You keep going on about how bad Sharia law is. To be honest, I could not care less about Sharia Law and it has no part in this discussion. The muslim nations in the middle east stand zero chance of forcing Sharia Law on Europe, even without the US "protecting" us. Your media might try and brain wash you into thinking otherwise, but come and live here amongst us for a short while and you will discover that we are not exactly the ideal muslim converts. We question everything and that generally makes us pretty hard to convert to any religion based on blind obedience.
Europe has come a long way as a result of two terrible wars that were fought on our own soil. It also means that we still have people alive who actually know what it was like to be bombed indiscriminately in their homes. This is one thing the US does not have or maybe it would have a different attitude to using air power to subdue other nations.
My comments about the US obeying international law were based on the US refusal to allow its soldiers to ever stand trial in the Hague. This is not a muslim court, it is European.
You also make it sound like the US uses its vast military expenditure to fight piracy yet most of you expenditure is used on stand off weapons used to destroy ground targets without risk to US forces. If a few innocent civilians get caught in the crossfire, who cares? Well the problem is that those innocent civilians generally have family, and the remainder of that family will bear that grudge for a very long time. This is what makes terrorists.
You in the US are brain washed into thinking your army is their to protect you, but the truth is they now just make you more vulnerable to terrorist attacks. You are now at the point where you need the Middle East to keep selling you oil far more then they need the money, that is one scary situation to be in to my mind.
The US (and everyone else just has the US do it for them (for free)) has to secure the seas around the middle eastern nations.
But why on earth does the US do it? If it really is the case that you are forced into having a military that size against your nations will then surely you would be better off leaving the rest of the world to its own devices? There might be wars elsewhere, but surely you could just stay out of it but promise to agressively defend your own nation if it was attacked?
It simply makes no sense to me that the nation with the most military might is forced into that situation by feeling it has a duty to police the entire planet. Especially not when that nation refuses to have its own armed forces bound by any law other than their own. Hell, sometimes you refuse to even follow your own laws when it comes to your military.
This is not the behaviour of a benevolent police force who only have everyone elses best interests at heart. If we want other nations to follow our laws, first and foremost we have to lead by example.
How much oil do you use (heating, electricity + car) ?
In the UK we have very few oil powered electricity stations, we phased most of them out in order to meet our obligations under the Kyoto treaty. The ones we do have I am all in favour of replacing with Nuclear power stations. My flat only has an electricity supply, no gas. If the cost of my electricity bills went up in return for me being less of a target for terrorism thats fine, I would prefer it.
I do not drive, instead I take the train to work. I do sometimes car share with my partner who drives to work, but I really do believe that we should move closer to where she works so she can walk. Then I (who earns more) can still take the train to my job. If I could find a developers job within walking or cycling distance I would gladly take it, even if it involved a pay cut since public transport is more expensive than driving I would probably be better off.
Sooner or later we are going to have to live without cheap oil, it might as well be sooner.
How many exploding subways have you been in ?
Not quite sure what you are getting at here as this backs up my point, not yours. The terrorist attacks on London (where I work) were a direct response to our involvement in the invasion of Iraq. If we had let the US go it alone maybe we would have escaped being targeted like France and Germany did.
It is also worth remembering that the attacks on the US were at least partially funded by Saudi (where Osama's from) Oil profits. Maybe buying less oil from the middle east would give these lunatics less money for their stupid jihad.
Maybe you're right about me being a bit too positive about the US. Still it's a FAR cry from stooping to the muslim students' moral abominations (that's "taliban" translated to English)
To be honest, I couldn't care less what the taliban does in its own backyard, It just needs to stay there. I feel exactly the same way though about the US. The US (and Britain, where I live) has a long history of meddling in the middle east.
We are already in a situation where we can easily defend ourselves against any aggression militarily for many years to come. Many wars nowadays are not about saving lives, there are about securing oil or some other commodity. Maybe we should actually go back to only using our armed forces (and intelligence agencies) purely for defence. We might have to make do with far less oil and a much weaker economy, but we would not be losing so many of our sons in far off lands.
This would of course dictate a massive policy switch from our leaders. We would have to recognise that there would be countries out there who gained access to nuclear weapons. Some of these countries would be ruled by people we would rather did not have access to them. The problem is that this seems inevitable at this point.
The technology to construct basic nuclear weapons is really not that complicated. The hard part is getting them into orbit and to come down where you want. This on the hand is going to become easier and easier over the next few decades as we have to look to space for more and more natural resources. Within 50 years we may be facing a situation where any fool can build a nuclear weapon and rocket capable of reaching orbit in his garage just by following instructions like this on the web:
The trick in this coming world is actually going to be riding a fine line where every nation has nukes, but nobody wants to use them first for fear of being annihilated by everyone else. This however will only work if the US stops using its conventional military strength quite so blatantly in other peoples back yard. It is actually the fear of being crushed by your vast conventional military superiority that is forcing more and more nations to try and develop nuclear weapons on the sly. The rest of the world is now so out matched by the US armed forces that what should be protecting US citizens is actually now making them more of a target.
