to bet the investors had a big part in turning this down, too. (Actually, they probably had to; VC firms usually demand a say in these sorts of decisions.)
A bunch of major VCs bought in to Foursquare about a week or two ago at prices that value the company at $80 million on paper. Given those valuations at the buy-in, an $100m exit is simply not enough for the VCs to get the sort of return on their investment they have in mind.
Their investors already think it's worth that much currently, though: Foursquare just raised a round of venture capital at a valuation of around $90 million. Why would an investor who just bought in at a price that implies a $90 million valuation be keen to sell out at $100 million? Venture capitalists usually aren't too excited about 10% returns.
Now of course, you could argue that they were stupid for buying in at a $90m valuation to begin with. But a few weeks ago they thought that was a good deal, and I can't imagine they've changed their minds in the past few weeks.
Generally even early employees won't become millionaires in these sorts of deals.
Typically, VCs get paid back all their initial investment right off the top (usually part of a "liquidation preference"). In Foursquare's case, that's about $12 million, leaving an $88 million pot. Of the rest, typically VCs plus founders own almost all of it. A very early employee, if lucky, might own up to 0.5% or so of the company. That would give them $440,000 in this scenario. But that's something of a best case, too, because employees often own common stock, while investors and founders own preferred shares, and there are sometimes liquidation preferences for those payouts too.
It's on the outside realm of possibility that there exists an early Foursquare employees with the requisite ~1.2% or so of equity to actually make one million dollars from an exit like this. But there wouldn't be many, and it's quite possible there are none.
Oh, and unlike the VCs and founders, employees typically have a 2-to-4-year vesting period, so they don't get any of their money unless they stay with the post-acquisition company for multiple years, even if they hate their new boss.
I think the founders of Foursquare already are filthy rich from selling previous companies, though. So they don't have to sell this one unless for some reason they needed to be even more filthy rich.
That's true of the Dresden firebombing also. Actually, it was true of most large-scale WW2 bombings, which were inaccurate and indiscriminate, mostly killing civilians and destroying residential homes. If you want to focus on an atrocity committed against Japan, the Tokyo firebombings were actually considerably worse than the atomic bombings.
That's generally the sentiment of most people on the receiving side of wartime attacks. Many Germans are still pretty upset about the "Dresden disaster".
I could be wrong, but I think there's some gray area. Many states consider an organized group of employees who're armed by the company to provide security for the company (as opposed to just employees who carry personal guns) to be "security guards", and some have extensive regulations on them. For example, in California, armed security guards have to obtain a license after passing a state-mandated training course--- so Google couldn't just arm all its engineers, unless it also got them all security-guard licenses.
That's certainly true, as a description of current law. What I was wondering is whether there are constitutional limits on how the government could change those laws. If a state wanted to outlaw armed private security forces, could it do so?
Do corporations have the right to bear arms?
(Half-joking, but I believe the question is actually not settled, and not really litigated. The government can probably regulate how corporations may arm their employees and deploy those armed employees, but it's not clear what the limits on that power are.)
Indeed, that prefix really makes no sense. To quote Ted Nelson:
I think "activist games" aren't really the future, but games that make people think about interrelationships are. Even Sim City has a lot of subtle elements to it, and it wasn't even intended as a "serious" game.
I sort of research in this area (only sorta, but enough to keep up and know about half the people in it). So I can't help but throw out some additional resources, which you can interpret as "stuff I like".
FWIW, the general idea is usually referred to as "serious games", with a bunch of terms like "persuasive games", "games for change", "games with a purpose", "political games", "news games", etc. having more specific meanings.
I personally rather like Ian Bogost's book on the subject, which, contrary to a lot of stuff in this space, is more measured in talking about both the possible benefits and likely pitfalls. Although I love the idea and think it has a lot of promise, I've got to admit most attempts to make "serious" or "political" or "world-changing" games fall flat. Anyone played McCain's 2004 campaign game, "John Kerry Tax Invaders"? It's exactly what you think it is: a space-invaders clone with John Kerry tax bills coming down at you, in place of aliens. Hilarious, but kind of stupid. So I think it's important to not be fan-boyish about it, and figure out what would make the medium actually flourish for these sorts of purposes. (FWIW, Bogost also has a former blog on "games with an agenda", and a interesting Colbert appearance).
