Most modern complicated websites do this to be honest. It makes debugging problems raised by users much more straightforward since you can actually look in the logs (not apache logs, they don't provide enough info to debug the internals of your application when form posts or session stuff is involved) and see what the user was doing when things went wrong.
Ideally we would not have to do this but since most users can't file a decent bug report to save their miserable lives you have to be able to follow their exact user journey through the site to replicate their issue. Any information you need to help you diagnose problems in an application need to be gathered within the application as even support monkeys will not be able gather exactly what you need all the time as they are not familiar with the internals.
That is also assuming the user with a problem gets to speak to the support dude who is a wannabe developer biding his time and getting work experience instead of the vast majority in my experience who are too stupid and lazy to any investigation of a users problem before sending it on the dev team.
As this comes directly from Microsoft and a couple of paid minions of them its pretty lame. Its so obvious who is behind this. What Google should try to do is to get any remedies they have to do be written down as much of it is applicable to Microsofts own promoting of MS Office inside Windows and its Server products etc.
When you cant compete, litigate. If everybody laughs at you for the sheer audacity, get a couple of toady minions to do your dirty work.
Actually, this did not come from MS.
It came from a crappy competitor to google product search called foundem. Unfortunately they consider the idea of learning about SEO to be akin to learning about black magic so they are suffering as no new users ever find them anymore.
They searched for things like "product search engine" in google and found they were not even listed on the first page and went straight to the EU screaming foul that Google Product Search came out first. Instead they should have tried the same thing on Bing and realised the same thing happened.
The problem is that their "vertical search technology" or whatever is the same old crap that the web used to be full of before Google. You searched for something then got back loads of links that just went to other search engines with a matching search. It meant you had to drill through 15 separate search engines to actually get to some useful results at the bottom of a huge tree structure of links. This was just shit for users.
Basically Foundem are crying out to be listed on the first page of googles search results for buying products even though all they do is aggregate stuff from somewhere else and have no original content what so ever on their site (apart from their anti-google rants that is). Sooner or later they will realise that this business model is just doomed, no matter how much they crap on Google since Bing do not direct any traffic to their shitty site either.
The only good thing that will come out of this is that Google will end up having to be far more transparent about their searching algorithm. They will then have to share it with all their competitors by making it public so the only way left they will have to protect it from copying will be with good old software patents. Maybe they will then join the pro-european software patent lobby. (ok, this last paragraph is me taking the piss slightly)
"Security expert and notorious self-promoter Mikko Hypponen"
"modern malware makers are motivated mainly by money, just as most of the antivirus industry, including F-Secure".
Everyone is motivated by money to a certain extent
The simple reality is that without money you cannot live. You need money to pay for food, housing and everything else you need in this world. You can try and not let money be your primary motivation in all things (for instance I could earn far more if I did a job I did not enjoy as much as being a software developer) but ultimately money always comes into these things as we live in a capitalist society based on money.
My chosen career would probably involve sitting around at home contributing to open source projects all day if I did not need to worry about getting paid. I could just create nice beautiful code that was a pleasure to work on 100% of the time instead of having to sometimes just throw a bunch of crap together as the client needed it yesterday and doing a proper job would take me a week or so.
Please stop repeating this crap. You might be able to dump a village elder in a local community centre and pretend it is a court but it carries no legal weight. The only way it can work is if both parties decide to forgo their normal entitlement to a real legal court and agree to an independent tribunal with no legal weight.
England does not have sharia courts with and legal weight. Just because some dickhead can sit in a room and pretend it is a court does not mean it carries and legal weight. If I do not like what a Sharia court says it has no legal right to force me into it unless a real court also agrees following normal legal precedent.
England does not have Sharia courts with any legal standing.
DMCA notices are free to file and are filed outside of the court system (they're just notices sent directly between two parties without a court clerk involved) so your lawyer angle doesn't seem plausible.
They might be free to file but who would know how to file one?
If a foreign company wants to file any sort of legal notice in the US it will almost always hire a local layer to do so since they will already have the expertise. I know it is not that difficult but this is just how business works, it is always easier to out source this to a US based legal company than it is to pay someone to figure out something even if it would only take them a few minutes. This also provides more surety of it being done right and that is very important.
I am not sure I entirely agree with outsourcing even the most basic tasks but it is certainly popular in the business world.
everyone in Argentina is proud about the Hand of God. It showed two things: - If he wanted, Maradona was able to fool the referee and make fun of the brits, despite them having stolen their island shortly before. - If he wanted, Maradona could just a few minutes later make one of the best goals in history. Of course the brits don't acknowledge it and just whine about the first one.
I don't wanna mix technology, sports, and politics here. I just wanted to point out that no one in Argentina is ashamed of the hand of god.
We will concede many things, but you still not having your island back. It's our island now, along with oil rights that go along with it.
According to their wikipedia entry MediaFire is based in the US (Texas), AFAIK you don't have to be a US citizen to sue a US organization in a US court for breach of US laws (feel free to correct me if I am wrong).
Nope, you are spot on. In civil cases you can usually sue in either the country where either party is based or in the country where the transaction took place.
Normally though you always sue in your own country in order to force your opponent to have to deal with the hassle of finding representation in a foreign country and sending witnesses half way round the world. Unless of course one country has such bat shit crazy laws in your favour as in this case:)
This is actually a good point. Maybe the DMCA was designed to help US lawyers by generating this additional revenue stream for them as companies flock to the US legal system to file this crap. In which case it will only change when an equivalent amount of revenue has been lost to overseas as tech companies abandon the US and that does not seem to have happened yet.
apparently you have never worn one of these things, they are heavy, and hurt your eyes, face, nose, and the back of your head, genius? if they are so grand why have they never become popular?
