then Director-General for NPfIT Richard Granger charged them not £1bn, as the contract permitted, but just £63m. Granger's first job was with Andersen Consulting, which later became Accenture.
I bet I know who will be getting a nice high-pay/no-show job after he retires from government.
Too late. Richard Granger long since left his post at Connecting for Health and now works for KPMG Australia. He was never really in government, as he was a civil servant rather than being elected. In fact for a while he was the highest paid civil servant in the country on £290,000 a year. The good thing about him leaving was that at least he did not get a golden handshake like most would have.
so you thing CA's or say RSA shouldn't do back ground checks because it's just a "job" and doesn't require "top secret" clearance?
Yes, because they are a company and the scope for abuse is too great. The scope for abuse is still large when government does this level of checking but that is a risk I am willing to take in order to save lives. I am not willing to take the same level of risk when the only thing on the line is a companies reputation and revenue, especially not when you may not actually end up working for said company.
Yup. But google doesn't have a monopoly in search.
Google has a higher percentage of the search market than Microsoft has of the OS market; Slashdot constantly tells me that Microsoft is a monopoly. Doesn't that mean that Google has a monopoly?
The only difference being the much lower barrier to switching. You can switch search providers in seconds, changing operating systems is not so easy.
A bank is not a secure mattress. Banking is an explicitly different activity than secure asset storage or investment. This gambling site promised secure asset storage and did not deliver. Their operation does imitate a Ponzi scheme quite closely. The only difference was that they promised secure asset storage rather than investment and dividend.
That makes no sense since companies keep their money in banks too. If bank current accounts do not count as secure asset storage for people why should they for businesses? I explicitly mantioned current accounts in my original post so that you would not think I was talk about investments, which can go down as well as up. I was talking about low interest, low return but supposedly low risk regular accounts, not investment accounts.
Their operation may mirror a ponzi scheme as it is presented by the feds, but maybe they have another reason for presenting it as so since the US is currently having one of its regular clampdowns on gamblling. Whenever the US gets a bee in its bonnet about something law enforcement never shies away from using illegal means to close its targets down. The first thing that comes to mind was immediately going after wikileaks card payment processors but I am sure there are a myriad of other examples.
It is often quicker to bankrupt a business rather than try and enforce new laws that may have constitutional or other issues so will involve a long drawn out case with many appeals to higher and higher courts. Once a law has been on the books for a while and has been found to be within the consitution by the supreme court it is generally much quicker since lower courts are bound by precedent but until then laws are often much less reliable unless they are non-contentious.
In this case it may be that they are simply talking up a storm to try and encourage people to not use the site or to encourage people with winnings on the site to all try and withdraw their money at the same time.
Actually, it is the very definition of a Ponzi scheme.
There should be two distinct piles of money here. First, we have the business's money. I don't know how they earn this (percentage of play maybe), but it doesn't really matter. This is the money they can use to operate the business. For this fund, it is perfectly reasonable to expect money to keep coming in, that is how businesses operate.
However, there should be a separate pile of money that belongs to the account holders. This is NOT the business's money. They should, at any time, be able to pay off every single account holder every penny they hold in the account. If you have to keep having new accounts (or more money added to them) to pay off other accounts, that is a Ponzi scheme.
If our banks don't ring fence the money that we deposit with them in current accounts then it stands to reason that a poker site is not going to. I am far more concerned with banks gambling with my deposit in their investment banking arm than I am about a gambling site dipping into my winnings to pay it's staff.
The bottom line here is that almost all businesses occasionally have liabilities greater than their assets. True, in this case it was too greater discrepancy but if we suddenly declared that it was illegal for a bank to operate and forced them to settle up with all their customers over the course of the next month then there would probably be just as many people out of pocket.
Except I wasn't the person getting clearance - i was just someone he put down as someone he knows.
I didn't say or think you were.
I was just saying that someone getting top secret clearance is entirely different to someone getting a job. I trust government far more than I trust companies.
Why? I do not like the weight the world has placed on money but I have no choice since without money I will most likely starve. At the very least people who spend their entire life reliant on the state to support them (I live in the UK where we have some semblance of a social security system) tend to have shorter lives than those who are more self sufficient. Also, I am some years off retiring and I cannot rely on their being a decent social security and state pension system when I eventually get there. This makes money very important.
Most people who do not see the importance of money do so because they are still supported in some way by their parents. This is because having parental support is enough to make sure you do not starve to death in most developed countries. If you have ever been in a situation where you do not have anyone you can go and ask for financial support and you do not have enough money to feed yourself then money is the most important thing. This is why people from the poorest backgrounds that dig themselves out of the whole they were born in often make the worlds best capitalists.
Almost every country when people don't start running everywhere yelling 'omg' when they hear 'socialism' or even 'communism' (I am from France).
I understand what you mean about this, but even though I was brought up to have a very left wing outlook I still am forced to acknowledge my own need for money for the reasons above. Maybe you in France are safer from having your social security system shot to hell by right wingers before you get old or need it, but that is a very risky gamble.
I know France is far more open to socialist ideas than here in the UK, but you still live in what is its root a capitalist system. It just has more of a safety net.
You are writing something that is self-contradictory
Yes, I realised it was self-contradictory after I wrote it but am posting in my lunch break at work so am under some time constraints. The main point I was trying to get across though was that even looking at these things from a purely economic perspective you still come back to the same result. The only difference is that in the real world mayors only have to muddle on through for a set number of years, in Sim City you are forced into a much longer term view as you never get to leave a pile of debt for your successor and then go somewhere else with all the money you screw out of the town in the 4 or 5 years you are in charge.