For the foreseeable future there will be no full employment, so employers will start degrading working conditions... it shouldn't be normal, but it is still the norm.
The capitalist system we live in actually relies on there not being 100% employment in order to keep wages low. As soon as you have more jobs than people, wages start to rise. If this happens across many different sectors at the same time, then it causes inflation to go up. High inflation has the potential to hurt the very rich more then the poor since people with saving suffer, people living day to day do not.
You can't believe the damage these punks did to the company
You have one really weird idea of "damage". Michael Dell founded the business and is now worth $13.5 Billion. He built Dell computers into a business worth $33 Billion in assets with revenue of $59 Billion. If this is is damage you can damage my business any time.
The truth is that you do not succeed in business by playing nice and being a good boy. You succeed by shafting people. There is the odd exception, but broadly speaking successful businesses are launched by people willing to do anything it takes to make their business a success. Ok, is now being fined a few million, but that is chump change compared to how much he has made from always being able to raise cash easily on the stock market. He would have found it much harder to grow his business the way he did if not for the fact that he was gaining a reputation as a damn good business man.
It's not surprising the quality sucks.
What on earth are you talking about? I have never had any problems with Dell PC's at work. They are far from the PC I would buy for my home since i am a techy and like to be able to upgrade my machine easily but if this is not a factor and you just want to buy a PC that works out of the box then they are fine. Who cares of it fails after a year or two, you are probably looking at replacing it by then anyway if you are a business.
Dell has grown to where it did by fiddling the markets and making dodgy deals with both Intel and Microsoft, but those are damn good business decisions in the screwy world we live in. Do I like this? No I do not but I am unable to change it on my own. The only way things like this would change is if governments looked at imprisoning people like this rather that fining them, but that is hardly likely to happen in the US since they have more politicians in their pocket than we do.
Successful business owners donate vast amounts to politician campaign funds to make sure that they have the ear of politicians when they get elected. This will always mean that any politician who actually wants to do things for the people will find himself fighting an army of corporate lobbyists. We also have the problem that our media is now almost entirely owned by a few large companies so the news we see is the news they want us to. In this world the politicians have almost no power to do anything unless they can find some businesses that support it too.
To answer your question, only in the situation in which you really don't want a commercial organization exploiting you. If you don't really care, that's another matter.
I get exploited by a commercial organisation every day, its called work:)
The GPL is the better open source license for the creator, I would say, but other licenses like BSD are better for those using the work.
Why? Surely this is only true if the creator actually buys in to the FSF and its aims? Many developers are happy just to have their work as widely used as possible. If you as a creator only want to produce something as useful as possible to as many people as possible then the BSD licence is far better for him too.
I do not think anybody id disputing that? It's the inflated costs of the damage to obtain the extradition order that is the issue.
The other issue that worries us is that he will not receive a fair trial. US courts have a nasty habit of towing the government line a little too eagerly for those of us in the UK. We are generally much more sceptical about government trying to drag lone individuals through the courts for embarrassing them.
There is also a perception that US jurors are much less friendly to foreign citizens due to the nationalism many of your citizens demonstrate.
In this case a large part of the evidence is going to be reliant on government records or government officers testifying. All of this evidence has to be treated with suspicion as your security services have been treating your own laws as optional since September 11th.
Also bear in mind that there is a sizeable minority of people in Europe who belief that September 11th was avoidable but the US Government allowed in to happen in order to justify invading Iraq and securing Oil contracts for US Companies.
I am very sorry, but Bush stomping all over your own laws (Guantanamo Bay, Illegally snooping on US Citizens, etc) has made the rest of the world a little sceptical as to the impartiality of your own legal system.
(Not only Jews, the Romani suffered greatly as well).
But long before he started on either of them he got rid of anyone who would kick up a fuss. His first target group was the Socialists / Communists as he felt they were the greatest threat facing Germany:
The problem, in short, is not that Linux/Unix is too hard. The problem is that Windows pretends to be too easy.
The real problem is that 90% of users prefer that paradigm over them having to learn to do complicated stuff. They would rather not be confronted with a decision they do not know how to make, instead they would rather something made the decision for them.
and at one or two other tech sites. Read through the posts here. Constant denigrating references to gay people, invective, four-letter words, endless hyperbole.
If you post anything moderate, you are immediately labeled a "fanboi" (again, a veiled homosexuality/gender joke in the misspelling of "fanboy").
But your post was not much better. We cant stop morons posing shite to these sorts of discussions, all we can do is try and keep the stuff we post free from insults and moderate like adults. I have better things to do with my time than read most of that drivel, I only started reading your post as you left the insults out of the first paragraph.