The reason they never became popular the first time around was that the Virtuality sets were so expensive. They cost tens of thousands of dollars each and were only good if you had a few so several of you could play together as they had no single player games available.
If you happened to get access to an arcade where you could play for free though (Like I did) you could still get seriously addicted to playing them. Whenever someone came in to the arcade and wanted to play but they were the only person I would have to don the other headset. I never remember the helmet being that uncomfortable to wear but I probably would not have cared if it was to be honest. The only thing that pissed me off was how expensive it was to play, I thought we should drop the price but when I found out how much it cost to rent it I understood.
Ultimately we gave it back as to just didn't generate the revenue for the floor space it took up. If you could have got the price down to a level where it could cost more like 50 cents or a dollar I think it might have been more profitable. As it was I think the minimum you could charge to cover the rent of one was about $5 per go and that barely covered the rental even if it was busy every night and all weekend (It wasn't at that price).
The problem with anything like this though is that once one company tries it and fails it poisons the idea and prevents anyone else from trying it for a while afterwards. The other problem is that most arcades started closing during this period as the consoles you could buy at home caught up in terms of technology.
The killer product that has made the idea of these things popular again though is the Microsoft Kinect. Once you take 2 or 3 Kinect style gizmos and throw them around you in a living room it will make it possible to track something like a brightly coloured gun to figure out where you are aiming it. Then a headset to control the visual movement and a simple joystick on the side of the gun to make you walk (so you can stay still in the middle of the room). Nobody previously would have predicted that microsoft could have produced the Kinect and released it for the price they did, that changed a whole lot of things.
Another amazing use for one of these devices now is in racing games. Currently even playing with a nice steering wheel setup the way you look at cars around you (such as when they are overtaking and in your mirror blindspot) is quirky or non existent. A device like this could make driving games seem far more natural.
As a side note from just across the strait here in Iceland, it's been abnormally warm this summer. Was kind of shocking, the peak of Snæfellsjökull (visible from Reykjavík on a clear day) showed through the ice cap. It's never happened before in recorded history. I mean, it was one thing when Iceland got a new tallest waterfall because of the retreating glaciers in Skaftafell, but to see a mountain whose name literally translates as "Snow Mountain" lose so much that its peak became visible... they're saying that at the current rate it's losing ice, the entire glacier will be gone in 20-30 years, and all of Iceland's glaciers in 150-200 years. Just crazy when you think about it, given that one of Iceland's glaciers alone is the largest in Europe by volume and takes up nearly 10% of the country.
I went mountain climbing in Ecuador a few years ago and it was the same story there too. We had to go almost 1k higher in order to find the glacier than we should have. The mountains we climbed have always been permanent snow covered peaks according to local custom but are looking like they will be bear rock within a decade if the current temperatures continue.
It is really bizarre walking on rocks that have been covered by glazier for thousands of years. They have a texture like a stony beach but instead of the pebbles being smooth as they would be if water had been washing over them they are all harsh and spiky. There will also be nothing growing due to the altitude and lack of any soil. Since most mountaineering is done at night so the glacier doesn't melt when your on it it makes for a very strange experience.
But Oracle wasn't suing phone manufacturers. They were suing Google. And in the end, the suit wasn't even about patents, it was about copyrights on APIs.
Next time, think things through before you get snarky.
I did think things through, you though did not.
In your original post that I replied to you said : "Actually, Android is open source — no licensing fees". That is simply not true as anyone using android does pay licencing fees, just not to Google. They pay them to MS instead but it is still a licencing fee as you are licencing a patented idea rather than the code.
Just because something is open source does not mean you do not have to pay a licence in order to use it as it may rely on ideas other people have patented. While I may not necessarily like this state of affairs I do at least recognise it is often the case.
If Google wanted they could keep Android as an open source project but wrap the whole thing in a million different patents covering aspects of its interface or design without every needing to even worry about software patents. If you include software patents as well (which are legal in the US after all) then you can create an open source project that nobody can use commercially without paying you a licence fee. The GPL probably prevents this but there are other open source licences.
Actually, Android is open source — no licensing fees
Utter rubbish. There no licencing fees paid to Google but almost every handset manufacturer who sells Android phones has to pay a cut to Microsoft to licence certain patents.
If we can't get them to manufacture things in the USA, then we need to get the foreign plants to increase their workers rights. Maybe we impose a tariff? I don't know what the answer is. Folks with morals don't have choices anymore. I make money developing software for the devices, so I have to buy them wherever they're made. What's your fucking excuse?
The problem is that even with the increase in workers rights it is often still cheaper to manufacture stuff abroad. In the case of most things Samsung make it is because the raw materials they need like rare earths are only being dug up in that part of the world now.
They used to be mined in the US but the mine closed when the price of rare earths was low few years ago (China flooded the market). This was a clear case where it was stupid to let that mine close, it should have been subsidised or an import tariff applied in order to keep it open and thus keep the factories that depended on it here as well. The problem is that both import tariffs and business subsidies are frowned upon by the WTO and the US has spent years taking other countries to the WTO courts to prevent them from doing this, so it makes it very hard for us to do it now.
The fact is that basing your economy on pure capitalist ideals makes it easy for another country like China to come along and game the system and put you at a disadvantage if they are willing to make some sacrifices. In China's case they are sacrificing their own currencies value in order to shore up their manufacturing and exports as they peg the value of their currency to the dollar instead of letting its value move freely.