As to whether they could have placed more weight on doing the right thing I am not sure, maybe if they made the game slightly less dependant on you having money to spend it would have been too easy. I always found that I had to make some sacrifices early on, but once my cities got above a certain size I could generally build a pretty nice place to live.
personally i agree with you - as for the start of this story - i find it funny that they thing it should be a crime, ~1 year ago a friend used me as a reference for a Top Secret Clearance, the person from DHS came in with all my finances for several years including a rental i don't claim as one (not required to). She also questioned me about Facebook & LinkedIn (which i don't use). She was very curious about any online aliases i go by - and people who i talk to online.
for them to say this should be a crime - they need to look close at them selves..
Getting clearance to work somewhere where you have access to top secret information is very different to getting a normal job. The worst case scenario regarding leaking top secret information is that people actually die. The worst case scenario about most companies leaking information is that the company makes less money and loses its competitive advantage. I would defend to the hilt the right of government to vet prospective employees going into sensitive work to the level you describe as my safety may well depend on it.
I would even go so far as to say that recent events with regard to some diplomatic cables show that they are not doing a good enough job so may need more vetting in future. I might think some of the information released belongs in the public domain but the manner in which it got there was entirely wrong and should not have happened.
Companies on the other hand should have far fewer rights to go wandering into my private life, and those rights should certainly not include vetting me based on who my friends are. I have some people in my wider circle of friends who I have known for many years but who would scare a great many people (drug dealers, environmental terrorists). These people bear no relation to how well I do my job, I am just not willing to cut them off now I have grown up.
These people would probably make some HR manager who came from a sheltered middle class back ground very nervous but I would never let the interfere with my job under any circumstances so it is easier for them not to know. Otherwise we end up living in a society where there is no route for people who come from certain backgrounds to turn their lives around without disowning their entire family.
In a way, SimCity is violent. Or at least brain-washing, which is the precise default we hope violent games don't have.
I'm not talking about the disasters (earthquakes, etc.) the player can unleash. For a SimCity game, one thing matters over everything : your bank account. You want to build this stuff? You need money. You want to change the landscape? You need money.
Having a positive balance may requier for the player to diminish stuff like hospital subventions, etc.: the kind of stuff that can cause more deaths in reality is here rewarded.
SimCity is extremely pro-capitalist (may seems unimportant in US, but many people in other countries don't have the same view about economy).
There is a huge gap in what you'ld expect of a good mayor, and what SimCity teaches.
SimCity has recently been accused of being to environmentally based as well.
I actually think it is just trying to be realistic. We live in a world where money matters more than everything, so Sim City would be utter rubbish if it did not mirror this to a certain extent.
Also, you sat people in many other countries don't have the same view of economy, did you have any in particular in mind? I am from the UK by very left leaning parents who considered themselves socialists. I was encouraged to play SimCity as a kid as a way to learn about economics and the results of your actions.
I would say that SimCity can be used to encourage left leaning thoughts in children. In the example above you give about hospitals as far as I remember if you skimped on things like healthcare and education people started leaving your city in droves to go and live somewhere nicer. If you just followed purely capitalist rationale for your decisions you would build lots of oil or coal fired power plants, but the resulting pollution also made people leave your city. People leaving meant you got reduced tax revenue, so that made it harder to balance the books in future. While the game might revolve around economics, economics is not a subject studied solely by people who are pro-capitalist.
Many lefties also study economics, they just approach it from a different point of view. Interestingly here in the UK both of our main parties (conservative and labour) are riddled with people who all studied the same thing at the same university: Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford. In my case this was also what my mother studied, then later taught at university.
Economics is not just the domain of capitalists, we could all do with learning about it. Ultimately, even without the existence of money economics would still be about how you allot resources.
Well, there's no civilians in America's Army (the US Army's propaganda game)
Are you sure? I thought there were doctors and nurses you could shoot (or hide behind hostage style) on the hospital level on Americas Army 2. The problem is it became called nurse camping as you could use them as cover and if anyone tried to shoot at you then there was a high chance they got ROE. Since a ROE limit was set on most servers it meant you got kicked for more than 1 or 2 nurse kills (the same as tking another player on your team) and also got sent to leavenworth.
On balance you had to kill 20 opfor or something like that to make up for a single ROE violation kill. This meant you were better off dieing than risking shooting back at someone camping behind a nurse, that does not make for a very fun game. This is always the problem with civilians in multiplayer FPS games, people who are supposed to be the goodies get themselves a human shield.
If the Dart language is intended to replace something like the buggy, slow and badly designed PHP language,
I was rather hoping it was intended to replace the buggy, slow (although progress has been made), and badly designed ECMAScript language, which you may also know as JavaScript.
JavaScript is not actually that bad compared to PHP. I know it can be used to create a complete mess, but in the hands of a competent developer it can be used to produce a decent end result.
PHP on the other hand seems to have hit a wall recently. I have to admit though I am a little jaded at the moment after a recent project exposing an existing PHP web application via web services. PHP has truly awful WSDL support, even if you try using the Zend Framework addons. Since more and more projects seem to involve some level of interworking with other systems that fact that PHP fail so badly in this regard is pretty inexcusable.
Just to explain why I am so jaded and not at all as a cathartic experience I am probably now going to rant about some of the issues:)
Firstly, the SOAP functions built into the latest verion of PHP only support rpc/literal WSDL. Since every other platform (.NET, JAVA, Axis2) wants document/literal this makes PHP only useful for talking to PHP.
Then you think Zend Framework might be better. Unfortunately although this lets you generate and expose WSDL2 files using document/literal, you cannot use them as a basis for your service. This means that you can't actually let anyone talk to the service without some awful compatibility layer that translates what a rpc/literal service would expect into document/literal by doing some crazy unravelling of arrays of parameters.
And then when you finally think you are done you discover there is a bug that means booleans are just broken and always get returned as false. You file a bug report but it looks like the maintainer of this part of the Zend Framework has died as he hasn't been on their bug tracker for months.