If I was not locked into a contract for the next 9 months I would be very grateful for the heads up about iPhone4 signal strength issues, since I live in an area where there are a lot of nimbys who object to mobile phone masts.
BTW - Thanks for the info on fanboi, I have never thought about where the word came from.
That's when I decided that the signal issue wasn't going to affect me, in my home/neighborhood, and when I decided to keep the phone.
YMMV, but a group of raging, testosterone-laden teenage Apple haters on Slashdot seems to have worked themselves into such a frenzy that iPhone 4 users have gone from "People who may experience signal issues in some locales and usage patterns" to "People so stupid they paid hundreds and hundreds of dollars for what is claimed to be a phone that is not capable, in fact, of making phone calls or connecting to the Internet under any circumstances!"
If you had conducted the testing you went though above and discovered that it did effect you, would you have taken the phone back and tried for a refund?
To describe everyone who has a problem with a product as an Apple hater just stinks of being a fan boy yourself. Your right though, there are far too many people who just post ill informed junk on the internet about Apple products, but they are clearly in both camps, for and against. I actually thought your post was pretty balanced until you dismissed all the people who have experienced an issue as "testosterone-laden teenage Apple haters".
The unfortunate reality is that there is obviously some sort of signal strength issue here, but chances are it will not matter anyway in a few weeks / months when every accessory company and its dog starts releasing covers for the iPhone4. Most people buy a case for their new phone anyway as many people have pointed out. How many people do you currently see wandering around with iPhone 3GS phones and no case?
Apple probably are going to patch the OS though so it is a bit more generous in assigning more bars in cases of medium signal strength. This will only bite them if the phone starts dropping calls when the device shows 4 bars and this would be harder to show on a viral uTube video than the number of bars displayed dropping as someone touched the antenna. If I was in their shoes I would probably do the same. Since Apple mostly turn out decent products people will always give them the benefit of the doubt unless they actually admit there is a show stopping issue.
Yeah, just China and North Korea and Thailand and Pakistan and...
Yet there is also South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, India, Israel, Kuwait and loads of other places.
It is the worlds largest continent so of course it contains some dubious countries. It would be like saying the Americas (North, South, and Central) are full of dictatorships based on the few in central America and ignoring all the rest. Making accurate generalisations about the policatal make up of an entire continent is just not possible unless you are limiting them to saying they have humans living there and not talking about antarctica.
The idea that his personal frustrations are more important than openness is quite self-centered. Hiding data is not better than educating people when they come to incorrect conclusions. Is it?
The problem with all this is that we will now never know if they were trying to suppress the raw data indefinately, or just trying to make sure they published their results first.
It is plain rude to try and force a rival scientific team to reveal their raw data before they have a chance to fully write up the experiment and publish their findings. Labs are rated on how many papers covering new research they get out the door. A lab that does not publish enough papers will stop getting funded and close down. Especially here in the UK where university funding has just been cut to shreds
Our security for timeouts was linked to that timing in Firefox. Firefox changed it to fix Facebook, broke our timing-based security.
So you were relying on firefox timing out non-responsive flash apps after 10 seconds and them changing it to time them out after 45 seconds broke your timing based security? Thats sounds a bit far fetched.
If it really is the case then I would suggest you take a good look at what you are doing and try and figure out a better way of achieving it without being reliant on a plugin being closed or reloaded after 10 seconds. To be honest though this whole things sounds completely bogus as the version of firefox before they implemented this never timed out a non-responsive plugin, it just left it up to the user to close the browser.
That timing thing they 'fixed' to make farmville work, stopped everything that *WAS* working properly with our test rollout of firefox across our corporate network.
Since this is technical discussion site would you care to flesh your post out with any details of why this happened and why this fix broke your test rollout across your corporate network? You post doesn't really provide any information to back up your point.
Oh, and try taking a valium or something, swearing at an application strikes me as being a little high strung:)
How much of this will end up in the pockets of a telco exec and leave us with nothing to show for it?
In the US? I have no idea, but in the UK Blair managed to get this to work with the deal he did with BT when he came to power in the 90's. He vastly inflated BT's share price by handing them a virtual monopoly for most of his reign but he did also vastly improve he quality of broadband connection available to people at a lower price who were not in the capital.
Some vary rural areas still suffered but people like myself who lived in run own inner cities where ADSL would never normally have been offered cheaply found we were being offered a service that was comparable to that which was on offer in the capital. This was no mean feat being that at the time I lived in one of the most run down areas of Britain (Moss Side).
I am not saying that his will turn out the same but these projects can if they are planned correctly and if the correct level of control is put in place to stop the sort of profiteering you describe. In the UK situation this was done by guaranteeing BT a virtual monopoly at the end of the subsidised period. They willingly were forced into selling space on their backbone to many other companies for a reasonable rate in return for being treated preferentially in the bidding for several nationwide contracts.
