The village I lived in as a child had 2 or 3 streetlights (that I can recall). It now has lights about every 15 metres.
Crime rates have definitely gone up. There have certainly been more accidents. The relationship with the street lighting would be hard to show.
Very few pedestrians need to walk down a road after midnight even in large cities (like I live in now), then one could wear a hi-visibility vest or an LED lamp. Oh and use the pavement!
>>> The publisher will be getting all the money for every sales.
Why would any currently established author bother using a publisher?
(1) Rent some web-server space and a reasonable web-tech (developer/designer), (2) pay your Adobe ebook license fee and distribute it yourself (3)... [I must have missed something] (4) Profit.
>>> I'm there to be productive, to build quality software, not to spend hours picking whatever picture would look best on the desktop I never look at because it's hidden under some IDE.
You see the desktop at boot. I generally match it to look pleasing with the task and toolbars and to contrast with the text of desktop icons.
Also I use my box for work (web design and some programming) and for pleasure; games, internet, family photos and the like.
I find that a bland working environment makes me feel depressed more! The computer is part of my working environment. I suspect you'll find that working environment plays a large part in productivity, particularly of more skilled workers... do the big creative companies have beige cubes for their best workers?
We already have the technology to halve the power usage of street lights. It's called an off switch.
OK maybe not quite half, perhaps cut by a third. Why do we need near daylight conditions for drivers at 2 in the morning, when they have perfectly good headlights?
It's called customisation: I did it when I installed Ubuntu and tried gnome (for about 10 days), I did it (less) when I installed KDE on top of Ubuntu, I did it when I booted the preinstalled Vista I have on this box...
Does anyone move into a room, office, flat and not think "that chair would look better there, we should have that colour for the walls and how about a pot plant?"?
>>> The fact that Microsoft is even attempting to do it says something about the Mozilla dev team. They were quite content to sit around for years with no real browser development until Firefox got popular.
How did that get marked insightful.
What is Microsoft attempting to do? What does it say about the MozDev team? Who was content to sit around?
I SSH'ed into a web server the other day, navigated to the desired folder intending to delete all files, I listed them... noticed a few I wanted to keep out of the hundred or so. Now what... how do I select all files, but not the few, and remove. They didn't match based on filename pattern or date.
I gave up and used fish (on KDE, it's great!) - one drag, 5 or 6 ctrl-clicks, delete. Done.
>>> "Avril Lavigne was first introduced to European audiences through FIFA 2003"
That may be true, but in the UK at least I'd have thought it was not through Complicated but through her second top 10 UK single (charting at number 8, 5 Jan 2003) "sk8er boi" from December 2002 that she was widely aired.
Who even knew she sang on Fifa 2003? Fifa 2003 was apparently released in UK in Oct 2002, some reports say November - which means it would have targetted the christmas market... Complicated was on "Top of The Pops" (the erstwhile UK chart show of record!) on 4 October 2002 (so was already popular), following the showings from the MTV Music Awards in August 2002 (MTV I warrant is far more popular across Europe than Fifa2003) which in turn followed the June release of Complicated.
So I'm guessing that this is far more correlation than cause.
>>> "like the idea of working hard and getting a higher income than the guy who doesn't, and having a nice house and a new car parked in front of it. I don't understand why people want to reduce the opportunity to do that."
People as they mature often realise that having a nice house and new car are worthless things in themselves. We derive true enjoyment from out relationships, interactions and associations with other people.
It depends a lot on why the guy is not working hard: disability, lack of opportunity, inexperience (youth), old-age. Some believe that if we work together to benefit one another in the essentials - companionship, food, health, shelter - then we can forgo "luxuries" and have a higher standard of living. There is an echo of this in the recent free (gratis) presentation of some music by various artists.
In such a utopia you would have provision of essential food, et cetera, so you could freely give of your talent to all those for whom your "original content" brought benefit. Imagine creating something that would better the lives of billions of people.
Suppose you discover a tweak for solar cells that will quintuple their efficiency. Do you give it away and benefit everyone or sell it and benefit yourself and those well off enough not to need it.
Patent holders (like the drug companies) will tell you they need the revenue for research. But they still buy private jets and spend 4 times more on advertising than on R&D.
Can you upload a photo of that page... I'd love to see it! Sounds like folklore to me.
I've always considered them to have been largely independent not least because of the different notations adopted. It was calculus's time, if not Newton or Leibniz some other genius...