So I might have worked round all these issues and delivered a working service but it took far longer than expected and that costs money. For a server side language that is supposed to be an established heavy weight this is not acceptable. It's enough to make you learn.NET:)
Well why don't you just fuck off and live there and leave us poor plebsd with our imperfect "democracy" to suffer here in the Uk then if it's so great?
Because I have just as much right to live here as you. I also have the right to have an opinion and express it, something I would probably not have in China. I do on the other hand think there is plenty of room in both systems for improvement and if we can learn anything from theirs then why shouldn't we?
The No to AV campaign a few months ago was probably the most cynical, underhanded and intellectually dishonest political campaign I have ever seen in this country, and I suspect a campaign pledge against digital and civil rights would be equally bad.
And the british public swallowed it hook line and sinker. After having lived here all my life the recent governments and elections we have had have convinced me it is a complete joke. The british system is based on the idea that government can do what it likes providing the majority of the populace will not be so up in arms that the take to the streets. It is not democracy, it is a dictatorship that you get a small say in once every 5 years when elections are due.
I am actually starting to like the Chinese system as at least there an ignorant pig farmer gets no say in things they are clearly not educated enough to understand. Here my vote is drowned out by the myriad of people solely rely on the Sun or Daily Mail for their knowledge of what is going on in the world. If you cannot be arsed to spend any time studying the important decisions government has to make on our behalf then you should lose your right to vote.
The way it is at the moment in this country Rupert Murdoch gets several million votes as he moulds the majority of the population into voting for who he wants to win. This would only change if people were forced to actually understand the issues facing us as a society and the news media was not all just a propaganda tool on behalf of big business.
Alternatively you can try contributing something positive to slashdot and then you get the option disable adverts anyway. I believe this happens when you get your Karma above a certain level but I also subscribe now anyway so stopped paying attention.
My Internet is plenty fast. Browsers are slow. OK, the browser combined withe the web site is slow. Chrome does JavaScript really well, blazingly fast. That's only half the problem though. The other half of the problem is that YOUR WEBSITE DOESN'T NEED THOSE SCRIPTS. Yes, I'm shouting. If I were a web designer, I would have embedded a video of a guy shouting using Javascript, along with 10 ads and several other embedded videos, and some Flash. At least half the embeds would contain exploits for IE/Windows and attempts at exploits for other browser/OS combos.
Anyway, plenty of bandwidth. We don't need a fatter pipe. We need less shit being flushed into the sewer that the Internet has become.
We also need world peace, and that's just as likely:)
But that unholy trinity sued, and then sponsored a law to prevent it, saying PUDs may not compete for telecommunication services. The only counties that got grandfathered in have gigabit fiber to the premises, for cheap. Two of the least dense counties in the state, and the PUDs are making so much money at it they have to lower power rates to compensate. But somehow those three don't see a profit in it in the most densely populated CITIES, let alone counties.
Somebody needs to explain to Google's wizards that Mountain View, CA is nice, but Cow Country isn't as close to Oakland. And for about the price you can get for your suburb five-bedroom conversion on 1/6 acre in California you can get almost 4.5 SQUARE MILES of ranch property with over a mile of major river frontage, countless trout and salmon ponds and streams and so on. And if you've got gigabit internet and HD telepresence software, who needs to go in to the office anyway?
Give us the Fiber Google, and the world is yours.
Lots of people always drag out the old rural argument when it comes to broadband. The interesting point they make in the full article though is that most other countries get round that by forcing the incumbent telco to share its wires with the competition. This makes it much easier for new players to enter the market and keeps prices low and speeds higher. The only loser is the incumbent telco but they were often just granted a defacto monopoly when they were privatised so who cares, they still generally make plenty anyway.
I am sure it is not possible for some reason to meddle in the affairs of big corporations in the US, but Europe often does and the result can sometimes be good for the general public if not for the corporations already vast profits.
Using full screen (F11) to remove the UI while browsing is one. Not your cup of tea?
If you are trying to do other things at the same time as browse the web like use a web guide to how to configure something then constantly having to use f11 every time you alt-tab back to the web browser gets really annoying.
Use UI customization and put the small version of buttons/search/address on the same line as your file menu and remove the navigation toolbar. End result? 1px more vertical space used than FF4.
I have zero interest in rewriting config files and for most users it is just out of the question anyway since it is beyond their abilities.
Your problem had solutions. The new UI creates problems for non-netbook/PDA users that have no easy solutions. So while my original post wasn't as detailed as it could have been the sentiment expressed is accurate.
I am not sure what problems this has created, other than lots of people having to gets used to a new UI, but I am sure it has created some. But the bit I said was inaccurate and still say is inaccurate is you saying their were no problems before that needed fixing, there most definitely were.
It's a statement based in fact and has nothing to do with arrogance or the "few" people I referred to. The simple fact is this: there was no bug where the community demanded a smaller UI.
The effects to a smaller UI are clear and obvious, increased space for websites/advertising, reduced "clutter", and something to market.
1) Space. Google is in the advertising business so it makes sense for them to want to maximize the available space for advertising in Chrome. The main push might be seen to be to adapt to Netbooks and PDAs. This would make sense if there weren't already built in options for those users such as full screen/UI customization.
2) Reduced clutter. This can be a good thing but they removed functional "clutter" and replaced it with things like bevelled tabs which look nice but reduce the number of tabs visible.
3) Something to market. It's work to justify the designer's pay and say they have a shiny new version everyone has to download.
You did not talk about bugs in the quote I was taking issue with, you said:
"The FF4 and 5 UIs do not solve any real problems users have/had. It's purely design over function with no benefit to the user."
But it did solve a problem I had so it is blatantly not a fact in the clear cut terms you describe. On my laptop and netbook the screen has very little height available so lots of menu bars stretching across the top was wasted space.
UI design is always about opinion and personal preference, and whenever anything changes there will always be people who cannot see past the fact that something has changed and simply be annoyed and negative, even if the change is considered an improvement by others. We do not know if this change is an improvement in the eyes of the majority of users, and will probably never be 100% sure.