This resulted in many small businesses setting up as BT resellers of ADSL products and being able to compete with BT on price even though they did not have a national backbone like BT. Now they are able to do the same by renting space in BT exchanges for servers and buying routing bandwidth from BT.
Maybe this is only possible when big business and governments can actually work together as they realise it is in both their long term interests. Blair wanted every child to grow up with internet access and BT realised this would give them a shit load of extra customers down the line. Blair new it would help the UK service economy he was trying to build if we were all PC and internet savvy before we entered the job market, even if we were destined for no IT roles that still involved a small element of PC use like writing an email or using excel to figure out if we have any money left to spend.
I'm in the UK, have a computer science degree (two, actually), and have never really looked for a job. I've had two books published (with a third coming out soon), and have no shortage of consulting work. It's the summer (the first one we've had in three years) and so I spend a lot of time sitting outside relaxing. Not sure why I'd want a job - I'd earn less, have to sit in an office, and have someone else telling me when I had to do work (instead of when I had to have done work by).
Just make sure you plan for the odd period where you are unable to find work. I know a few consultants who found finding work quite tricky to get the consulting work they relied on in about 2004 or so when the trend in the UK job market was to always hire permanent staff whenever possible and train them up via various government grants.
This is never going happen with our current government but remember than things change. If you are in IT for the long haul then you can be sure you will see many changes over the course of your career. Consultants and the self-employed generally do better under Conservative governments, but Labour have habit of trying to encourage people to become permanent employees so they have less scope to get creative with paying income tax.
The ease of theft vs the value of content hadn't really existed in this way before.
Every generation also so say that this will never happen to them as their situation is different for whatever reason.
The simple reality is that as we get older we stop caring about our ideals as much as we did in our youth. We might still try and hold to them, but they start being a secondary thing to keeping a roof over our head and food in our belies when we have no safety net to fall back on and people we care about come to rely on us as their safety net instead.
While the damage produced is probably nominal, the number of people that gulp pirated content is fairly large, not an insignificant blip.
You are of course absolutely right. The problem however is the the people who gulp pirated content may not stay that way for ever. Many previous movements in history have shown us that as people get older they generally become more inclined to toe the line and less inclined to break societies laws, however injust they may be.
Once upon a time when I was a student I pirated everything I watched. I always made sure my ratio was sky high and kept a permanent ultrapeer available on the gnutella network. Now I actually buy more DVD's than I pirate and very rarely use bitrorrent or any of the networks I thought were so important. I would also be horrified if the software I produce for a living was given away free without me seeing any benefit or giving my consent. The only thing I use bittorrent for is for things I am unable to buy, such as very old computer games or copyleft materials.
I am also far more conservative in my views than I was when I was young. I used to think nothing about being arrested for my beliefs (and as an eco-protester I frequently was) but now this is not something I would allow to happen.
Unfortunately this is how things are, just ask the vast majority of people from the sixties who have now given up struggling against the system and are now contributing towards it since it is in their best interests to do so. Generation after generation have tried to rock the boat while they were young then switched to steadying it in their middle and old age.
Even after all this though, I would certainly not ever support bittorrent being banned or non-copyright material being made illegal. The question however is how far I would be willing to go in order to campaign against laws that made such things illegal now I have other concerns that come with old age.
Yeah, the study sounds almost as flawed as the summary of it. Trusting Google more than traditional media is almost completely a non-sequitur. Google isn't of itself a source of news. There's Google News that aggregates articles from news sites, but Google doesn't have its own news bureau. The comparison between Google and "traditional media" implies that people were ranking Google as a news provider against traditional news sources, where in actuality that wasn't the comparison at all.
You see to me this actually makes perfect sense and is an entirely expected result.
If I base my knowledge of something to s single news source, then I am only getting the person who wrote that articles perspective. However if I can read several perspectives on an event side by side (even if I have to click through to each individual site to do this), then I am getting a far more balanced view than I would by just reading one. News aggregation services like Google News are bound to come out looking more "honest" when viewed from this perspective.
The other reason is that most of the worst news services are not biased in the way the cover a world event, they are bias by simply not covering world events that do not put across the world view they want to encourage. This neatly gets round all the laws regarding balanced coverage that they would have to obey in certain countries. This is something that is completely bypassed however if you have an automated news aggregator that does not have a human editor who can be required to toe the company line. Since Google specialise in automating the crap out of everything I would be very surprised if Google News worked differently.
Well, your signature really does hold true, you're ignorant.
Not bothering to reply to the rest of your post since you are clearly a moron but my sig is called Irony, its very popular but it does involve a brain to figure it out. Here is a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony
Slashdot Mirror
You keep going on about how bad Sharia law is. To be honest, I could not care less about Sharia Law and it has no part in this discussion. The muslim nations in the middle east stand zero chance of forcing Sharia Law on Europe, even without the US "protecting" us. Your media might try and brain wash you into thinking otherwise, but come and live here amongst us for a short while and you will discover that we are not exactly the ideal muslim converts. We question everything and that generally makes us pretty hard to convert to any religion based on blind obedience.