Can't remember any others. The point is these are all tried and tested with details of hardware on which they're implemented. I think Lane is in Canada(?) and sells the whole systems not just the FOSS but they standardise on Epson which you can get nearly anywhere.
This is off the shelf for a small business. Tying it into an OSS accounting package shouldn't be hard either.
You're totally right however that you need to look at hidden costs as well as ticket costs too.
I've used carbon paper several times today... for simple receipt counterfoils. We're too small a business to afford the cost / time-cost of implementing a fully computerised system - also the method we use the counterfoils for (tracking with pottery items) would need large hardware expenditure. I can currently just put the counterfoil in a mug... how do I replicate that with computers, perhaps an item recognition system create closest matches based on colours, or an RFID system. I could just print lots of receipts... but the benefit isn't great enough to implement.
Like I said not obsolete. The right tools for the job.
Also, we use carbon paper for transferring images onto once-fired pottery (bisque) to aid painting.
I haven't looked at the claims... but given that Patent Attorneys are some of the highest paid lawyers available (for a reason, they save and acru huge amounts of capital for their clients) and that the banks are not exactly poor... I think if there were a simple challenge it would have been made. The banks aren't going to spend 100million on the court case when they can spend 10million on debunking the thing.
So you're not anti-censorship as your prev. post suggests just want to add your own censorship on top. Quite a different complexion on the topic.
Interestingly for the link I tried (?q=vagina) enabling "strict safe search" (contrary to what it says in the description) filtered some of the images too (the slightly gruesome picture of a cervix for example). It did however add in pictures purporting to show "vagina crotch shots" of a couple of celebs.
Now those zoom lenses are good but at best I think they're going to show those celebs vulvas, no?
So nice to see that google, along with most of ParentDish, doesn't know the diff between a vagina (sheath) and vulva/mons pubis...
xaxa >>> "I don't think it should block porn either."
Really. So it a kid is searching for pictures of goats for his "3 billy goats gruff" storybook homework he should be subjected to [possibly due to a typo, maybe not] "goatses"? And you're fine with that?
I'm not. I think porn filters on a search engine are fine.
(You may be happier with a child with a scat fetish [porn] than one wanting to research the "right to bear arms" [guns], doesn't mean everyone is.)
"The original case was sparked when police were contacted by Raja's parents. The schoolboy had run away to Bradford to meet the other students, who he had met online, leaving a note to say he intended to fight abroad."
The UK law requires that there is intent to use the material for terrorist activities. The plan apparently was for them to go to Pakistan to train and then to "fight" against the British. Just downloading the book and talking about it... not a crime but pretty worrying.
Leaving a note for your parents and going off to meet the guys you've been planning to embark on your life of terrorism with... seems like intent to me.
Now of course proving that in court is hard. But I don't think these guys are innocent, whether they technically committed a crime or not.
Malik [one of the accused] "... I do not, have not and will not support terrorism in any form against innocent people".
So if you believe them to be guilty, the belief of the hardline muslims for the whole of western society, or believe that killing apostates and dhimma is not terrorism but your Islamic duty in installing sharia... well you fill in the blanks and tell me you think this sort of thing is OK.
---
Analogy: I have an argument with my neighbour because he drew a cartoon of my dad I didn't like... I threaten to kill him. I download the anarchists cookbook and some info on firearms use. I then go and buy a gun and a few sacks of fertiliser. Finally I leave a note for my wife 'going in to hiding as police will be after me for murdering the neighbour'. Wife finds the note and reports me... I'm picked up and taken for an interview before I commit any harm on my neighbour. Should the police send me home?
timeOday >>> "evolution of natural language processing in search (rather than manual tagging) will solve the problem"
But then if you're creating an addon for joomla (or any template elements really) to display event listings why not add a semantic tag so that a search engine could limit the domain by "tag:events". The extra effort involved is pretty minimal, especially when, if you code well, each event is probably in a "<div class="event eventtype">..." anyway.
Once people realise that search engines can do semantic filtering then it will be worth it.
As for tag-spamming well surely google, et al., won't accept based on tag first but will do their usual contextual/ quantative analyses first and then limit based on tags. So we wouldn't be gaining any spam over what we have now?
late payment
on
Ethics In IT
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Kupfernigk >>> "When I was a general manager, one of my policies was always to pay the small suppliers promptly, because they need it most."
Well, most companies don't hold to that.
Oft repeated rhetoric here is that a companies only purpose is to make money. You're actually depriving your shareholders of a small amount of capital by paying on time if it's possible to avoid.