China also uses state run and financed businesses to ensure it is always on top. Any export contract to China usually has a clause that ultimately results in the work being done in China by the end of the contract even if they lack the skills to do it at the beginning. This forces you to train a foreign competitor who will ultimately cut you out of the deal. They pay more for these clauses in the short term and it generates more profit for the foreign company initially but in the long term is commercial suicide. This sort of short termism is what is really harming the US.
USA is becoming a third world country because of democratic votes cast by the majority who wants free bread and circuses for the politicians that promise it, while in reality stealing individual freedoms from people to run their businesses to the best of their abilities without being hindered by the government power. That's why people move production out of USA, while government ends up growing on printed, taxed, borrowed money, that's the reason for USA becoming the 3rd world country.
So then why is Germany, a country that has a very substantial social security system (free bread) not becoming a third world country. It is currently suffering a little as it is being asked to single handedly bail out the entire continent but that won't last, if the euro splits Germany is the one country that will not be badly affected. It is still an economic power house even with unions, social security, high taxes and business regulation.
The reality is that the US is not becoming a third world country at all, it is just that the wealth is becoming more concentrated in the hands of fewer people. The manual labour might all be getting outsourced to China to but the people running companies profit from this in the short term since it lowers costs.
The other problem with the US is that for the past 50 years it has been spending vastly beyond its means in order to maintain its crazily sized armed forces. Ron Paul was right about this, sooner or later the US is going to be forced to scale back its armed forces and concentrate on self-defence.
That's all irrelevant. What matters is that keyboard and mouse gamers beat the pants off of gamepad players whenever they go head to head. The keyboard and mouse is the superior controller by the only metric that matters, performance.
Lol. You really should have qualified that statement by gametype!
I am an avid FPS player and in that case you are mostly spot on. I hate playing shooters without my mouse to aim although I am open to the idea of replacing my keyboard with a dedicated controller (gamer keypad style) that just does the keys I want and makes the wasd keys bigger or something.
But since you did not qualify your statement to discount driving games that is one are where keyboard players lose everytime. I own nice logitech steering controller from when I played NFS a lot a few years ago and it still kicks arse. Once you play driving games on a better controller than a keyboard and mouse you will never look back.
I am also not sure how you statement applies to games like Skyrim / Diablo / World of Warcraft where precise aiming is less important. In this case having a multitude of easily accessible buttons in comfortable places would surely be an advantage. A keyboard is great and all, but sometimes we all hit the wrong key. Maybe the alphagrip thing that someone else posted would be better for games involving lots of magic / type stuff and weapon changes.
That would reduce the need to use your nuclear generator
It's a nice idea, but an RTG can't be shut down, as it works from radioactive decay heat.
I see a larger problem being the lack of the plutonium-238 required to make them. Some of the last of it went up with the Curiosity rover, and they had to scrounge that from the Russians.
Not scrounge, buy. It also wasn't the last of it. NASA has enough to last until 2022.
Anyway the reason congress keeps denying funding to try making more P-238 is they just want NASA to find a way of using P-239 instead. That will also solve the problem of there being tons of the stuff in storage we have no need for.
The only reason they use P-238 at present is because of it's shorter half-life and the fact that it only gives off alpha particles which are relatively easy to stop. I reckon it must be fairly easy to get power out of P-239, the only problem is that if it goes wrong it will go wrong in the most spectacular manner possible:)
This might technically be a phishing exploit but you would have to be pretty stupid to fall for it still as the address bar at the top of the page would not be your banks a web address.
...you learn a lot by finding out not just whether the candidate can solve them, but what it took for them to solve it.
For one thing, you learn their approach to problem solving and what process/methods they've learned.
The first thing to watch for on a coding test is: did they analyze the problem and design the solution before starting to code? If they just jumped in and started writing code, you don't want them!
Actually that is utter crap too.
Do not try and force other people to follow the same process to a solution that you do, instead judge them on their results. Different people approach problems very differently but that often has no relevance to whether who's solution is better.
It may be that the person you are testing has simply seen a comparison between the problem you gave them and a problem they have previously solved so can create a solution pretty much from memory. This is actually very likely based on the fact that tests you hand out in interview scenarios have to be short and quick.
By your logic you just denied a perfectly good candidate the job based on your own preconceptions that there were taking a shortcut.
No programmer in his right (or left one for that matter) mind can believe that a "programming test" during an interview would provide any meaningful indicator about a coder's abilities.
Actually, I think you are dead wrong here.
I have been through a few programming tests and have now created a few as well and I think they can be a very good indicator if they are approached correctly (by the company, not the prospective employee).
Firstly, there are no hard and fast wrong answers. I made a few glaring screw ups in mine but since I was able to recognise them myself and discuss them during the post test interview this did not count against me.
We were asked to fill in some blanks in a some code (very big blanks though, more than a few lines long). This pretty much guaranteed some mistakes since we had to do it on paper with no access to a computer or any reference material. We also go to choose a language were comfortable with to do the test in (PHP or ASP since it was a web dev role). All in all I think the test took about half an hour, then a further half hour to discuss it.
The main thing is that you do not expect the test to be marked and that be the be all and end all. Instead it is used as a starting point for an interview. Then the interview can be far more useful than if you just go in with a list of stock questions that the candidate will have rehearsed for anyway.
Well, in America "unions" mean very powerful quasai-political entities like SEIU or UAW which basically make american labor unprofitable (see the insane costs of auto-workers). These "unions" extort huge fees from their often-unwilling constituents and in turn donate large sums to our Democratic/socialist party.
Source: my uncle worked in Detroit from high school-> retirement. He loves American cars but told me it's one of the most corrupt systems out there.
Not all countries unions work the same way. I know that here in the UK unions are very different from unions in the US and also different to unions in Germany.
The fact that the union system in the US was infiltrated in organised crime does not mean that happened anywhere else. I think it might be one of the only developed western countries where this happened actually, it is certainly not the case in the UK.
To be fair, and I don't know if it's changed, the ANPR cameras used to only log your details if your plate could be cross-referenced with another list such as a list of stolen cars, a list of uninsured/declared off the road vehicles etc. or vehicles on a specific watch-list which IIRC they do actually have to obtain a warrant to add a vehicle to.
Warrant? What is this warrant thing you speak of?
Oh, you mean like a search warrant that can just be issued by any police officer above the rank of inspector? Warrants in the UK are a joke since most are now just issued by the police themselves without them having to go anywhere near a judge or magistrate. If a police officer is willing to arrest you he can immediately search you and the surrounding area (including your home, car, etc) without needing a warrant.
The police refer to these things so as "markers" on your car. Contrary to you belief though they can can pull your car over just because it has a marker on it, they do not need any further reason. If you can show you have recently bought the vehicle then they will most likely just start the process of having the marker removed but only the force that added the marker can remove it.
The problem is though that the PNC is not covered by the data protection act so there is no reason to actually tell you there is a marker on your car. They can equally just lie and make something up about your driving (not something criminal). The police in this country can pretty much stop anyone they please and you have very little recourse.
They are only likely to actually use their ability to stop people at will though if you happen to get yourself on their shitlist, stay off it like most people do and you are fine.
Why are number plates printed by private businesses anyhow? It seems like a weak point in the system.
Yup, certainly is.
A few years ago a friend of mine had a minor crash and trashed the number plate on his car. This was no surprise as he was a crap driver who shouldn't have been on the road anyway (he had about 5 or 6 crashes in the same year, all low speed though).
He got pulled over for driving a car with no front number plate and the police told him to get it sorted before he drove it again so he walked to the local garage and paid them to print up a new front plate for him. Unfortunately he was not all that bright a lad so he got the wrong plate printed as he could not remember the right one. He realised when he got home and noticed it was different so the next time he tried again. It took him about 3 or 4 attempts to get it right and every time the garage just took his money and printed him a new plate without any proof the plate he was asking for was correct.
I've been running a Q6600 for several years, and only replaced it last month. That's a July 2006 CPU. It didn't really seem strained until the very most recent crop of games... and yes, sure, it's a quadcore, but game CPU logic hasn't been heavily parallelized yet, so a fast dualcore will still be better for most gamers than a quadcore - and the Q6600 is pretty slow by today's standard (2.4GHz, and with a less efficient microarchitecture than the current breed of core2 CPUs).
Sure, CPUs matter, but it's not even near a case of "you need the latest generation of CPU to run the latest generation of games!" anymore. Upgrading to a i7-3770 did smooth out a few games somewhat, but I'm seeing far larger improvements when transcoding FLAC albums to MP3 for my portable MP3 player, or compiling large codebases:)
I had to can my dual core E8600 when BlackOps came out so I beg to differ on that. I only upgraded to a Q9650 I found second hand and it made the world of difference. The old dual core chip stuttered horrendously at 1920*1200 with a GTX480 for the first minute or so of a multiplayer match. I am guessing the game was trying to load the textures after I had started playing or something but I tried everything I could think of to fix it before spending any money. I even tried overclocking the E8600 up to 3.5 or 3.6 or something but that still didn't help at all. As soon as I had those extra 2 cores, even with each running slower it was fixed.
If you're talking about the best use of say 1000 dollars to build a gaming PC, well then the cheapest i5 you can find with the best video card you can afford is probably the best bang for your buck.
I just built myself a nice shiny new gaming PC as my old Core2 Quad 9650 decided to go pop a few weeks ago and gave up trying to resurrect it.
I looked at the prices and it seems that a low end 2011 Sandy Bridge CPU is actually pretty reasonable so you should be able to put together a gaming PC featuring this for under a $1000. The 3820 is only $300. Throw in some memory, motherboard and a mid range graphics card and you get up to $785.96 on new egg:)
Most people seem to discount 2011 SandyBridge stuff based on how expensive the high end cards are but the low end ones are still miles ahead of everything else and the price is not that different to a 1155 system. I almost hit the buy button on a 1155 system myself before I actually thought I would quickly check a 2011 even though I thought I could not afford it.
I reckon the extra bus width to talk to the CPU must make far more difference than a few extra Hz on a CPU internally in most real world situations.
>>>you still can't get most people to even think of taking Vista on a bet
Absolutely right. That's why they changed the NT version number from 6.0 to 6.1 and renamed Vista to Windows Mohave'..... ooops I mean..... Seven.
I probably would have liked Vista if Microsoft had said minimum RAM was 1 gigabyte. But no they said 512 megabyte instead, which is what my brother's computer came with by default, and so it ran horribly.
They also made some serious improvements in Windows 7 that you seem to be ignoring:
1) They fixed the off button on the start menu so it actually shut the machine down rather than just suspending it. 2) The vastly improved taskbar. I still think this is the best idea to come of out of MS in years.
True, these are both pretty small visible but the reality is that small things matter more then big invisible things when it comes to changing a product name. If they rewrote the entire kernel then slapped the same UI on top would you think that warranted changing the name from Vista to 7? Most people would not since most people would have no idea what happened.
Slashdot Mirror
What could possibly be more invasive than tracking a user's every interaction with a Web site?
