Police shouldn't try arresting peaceful demonstrators (because you were peaceful in that battle, weren't you?), said demonstrators shouldn't be termed terrorists and they shouldn't be fired. Those are the real problems in your story.
In the real world, Police will accuse you of anything, if it serves their purpose, and their masters' purpose. Then it's up to the legal system to clean up the mess. In the mean time, your name is associated with criminal activities, and even if you are found innocent, no one would want to associate themselves with you.
The Id card as proposed by the UK government is not a simple reference document, but it allows connection with any means of electronic media, including computer databases, of course. This opens a huge can of worms: forming a resistance movement against an authoritative power will become very difficult, or even impossible.
Here is an example: suppose that you are interested in the preservation of the environment and the climate change; you don't want to sit on your couch all day, and the next G7 climate change meeting is not far from your country. You take a holiday, and then riding the first plane to the city where the climate change meeting takes place, you participate in the rallies against G7 policies regarding the climate. Sooner or later, you are part of a street battle with the local police that wants you not to rally at all. They arrest you, they get your picture and send it to the London's police department along your ID card data. They open a record for you in the UK criminal database as a possible "environmental terrorist".
You then return home, only to find that you have been fired. Although it hurts your feelings, you try another job. But without luck...employee after employee connect to the UK's criminal database using your Id card only to find out that you are a "terrorist". You are essentially finished...
Today's Air-Combat simulators run efficiently on a single Dual-Core Pentium machine with a good graphics card. Military Simulations barely need more than 5% of CPU time these days (disclaimer: I work in the field as a programmer). Why do they need a cluster of machines to run the simulator?
That's why there is no Bell Labs or Xerox these days. 30 years ago, we did not have all the goodies we have now. The computer market was non-existent. There were no cellular phones (for the Average Joe, at least). The fields were open for exploration back then...
From the seven sins, only three of them have any real value (monopoly, lock-in and standards), but the last two are the same topic actually.
Education is not harmed by using commercial closed source software. It's a mono-culture, no doubt, but it would be exactly the same if anyone was using free software only.
DRM does not restrict what people can do with their computers, it restricts them to infringe copyright.
Security is a Windows problem, largely due to its legacy. But it is no way a sin, because if a user secures its Windows machine, then he has no problem.
WGA does not violate privacy.
It's too bad FSF has gotten to that...instead of being a beacon for free thinkers, they have become worst then communists...
This is very important for the industry. It proves, once more, that software is more important than hardware.
It also proves that Apple follows a wrong path selling hardware. It has some nice software in its hands, and it could become an alternative to Microsoft/Google if they wanted to.
Now Google comes and stills their business - if users are accustomed to Google services, they could be tempted to buy an Android-based phone in the future, since the services would be similar to the ones they were used to.
You are an absolute moron. I hope the system you want becomes a reality (the "let the poor die" part) and then you become poor. Let us see then how fair the system will be.
Poor people are poor not because they are idiots. Jesus, this is so stupid, I don't know where to begin from. You just invalidated heaps of economic theories of the last 4 hundred years.
You certainly need to educate yourself and fast, you are a danger to the world.
Many companies lose a lot of money while developing a game in experimenting with various sides of the game. Besides Duke Nukem Forever, there is the example of Half Life 2, which took Valve 5 years to release from HL1 simply because they rebuilt and rebuilt and rebuilt their game...sometimes with a new engine, sometimes with new graphics etc.
A game does not need to be perfect, it needs to be nice and fun, above all. The gameplay is usually an afterthought in many modern games.
One problem with taxes is that there is no accountability for the money. Where do they go? Many people have a big problem with that. And they are right, because it seems governments become more and more bureaucratic, and more bureaucracy requires more money. It seems a big amount of money is lost in corruption as well.
The solution is to pay directly for the public works. Do you want roads? pay for each road. schools? the same. Police? give money to the police. National TV? give money to the TV station. National Health Care System? give money to hospitals directly, separately for each hospital. Do you want to support unemployed people? give the money directly to them. Do you want an army? pay for the army.
In any case, a huge organization like a government is not required. The only thing a huge government achieves with great efficiency is to suck resources up. It's not that, in the past, governments of the world had not achieved great things, but they did so when they were smaller and easier to operate.
While this comment is not directly related to the topic at hand, it is high taxation that leads to saying that hiring US students is a bad deal. Find a cure for the high taxation and then hiring US students may not be such a bad deal after all.
The problem is very few programmers can master C. And the masters can occasionally make an error that may cost millions in the process. Why not move to another programming language that is safer?
There are numerous problems reported in Slashdot the last few years, and most, if not all of them, are in the C programming language. When some people say "it's time to move on from C, problems from using it have cost billion of dollars so far", some people insist that it's not the language but the programmers that are at fault. I would like to see for how long they would support that view, since the flow of problems coming from C pointers and arrays seems never ending...
Actually, the ribbon is not that different from menus in terms of usability. Have you ever count how many clicks you need to get things done with the ribbon? for some functions, and depending on your selection, you need more clicks and mouse movement with the ribbon than with menus. What the ribbon has over menus is that it exposes more functions to the user, but it is actually slower to work with than menus.
The number 1 reason the ribbon exists though is to differentiate Windows from other OSes, and make programming of cross-platform apps difficult.
The major problem with Word is that it allows the creation of on-the-fly styles while typing. For example, when I type with normal style, using Ctrl+B will add a new style to the document: normal + bold. This easy creation and modification of styles creates a style nightmare. I have seen documents with over 500 different styles, as a result of the document being passed around in various home and abroad offices and partners.
Word should be strict about its types. Either you use an existing type or create a new one from the beginning. That will limit the amount of hacks people do in order to format their documents.
What are we doing, as humans, the last 40 years, after sending men to the moon? we are sending robots in order to increase our scientific knowledge.
That's fine and sweet, but we are not gonna explore space with robots. What we need is a spaceship. A huge spaceship, assembled in space, with huge rotating sections for artificial gravity, big spaces for agriculture, for scientific experiments, and with nuclear propulsion that can get us to relativistic speeds.
With this spaceship, the trip to Mars can be shortened to a few weeks, even days. The spaceship could have landing craft that are launched from it towards the surface of any planet.
Personally, I can't see anything more advanced, until major physics breakthroughs are achieved.
Slashdot Mirror
In the real world, Police will accuse you of anything, if it serves their purpose, and their masters' purpose. Then it's up to the legal system to clean up the mess. In the mean time, your name is associated with criminal activities, and even if you are found innocent, no one would want to associate themselves with you.
The Id card as proposed by the UK government is not a simple reference document, but it allows connection with any means of electronic media, including computer databases, of course. This opens a huge can of worms: forming a resistance movement against an authoritative power will become very difficult, or even impossible.
Here is an example: suppose that you are interested in the preservation of the environment and the climate change; you don't want to sit on your couch all day, and the next G7 climate change meeting is not far from your country. You take a holiday, and then riding the first plane to the city where the climate change meeting takes place, you participate in the rallies against G7 policies regarding the climate. Sooner or later, you are part of a street battle with the local police that wants you not to rally at all. They arrest you, they get your picture and send it to the London's police department along your ID card data. They open a record for you in the UK criminal database as a possible "environmental terrorist".
You then return home, only to find that you have been fired. Although it hurts your feelings, you try another job. But without luck...employee after employee connect to the UK's criminal database using your Id card only to find out that you are a "terrorist". You are essentially finished...
I long for the day that gravity is controlled by a switch, like the lights of a room...
Today's Air-Combat simulators run efficiently on a single Dual-Core Pentium machine with a good graphics card. Military Simulations barely need more than 5% of CPU time these days (disclaimer: I work in the field as a programmer). Why do they need a cluster of machines to run the simulator?
That's why there is no Bell Labs or Xerox these days. 30 years ago, we did not have all the goodies we have now. The computer market was non-existent. There were no cellular phones (for the Average Joe, at least). The fields were open for exploration back then...
From the seven sins, only three of them have any real value (monopoly, lock-in and standards), but the last two are the same topic actually.
Education is not harmed by using commercial closed source software. It's a mono-culture, no doubt, but it would be exactly the same if anyone was using free software only.
DRM does not restrict what people can do with their computers, it restricts them to infringe copyright.
Security is a Windows problem, largely due to its legacy. But it is no way a sin, because if a user secures its Windows machine, then he has no problem.
WGA does not violate privacy.
It's too bad FSF has gotten to that...instead of being a beacon for free thinkers, they have become worst then communists...
One of the Christian beliefs is that at Judgment day, people will be resurrected with their full bodies intact.
It's absurd, but what if someone claims it? doesn't he/she have the right not to donate their organs?
This is very important for the industry. It proves, once more, that software is more important than hardware.
It also proves that Apple follows a wrong path selling hardware. It has some nice software in its hands, and it could become an alternative to Microsoft/Google if they wanted to.
Now Google comes and stills their business - if users are accustomed to Google services, they could be tempted to buy an Android-based phone in the future, since the services would be similar to the ones they were used to.
If you can make love to her, then she is a woman (provided that you know where you put your willy in)...
Perhaps it is not mass that pulls things together, it is the void that pushes things together. That would explain gravity as well as the dark energy.
You are an absolute moron. I hope the system you want becomes a reality (the "let the poor die" part) and then you become poor. Let us see then how fair the system will be.
Poor people are poor not because they are idiots. Jesus, this is so stupid, I don't know where to begin from. You just invalidated heaps of economic theories of the last 4 hundred years.
You certainly need to educate yourself and fast, you are a danger to the world.
If it's possible to do this, then why not break the dependency from oil anyway? why do we have to wait for an oil embargo?
So the constitution and the laws do not apply to corporations?
Many companies lose a lot of money while developing a game in experimenting with various sides of the game. Besides Duke Nukem Forever, there is the example of Half Life 2, which took Valve 5 years to release from HL1 simply because they rebuilt and rebuilt and rebuilt their game...sometimes with a new engine, sometimes with new graphics etc.
A game does not need to be perfect, it needs to be nice and fun, above all. The gameplay is usually an afterthought in many modern games.
...in wanting censorship. Otherwise, why would another government be interested in evading it?
If successful, then it's the UK, then the US, then the rest of the world.
By the way, if governments cared about other things as much as they care about copyright infringement, things would be so much better...
One problem with taxes is that there is no accountability for the money. Where do they go? Many people have a big problem with that. And they are right, because it seems governments become more and more bureaucratic, and more bureaucracy requires more money. It seems a big amount of money is lost in corruption as well.
The solution is to pay directly for the public works. Do you want roads? pay for each road. schools? the same. Police? give money to the police. National TV? give money to the TV station. National Health Care System? give money to hospitals directly, separately for each hospital. Do you want to support unemployed people? give the money directly to them. Do you want an army? pay for the army.
In any case, a huge organization like a government is not required. The only thing a huge government achieves with great efficiency is to suck resources up. It's not that, in the past, governments of the world had not achieved great things, but they did so when they were smaller and easier to operate.
While this comment is not directly related to the topic at hand, it is high taxation that leads to saying that hiring US students is a bad deal. Find a cure for the high taxation and then hiring US students may not be such a bad deal after all.
The problem is very few programmers can master C. And the masters can occasionally make an error that may cost millions in the process. Why not move to another programming language that is safer?
There are numerous problems reported in Slashdot the last few years, and most, if not all of them, are in the C programming language. When some people say "it's time to move on from C, problems from using it have cost billion of dollars so far", some people insist that it's not the language but the programmers that are at fault. I would like to see for how long they would support that view, since the flow of problems coming from C pointers and arrays seems never ending...
Except if it runs Windows.
I am amazed with all the comments so far. Hidden in all posts are the words 'pattern matching', but none has said it directly.
The only thing required for AI is pattern matching. Do it fast, and there you have true AI.
Actually, the ribbon is not that different from menus in terms of usability. Have you ever count how many clicks you need to get things done with the ribbon? for some functions, and depending on your selection, you need more clicks and mouse movement with the ribbon than with menus. What the ribbon has over menus is that it exposes more functions to the user, but it is actually slower to work with than menus.
The number 1 reason the ribbon exists though is to differentiate Windows from other OSes, and make programming of cross-platform apps difficult.
You use concrete on roads? oh my! in my country, asphalt is slopped over plain dirt!!!
The major problem with Word is that it allows the creation of on-the-fly styles while typing. For example, when I type with normal style, using Ctrl+B will add a new style to the document: normal + bold. This easy creation and modification of styles creates a style nightmare. I have seen documents with over 500 different styles, as a result of the document being passed around in various home and abroad offices and partners.
Word should be strict about its types. Either you use an existing type or create a new one from the beginning. That will limit the amount of hacks people do in order to format their documents.
What are we doing, as humans, the last 40 years, after sending men to the moon? we are sending robots in order to increase our scientific knowledge.
That's fine and sweet, but we are not gonna explore space with robots. What we need is a spaceship. A huge spaceship, assembled in space, with huge rotating sections for artificial gravity, big spaces for agriculture, for scientific experiments, and with nuclear propulsion that can get us to relativistic speeds.
With this spaceship, the trip to Mars can be shortened to a few weeks, even days. The spaceship could have landing craft that are launched from it towards the surface of any planet.
Personally, I can't see anything more advanced, until major physics breakthroughs are achieved.