I find that (as a director in a small business) we get paid late by big businesses and government organisations. They can pay late, we can't afford to sue and we need them more than they need us. We've been paid over a month late by a local council (!) for an amount equal to about 50% of our wages bill... that doesn't help cash flow much!
Inspired by Google's early ethical policy of "do no evil" ours is "be nice". We've many times checked our behaviour, and adapted it (sometimes to our financial detriment), by following this code.
>>> "do they have the right to investigate my background and decide to tell me that they do not want to sell their goods to me because I did something they do not like in my past?"
Yes actually. It's called a credit reference check. Of course if you pay cash for most transactions you're fine. There are other restrictions like having age ID, having a driving license (hiring a vehicle), etc..
Also displaying goods is known (IIRC, in the UK) as an "offer to treat" and doesn't obligate the retailer in anyway to sell you the goods (but if they do sell them then they are obligated to do it in the proper manner, eg at the right price, etc.). This issue often arises when selling to children - no matches and paraffin, no eggs and flour, you get the idea.
If I don't like the look of you I won't let you in or will quickly usher you out of my store. If I've just seen your picture in the paper associated with anti-social behaviour then I'd be even more inclined to do that. Larger stores in most cities have a "store watch" or similar that bars people who have been caught shoplifting or which ensures suspected shoplifters are escorted around the store. So, this sort of thing does translate from/to the web/traditional retail environments.
Buyers of course have ample opportunity too to know about who they are buying from. There are lists of registered companies (with details of directors and other personnel). Also there are established mechanisms (trademark law and other consumer rights laws) that protect buyers at traditional retail outlets.
Basically I think your whole argument is pure bunkum.
Slashdot Mirror
The village I lived in as a child had 2 or 3 streetlights (that I can recall). It now has lights about every 15 metres.
Crime rates have definitely gone up. There have certainly been more accidents. The relationship with the street lighting would be hard to show.
Very few pedestrians need to walk down a road after midnight even in large cities (like I live in now), then one could wear a hi-visibility vest or an LED lamp. Oh and use the pavement!
>>> The publisher will be getting all the money for every sales.
... [I must have missed something]
Why would any currently established author bother using a publisher?
(1) Rent some web-server space and a reasonable web-tech (developer/designer),
(2) pay your Adobe ebook license fee and distribute it yourself
(3)
(4) Profit.
>>> I'm there to be productive, to build quality software, not to spend hours picking whatever picture would look best on the desktop I never look at because it's hidden under some IDE.
... do the big creative companies have beige cubes for their best workers?
You see the desktop at boot. I generally match it to look pleasing with the task and toolbars and to contrast with the text of desktop icons.
Also I use my box for work (web design and some programming) and for pleasure; games, internet, family photos and the like.
I find that a bland working environment makes me feel depressed more! The computer is part of my working environment. I suspect you'll find that working environment plays a large part in productivity, particularly of more skilled workers
We already have the technology to halve the power usage of street lights. It's called an off switch.
OK maybe not quite half, perhaps cut by a third. Why do we need near daylight conditions for drivers at 2 in the morning, when they have perfectly good headlights?
It's called customisation: I did it when I installed Ubuntu and tried gnome (for about 10 days), I did it (less) when I installed KDE on top of Ubuntu, I did it when I booted the preinstalled Vista I have on this box ...
Does anyone move into a room, office, flat and not think "that chair would look better there, we should have that colour for the walls and how about a pot plant?"?
>>> The fact that Microsoft is even attempting to do it says something about the Mozilla dev team. They were quite content to sit around for years with no real browser development until Firefox got popular.
How did that get marked insightful.
What is Microsoft attempting to do? What does it say about the MozDev team? Who was content to sit around?
I SSH'ed into a web server the other day, navigated to the desired folder intending to delete all files, I listed them ... noticed a few I wanted to keep out of the hundred or so. Now what ... how do I select all files, but not the few, and remove. They didn't match based on filename pattern or date.
I gave up and used fish (on KDE, it's great!) - one drag, 5 or 6 ctrl-clicks, delete. Done.
It seems I always want a mix of CLI and GUI.
>>> "Avril Lavigne was first introduced to European audiences through FIFA 2003"
... Complicated was on "Top of The Pops" (the erstwhile UK chart show of record!) on 4 October 2002 (so was already popular), following the showings from the MTV Music Awards in August 2002 (MTV I warrant is far more popular across Europe than Fifa2003) which in turn followed the June release of Complicated.