An interesting precursor is Chris Crawford's 1980s games, which tackled subjects like the Cold War and the environment in interesting ways. He's now giving away a .txt of a book describing the design behind Balance of Power (1986), still something of a high-water mark in combining the simulation genre with attempts to really make people think about the real world.
For more recent games, specifically in response to news events, some of which have activist content and some of which are just commentary, there's also a newsgame index. In addition, there's a recent paper discussing whether and how newsgames might become the 21st century's equivalent of political cartoons.
Yes, but empirically they don't. Even OpenBSD has had multiple remote-root holes in the default install (and many more remote-root holes in any actually working install).
Huh, I could've sworn Java was over 18 by now. Oops.
All this article seems to claim is that some people are making them. And most of the ones the article mentions aren't even out yet. It remains to be seen if they'll "get traction".
The overall trajectory of hyper-realistic computer versions of traditional games reminds me of an old SNL parody of virtual reality: you put on a headset, and engage in an immersive story world, consisting of a 3d-rendered room exactly like the one you're sitting in. You pick up a 3d-rendered book from the 3d-rendered table beside you, and can read it, turning the pages in beautiful virtual reality. Unfortunately only about 5 words fit per page, due to technical limitations.
It is a website on the internet, where you can post reviews of things. Mostly restaurants, but apparently also hospitals. It's gotten popular enough that businesses care what their Yelp reviews are like, because it can meaningfully impact business. There are allegations that Yelp takes advantage of this to "suggest" that businesses become paying advertisers, if they'd like their reviews page to look good.
One of the mentioned changes --- giving a link to see the reviews that Yelp's filtered out --- addresses some of the concerns, by at least making it possible to research what Yelp is filtering / not filtering (assuming they really show all reviews in the unfiltered view). The other change the article mentions seems totally besides the point though: the fact that businesses who paid could choose a review to always appear first was never the problem, because that was up-front and part of the advertising package. Removing that feature doesn't even seem necessary.
What the controversy is over is: did or didn't Yelp modify its filtering for particular entries based on whether they were advertisers, and did or didn't they get people (employees or associates) to add positive or negative reviews based on whether they were advertisers? And, separately from that, did their sales staff offer or threaten to do any of those things as part of the attempt to sell ads (and if they did, was that Yelp policy)?
Wow, for some reason I never knew that. Mercury being a liquid at room temperature is apparently also a relativistic effect. Interesting stuff.
Signatories to the NPT are required to sign a "safeguards agreement" with the IAEA, which lays out how the IAEA will monitor the country's compliance with the NPT. Iran did so, and then in 2005 the IAEA, after several warnings, concluded that Iran was not in compliance with its safeguards agreement.
According to the Chairman of IAEA Standing Advisory Group on Safeguards Implementation, this is in effect a declaration of NPT violation:
Iran was then referred to the UN Security Council for the violation, as provided for in the NPT. Incidentally, as a signatory of the UN Charter, Iran also agrees to abide by all decisions of the UN Security Council. Security Council resolution 1696 demanded that Iran halt its uranium enrichment program; resolutions 1737 and 1747 have followed up and imposed sanctions for noncompliance (the two follow-up resolutions passed unanimously). Iran has so far violated all three resolutions.
I think the grandparent post was commenting on kdawson using "early adapter" instead of "early adopter" in the post. Presumably, an early adapter is someone who is among the first to adapt to the revolutionary new world that the Jesus Tablet brings us.
Haha yeah, it's pretty inappropriate in this case. This was a causational study, not simply a measurement of correlation in the wild: they varied a variable in a laboratory setting, and measured how varying it changed the response variable.
There are of course many ways the study could be flawed, but it's not a case of measuring a correlation and then inferring a causation from it.