Europe has come a long way as a result of two terrible wars that were fought on our own soil. It also means that we still have people alive who actually know what it was like to be bombed indiscriminately in their homes. This is one thing the US does not have or maybe it would have a different attitude to using air power to subdue other nations.
My comments about the US obeying international law were based on the US refusal to allow its soldiers to ever stand trial in the Hague. This is not a muslim court, it is European.
You also make it sound like the US uses its vast military expenditure to fight piracy yet most of you expenditure is used on stand off weapons used to destroy ground targets without risk to US forces. If a few innocent civilians get caught in the crossfire, who cares? Well the problem is that those innocent civilians generally have family, and the remainder of that family will bear that grudge for a very long time. This is what makes terrorists.
You in the US are brain washed into thinking your army is their to protect you, but the truth is they now just make you more vulnerable to terrorist attacks. You are now at the point where you need the Middle East to keep selling you oil far more then they need the money, that is one scary situation to be in to my mind.
The US (and everyone else just has the US do it for them (for free)) has to secure the seas around the middle eastern nations.
But why on earth does the US do it? If it really is the case that you are forced into having a military that size against your nations will then surely you would be better off leaving the rest of the world to its own devices? There might be wars elsewhere, but surely you could just stay out of it but promise to agressively defend your own nation if it was attacked?
It simply makes no sense to me that the nation with the most military might is forced into that situation by feeling it has a duty to police the entire planet. Especially not when that nation refuses to have its own armed forces bound by any law other than their own. Hell, sometimes you refuse to even follow your own laws when it comes to your military.
This is not the behaviour of a benevolent police force who only have everyone elses best interests at heart. If we want other nations to follow our laws, first and foremost we have to lead by example.
How much oil do you use (heating, electricity + car) ?
In the UK we have very few oil powered electricity stations, we phased most of them out in order to meet our obligations under the Kyoto treaty. The ones we do have I am all in favour of replacing with Nuclear power stations. My flat only has an electricity supply, no gas. If the cost of my electricity bills went up in return for me being less of a target for terrorism thats fine, I would prefer it.
I do not drive, instead I take the train to work. I do sometimes car share with my partner who drives to work, but I really do believe that we should move closer to where she works so she can walk. Then I (who earns more) can still take the train to my job. If I could find a developers job within walking or cycling distance I would gladly take it, even if it involved a pay cut since public transport is more expensive than driving I would probably be better off.
Sooner or later we are going to have to live without cheap oil, it might as well be sooner.
How many exploding subways have you been in ?
Not quite sure what you are getting at here as this backs up my point, not yours. The terrorist attacks on London (where I work) were a direct response to our involvement in the invasion of Iraq. If we had let the US go it alone maybe we would have escaped being targeted like France and Germany did.
It is also worth remembering that the attacks on the US were at least partially funded by Saudi (where Osama's from) Oil profits. Maybe buying less oil from the middle east would give these lunatics less money for their stupid jihad.
Maybe you're right about me being a bit too positive about the US. Still it's a FAR cry from stooping to the muslim students' moral abominations (that's "taliban" translated to English)
To be honest, I couldn't care less what the taliban does in its own backyard, It just needs to stay there. I feel exactly the same way though about the US. The US (and Britain, where I live) has a long history of meddling in the middle east.
We are already in a situation where we can easily defend ourselves against any aggression militarily for many years to come. Many wars nowadays are not about saving lives, there are about securing oil or some other commodity. Maybe we should actually go back to only using our armed forces (and intelligence agencies) purely for defence. We might have to make do with far less oil and a much weaker economy, but we would not be losing so many of our sons in far off lands.
This would of course dictate a massive policy switch from our leaders. We would have to recognise that there would be countries out there who gained access to nuclear weapons. Some of these countries would be ruled by people we would rather did not have access to them. The problem is that this seems inevitable at this point.
The technology to construct basic nuclear weapons is really not that complicated. The hard part is getting them into orbit and to come down where you want. This on the hand is going to become easier and easier over the next few decades as we have to look to space for more and more natural resources. Within 50 years we may be facing a situation where any fool can build a nuclear weapon and rocket capable of reaching orbit in his garage just by following instructions like this on the web:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design
The trick in this coming world is actually going to be riding a fine line where every nation has nukes, but nobody wants to use them first for fear of being annihilated by everyone else. This however will only work if the US stops using its conventional military strength quite so blatantly in other peoples back yard. It is actually the fear of being crushed by your vast conventional military superiority that is forcing more and more nations to try and develop nuclear weapons on the sly. The rest of the world is now so out matched by the US armed forces that what should be protecting US citizens is actually now making them more of a target.