That may be true, but in the UK at least I'd have thought it was not through Complicated but through her second top 10 UK single (charting at number 8, 5 Jan 2003) "sk8er boi" from December 2002 that she was widely aired.
Who even knew she sang on Fifa 2003? Fifa 2003 was apparently released in UK in Oct 2002, some reports say November - which means it would have targetted the christmas market
So I'm guessing that this is far more correlation than cause.
Whatever.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/2629761.stm/
>>> "like the idea of working hard and getting a higher income than the guy who doesn't, and having a nice house and a new car parked in front of it. I don't understand why people want to reduce the opportunity to do that."
People as they mature often realise that having a nice house and new car are worthless things in themselves. We derive true enjoyment from out relationships, interactions and associations with other people.
It depends a lot on why the guy is not working hard: disability, lack of opportunity, inexperience (youth), old-age. Some believe that if we work together to benefit one another in the essentials - companionship, food, health, shelter - then we can forgo "luxuries" and have a higher standard of living. There is an echo of this in the recent free (gratis) presentation of some music by various artists.
In such a utopia you would have provision of essential food, et cetera, so you could freely give of your talent to all those for whom your "original content" brought benefit. Imagine creating something that would better the lives of billions of people.
Suppose you discover a tweak for solar cells that will quintuple their efficiency. Do you give it away and benefit everyone or sell it and benefit yourself and those well off enough not to need it.
Patent holders (like the drug companies) will tell you they need the revenue for research. But they still buy private jets and spend 4 times more on advertising than on R&D.
Hmmm end of rant, get off my lawn?!
Can you upload a photo of that page ... I'd love to see it! Sounds like folklore to me.
...
I've always considered them to have been largely independent not least because of the different notations adopted. It was calculus's time, if not Newton or Leibniz some other genius
I think he meant it fscks with your computers memory.
Seems quite apposite to me.
>>> "much more "out of the box" than any open product"
You know "any" is a pretty all-encompassing aspersion against the whole open source POS industry.
Check out the ones I know of (from a short review about 4 years ago):
Lane POS - http://l-ane.net/
Banana POS - http://www.bananahead.com/pos/home.html
easypos http://easypos.sourceforge.net/
Can't remember any others. The point is these are all tried and tested with details of hardware on which they're implemented. I think Lane is in Canada(?) and sells the whole systems not just the FOSS but they standardise on Epson which you can get nearly anywhere.
This is off the shelf for a small business. Tying it into an OSS accounting package shouldn't be hard either.
You're totally right however that you need to look at hidden costs as well as ticket costs too.
I've used carbon paper several times today ... for simple receipt counterfoils. We're too small a business to afford the cost / time-cost of implementing a fully computerised system - also the method we use the counterfoils for (tracking with pottery items) would need large hardware expenditure. I can currently just put the counterfoil in a mug ... how do I replicate that with computers, perhaps an item recognition system create closest matches based on colours, or an RFID system. I could just print lots of receipts ... but the benefit isn't great enough to implement.
Like I said not obsolete. The right tools for the job.
Also, we use carbon paper for transferring images onto once-fired pottery (bisque) to aid painting.
We're a pottery painting studio - Barefoot Ceramics pottery painting studio, Newport, UK.
I haven't looked at the claims ... but given that Patent Attorneys are some of the highest paid lawyers available (for a reason, they save and acru huge amounts of capital for their clients) and that the banks are not exactly poor ... I think if there were a simple challenge it would have been made. The banks aren't going to spend 100million on the court case when they can spend 10million on debunking the thing.
Just an a priori opinion.
So you're not anti-censorship as your prev. post suggests just want to add your own censorship on top. Quite a different complexion on the topic.
...
Interestingly for the link I tried (?q=vagina) enabling "strict safe search" (contrary to what it says in the description) filtered some of the images too (the slightly gruesome picture of a cervix for example). It did however add in pictures purporting to show "vagina crotch shots" of a couple of celebs.
Now those zoom lenses are good but at best I think they're going to show those celebs vulvas, no?
So nice to see that google, along with most of ParentDish, doesn't know the diff between a vagina (sheath) and vulva/mons pubis
>>> "Fenestrae delendae sunt."
So you're so bothered about people being able to read documents that you wrote your sig in Latin so noone could read it.
Presumably it's something like "windows sucks"?
xaxa >>> "I don't think it should block porn either."
Really. So it a kid is searching for pictures of goats for his "3 billy goats gruff" storybook homework he should be subjected to [possibly due to a typo, maybe not] "goatses"? And you're fine with that?
I'm not. I think porn filters on a search engine are fine.
(You may be happier with a child with a scat fetish [porn] than one wanting to research the "right to bear arms" [guns], doesn't mean everyone is.)
From the Register article:
... not a crime but pretty worrying.
... seems like intent to me.
... well you fill in the blanks and tell me you think this sort of thing is OK.
... I threaten to kill him. I download the anarchists cookbook and some info on firearms use. I then go and buy a gun and a few sacks of fertiliser. Finally I leave a note for my wife 'going in to hiding as police will be after me for murdering the neighbour'. Wife finds the note and reports me ... I'm picked up and taken for an interview before I commit any harm on my neighbour. Should the police send me home?
"The original case was sparked when police were contacted by Raja's parents. The schoolboy had run away to Bradford to meet the other students, who he had met online, leaving a note to say he intended to fight abroad."
The UK law requires that there is intent to use the material for terrorist activities. The plan apparently was for them to go to Pakistan to train and then to "fight" against the British. Just downloading the book and talking about it
Leaving a note for your parents and going off to meet the guys you've been planning to embark on your life of terrorism with
Now of course proving that in court is hard. But I don't think these guys are innocent, whether they technically committed a crime or not.
Malik [one of the accused] "... I do not, have not and will not support terrorism in any form against innocent people".
So if you believe them to be guilty, the belief of the hardline muslims for the whole of western society, or believe that killing apostates and dhimma is not terrorism but your Islamic duty in installing sharia
---
Analogy: I have an argument with my neighbour because he drew a cartoon of my dad I didn't like
You could have mentioned filing tax returns / NI info too. If you don't file you've committed an offence, online will soon be the only way.
... loss of livelihood?
How about homeworkers
Rogerborg >>> "they employee front line support who shouldn't be allowed to play with Big Boy Scissors"
Loving it, lol.
Never even heard of a "cheese tray" ... thanks for your insight though.
timeOday >>> "evolution of natural language processing in search (rather than manual tagging) will solve the problem"
..." anyway.
But then if you're creating an addon for joomla (or any template elements really) to display event listings why not add a semantic tag so that a search engine could limit the domain by "tag:events". The extra effort involved is pretty minimal, especially when, if you code well, each event is probably in a "<div class="event eventtype">
Once people realise that search engines can do semantic filtering then it will be worth it.
As for tag-spamming well surely google, et al., won't accept based on tag first but will do their usual contextual/ quantative analyses first and then limit based on tags. So we wouldn't be gaining any spam over what we have now?
Kupfernigk >>> "When I was a general manager, one of my policies was always to pay the small suppliers promptly, because they need it most."
... that doesn't help cash flow much!
Well, most companies don't hold to that.
Oft repeated rhetoric here is that a companies only purpose is to make money. You're actually depriving your shareholders of a small amount of capital by paying on time if it's possible to avoid.
I find that (as a director in a small business) we get paid late by big businesses and government organisations. They can pay late, we can't afford to sue and we need them more than they need us. We've been paid over a month late by a local council (!) for an amount equal to about 50% of our wages bill
Inspired by Google's early ethical policy of "do no evil" ours is "be nice". We've many times checked our behaviour, and adapted it (sometimes to our financial detriment), by following this code.
>>> "do they have the right to investigate my background and decide to tell me that they do not want to sell their goods to me because I did something they do not like in my past?"
Yes actually. It's called a credit reference check. Of course if you pay cash for most transactions you're fine. There are other restrictions like having age ID, having a driving license (hiring a vehicle), etc..
Also displaying goods is known (IIRC, in the UK) as an "offer to treat" and doesn't obligate the retailer in anyway to sell you the goods (but if they do sell them then they are obligated to do it in the proper manner, eg at the right price, etc.). This issue often arises when selling to children - no matches and paraffin, no eggs and flour, you get the idea.
If I don't like the look of you I won't let you in or will quickly usher you out of my store. If I've just seen your picture in the paper associated with anti-social behaviour then I'd be even more inclined to do that. Larger stores in most cities have a "store watch" or similar that bars people who have been caught shoplifting or which ensures suspected shoplifters are escorted around the store. So, this sort of thing does translate from/to the web/traditional retail environments.
Buyers of course have ample opportunity too to know about who they are buying from. There are lists of registered companies (with details of directors and other personnel). Also there are established mechanisms (trademark law and other consumer rights laws) that protect buyers at traditional retail outlets.
Basically I think your whole argument is pure bunkum.
We can forget about it, but I'd try a little less caffeine in your diet if I were you.