Most modern complicated websites do this to be honest. It makes debugging problems raised by users much more straightforward since you can actually look in the logs (not apache logs, they don't provide enough info to debug the internals of your application when form posts or session stuff is involved) and see what the user was doing when things went wrong.
Ideally we would not have to do this but since most users can't file a decent bug report to save their miserable lives you have to be able to follow their exact user journey through the site to replicate their issue. Any information you need to help you diagnose problems in an application need to be gathered within the application as even support monkeys will not be able gather exactly what you need all the time as they are not familiar with the internals.
That is also assuming the user with a problem gets to speak to the support dude who is a wannabe developer biding his time and getting work experience instead of the vast majority in my experience who are too stupid and lazy to any investigation of a users problem before sending it on the dev team.
As this comes directly from Microsoft and a couple of paid minions of them its pretty lame. Its so obvious who is behind this. What Google should try to do is to get any remedies they have to do be written down as much of it is applicable to Microsofts own promoting of MS Office inside Windows and its Server products etc.
When you cant compete, litigate. If everybody laughs at you for the sheer audacity, get a couple of toady minions to do your dirty work.
Actually, this did not come from MS.
It came from a crappy competitor to google product search called foundem. Unfortunately they consider the idea of learning about SEO to be akin to learning about black magic so they are suffering as no new users ever find them anymore.
They searched for things like "product search engine" in google and found they were not even listed on the first page and went straight to the EU screaming foul that Google Product Search came out first. Instead they should have tried the same thing on Bing and realised the same thing happened.
The problem is that their "vertical search technology" or whatever is the same old crap that the web used to be full of before Google. You searched for something then got back loads of links that just went to other search engines with a matching search. It meant you had to drill through 15 separate search engines to actually get to some useful results at the bottom of a huge tree structure of links. This was just shit for users.
Basically Foundem are crying out to be listed on the first page of googles search results for buying products even though all they do is aggregate stuff from somewhere else and have no original content what so ever on their site (apart from their anti-google rants that is). Sooner or later they will realise that this business model is just doomed, no matter how much they crap on Google since Bing do not direct any traffic to their shitty site either.
The only good thing that will come out of this is that Google will end up having to be far more transparent about their searching algorithm. They will then have to share it with all their competitors by making it public so the only way left they will have to protect it from copying will be with good old software patents. Maybe they will then join the pro-european software patent lobby. (ok, this last paragraph is me taking the piss slightly)
"Security expert and notorious self-promoter Mikko Hypponen"
"modern malware makers are motivated mainly by money, just as most of the antivirus industry, including F-Secure".
Everyone is motivated by money to a certain extent
The simple reality is that without money you cannot live. You need money to pay for food, housing and everything else you need in this world. You can try and not let money be your primary motivation in all things (for instance I could earn far more if I did a job I did not enjoy as much as being a software developer) but ultimately money always comes into these things as we live in a capitalist society based on money.
My chosen career would probably involve sitting around at home contributing to open source projects all day if I did not need to worry about getting paid. I could just create nice beautiful code that was a pleasure to work on 100% of the time instead of having to sometimes just throw a bunch of crap together as the client needed it yesterday and doing a proper job would take me a week or so.
England already has Sharia courts.
Please stop repeating this crap. You might be able to dump a village elder in a local community centre and pretend it is a court but it carries no legal weight. The only way it can work is if both parties decide to forgo their normal entitlement to a real legal court and agree to an independent tribunal with no legal weight.
England does not have sharia courts with and legal weight. Just because some dickhead can sit in a room and pretend it is a court does not mean it carries and legal weight. If I do not like what a Sharia court says it has no legal right to force me into it unless a real court also agrees following normal legal precedent.
England does not have Sharia courts with any legal standing.
DMCA notices are free to file and are filed outside of the court system (they're just notices sent directly between two parties without a court clerk involved) so your lawyer angle doesn't seem plausible.
They might be free to file but who would know how to file one?
If a foreign company wants to file any sort of legal notice in the US it will almost always hire a local layer to do so since they will already have the expertise. I know it is not that difficult but this is just how business works, it is always easier to out source this to a US based legal company than it is to pay someone to figure out something even if it would only take them a few minutes. This also provides more surety of it being done right and that is very important.
I am not sure I entirely agree with outsourcing even the most basic tasks but it is certainly popular in the business world.
everyone in Argentina is proud about the Hand of God. It showed two things:
- If he wanted, Maradona was able to fool the referee and make fun of the brits, despite them having stolen their island shortly before.
- If he wanted, Maradona could just a few minutes later make one of the best goals in history. Of course the brits don't acknowledge it and just whine about the first one.
I don't wanna mix technology, sports, and politics here. I just wanted to point out that no one in Argentina is ashamed of the hand of god.
We will concede many things, but you still not having your island back. It's our island now, along with oil rights that go along with it.
According to their wikipedia entry MediaFire is based in the US (Texas), AFAIK you don't have to be a US citizen to sue a US organization in a US court for breach of US laws (feel free to correct me if I am wrong).
Nope, you are spot on. In civil cases you can usually sue in either the country where either party is based or in the country where the transaction took place.
Normally though you always sue in your own country in order to force your opponent to have to deal with the hassle of finding representation in a foreign country and sending witnesses half way round the world. Unless of course one country has such bat shit crazy laws in your favour as in this case :)
This is actually a good point. Maybe the DMCA was designed to help US lawyers by generating this additional revenue stream for them as companies flock to the US legal system to file this crap. In which case it will only change when an equivalent amount of revenue has been lost to overseas as tech companies abandon the US and that does not seem to have happened yet.
apparently you have never worn one of these things, they are heavy, and hurt your eyes, face, nose, and the back of your head, genius? if they are so grand why have they never become popular?