Look at the following table and tell me if you would not feel slightly threatened by a nation that spent this much on war but was still supposedly peaceful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures
And to top it all, this is the only country in the world that has actually used nuclear weapons in anger on another nation.
For the foreseeable future there will be no full employment, so employers will start degrading working conditions ... it shouldn't be normal, but it is still the norm.
The capitalist system we live in actually relies on there not being 100% employment in order to keep wages low. As soon as you have more jobs than people, wages start to rise. If this happens across many different sectors at the same time, then it causes inflation to go up. High inflation has the potential to hurt the very rich more then the poor since people with saving suffer, people living day to day do not.
You can't believe the damage these punks did to the company
You have one really weird idea of "damage". Michael Dell founded the business and is now worth $13.5 Billion. He built Dell computers into a business worth $33 Billion in assets with revenue of $59 Billion. If this is is damage you can damage my business any time.
The truth is that you do not succeed in business by playing nice and being a good boy. You succeed by shafting people. There is the odd exception, but broadly speaking successful businesses are launched by people willing to do anything it takes to make their business a success. Ok, is now being fined a few million, but that is chump change compared to how much he has made from always being able to raise cash easily on the stock market. He would have found it much harder to grow his business the way he did if not for the fact that he was gaining a reputation as a damn good business man.
It's not surprising the quality sucks.
What on earth are you talking about? I have never had any problems with Dell PC's at work. They are far from the PC I would buy for my home since i am a techy and like to be able to upgrade my machine easily but if this is not a factor and you just want to buy a PC that works out of the box then they are fine. Who cares of it fails after a year or two, you are probably looking at replacing it by then anyway if you are a business.
Dell has grown to where it did by fiddling the markets and making dodgy deals with both Intel and Microsoft, but those are damn good business decisions in the screwy world we live in. Do I like this? No I do not but I am unable to change it on my own. The only way things like this would change is if governments looked at imprisoning people like this rather that fining them, but that is hardly likely to happen in the US since they have more politicians in their pocket than we do.
Successful business owners donate vast amounts to politician campaign funds to make sure that they have the ear of politicians when they get elected. This will always mean that any politician who actually wants to do things for the people will find himself fighting an army of corporate lobbyists. We also have the problem that our media is now almost entirely owned by a few large companies so the news we see is the news they want us to. In this world the politicians have almost no power to do anything unless they can find some businesses that support it too.
To answer your question, only in the situation in which you really don't want a commercial organization exploiting you. If you don't really care, that's another matter.
I get exploited by a commercial organisation every day, its called work :)
The GPL is the better open source license for the creator, I would say, but other licenses like BSD are better for those using the work.
Why? Surely this is only true if the creator actually buys in to the FSF and its aims? Many developers are happy just to have their work as widely used as possible. If you as a creator only want to produce something as useful as possible to as many people as possible then the BSD licence is far better for him too.
I do not think anybody id disputing that? It's the inflated costs of the damage to obtain the extradition order that is the issue.
The other issue that worries us is that he will not receive a fair trial. US courts have a nasty habit of towing the government line a little too eagerly for those of us in the UK. We are generally much more sceptical about government trying to drag lone individuals through the courts for embarrassing them.
There is also a perception that US jurors are much less friendly to foreign citizens due to the nationalism many of your citizens demonstrate.
In this case a large part of the evidence is going to be reliant on government records or government officers testifying. All of this evidence has to be treated with suspicion as your security services have been treating your own laws as optional since September 11th.
Also bear in mind that there is a sizeable minority of people in Europe who belief that September 11th was avoidable but the US Government allowed in to happen in order to justify invading Iraq and securing Oil contracts for US Companies.
I am very sorry, but Bush stomping all over your own laws (Guantanamo Bay, Illegally snooping on US Citizens, etc) has made the rest of the world a little sceptical as to the impartiality of your own legal system.
(Not only Jews, the Romani suffered greatly as well).
But long before he started on either of them he got rid of anyone who would kick up a fuss. His first target group was the Socialists / Communists as he felt they were the greatest threat facing Germany:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_Fire_Decree
The problem, in short, is not that Linux/Unix is too hard. The problem is that Windows pretends to be too easy.
The real problem is that 90% of users prefer that paradigm over them having to learn to do complicated stuff. They would rather not be confronted with a decision they do not know how to make, instead they would rather something made the decision for them.
and at one or two other tech sites. Read through the posts here. Constant denigrating references to gay people, invective, four-letter words, endless hyperbole.
If you post anything moderate, you are immediately labeled a "fanboi" (again, a veiled homosexuality/gender joke in the misspelling of "fanboy").
But your post was not much better. We cant stop morons posing shite to these sorts of discussions, all we can do is try and keep the stuff we post free from insults and moderate like adults. I have better things to do with my time than read most of that drivel, I only started reading your post as you left the insults out of the first paragraph.
If I was not locked into a contract for the next 9 months I would be very grateful for the heads up about iPhone4 signal strength issues, since I live in an area where there are a lot of nimbys who object to mobile phone masts.