The FF4 and 5 UIs do not solve any real problems users have/had. It's purely design over function with no benefit to the user.
That is a very arrogant statement unless you have a whole bunch of actual user testing and research to back it up. All you can say is it did not solve any problems you or the few people you moaned at about it had.
I would not say it solved a problem, but I now really like the awesome bar. This is the best thing mozilla have done for years as it enables me to choose sites much more easily by typing and using auto completion options. I find this a million miles quicker than navigating menu's with a mouse, especially on my laptop.
If we all followed that logic we would all still be using WordPerfect.
Software evolves, sometimes you might think its an improvement, sometimes you might not. Remember though that this is a personal preference and not everyone feels the same way.
I like the look of the new designs as it seems closer to Chrome, giving me more browser space and less menu crap getting in the way. This suits me as I type stuff into the URL bar and then rely on the completion options to get to my favourite sites.
That's not always the case, probably not even most of the time. Consider someone enlisted in the army who at the same times writes a journal. Is the journal the property of the army? Nope. Is this silly slashdot comment the property of *my* employer because I'm writing it at their computer? No again. It all depends on in what effect the asker wrote his framework. Was it his main job to develop a web framework for the companys new product? Or was it something he was having fun with at breaks and in the downtime between tasks?
Most employment contracts have a clause in them that says some like "and any other duties as directed". That covers most stuff like this. If he was being paid as a software developer, and he used this in any sort of work project, then they have a strong argument for it being theirs. Based on this strong argument the FSF is unlikely to touch this with a 12 foot pole, so he would have to fight his previous employer in court himself.
Court cases are long, slow and expensive. In the meantime they are making money off his project, he is unemployed and rapidly haemorrhaging money. Ergo, they will most likely get the pleasure of bankrupting him as well as making him look like a nightmare employee to anyone who considers employing him in future.
The moral of this story is that when you are at work, your boss is your boss. If you work on your own projects in your own time then you have to be damn sure they are kept very separate from your work and NEVER use them as part of a project you write at work.
But it is quite long so here is the relevant part:
"In January 1984 I quit my job at MIT and began writing GNU software. Leaving MIT was necessary so that MIT would not be able to interfere with distributing GNU as free software. If I had remained on the staff, MIT could have claimed to own the work, and could have imposed their own distribution terms, or even turned the work into a proprietary software package. I had no intention of doing a large amount of work only to see it become useless for its intended purpose: creating a new software-sharing community."
The Tea Party is not a sane political movement, as guys like Boehner are beginning to find out.
Actually, I think he has known that for some time but the people who think the Tea Party are great are the core republican supporters down in redneck ville. He cannot openly decry them without alienating the core of his own parties support. This is why the republican party are so shit scared of the Tea Party movement, if it was spun off into a separate party it would rob the republican party of any hope of being elected any time soon and just serve the next 10 years of government up to the Democrats on a silver platter. They have to make as many concessions to the Tea Party movement as they ask for because if you think they can threaten the entire US with mutually assured destruction that is nothing to what they can do to the republican party itself.
It's depressing how the debt ceiling is such a matter of contention right now, when it's been increased without much hullabaloo every six months or so since WWII. The reason for any artificial crisis is for politicians to threaten the public with doom and gloom in order to sneak something past them that the public normally would not accept. With Democrats and Republicans both playing along, what do both parties want to sneak by us? My guess is deep cuts to vital social programs, since the Obama administration started calling them "entitlement programs" at the start of the debate.
Actually there is another reason that this is a slightly bigger deal this time. The US is currently on the credit rating agencies negative watchlist. This has not happened before. If the US was downgraded to AA it would add about 0.7% to the interest rate the US pays when borrowing money, this would in turn cause more money to be spent on debt interest in future and make it harder for the next government to balance the budget without even deeper cuts.
The really interesting thing though is that the democrat plan is the only one that is likely to avoid a downgrade. The one just passed by congress seems to be recognised by many economists as a political tool designed to make this pop up during a presidential election, not exactly a prudent economic move. Interestingly the person who wrote the second article below thinks the debt ceiling is such a joke it should just be done away with altogether as it really just window dressing to the real issue.
Why would you create an anonymous google account and then use your real name when complaining that it was deleted?
The example they give did not have his account deleted for a pseudonym, it was deleted as an image he had in picasa was borderline child porn. Also, Google eventually turn his account back on after a human being reviewed his case. It was only turned off by an automated system that red flagged the image. None of this is really that surprising.
"If this is the case then try and ask the community for help, cap in hand with humility."
Given the total ignorance that the internet community has for the hurd it is probably better that the development is left to the few who are willing to put in the time and effort to understand the problem correctly so that they can make meaningful contributions.
The Hurd is radically different platform for application and OS development. Linux is no more than another POSIX implementation and the concepts are well known to all so it is easier to get contributions from the mainstream community.
This kind of assumes that not one single person out there could come on board and actually bring anything worthwhile to the project, which is a very arrogant attitude. If you asked for help you might get a lot of piss taking from ignoramuses, you might also get a single person who actually helps and that one person is why you ask. The single person makes it worthwhile with their contribution to the project.
Go and read the email that accompanied Linus's first ever code drop for an exercise in humility and how to bring other people on board a project. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux). He started by aiming low and setting an easily achievable goal that motivated many people to try and help. Hurd seems to have always moved the goalposts out of sight whenever things started looking promising and that massively de-motivates people who have worked for a goal, even if they do acknowledge the new goal is a better idea.
Slashdot Mirror
then Director-General for NPfIT Richard Granger charged them not £1bn, as the contract permitted, but just £63m. Granger's first job was with Andersen Consulting, which later became Accenture.
I bet I know who will be getting a nice high-pay/no-show job after he retires from government.