The reason they never became popular the first time around was that the Virtuality sets were so expensive. They cost tens of thousands of dollars each and were only good if you had a few so several of you could play together as they had no single player games available.
If you happened to get access to an arcade where you could play for free though (Like I did) you could still get seriously addicted to playing them. Whenever someone came in to the arcade and wanted to play but they were the only person I would have to don the other headset. I never remember the helmet being that uncomfortable to wear but I probably would not have cared if it was to be honest. The only thing that pissed me off was how expensive it was to play, I thought we should drop the price but when I found out how much it cost to rent it I understood.
Ultimately we gave it back as to just didn't generate the revenue for the floor space it took up. If you could have got the price down to a level where it could cost more like 50 cents or a dollar I think it might have been more profitable. As it was I think the minimum you could charge to cover the rent of one was about $5 per go and that barely covered the rental even if it was busy every night and all weekend (It wasn't at that price).
The problem with anything like this though is that once one company tries it and fails it poisons the idea and prevents anyone else from trying it for a while afterwards. The other problem is that most arcades started closing during this period as the consoles you could buy at home caught up in terms of technology.
The killer product that has made the idea of these things popular again though is the Microsoft Kinect. Once you take 2 or 3 Kinect style gizmos and throw them around you in a living room it will make it possible to track something like a brightly coloured gun to figure out where you are aiming it. Then a headset to control the visual movement and a simple joystick on the side of the gun to make you walk (so you can stay still in the middle of the room). Nobody previously would have predicted that microsoft could have produced the Kinect and released it for the price they did, that changed a whole lot of things.
Another amazing use for one of these devices now is in racing games. Currently even playing with a nice steering wheel setup the way you look at cars around you (such as when they are overtaking and in your mirror blindspot) is quirky or non existent. A device like this could make driving games seem far more natural.
As a side note from just across the strait here in Iceland, it's been abnormally warm this summer. Was kind of shocking, the peak of Snæfellsjökull (visible from Reykjavík on a clear day) showed through the ice cap. It's never happened before in recorded history. I mean, it was one thing when Iceland got a new tallest waterfall because of the retreating glaciers in Skaftafell, but to see a mountain whose name literally translates as "Snow Mountain" lose so much that its peak became visible... they're saying that at the current rate it's losing ice, the entire glacier will be gone in 20-30 years, and all of Iceland's glaciers in 150-200 years. Just crazy when you think about it, given that one of Iceland's glaciers alone is the largest in Europe by volume and takes up nearly 10% of the country.
I went mountain climbing in Ecuador a few years ago and it was the same story there too. We had to go almost 1k higher in order to find the glacier than we should have. The mountains we climbed have always been permanent snow covered peaks according to local custom but are looking like they will be bear rock within a decade if the current temperatures continue.
It is really bizarre walking on rocks that have been covered by glazier for thousands of years. They have a texture like a stony beach but instead of the pebbles being smooth as they would be if water had been washing over them they are all harsh and spiky. There will also be nothing growing due to the altitude and lack of any soil. Since most mountaineering is done at night so the glacier doesn't melt when your on it it makes for a very strange experience.
But Oracle wasn't suing phone manufacturers. They were suing Google. And in the end, the suit wasn't even about patents, it was about copyrights on APIs.
Next time, think things through before you get snarky.
I did think things through, you though did not.
In your original post that I replied to you said : "Actually, Android is open source — no licensing fees". That is simply not true as anyone using android does pay licencing fees, just not to Google. They pay them to MS instead but it is still a licencing fee as you are licencing a patented idea rather than the code.
Just because something is open source does not mean you do not have to pay a licence in order to use it as it may rely on ideas other people have patented. While I may not necessarily like this state of affairs I do at least recognise it is often the case.
If Google wanted they could keep Android as an open source project but wrap the whole thing in a million different patents covering aspects of its interface or design without every needing to even worry about software patents. If you include software patents as well (which are legal in the US after all) then you can create an open source project that nobody can use commercially without paying you a licence fee. The GPL probably prevents this but there are other open source licences.
Actually, Android is open source — no licensing fees
Utter rubbish. There no licencing fees paid to Google but almost every handset manufacturer who sells Android phones has to pay a cut to Microsoft to licence certain patents.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15427575
This is what Oracle were aiming for too, thankfully they failed. Nice try though.
If we can't get them to manufacture things in the USA, then we need to get the foreign plants to increase their workers rights. Maybe we impose a tariff? I don't know what the answer is. Folks with morals don't have choices anymore. I make money developing software for the devices, so I have to buy them wherever they're made. What's your fucking excuse?
The problem is that even with the increase in workers rights it is often still cheaper to manufacture stuff abroad. In the case of most things Samsung make it is because the raw materials they need like rare earths are only being dug up in that part of the world now.
They used to be mined in the US but the mine closed when the price of rare earths was low few years ago (China flooded the market). This was a clear case where it was stupid to let that mine close, it should have been subsidised or an import tariff applied in order to keep it open and thus keep the factories that depended on it here as well. The problem is that both import tariffs and business subsidies are frowned upon by the WTO and the US has spent years taking other countries to the WTO courts to prevent them from doing this, so it makes it very hard for us to do it now.
The fact is that basing your economy on pure capitalist ideals makes it easy for another country like China to come along and game the system and put you at a disadvantage if they are willing to make some sacrifices. In China's case they are sacrificing their own currencies value in order to shore up their manufacturing and exports as they peg the value of their currency to the dollar instead of letting its value move freely.
China also uses state run and financed businesses to ensure it is always on top. Any export contract to China usually has a clause that ultimately results in the work being done in China by the end of the contract even if they lack the skills to do it at the beginning. This forces you to train a foreign competitor who will ultimately cut you out of the deal. They pay more for these clauses in the short term and it generates more profit for the foreign company initially but in the long term is commercial suicide. This sort of short termism is what is really harming the US.
USA is becoming a third world country because of democratic votes cast by the majority who wants free bread and circuses for the politicians that promise it, while in reality stealing individual freedoms from people to run their businesses to the best of their abilities without being hindered by the government power. That's why people move production out of USA, while government ends up growing on printed, taxed, borrowed money, that's the reason for USA becoming the 3rd world country.
So then why is Germany, a country that has a very substantial social security system (free bread) not becoming a third world country. It is currently suffering a little as it is being asked to single handedly bail out the entire continent but that won't last, if the euro splits Germany is the one country that will not be badly affected. It is still an economic power house even with unions, social security, high taxes and business regulation.
The reality is that the US is not becoming a third world country at all, it is just that the wealth is becoming more concentrated in the hands of fewer people. The manual labour might all be getting outsourced to China to but the people running companies profit from this in the short term since it lowers costs.
The other problem with the US is that for the past 50 years it has been spending vastly beyond its means in order to maintain its crazily sized armed forces. Ron Paul was right about this, sooner or later the US is going to be forced to scale back its armed forces and concentrate on self-defence.
That's all irrelevant. What matters is that keyboard and mouse gamers beat the pants off of gamepad players whenever they go head to head. The keyboard and mouse is the superior controller by the only metric that matters, performance.
Lol. You really should have qualified that statement by gametype!
I am an avid FPS player and in that case you are mostly spot on. I hate playing shooters without my mouse to aim although I am open to the idea of replacing my keyboard with a dedicated controller (gamer keypad style) that just does the keys I want and makes the wasd keys bigger or something.
But since you did not qualify your statement to discount driving games that is one are where keyboard players lose everytime. I own nice logitech steering controller from when I played NFS a lot a few years ago and it still kicks arse. Once you play driving games on a better controller than a keyboard and mouse you will never look back.
I am also not sure how you statement applies to games like Skyrim / Diablo / World of Warcraft where precise aiming is less important. In this case having a multitude of easily accessible buttons in comfortable places would surely be an advantage. A keyboard is great and all, but sometimes we all hit the wrong key. Maybe the alphagrip thing that someone else posted would be better for games involving lots of magic / type stuff and weapon changes.
> ...you would have to be pretty stupid...
So it only works on half the population.
Good point.
That would reduce the need to use your nuclear generator
It's a nice idea, but an RTG can't be shut down, as it works from radioactive decay heat.
I see a larger problem being the lack of the plutonium-238 required to make them. Some of the last of it went up with the Curiosity rover, and they had to scrounge that from the Russians.
Not scrounge, buy. It also wasn't the last of it. NASA has enough to last until 2022.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-238
Anyway the reason congress keeps denying funding to try making more P-238 is they just want NASA to find a way of using P-239 instead. That will also solve the problem of there being tons of the stuff in storage we have no need for.
The only reason they use P-238 at present is because of it's shorter half-life and the fact that it only gives off alpha particles which are relatively easy to stop. I reckon it must be fairly easy to get power out of P-239, the only problem is that if it goes wrong it will go wrong in the most spectacular manner possible :)
This might technically be a phishing exploit but you would have to be pretty stupid to fall for it still as the address bar at the top of the page would not be your banks a web address.
For one thing, you learn their approach to problem solving and what process/methods they've learned.
The first thing to watch for on a coding test is: did they analyze the problem and design the solution before starting to code? If they just jumped in and started writing code, you don't want them!
Actually that is utter crap too.
Do not try and force other people to follow the same process to a solution that you do, instead judge them on their results. Different people approach problems very differently but that often has no relevance to whether who's solution is better.
It may be that the person you are testing has simply seen a comparison between the problem you gave them and a problem they have previously solved so can create a solution pretty much from memory. This is actually very likely based on the fact that tests you hand out in interview scenarios have to be short and quick.
By your logic you just denied a perfectly good candidate the job based on your own preconceptions that there were taking a shortcut.
No programmer in his right (or left one for that matter) mind can believe that a "programming test" during an interview would provide any meaningful indicator about a coder's abilities.
Actually, I think you are dead wrong here.
I have been through a few programming tests and have now created a few as well and I think they can be a very good indicator if they are approached correctly (by the company, not the prospective employee).
Firstly, there are no hard and fast wrong answers. I made a few glaring screw ups in mine but since I was able to recognise them myself and discuss them during the post test interview this did not count against me.
We were asked to fill in some blanks in a some code (very big blanks though, more than a few lines long). This pretty much guaranteed some mistakes since we had to do it on paper with no access to a computer or any reference material. We also go to choose a language were comfortable with to do the test in (PHP or ASP since it was a web dev role). All in all I think the test took about half an hour, then a further half hour to discuss it.
The main thing is that you do not expect the test to be marked and that be the be all and end all. Instead it is used as a starting point for an interview. Then the interview can be far more useful than if you just go in with a list of stock questions that the candidate will have rehearsed for anyway.
Well, in America "unions" mean very powerful quasai-political entities like SEIU or UAW which basically make american labor unprofitable (see the insane costs of auto-workers). These "unions" extort huge fees from their often-unwilling constituents and in turn donate large sums to our Democratic/socialist party.
Source: my uncle worked in Detroit from high school-> retirement. He loves American cars but told me it's one of the most corrupt systems out there.
Not all countries unions work the same way. I know that here in the UK unions are very different from unions in the US and also different to unions in Germany.
The fact that the union system in the US was infiltrated in organised crime does not mean that happened anywhere else. I think it might be one of the only developed western countries where this happened actually, it is certainly not the case in the UK.
To be fair, and I don't know if it's changed, the ANPR cameras used to only log your details if your plate could be cross-referenced with another list such as a list of stolen cars, a list of uninsured/declared off the road vehicles etc. or vehicles on a specific watch-list which IIRC they do actually have to obtain a warrant to add a vehicle to.
Warrant? What is this warrant thing you speak of?
Oh, you mean like a search warrant that can just be issued by any police officer above the rank of inspector? Warrants in the UK are a joke since most are now just issued by the police themselves without them having to go anywhere near a judge or magistrate. If a police officer is willing to arrest you he can immediately search you and the surrounding area (including your home, car, etc) without needing a warrant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_warrant
The police refer to these things so as "markers" on your car. Contrary to you belief though they can can pull your car over just because it has a marker on it, they do not need any further reason. If you can show you have recently bought the vehicle then they will most likely just start the process of having the marker removed but only the force that added the marker can remove it.
The problem is though that the PNC is not covered by the data protection act so there is no reason to actually tell you there is a marker on your car. They can equally just lie and make something up about your driving (not something criminal). The police in this country can pretty much stop anyone they please and you have very little recourse.
They are only likely to actually use their ability to stop people at will though if you happen to get yourself on their shitlist, stay off it like most people do and you are fine.
Also, it has changed. These cameras log every car that goes by regardless of whether it has a marker on or not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police-enforced_ANPR_in_the_UK
Why are number plates printed by private businesses anyhow? It seems like a weak point in the system.
Yup, certainly is.
A few years ago a friend of mine had a minor crash and trashed the number plate on his car. This was no surprise as he was a crap driver who shouldn't have been on the road anyway (he had about 5 or 6 crashes in the same year, all low speed though).
He got pulled over for driving a car with no front number plate and the police told him to get it sorted before he drove it again so he walked to the local garage and paid them to print up a new front plate for him. Unfortunately he was not all that bright a lad so he got the wrong plate printed as he could not remember the right one. He realised when he got home and noticed it was different so the next time he tried again. It took him about 3 or 4 attempts to get it right and every time the garage just took his money and printed him a new plate without any proof the plate he was asking for was correct.
*shrug*
I've been running a Q6600 for several years, and only replaced it last month. That's a July 2006 CPU. It didn't really seem strained until the very most recent crop of games... and yes, sure, it's a quadcore, but game CPU logic hasn't been heavily parallelized yet, so a fast dualcore will still be better for most gamers than a quadcore - and the Q6600 is pretty slow by today's standard (2.4GHz, and with a less efficient microarchitecture than the current breed of core2 CPUs).
Sure, CPUs matter, but it's not even near a case of "you need the latest generation of CPU to run the latest generation of games!" anymore. Upgrading to a i7-3770 did smooth out a few games somewhat, but I'm seeing far larger improvements when transcoding FLAC albums to MP3 for my portable MP3 player, or compiling large codebases :)
I had to can my dual core E8600 when BlackOps came out so I beg to differ on that. I only upgraded to a Q9650 I found second hand and it made the world of difference. The old dual core chip stuttered horrendously at 1920*1200 with a GTX480 for the first minute or so of a multiplayer match. I am guessing the game was trying to load the textures after I had started playing or something but I tried everything I could think of to fix it before spending any money. I even tried overclocking the E8600 up to 3.5 or 3.6 or something but that still didn't help at all. As soon as I had those extra 2 cores, even with each running slower it was fixed.
If you're talking about the best use of say 1000 dollars to build a gaming PC, well then the cheapest i5 you can find with the best video card you can afford is probably the best bang for your buck.
I just built myself a nice shiny new gaming PC as my old Core2 Quad 9650 decided to go pop a few weeks ago and gave up trying to resurrect it.
I looked at the prices and it seems that a low end 2011 Sandy Bridge CPU is actually pretty reasonable so you should be able to put together a gaming PC featuring this for under a $1000. The 3820 is only $300. Throw in some memory, motherboard and a mid range graphics card and you get up to $785.96 on new egg :)
Most people seem to discount 2011 SandyBridge stuff based on how expensive the high end cards are but the low end ones are still miles ahead of everything else and the price is not that different to a 1155 system. I almost hit the buy button on a 1155 system myself before I actually thought I would quickly check a 2011 even though I thought I could not afford it.
I reckon the extra bus width to talk to the CPU must make far more difference than a few extra Hz on a CPU internally in most real world situations.
>>>you still can't get most people to even think of taking Vista on a bet
Absolutely right. That's why they changed the NT version number from 6.0 to 6.1 and renamed Vista to Windows Mohave'..... ooops I mean..... Seven.
I probably would have liked Vista if Microsoft had said minimum RAM was 1 gigabyte. But no they said 512 megabyte instead, which is what my brother's computer came with by default, and so it ran horribly.
They also made some serious improvements in Windows 7 that you seem to be ignoring:
1) They fixed the off button on the start menu so it actually shut the machine down rather than just suspending it.
2) The vastly improved taskbar. I still think this is the best idea to come of out of MS in years.
True, these are both pretty small visible but the reality is that small things matter more then big invisible things when it comes to changing a product name. If they rewrote the entire kernel then slapped the same UI on top would you think that warranted changing the name from Vista to 7? Most people would not since most people would have no idea what happened.