BTW - Thanks for the info on fanboi, I have never thought about where the word came from.
That's when I decided that the signal issue wasn't going to affect me, in my home/neighborhood, and when I decided to keep the phone.
YMMV, but a group of raging, testosterone-laden teenage Apple haters on Slashdot seems to have worked themselves into such a frenzy that iPhone 4 users have gone from "People who may experience signal issues in some locales and usage patterns" to "People so stupid they paid hundreds and hundreds of dollars for what is claimed to be a phone that is not capable, in fact, of making phone calls or connecting to the Internet under any circumstances!"
If you had conducted the testing you went though above and discovered that it did effect you, would you have taken the phone back and tried for a refund?
To describe everyone who has a problem with a product as an Apple hater just stinks of being a fan boy yourself. Your right though, there are far too many people who just post ill informed junk on the internet about Apple products, but they are clearly in both camps, for and against. I actually thought your post was pretty balanced until you dismissed all the people who have experienced an issue as "testosterone-laden teenage Apple haters".
The unfortunate reality is that there is obviously some sort of signal strength issue here, but chances are it will not matter anyway in a few weeks / months when every accessory company and its dog starts releasing covers for the iPhone4. Most people buy a case for their new phone anyway as many people have pointed out. How many people do you currently see wandering around with iPhone 3GS phones and no case?
Apple probably are going to patch the OS though so it is a bit more generous in assigning more bars in cases of medium signal strength. This will only bite them if the phone starts dropping calls when the device shows 4 bars and this would be harder to show on a viral uTube video than the number of bars displayed dropping as someone touched the antenna. If I was in their shoes I would probably do the same. Since Apple mostly turn out decent products people will always give them the benefit of the doubt unless they actually admit there is a show stopping issue.
This is not saying eventually, this is saying I will release it at the same time as I release my findings. It is how scientific research works.
Yeah, just China and North Korea and Thailand and Pakistan and...
Yet there is also South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, India, Israel, Kuwait and loads of other places.
It is the worlds largest continent so of course it contains some dubious countries. It would be like saying the Americas (North, South, and Central) are full of dictatorships based on the few in central America and ignoring all the rest. Making accurate generalisations about the policatal make up of an entire continent is just not possible unless you are limiting them to saying they have humans living there and not talking about antarctica.
The idea that his personal frustrations are more important than openness is quite self-centered. Hiding data is not better than educating people when they come to incorrect conclusions. Is it?
The problem with all this is that we will now never know if they were trying to suppress the raw data indefinately, or just trying to make sure they published their results first.
It is plain rude to try and force a rival scientific team to reveal their raw data before they have a chance to fully write up the experiment and publish their findings. Labs are rated on how many papers covering new research they get out the door. A lab that does not publish enough papers will stop getting funded and close down. Especially here in the UK where university funding has just been cut to shreds
Our security for timeouts was linked to that timing in Firefox. Firefox changed it to fix Facebook, broke our timing-based security.
So you were relying on firefox timing out non-responsive flash apps after 10 seconds and them changing it to time them out after 45 seconds broke your timing based security? Thats sounds a bit far fetched.
If it really is the case then I would suggest you take a good look at what you are doing and try and figure out a better way of achieving it without being reliant on a plugin being closed or reloaded after 10 seconds. To be honest though this whole things sounds completely bogus as the version of firefox before they implemented this never timed out a non-responsive plugin, it just left it up to the user to close the browser.
http://mashable.com/2010/06/28/firefox-3-6-6-farmville/
That timing thing they 'fixed' to make farmville work, stopped everything that *WAS* working properly with our test rollout of firefox across our corporate network.
Since this is technical discussion site would you care to flesh your post out with any details of why this happened and why this fix broke your test rollout across your corporate network? You post doesn't really provide any information to back up your point.
Oh, and try taking a valium or something, swearing at an application strikes me as being a little high strung :)
How much of this will end up in the pockets of a telco exec and leave us with nothing to show for it?
In the US? I have no idea, but in the UK Blair managed to get this to work with the deal he did with BT when he came to power in the 90's. He vastly inflated BT's share price by handing them a virtual monopoly for most of his reign but he did also vastly improve he quality of broadband connection available to people at a lower price who were not in the capital.
Some vary rural areas still suffered but people like myself who lived in run own inner cities where ADSL would never normally have been offered cheaply found we were being offered a service that was comparable to that which was on offer in the capital. This was no mean feat being that at the time I lived in one of the most run down areas of Britain (Moss Side).
I am not saying that his will turn out the same but these projects can if they are planned correctly and if the correct level of control is put in place to stop the sort of profiteering you describe. In the UK situation this was done by guaranteeing BT a virtual monopoly at the end of the subsidised period. They willingly were forced into selling space on their backbone to many other companies for a reasonable rate in return for being treated preferentially in the bidding for several nationwide contracts.