Too late. Richard Granger long since left his post at Connecting for Health and now works for KPMG Australia. He was never really in government, as he was a civil servant rather than being elected. In fact for a while he was the highest paid civil servant in the country on £290,000 a year. The good thing about him leaving was that at least he did not get a golden handshake like most would have.
http://www.cio.co.uk/news/3141/kpmg-confirm-appointment-of-richard-granger-ex-nhs-cio
so you thing CA's or say RSA shouldn't do back ground checks because it's just a "job" and doesn't require "top secret" clearance?
Yes, because they are a company and the scope for abuse is too great. The scope for abuse is still large when government does this level of checking but that is a risk I am willing to take in order to save lives. I am not willing to take the same level of risk when the only thing on the line is a companies reputation and revenue, especially not when you may not actually end up working for said company.
Yup. But google doesn't have a monopoly in search.
Google has a higher percentage of the search market than Microsoft has of the OS market; Slashdot constantly tells me that Microsoft is a monopoly. Doesn't that mean that Google has a monopoly?
The only difference being the much lower barrier to switching. You can switch search providers in seconds, changing operating systems is not so easy.
A bank is not a secure mattress. Banking is an explicitly different activity than secure asset storage or investment. This gambling site promised secure asset storage and did not deliver. Their operation does imitate a Ponzi scheme quite closely. The only difference was that they promised secure asset storage rather than investment and dividend.
That makes no sense since companies keep their money in banks too. If bank current accounts do not count as secure asset storage for people why should they for businesses? I explicitly mantioned current accounts in my original post so that you would not think I was talk about investments, which can go down as well as up. I was talking about low interest, low return but supposedly low risk regular accounts, not investment accounts.
Their operation may mirror a ponzi scheme as it is presented by the feds, but maybe they have another reason for presenting it as so since the US is currently having one of its regular clampdowns on gamblling. Whenever the US gets a bee in its bonnet about something law enforcement never shies away from using illegal means to close its targets down. The first thing that comes to mind was immediately going after wikileaks card payment processors but I am sure there are a myriad of other examples.
It is often quicker to bankrupt a business rather than try and enforce new laws that may have constitutional or other issues so will involve a long drawn out case with many appeals to higher and higher courts. Once a law has been on the books for a while and has been found to be within the consitution by the supreme court it is generally much quicker since lower courts are bound by precedent but until then laws are often much less reliable unless they are non-contentious.
In this case it may be that they are simply talking up a storm to try and encourage people to not use the site or to encourage people with winnings on the site to all try and withdraw their money at the same time.
Actually, it is the very definition of a Ponzi scheme.
There should be two distinct piles of money here. First, we have the business's money. I don't know how they earn this (percentage of play maybe), but it doesn't really matter. This is the money they can use to operate the business. For this fund, it is perfectly reasonable to expect money to keep coming in, that is how businesses operate.
However, there should be a separate pile of money that belongs to the account holders. This is NOT the business's money. They should, at any time, be able to pay off every single account holder every penny they hold in the account. If you have to keep having new accounts (or more money added to them) to pay off other accounts, that is a Ponzi scheme.
If our banks don't ring fence the money that we deposit with them in current accounts then it stands to reason that a poker site is not going to. I am far more concerned with banks gambling with my deposit in their investment banking arm than I am about a gambling site dipping into my winnings to pay it's staff.
The bottom line here is that almost all businesses occasionally have liabilities greater than their assets. True, in this case it was too greater discrepancy but if we suddenly declared that it was illegal for a bank to operate and forced them to settle up with all their customers over the course of the next month then there would probably be just as many people out of pocket.
Except I wasn't the person getting clearance - i was just someone he put down as someone he knows.
I didn't say or think you were.
I was just saying that someone getting top secret clearance is entirely different to someone getting a job. I trust government far more than I trust companies.
You are a perfect example of what I fear...
Why? I do not like the weight the world has placed on money but I have no choice since without money I will most likely starve. At the very least people who spend their entire life reliant on the state to support them (I live in the UK where we have some semblance of a social security system) tend to have shorter lives than those who are more self sufficient. Also, I am some years off retiring and I cannot rely on their being a decent social security and state pension system when I eventually get there. This makes money very important.
Most people who do not see the importance of money do so because they are still supported in some way by their parents. This is because having parental support is enough to make sure you do not starve to death in most developed countries. If you have ever been in a situation where you do not have anyone you can go and ask for financial support and you do not have enough money to feed yourself then money is the most important thing. This is why people from the poorest backgrounds that dig themselves out of the whole they were born in often make the worlds best capitalists.
Almost every country when people don't start running everywhere yelling 'omg' when they hear 'socialism' or even 'communism' (I am from France).
I understand what you mean about this, but even though I was brought up to have a very left wing outlook I still am forced to acknowledge my own need for money for the reasons above. Maybe you in France are safer from having your social security system shot to hell by right wingers before you get old or need it, but that is a very risky gamble.
I know France is far more open to socialist ideas than here in the UK, but you still live in what is its root a capitalist system. It just has more of a safety net.
You are writing something that is self-contradictory
Yes, I realised it was self-contradictory after I wrote it but am posting in my lunch break at work so am under some time constraints. The main point I was trying to get across though was that even looking at these things from a purely economic perspective you still come back to the same result. The only difference is that in the real world mayors only have to muddle on through for a set number of years, in Sim City you are forced into a much longer term view as you never get to leave a pile of debt for your successor and then go somewhere else with all the money you screw out of the town in the 4 or 5 years you are in charge.
As to whether they could have placed more weight on doing the right thing I am not sure, maybe if they made the game slightly less dependant on you having money to spend it would have been too easy. I always found that I had to make some sacrifices early on, but once my cities got above a certain size I could generally build a pretty nice place to live.
personally i agree with you - as for the start of this story - i find it funny that they thing it should be a crime, ~1 year ago a friend used me as a reference for a Top Secret Clearance, the person from DHS came in with all my finances for several years including a rental i don't claim as one (not required to). She also questioned me about Facebook & LinkedIn (which i don't use). She was very curious about any online aliases i go by - and people who i talk to online.
for them to say this should be a crime - they need to look close at them selves..
Getting clearance to work somewhere where you have access to top secret information is very different to getting a normal job. The worst case scenario regarding leaking top secret information is that people actually die. The worst case scenario about most companies leaking information is that the company makes less money and loses its competitive advantage. I would defend to the hilt the right of government to vet prospective employees going into sensitive work to the level you describe as my safety may well depend on it.
I would even go so far as to say that recent events with regard to some diplomatic cables show that they are not doing a good enough job so may need more vetting in future. I might think some of the information released belongs in the public domain but the manner in which it got there was entirely wrong and should not have happened.
Companies on the other hand should have far fewer rights to go wandering into my private life, and those rights should certainly not include vetting me based on who my friends are. I have some people in my wider circle of friends who I have known for many years but who would scare a great many people (drug dealers, environmental terrorists). These people bear no relation to how well I do my job, I am just not willing to cut them off now I have grown up.
These people would probably make some HR manager who came from a sheltered middle class back ground very nervous but I would never let the interfere with my job under any circumstances so it is easier for them not to know. Otherwise we end up living in a society where there is no route for people who come from certain backgrounds to turn their lives around without disowning their entire family.
In a way, SimCity is violent. Or at least brain-washing, which is the precise default we hope violent games don't have.
I'm not talking about the disasters (earthquakes, etc.) the player can unleash. For a SimCity game, one thing matters over everything : your bank account. You want to build this stuff? You need money. You want to change the landscape? You need money.
Having a positive balance may requier for the player to diminish stuff like hospital subventions, etc.: the kind of stuff that can cause more deaths in reality is here rewarded.
SimCity is extremely pro-capitalist (may seems unimportant in US, but many people in other countries don't have the same view about economy).
There is a huge gap in what you'ld expect of a good mayor, and what SimCity teaches.
SimCity has recently been accused of being to environmentally based as well.
I actually think it is just trying to be realistic. We live in a world where money matters more than everything, so Sim City would be utter rubbish if it did not mirror this to a certain extent.
Also, you sat people in many other countries don't have the same view of economy, did you have any in particular in mind? I am from the UK by very left leaning parents who considered themselves socialists. I was encouraged to play SimCity as a kid as a way to learn about economics and the results of your actions.
I would say that SimCity can be used to encourage left leaning thoughts in children. In the example above you give about hospitals as far as I remember if you skimped on things like healthcare and education people started leaving your city in droves to go and live somewhere nicer. If you just followed purely capitalist rationale for your decisions you would build lots of oil or coal fired power plants, but the resulting pollution also made people leave your city. People leaving meant you got reduced tax revenue, so that made it harder to balance the books in future. While the game might revolve around economics, economics is not a subject studied solely by people who are pro-capitalist.
Many lefties also study economics, they just approach it from a different point of view. Interestingly here in the UK both of our main parties (conservative and labour) are riddled with people who all studied the same thing at the same university: Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford. In my case this was also what my mother studied, then later taught at university.
Economics is not just the domain of capitalists, we could all do with learning about it. Ultimately, even without the existence of money economics would still be about how you allot resources.
Well, there's no civilians in America's Army (the US Army's propaganda game)
Are you sure? I thought there were doctors and nurses you could shoot (or hide behind hostage style) on the hospital level on Americas Army 2. The problem is it became called nurse camping as you could use them as cover and if anyone tried to shoot at you then there was a high chance they got ROE. Since a ROE limit was set on most servers it meant you got kicked for more than 1 or 2 nurse kills (the same as tking another player on your team) and also got sent to leavenworth.
On balance you had to kill 20 opfor or something like that to make up for a single ROE violation kill. This meant you were better off dieing than risking shooting back at someone camping behind a nurse, that does not make for a very fun game. This is always the problem with civilians in multiplayer FPS games, people who are supposed to be the goodies get themselves a human shield.
If the Dart language is intended to replace something like the buggy, slow and badly designed PHP language,
I was rather hoping it was intended to replace the buggy, slow (although progress has been made), and badly designed ECMAScript language, which you may also know as JavaScript.
JavaScript is not actually that bad compared to PHP. I know it can be used to create a complete mess, but in the hands of a competent developer it can be used to produce a decent end result.
PHP on the other hand seems to have hit a wall recently. I have to admit though I am a little jaded at the moment after a recent project exposing an existing PHP web application via web services. PHP has truly awful WSDL support, even if you try using the Zend Framework addons. Since more and more projects seem to involve some level of interworking with other systems that fact that PHP fail so badly in this regard is pretty inexcusable.
Just to explain why I am so jaded and not at all as a cathartic experience I am probably now going to rant about some of the issues :)
Firstly, the SOAP functions built into the latest verion of PHP only support rpc/literal WSDL. Since every other platform (.NET, JAVA, Axis2) wants document/literal this makes PHP only useful for talking to PHP.
Then you think Zend Framework might be better. Unfortunately although this lets you generate and expose WSDL2 files using document/literal, you cannot use them as a basis for your service. This means that you can't actually let anyone talk to the service without some awful compatibility layer that translates what a rpc/literal service would expect into document/literal by doing some crazy unravelling of arrays of parameters.
And then when you finally think you are done you discover there is a bug that means booleans are just broken and always get returned as false. You file a bug report but it looks like the maintainer of this part of the Zend Framework has died as he hasn't been on their bug tracker for months.
So I might have worked round all these issues and delivered a working service but it took far longer than expected and that costs money. For a server side language that is supposed to be an established heavy weight this is not acceptable. It's enough to make you learn .NET :)
I am actually starting to like the Chinese system
Well why don't you just fuck off and live there and leave us poor plebsd with our imperfect "democracy" to suffer here in the Uk then if it's so great?
Because I have just as much right to live here as you. I also have the right to have an opinion and express it, something I would probably not have in China. I do on the other hand think there is plenty of room in both systems for improvement and if we can learn anything from theirs then why shouldn't we?
The No to AV campaign a few months ago was probably the most cynical, underhanded and intellectually dishonest political campaign I have ever seen in this country, and I suspect a campaign pledge against digital and civil rights would be equally bad.
And the british public swallowed it hook line and sinker. After having lived here all my life the recent governments and elections we have had have convinced me it is a complete joke. The british system is based on the idea that government can do what it likes providing the majority of the populace will not be so up in arms that the take to the streets. It is not democracy, it is a dictatorship that you get a small say in once every 5 years when elections are due.
I am actually starting to like the Chinese system as at least there an ignorant pig farmer gets no say in things they are clearly not educated enough to understand. Here my vote is drowned out by the myriad of people solely rely on the Sun or Daily Mail for their knowledge of what is going on in the world. If you cannot be arsed to spend any time studying the important decisions government has to make on our behalf then you should lose your right to vote.
The way it is at the moment in this country Rupert Murdoch gets several million votes as he moulds the majority of the population into voting for who he wants to win. This would only change if people were forced to actually understand the issues facing us as a society and the news media was not all just a propaganda tool on behalf of big business.
Slashdot has ads?
Thank you Ad Block Plus.
Alternatively you can try contributing something positive to slashdot and then you get the option disable adverts anyway. I believe this happens when you get your Karma above a certain level but I also subscribe now anyway so stopped paying attention.
My Internet is plenty fast. Browsers are slow. OK, the browser combined withe the web site is slow. Chrome does JavaScript really well, blazingly fast. That's only half the problem though. The other half of the problem is that YOUR WEBSITE DOESN'T NEED THOSE SCRIPTS. Yes, I'm shouting. If I were a web designer, I would have embedded a video of a guy shouting using Javascript, along with 10 ads and several other embedded videos, and some Flash. At least half the embeds would contain exploits for IE/Windows and attempts at exploits for other browser/OS combos.
Anyway, plenty of bandwidth. We don't need a fatter pipe. We need less shit being flushed into the sewer that the Internet has become.
We also need world peace, and that's just as likely :)
But that unholy trinity sued, and then sponsored a law to prevent it, saying PUDs may not compete for telecommunication services. The only counties that got grandfathered in have gigabit fiber to the premises, for cheap. Two of the least dense counties in the state, and the PUDs are making so much money at it they have to lower power rates to compensate. But somehow those three don't see a profit in it in the most densely populated CITIES, let alone counties.
Somebody needs to explain to Google's wizards that Mountain View, CA is nice, but Cow Country isn't as close to Oakland. And for about the price you can get for your suburb five-bedroom conversion on 1/6 acre in California you can get almost 4.5 SQUARE MILES of ranch property with over a mile of major river frontage, countless trout and salmon ponds and streams and so on. And if you've got gigabit internet and HD telepresence software, who needs to go in to the office anyway?
Give us the Fiber Google, and the world is yours.
Lots of people always drag out the old rural argument when it comes to broadband. The interesting point they make in the full article though is that most other countries get round that by forcing the incumbent telco to share its wires with the competition. This makes it much easier for new players to enter the market and keeps prices low and speeds higher. The only loser is the incumbent telco but they were often just granted a defacto monopoly when they were privatised so who cares, they still generally make plenty anyway.
I am sure it is not possible for some reason to meddle in the affairs of big corporations in the US, but Europe often does and the result can sometimes be good for the general public if not for the corporations already vast profits.
Using full screen (F11) to remove the UI while browsing is one. Not your cup of tea?
If you are trying to do other things at the same time as browse the web like use a web guide to how to configure something then constantly having to use f11 every time you alt-tab back to the web browser gets really annoying.
Use UI customization and put the small version of buttons/search/address on the same line as your file menu and remove the navigation toolbar. End result? 1px more vertical space used than FF4.
I have zero interest in rewriting config files and for most users it is just out of the question anyway since it is beyond their abilities.
Your problem had solutions. The new UI creates problems for non-netbook/PDA users that have no easy solutions. So while my original post wasn't as detailed as it could have been the sentiment expressed is accurate.
I am not sure what problems this has created, other than lots of people having to gets used to a new UI, but I am sure it has created some. But the bit I said was inaccurate and still say is inaccurate is you saying their were no problems before that needed fixing, there most definitely were.
It's a statement based in fact and has nothing to do with arrogance or the "few" people I referred to. The simple fact is this: there was no bug where the community demanded a smaller UI.
The effects to a smaller UI are clear and obvious, increased space for websites/advertising, reduced "clutter", and something to market.
1) Space. Google is in the advertising business so it makes sense for them to want to maximize the available space for advertising in Chrome. The main push might be seen to be to adapt to Netbooks and PDAs. This would make sense if there weren't already built in options for those users such as full screen/UI customization.
2) Reduced clutter. This can be a good thing but they removed functional "clutter" and replaced it with things like bevelled tabs which look nice but reduce the number of tabs visible.
3) Something to market. It's work to justify the designer's pay and say they have a shiny new version everyone has to download.
You did not talk about bugs in the quote I was taking issue with, you said:
"The FF4 and 5 UIs do not solve any real problems users have/had. It's purely design over function with no benefit to the user."
But it did solve a problem I had so it is blatantly not a fact in the clear cut terms you describe. On my laptop and netbook the screen has very little height available so lots of menu bars stretching across the top was wasted space.
UI design is always about opinion and personal preference, and whenever anything changes there will always be people who cannot see past the fact that something has changed and simply be annoyed and negative, even if the change is considered an improvement by others. We do not know if this change is an improvement in the eyes of the majority of users, and will probably never be 100% sure.
The FF4 and 5 UIs do not solve any real problems users have/had. It's purely design over function with no benefit to the user.
That is a very arrogant statement unless you have a whole bunch of actual user testing and research to back it up. All you can say is it did not solve any problems you or the few people you moaned at about it had.
I would not say it solved a problem, but I now really like the awesome bar. This is the best thing mozilla have done for years as it enables me to choose sites much more easily by typing and using auto completion options. I find this a million miles quicker than navigating menu's with a mouse, especially on my laptop.
when it's not broken, do not fix it.
If we all followed that logic we would all still be using WordPerfect.
Software evolves, sometimes you might think its an improvement, sometimes you might not. Remember though that this is a personal preference and not everyone feels the same way.
I like the look of the new designs as it seems closer to Chrome, giving me more browser space and less menu crap getting in the way. This suits me as I type stuff into the URL bar and then rely on the completion options to get to my favourite sites.
That's not always the case, probably not even most of the time. Consider someone enlisted in the army who at the same times writes a journal. Is the journal the property of the army? Nope. Is this silly slashdot comment the property of *my* employer because I'm writing it at their computer? No again. It all depends on in what effect the asker wrote his framework. Was it his main job to develop a web framework for the companys new product? Or was it something he was having fun with at breaks and in the downtime between tasks?
Most employment contracts have a clause in them that says some like "and any other duties as directed". That covers most stuff like this. If he was being paid as a software developer, and he used this in any sort of work project, then they have a strong argument for it being theirs. Based on this strong argument the FSF is unlikely to touch this with a 12 foot pole, so he would have to fight his previous employer in court himself.
Court cases are long, slow and expensive. In the meantime they are making money off his project, he is unemployed and rapidly haemorrhaging money. Ergo, they will most likely get the pleasure of bankrupting him as well as making him look like a nightmare employee to anyone who considers employing him in future.
The moral of this story is that when you are at work, your boss is your boss. If you work on your own projects in your own time then you have to be damn sure they are kept very separate from your work and NEVER use them as part of a project you write at work.
The following page is about Stallman commencing the GNU project: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html
But it is quite long so here is the relevant part:
"In January 1984 I quit my job at MIT and began writing GNU software. Leaving MIT was necessary so that MIT would not be able to interfere with distributing GNU as free software. If I had remained on the staff, MIT could have claimed to own the work, and could have imposed their own distribution terms, or even turned the work into a proprietary software package. I had no intention of doing a large amount of work only to see it become useless for its intended purpose: creating a new software-sharing community."
The Tea Party is not a sane political movement, as guys like Boehner are beginning to find out.
Actually, I think he has known that for some time but the people who think the Tea Party are great are the core republican supporters down in redneck ville. He cannot openly decry them without alienating the core of his own parties support. This is why the republican party are so shit scared of the Tea Party movement, if it was spun off into a separate party it would rob the republican party of any hope of being elected any time soon and just serve the next 10 years of government up to the Democrats on a silver platter. They have to make as many concessions to the Tea Party movement as they ask for because if you think they can threaten the entire US with mutually assured destruction that is nothing to what they can do to the republican party itself.
It's depressing how the debt ceiling is such a matter of contention right now, when it's been increased without much hullabaloo every six months or so since WWII. The reason for any artificial crisis is for politicians to threaten the public with doom and gloom in order to sneak something past them that the public normally would not accept. With Democrats and Republicans both playing along, what do both parties want to sneak by us? My guess is deep cuts to vital social programs, since the Obama administration started calling them "entitlement programs" at the start of the debate.
Actually there is another reason that this is a slightly bigger deal this time. The US is currently on the credit rating agencies negative watchlist. This has not happened before. If the US was downgraded to AA it would add about 0.7% to the interest rate the US pays when borrowing money, this would in turn cause more money to be spent on debt interest in future and make it harder for the next government to balance the budget without even deeper cuts.
The really interesting thing though is that the democrat plan is the only one that is likely to avoid a downgrade. The one just passed by congress seems to be recognised by many economists as a political tool designed to make this pop up during a presidential election, not exactly a prudent economic move. Interestingly the person who wrote the second article below thinks the debt ceiling is such a joke it should just be done away with altogether as it really just window dressing to the real issue.
Interesting articles used as partial sources (free registration required):
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/07/29/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-debt-ceiling-crisi.aspx?source=ihpsitth0000001
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/07/26/get-ready-for-a-us-debt-downgrade.aspx?source=isesitlnk0000001&mrr=0.50
Why would you create an anonymous google account and then use your real name when complaining that it was deleted?
The example they give did not have his account deleted for a pseudonym, it was deleted as an image he had in picasa was borderline child porn. Also, Google eventually turn his account back on after a human being reviewed his case. It was only turned off by an automated system that red flagged the image. None of this is really that surprising.
"If this is the case then try and ask the community for help, cap in hand with humility."
Given the total ignorance that the internet community has for the hurd it is probably better that the development is left to the few who are willing to put in the time and effort to understand the problem correctly so that they can make meaningful contributions.
The Hurd is radically different platform for application and OS development. Linux is no more than another POSIX implementation and the concepts are well known to all so it is easier to get contributions from the mainstream community.
This kind of assumes that not one single person out there could come on board and actually bring anything worthwhile to the project, which is a very arrogant attitude. If you asked for help you might get a lot of piss taking from ignoramuses, you might also get a single person who actually helps and that one person is why you ask. The single person makes it worthwhile with their contribution to the project.
Go and read the email that accompanied Linus's first ever code drop for an exercise in humility and how to bring other people on board a project. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux). He started by aiming low and setting an easily achievable goal that motivated many people to try and help. Hurd seems to have always moved the goalposts out of sight whenever things started looking promising and that massively de-motivates people who have worked for a goal, even if they do acknowledge the new goal is a better idea.