This resulted in many small businesses setting up as BT resellers of ADSL products and being able to compete with BT on price even though they did not have a national backbone like BT. Now they are able to do the same by renting space in BT exchanges for servers and buying routing bandwidth from BT.
Maybe this is only possible when big business and governments can actually work together as they realise it is in both their long term interests. Blair wanted every child to grow up with internet access and BT realised this would give them a shit load of extra customers down the line. Blair new it would help the UK service economy he was trying to build if we were all PC and internet savvy before we entered the job market, even if we were destined for no IT roles that still involved a small element of PC use like writing an email or using excel to figure out if we have any money left to spend.
I'm in the UK, have a computer science degree (two, actually), and have never really looked for a job. I've had two books published (with a third coming out soon), and have no shortage of consulting work. It's the summer (the first one we've had in three years) and so I spend a lot of time sitting outside relaxing. Not sure why I'd want a job - I'd earn less, have to sit in an office, and have someone else telling me when I had to do work (instead of when I had to have done work by).
Just make sure you plan for the odd period where you are unable to find work. I know a few consultants who found finding work quite tricky to get the consulting work they relied on in about 2004 or so when the trend in the UK job market was to always hire permanent staff whenever possible and train them up via various government grants.
This is never going happen with our current government but remember than things change. If you are in IT for the long haul then you can be sure you will see many changes over the course of your career. Consultants and the self-employed generally do better under Conservative governments, but Labour have habit of trying to encourage people to become permanent employees so they have less scope to get creative with paying income tax.
The ease of theft vs the value of content hadn't really existed in this way before.
Every generation also so say that this will never happen to them as their situation is different for whatever reason.
The simple reality is that as we get older we stop caring about our ideals as much as we did in our youth. We might still try and hold to them, but they start being a secondary thing to keeping a roof over our head and food in our belies when we have no safety net to fall back on and people we care about come to rely on us as their safety net instead.
Long story short, fuck capitalism. Give the stuff you love away for free, and earn money from the stuff you don't care about.
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I would love too, but unfortunately I really need money for rent, food and the hardware I use to write software.
While the damage produced is probably nominal, the number of people that gulp pirated content is fairly large, not an insignificant blip.
You are of course absolutely right. The problem however is the the people who gulp pirated content may not stay that way for ever. Many previous movements in history have shown us that as people get older they generally become more inclined to toe the line and less inclined to break societies laws, however injust they may be.
Once upon a time when I was a student I pirated everything I watched. I always made sure my ratio was sky high and kept a permanent ultrapeer available on the gnutella network. Now I actually buy more DVD's than I pirate and very rarely use bitrorrent or any of the networks I thought were so important. I would also be horrified if the software I produce for a living was given away free without me seeing any benefit or giving my consent. The only thing I use bittorrent for is for things I am unable to buy, such as very old computer games or copyleft materials.
I am also far more conservative in my views than I was when I was young. I used to think nothing about being arrested for my beliefs (and as an eco-protester I frequently was) but now this is not something I would allow to happen.
Unfortunately this is how things are, just ask the vast majority of people from the sixties who have now given up struggling against the system and are now contributing towards it since it is in their best interests to do so. Generation after generation have tried to rock the boat while they were young then switched to steadying it in their middle and old age.
Even after all this though, I would certainly not ever support bittorrent being banned or non-copyright material being made illegal. The question however is how far I would be willing to go in order to campaign against laws that made such things illegal now I have other concerns that come with old age.
Yeah, the study sounds almost as flawed as the summary of it. Trusting Google more than traditional media is almost completely a non-sequitur. Google isn't of itself a source of news. There's Google News that aggregates articles from news sites, but Google doesn't have its own news bureau. The comparison between Google and "traditional media" implies that people were ranking Google as a news provider against traditional news sources, where in actuality that wasn't the comparison at all.
You see to me this actually makes perfect sense and is an entirely expected result.
If I base my knowledge of something to s single news source, then I am only getting the person who wrote that articles perspective. However if I can read several perspectives on an event side by side (even if I have to click through to each individual site to do this), then I am getting a far more balanced view than I would by just reading one. News aggregation services like Google News are bound to come out looking more "honest" when viewed from this perspective.
The other reason is that most of the worst news services are not biased in the way the cover a world event, they are bias by simply not covering world events that do not put across the world view they want to encourage. This neatly gets round all the laws regarding balanced coverage that they would have to obey in certain countries. This is something that is completely bypassed however if you have an automated news aggregator that does not have a human editor who can be required to toe the company line.
Since Google specialise in automating the crap out of everything I would be very surprised if Google News worked differently.
Well, your signature really does hold true, you're ignorant.
Not bothering to reply to the rest of your post since you are clearly a moron but my sig is called Irony, its very popular but it does involve a brain to figure it out. Here is a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony