There are two major problems though. The first is with step 2. All that's happened at that point is an accusation. There's no proof and no due process at this point. Just an accusation and a jump immediately to punishment. This is a huge problem.
Also, the "under penalty of perjury" needs to be re-written to have some teeth. If attorneys were disbarred and executives imprisoned for perjury when the subject of takedowns turns out to be fair use, not actually owned by the takedown claimant, or otherwise non-infringing; I think we'd see a lot few fraudulent claims.
As a corollary to point two, all automatic and electronic submission of DMCA takedown claims need to go away as well. Supposed infringements should have to be submitted by an actual person; who will review the content and issue a sworn, notarized, and delivered by registered mail or other trackable courier, statement in writing and on the hook for perjury; that the content is, in fact, his (or his client's) and that it is, in fact, infringing.
The point isn't really the amount of damage done to Ahmed. The point, IMO, is to see to it that this never happens again. At any point in the chain from teacher to principle to arresting officer to booking officer, someone could have looked at the situation with a level-headed, rational, non-racist view, realized that his/her underlings were engaged in a massive and unjust cock-up, and put a stop to Ahmed's ordeal. Hell, they could even tried admitting that they screwed up and apologizing. But all the way up to the town's mayor, none of them did so. Even as the president, Google, MIT, Facebook, NASA, George Takei, and no less than Steve Wozniak (!!!) were all telling them that they screwed up; the school, the police department, and the city government all just kept doubling down on stupid.
Heads need to roll, from the bottom to the top.
A big problem is that it's so hard for public employees to be held accountable. Personally? I think a just and adequate compensation would be tuition costs in full for a private high school of Ahmed's choice; plus the aforementioned terminations. There's no need for him to come out of this a millionaire. But how likely would it be, in that case, that anyone *does* get fired over this? Not likely, unfortunately. But if someone's personal maliciousness and incompetence costs the city millions of dollars, it's much more likely that they'll be punished.
My point wasn't that Natalie Portman is a bad actress. I think she's quite good as well. My point is that Christensen is just so bad, that he dragged her down into the depths of sucktitude with him.
And as for Christensen starting with bad material in the first place, I'll point out that Alec Guinness, Harrison Ford, Peter Cushing, Kenny Baker, James Earl Jones, Ewan McGregor, Peter Mayhew, Liam Neeson, Frank Oz, and even Billy Dee Williams, all suffered under the yoke of George Lucas' film-making "talents". And they all turned in much better performances across the board than Hayden Christensen. It takes a pretty damn bad actor that a voiceover, a walking fur suit, a metal can, and a muppet are all more believable and likable in their roles.
I actually quite likes a fair bit of the re-done & enhanced effects in the Special Editions. Where they went wrong, IMO, is where they changed plot or characterization (Greedo shooting first.), added scenes that just didn't make sense (Palpatine's not dead a whole day, and his statues are already being torn down on Coruscant? How did the news get there so fast? What happened to the empire's military and police forces? Did they all just decide to take the day off?), and where they were obviously half-baked (Jabba the Hutt inserted into Ep.4).
Inserting Hayden Christensen into the ghost scene at the end wasn't offensive so much for the replacement of the original actor; but because Hayden Christensen is just so bloody awful I didn't want to be reminded of his casting. And I think that's a big part of why the prequels were bad too. Sure Jar-Jar was annoying. But he was really a non-essential bit of (bad) comic relief... easily ignored. Midichlorians were dumb fake science, but no more than timing the Kessel run in units of distance. No, the main thing that made the prequels so terrible was casting two of the most obnoxious, annoying, incompetently-acting, prats to play the most important character of the trilogy. Hell, Christensen was so terrible that even sharing the screen with Natalie Portman couldn't make him anything better than craptastic. And the less said of that other one, the better.
Also, if Lucas ever tries to write a romance subplot again, someone should break his fingers.
I could debate the theoretical ins and outs of the business models and how they might affect quality, but there's really no need because simple observation demonstrates that you're wrong. I have occasionally encountered a taxi that was clean and in good condition, with a driver who is polite and friendly. I have also encountered many cabs that were old, dirty, smelly and with a driver who was rude and ornery. I've yet to find an Uber car or driver that wasn't very pleasant.
Basically this. I've lived in San Francisco for the better part of two decades now. And for most of that, the only late-night transportation options were taxis (just bloody awful) or MUNI Owl service (worse). Uber (And, to be fair, Lyft and Sidecar as well.) provides such a higher quality of service that I really can't fathom the people opposing them. Even when the only Uber available was the black car service, once I tried it I happily paid the higher price vs the cabs; it was SO much better. The legacy cab companies made their bed with their horrible service. Uber would never have managed to get started if the taxis didn't suck major ass (Remember... for those first few years, when the black car service was all the Uber there was, it was almost always at least 20% more expensive than a taxi.).
In addition to your list, also throw in the fact that Uber cars show up when and where they're supposed to. The drivers will take you out to the avenues without throwing a hissy fit. They'll actually show pick you up in the avenues, and not just on 19th. And, since all billing is inherently handled via the app, they never try the "my credit card machine is broken, cash only" scam.
Really, the only thing that makes any sense to me is that the anti-ridesharing people are really either just paid shills for the taxi companies, or people who just live out in remote suburbs and don't realize just how terrible cabs are.
Also, businesses are constrained by the necessity of convincing people to give them money willingly, and the requirement of bringing in more money than they spend.
Give me the authority to take as much money as I want from everyone straight out of their paychecks, plus the ability to still spend an effectively unlimited amount of money on top of that; and I'll build you a pretty nice empire, coattails to ride, or not.
You mean the same salvation army that denies homeless transgender women open beds in their shelters; leaving them out on the streets to die in the cold? You mean the same LDS church that spent millions on prop 8 to take away civil rights from gays in California and now demands that mormon children disavow their gay relatives if they want to remain in the church themselves? They sure do seem mean and bitter to me.
Blizzard uses torrents to distribute files for their game purchases, downloads, patches, and updates. And with the Legacy of the Void finally available, Starcraft 2 seems to be going as strong as ever. Even though we do seem to be past peak WoW, that's huge.
Also, every Linux distort I can recall fetching recently offers a torrent as an alternative to a monolithic download.
That's why we should not be dealing in terms of total GB/TB/whatever used per month. Data plans should be sold by data rate, guaranteed and burstable. After all, once the infrastructure is built out, it doesn't matter a whit whether you use it for casual surfing of the web in the afternoon, for watching movies in the evening, or continuously for bittorrenting.
Data providers should be broken of the notion that they're anything but big dumb pipes to the internet. And the same company should never be allowed to be both a data and a content provider. That's what this really is about, after all. AT&T and Verizon want to pull you away from the open internet in favor of their (dubious) "value added" services. And Comcast wants you buying and watching cable channels, not Netflix or Hulu. Just be honest and upfront about what bandwidth is allocated to me and to what extent the infrastructure is oversubscribed.
1Mbps guaranteed, burstable to 10 5Mbps guaranteed, burstable to 25 20Mbps guaranteed, burstable to 50 50Mbps guaranteed, burstable to 100 whatever
The 24/7 bittorrent-ers can have and pay for their guaranteed rate, and the rest of can burst to watch our ultra-HD Netflix. But the service providers should be on the hook promising only what they can, in reality, deliver. And they should be severely punished for delivering anything less.
I doubt Canada will leave it in the ground forever. But with current oil prices, it may make sense to leave it in the ground for a few more years.
But there's something I've never quite gotten about the controversy. My understanding is that the oil that would be pumped through Keystone XL was contractually promised to China, and would not be available to the US anyway. It would just be pumped across the US to our ports on the Gulf of Mexico for shipping. And we would not get any of it or the benefit from it. (Setting aside, for the sake of argument, the fact that we should really not be dumping more carbon into the atmosphere anyway. There is no denying that there is a short-term economic benefit to the use of the energy in fossil fuels though.)
So, whether the risks of Keystone XL are overstated or not, there is some risk. Why should the US absorb that risk... to the environment, to the aquifers, to the health of the populace along the route... when it's purely for the benefit of China's economy, not our own? And the pipeline is really so safe as its supporters want us to believe, why isn't Canada building it across their own land? They have plenty of coastline of their own on both the Atlantic and Pacific, after all. It just doesn't pass the smell test.
Now, if I've read the wrong articles, and that oil is *not* ultimately destined for China; then my bad. I'll admit the screwup and blithely facepalm. But I still maintain that we should be switching to nuclear and renewables and eliminating hydrocarbons in our energy production. And I still suspect that the currently-cheap Saudi oil ought to make Canada consider sitting on theirs for a few more years anyway.
Are you sure about that? 'Cuz my PS4 can already stream Netflix and Amazon Prime and I think it can stream Hulu. I'm pretty sure the PS3 could as well. And I doubt that the xBox would omit that functionality if Sony had it. The PS3 could play (some formats of) movies and music if I shared it from my computer to the network. I haven't tried that with the PS4 though because...
... as with the Netflix & Amazon apps, the UI for that feature sucks major ass. There's just no other way to put it. The Playstation, despite having the functionality, if just bloody awful for streaming media. My TV's built-in Netflix and Amazon apps are better by far. And for specialty channels or anything that comes off my computer, the (old) AppleTV is fantastic. I don't see anything about the new one to compel me to ditch the one I have and upgrade. Nor would I toss the PS4 to plat games on the new AppleTV. But the game console really is pretty damn terrible as a streaming media player.
To be fair, though, in Japan your chances of getting mugged and your cash stolen are about as near to zero as is statistically possible. And, should you lose your wallet full of cash, the chances are about 99% that it will be turned into the police (Who operate some truly astoundingly massive lost & found warehouses.) with the cash left untouched.
Given that the country, unlike the US, generates remarkably few thieving bastards; the motivation to adopt cash replacements is somewhat lower.
A fair assortment of government officials in the US, including multiple current presidential candidates and at least one former vice-presidential candidate, are on record as having stated (quite publicly) that the US should concoct a way to seize and execute Assange. Fortunately, cooler heads have prevailed in the executive branch's leadership... so far. But it's still anybody's guess as to who wins the election. And it is quite possible that part of the "kidnap and murder him" wing will be sitting in the Oval Office in a year and a quarter.
I'd like to believe that, though possible, it's very unlikely. But I thought the 2000 election had a snowball's chance in Florida of going into the crapper either.
I think you're looking back at early TNG and DS9 with rose-colored glasses. Neither were good in their second seasons.
TNG actually got *worse* in season 2, when they brought in doctor #2 to pretend to be a female version of McCoy... baiting and arguing with Data, the way McCoy did with Spock... but without any of the charm or chemistry that DeForest Kelly and Leonard Nimoy had together. It really wan't until the 3rd season that it got good.
DS9 didn't get any better its second season either. And even the third was pretty dreary. The 4th season, is when it started to get watchable; getting better pretty reliably as they handed more control over the stories to Ronald D Moore.
Canada's not exactly a good Compaq analog. To carry the analogy properly, you'd have to posit that Fiorina would merge the US with Greece, Syria, or Ukraine. And then fire half of the US and base the entire country's remaining economy on printer ink made in Mexico.
Actually, if I recall correctly, the point Adams made was that anyone who is the sort of person capable of getting himself elected to office should, under no circumstances, be trusted or allowed to do the job.
QuickTime is more than just the QuickTime player. It's libraries are used by Finder for previews of media files, iTunes for playback of movies and music (That's why if you want to add ogg support, you put the codec in/Library/QuickTime and not/Library/iTunes.), and various third-party programs call on its functions as well. Also, it does more than just playback and encoding. It supports subtitles, branching, chapters, and most of the other features you'd fine on DVD to BluRay. That's how movies purchased from iTunes have those special features and such.
So yeah... it's kind of important. And you're using it at some point, even if you never use the QuickTime player itself. And honestly, I don't get the hate for QuickTime player anyway. It's only real handicap in daily use for me is the lack of support, by default, for some codecs, and the flakey plugins for those that do require me to switch to VLC occasionally.
Actually, the thing that drives me batty is not so much whether or not time noon is synced with solar noon or if the sun rises or sets at 5, 6, or 7. Between managing servers on various continents and syncing phone meetings with co-workers scattered all over the place, I've come to the conclusion that daylight savings time, time zones, and the am/pm thing are all the work of the devil, and they should be abolished and we should all use GMT.
I don't see why it matters a whit whether I start work at 8:30am, 0830PST, 0930PDT, or 1630GMT. I'm still going to wrap things up and head out at 5:30pm, 1730PST, 1830PDT, or 0130GMT. Same goes for shopping hours, TV schedules, air & train timetables, etc. But having everyone and everything on the same clock would make it sooo much easier to coordinate people, and manage equipment, across time zones.
I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. My point was that there is a valid rationale for Manning to be subject to US law; where that is not true in the case of Assange. The fact that US law has inadequate protections for whistleblowers who expose wrongdoing by their employers is a separate issue.
In the past, we've also given full trials and due process to criminals much worse than anyone we're holding in Guantanamo Bay. Granted Nuremberg was an international thing, not just a US procedure. But still, we had open trials, not a indefinite detention in an extraterritorial prison camp.
Sadly, we've fallen from what we were before 9/11. And not only do we maintain that gulag in Cuba, we also have a network of black sites in eastern Europe and Asia where we shuffle people off to be tortured and murdered by the CIA; or, to put it politely, subject people to "extraordinary rendition".
None of that should matter for Assange though. Manning, sure... To get the intel job, she would have had to get a security clearance; which includes a secrecy oath and informed agreement to the non-disclosure paperwork. That's in addition to the oath of service that goes along with joining the armed forces in the first place. On top of all that, Manning is a US citizen and was inside the country when she leaked the docs. Whether you agree with the release or not, there's a pretty clear rationale for the criminality of that release. And if you discount the whistleblower argument, the same applies to Snowden. Personally, I think both Manning and Snowden should be protected as whistleblowers.
Assange? Not so much. Literally NONE of the above applies to him. He's neither citizen nor resident. He was not in the US when he released the info. And he has (to my knowledge) never had a security clearance or taken a secrecy oath or signed a NDA with the US government. He owes the United States absolutely no allegiance, loyalty, or duty whatsoever. You may as well claim that I am obligated to obey the laws and keep the secrets of Cuba, Zimbabwe, or Belgium.
If anything, the anti-Assange witch-hunt is worse than the anti Snowden one. And I think it sets a very dangerous precedent to let nations go fishing for people who annoy them from outside their borders. And while people like Assange and Kim Dotcom may, themselves, be douchebags; I think it's more important to look past that at the bigger picture. A nations's laws should end at its borders. Period. Full stop. If it's a crime in Australia for one of their citizens to release the secrets of other countries, or a crime under New Zealand law for a resident to violate a foreign copyright, fine; then Australia or New Zealand should do the arresting and prosecuting. But the US should be told to go pound sand.
What project managers and "development methodology" types want is predictability and repeatability. And to achieve it they're willing to sacrifice productivity.
To be honest, I can see where they're coming from. I've done my share of diving into legacy systems that have been hacked together on-the-fly by other people and trying to sort things out so I can duplicate it (For instance, migrating a ten year old app from datacenter to AWS.). And when the documentation is lacking, it is rather painful.
Then again, I've also worked for a government contractor that was SEI level 3 certified and trying for 4. And I think I generated about a page and a half of paperwork per line of code.
There must be a happy medium between the two. Where exactly that is, I'm not sure.
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There are two major problems though. The first is with step 2. All that's happened at that point is an accusation. There's no proof and no due process at this point. Just an accusation and a jump immediately to punishment. This is a huge problem.
Also, the "under penalty of perjury" needs to be re-written to have some teeth. If attorneys were disbarred and executives imprisoned for perjury when the subject of takedowns turns out to be fair use, not actually owned by the takedown claimant, or otherwise non-infringing; I think we'd see a lot few fraudulent claims.
As a corollary to point two, all automatic and electronic submission of DMCA takedown claims need to go away as well. Supposed infringements should have to be submitted by an actual person; who will review the content and issue a sworn, notarized, and delivered by registered mail or other trackable courier, statement in writing and on the hook for perjury; that the content is, in fact, his (or his client's) and that it is, in fact, infringing.
The point isn't really the amount of damage done to Ahmed. The point, IMO, is to see to it that this never happens again. At any point in the chain from teacher to principle to arresting officer to booking officer, someone could have looked at the situation with a level-headed, rational, non-racist view, realized that his/her underlings were engaged in a massive and unjust cock-up, and put a stop to Ahmed's ordeal. Hell, they could even tried admitting that they screwed up and apologizing. But all the way up to the town's mayor, none of them did so. Even as the president, Google, MIT, Facebook, NASA, George Takei, and no less than Steve Wozniak (!!!) were all telling them that they screwed up; the school, the police department, and the city government all just kept doubling down on stupid.
Heads need to roll, from the bottom to the top.
A big problem is that it's so hard for public employees to be held accountable. Personally? I think a just and adequate compensation would be tuition costs in full for a private high school of Ahmed's choice; plus the aforementioned terminations. There's no need for him to come out of this a millionaire. But how likely would it be, in that case, that anyone *does* get fired over this? Not likely, unfortunately. But if someone's personal maliciousness and incompetence costs the city millions of dollars, it's much more likely that they'll be punished.
My point wasn't that Natalie Portman is a bad actress. I think she's quite good as well. My point is that Christensen is just so bad, that he dragged her down into the depths of sucktitude with him.
And as for Christensen starting with bad material in the first place, I'll point out that Alec Guinness, Harrison Ford, Peter Cushing, Kenny Baker, James Earl Jones, Ewan McGregor, Peter Mayhew, Liam Neeson, Frank Oz, and even Billy Dee Williams, all suffered under the yoke of George Lucas' film-making "talents". And they all turned in much better performances across the board than Hayden Christensen. It takes a pretty damn bad actor that a voiceover, a walking fur suit, a metal can, and a muppet are all more believable and likable in their roles.
How about settling for 1.5 million plus the termination of the teacher, principal, and arresting and booking officers?
I actually quite likes a fair bit of the re-done & enhanced effects in the Special Editions. Where they went wrong, IMO, is where they changed plot or characterization (Greedo shooting first.), added scenes that just didn't make sense (Palpatine's not dead a whole day, and his statues are already being torn down on Coruscant? How did the news get there so fast? What happened to the empire's military and police forces? Did they all just decide to take the day off?), and where they were obviously half-baked (Jabba the Hutt inserted into Ep.4).
Inserting Hayden Christensen into the ghost scene at the end wasn't offensive so much for the replacement of the original actor; but because Hayden Christensen is just so bloody awful I didn't want to be reminded of his casting. And I think that's a big part of why the prequels were bad too. Sure Jar-Jar was annoying. But he was really a non-essential bit of (bad) comic relief... easily ignored. Midichlorians were dumb fake science, but no more than timing the Kessel run in units of distance. No, the main thing that made the prequels so terrible was casting two of the most obnoxious, annoying, incompetently-acting, prats to play the most important character of the trilogy. Hell, Christensen was so terrible that even sharing the screen with Natalie Portman couldn't make him anything better than craptastic. And the less said of that other one, the better.
Also, if Lucas ever tries to write a romance subplot again, someone should break his fingers.
Basically this. I've lived in San Francisco for the better part of two decades now. And for most of that, the only late-night transportation options were taxis (just bloody awful) or MUNI Owl service (worse). Uber (And, to be fair, Lyft and Sidecar as well.) provides such a higher quality of service that I really can't fathom the people opposing them. Even when the only Uber available was the black car service, once I tried it I happily paid the higher price vs the cabs; it was SO much better. The legacy cab companies made their bed with their horrible service. Uber would never have managed to get started if the taxis didn't suck major ass (Remember... for those first few years, when the black car service was all the Uber there was, it was almost always at least 20% more expensive than a taxi.).
In addition to your list, also throw in the fact that Uber cars show up when and where they're supposed to. The drivers will take you out to the avenues without throwing a hissy fit. They'll actually show pick you up in the avenues, and not just on 19th. And, since all billing is inherently handled via the app, they never try the "my credit card machine is broken, cash only" scam.
Really, the only thing that makes any sense to me is that the anti-ridesharing people are really either just paid shills for the taxi companies, or people who just live out in remote suburbs and don't realize just how terrible cabs are.
Also, businesses are constrained by the necessity of convincing people to give them money willingly, and the requirement of bringing in more money than they spend.
Give me the authority to take as much money as I want from everyone straight out of their paychecks, plus the ability to still spend an effectively unlimited amount of money on top of that; and I'll build you a pretty nice empire, coattails to ride, or not.
You mean the same salvation army that denies homeless transgender women open beds in their shelters; leaving them out on the streets to die in the cold? You mean the same LDS church that spent millions on prop 8 to take away civil rights from gays in California and now demands that mormon children disavow their gay relatives if they want to remain in the church themselves? They sure do seem mean and bitter to me.
Blizzard uses torrents to distribute files for their game purchases, downloads, patches, and updates. And with the Legacy of the Void finally available, Starcraft 2 seems to be going as strong as ever. Even though we do seem to be past peak WoW, that's huge.
Also, every Linux distort I can recall fetching recently offers a torrent as an alternative to a monolithic download.
That's why we should not be dealing in terms of total GB/TB/whatever used per month. Data plans should be sold by data rate, guaranteed and burstable. After all, once the infrastructure is built out, it doesn't matter a whit whether you use it for casual surfing of the web in the afternoon, for watching movies in the evening, or continuously for bittorrenting.
Data providers should be broken of the notion that they're anything but big dumb pipes to the internet. And the same company should never be allowed to be both a data and a content provider. That's what this really is about, after all. AT&T and Verizon want to pull you away from the open internet in favor of their (dubious) "value added" services. And Comcast wants you buying and watching cable channels, not Netflix or Hulu. Just be honest and upfront about what bandwidth is allocated to me and to what extent the infrastructure is oversubscribed.
1Mbps guaranteed, burstable to 10
5Mbps guaranteed, burstable to 25
20Mbps guaranteed, burstable to 50
50Mbps guaranteed, burstable to 100
whatever
The 24/7 bittorrent-ers can have and pay for their guaranteed rate, and the rest of can burst to watch our ultra-HD Netflix. But the service providers should be on the hook promising only what they can, in reality, deliver. And they should be severely punished for delivering anything less.
I doubt Canada will leave it in the ground forever. But with current oil prices, it may make sense to leave it in the ground for a few more years.
But there's something I've never quite gotten about the controversy. My understanding is that the oil that would be pumped through Keystone XL was contractually promised to China, and would not be available to the US anyway. It would just be pumped across the US to our ports on the Gulf of Mexico for shipping. And we would not get any of it or the benefit from it. (Setting aside, for the sake of argument, the fact that we should really not be dumping more carbon into the atmosphere anyway. There is no denying that there is a short-term economic benefit to the use of the energy in fossil fuels though.)
So, whether the risks of Keystone XL are overstated or not, there is some risk. Why should the US absorb that risk... to the environment, to the aquifers, to the health of the populace along the route... when it's purely for the benefit of China's economy, not our own? And the pipeline is really so safe as its supporters want us to believe, why isn't Canada building it across their own land? They have plenty of coastline of their own on both the Atlantic and Pacific, after all. It just doesn't pass the smell test.
Now, if I've read the wrong articles, and that oil is *not* ultimately destined for China; then my bad. I'll admit the screwup and blithely facepalm. But I still maintain that we should be switching to nuclear and renewables and eliminating hydrocarbons in our energy production. And I still suspect that the currently-cheap Saudi oil ought to make Canada consider sitting on theirs for a few more years anyway.
Are you sure about that? 'Cuz my PS4 can already stream Netflix and Amazon Prime and I think it can stream Hulu. I'm pretty sure the PS3 could as well. And I doubt that the xBox would omit that functionality if Sony had it. The PS3 could play (some formats of) movies and music if I shared it from my computer to the network. I haven't tried that with the PS4 though because...
In fact, this has already happened on numerous occasions; sometimes with the passengers actually beating the would-be 9/11-ers to death.
To be fair, though, in Japan your chances of getting mugged and your cash stolen are about as near to zero as is statistically possible. And, should you lose your wallet full of cash, the chances are about 99% that it will be turned into the police (Who operate some truly astoundingly massive lost & found warehouses.) with the cash left untouched.
Given that the country, unlike the US, generates remarkably few thieving bastards; the motivation to adopt cash replacements is somewhat lower.
A fair assortment of government officials in the US, including multiple current presidential candidates and at least one former vice-presidential candidate, are on record as having stated (quite publicly) that the US should concoct a way to seize and execute Assange. Fortunately, cooler heads have prevailed in the executive branch's leadership... so far. But it's still anybody's guess as to who wins the election. And it is quite possible that part of the "kidnap and murder him" wing will be sitting in the Oval Office in a year and a quarter.
I'd like to believe that, though possible, it's very unlikely. But I thought the 2000 election had a snowball's chance in Florida of going into the crapper either.
I think you're looking back at early TNG and DS9 with rose-colored glasses. Neither were good in their second seasons.
TNG actually got *worse* in season 2, when they brought in doctor #2 to pretend to be a female version of McCoy... baiting and arguing with Data, the way McCoy did with Spock... but without any of the charm or chemistry that DeForest Kelly and Leonard Nimoy had together. It really wan't until the 3rd season that it got good.
DS9 didn't get any better its second season either. And even the third was pretty dreary. The 4th season, is when it started to get watchable; getting better pretty reliably as they handed more control over the stories to Ronald D Moore.
Canada's not exactly a good Compaq analog. To carry the analogy properly, you'd have to posit that Fiorina would merge the US with Greece, Syria, or Ukraine. And then fire half of the US and base the entire country's remaining economy on printer ink made in Mexico.
Actually, if I recall correctly, the point Adams made was that anyone who is the sort of person capable of getting himself elected to office should, under no circumstances, be trusted or allowed to do the job.
QuickTime is more than just the QuickTime player. It's libraries are used by Finder for previews of media files, iTunes for playback of movies and music (That's why if you want to add ogg support, you put the codec in /Library/QuickTime and not /Library/iTunes.), and various third-party programs call on its functions as well. Also, it does more than just playback and encoding. It supports subtitles, branching, chapters, and most of the other features you'd fine on DVD to BluRay. That's how movies purchased from iTunes have those special features and such.
So yeah... it's kind of important. And you're using it at some point, even if you never use the QuickTime player itself. And honestly, I don't get the hate for QuickTime player anyway. It's only real handicap in daily use for me is the lack of support, by default, for some codecs, and the flakey plugins for those that do require me to switch to VLC occasionally.
Actually, the thing that drives me batty is not so much whether or not time noon is synced with solar noon or if the sun rises or sets at 5, 6, or 7. Between managing servers on various continents and syncing phone meetings with co-workers scattered all over the place, I've come to the conclusion that daylight savings time, time zones, and the am/pm thing are all the work of the devil, and they should be abolished and we should all use GMT.
I don't see why it matters a whit whether I start work at 8:30am, 0830PST, 0930PDT, or 1630GMT. I'm still going to wrap things up and head out at 5:30pm, 1730PST, 1830PDT, or 0130GMT. Same goes for shopping hours, TV schedules, air & train timetables, etc. But having everyone and everything on the same clock would make it sooo much easier to coordinate people, and manage equipment, across time zones.
So, why not just make the leap second change when the markets are closed? We change to/from DST in the wee hours of the morning on the weekend.
(Now, daylight savings time... THAT is something that should be abolished.)
I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. My point was that there is a valid rationale for Manning to be subject to US law; where that is not true in the case of Assange. The fact that US law has inadequate protections for whistleblowers who expose wrongdoing by their employers is a separate issue.
In the past, we've also given full trials and due process to criminals much worse than anyone we're holding in Guantanamo Bay. Granted Nuremberg was an international thing, not just a US procedure. But still, we had open trials, not a indefinite detention in an extraterritorial prison camp.
Sadly, we've fallen from what we were before 9/11. And not only do we maintain that gulag in Cuba, we also have a network of black sites in eastern Europe and Asia where we shuffle people off to be tortured and murdered by the CIA; or, to put it politely, subject people to "extraordinary rendition".
None of that should matter for Assange though. Manning, sure... To get the intel job, she would have had to get a security clearance; which includes a secrecy oath and informed agreement to the non-disclosure paperwork. That's in addition to the oath of service that goes along with joining the armed forces in the first place. On top of all that, Manning is a US citizen and was inside the country when she leaked the docs. Whether you agree with the release or not, there's a pretty clear rationale for the criminality of that release. And if you discount the whistleblower argument, the same applies to Snowden. Personally, I think both Manning and Snowden should be protected as whistleblowers.
Assange? Not so much. Literally NONE of the above applies to him. He's neither citizen nor resident. He was not in the US when he released the info. And he has (to my knowledge) never had a security clearance or taken a secrecy oath or signed a NDA with the US government. He owes the United States absolutely no allegiance, loyalty, or duty whatsoever. You may as well claim that I am obligated to obey the laws and keep the secrets of Cuba, Zimbabwe, or Belgium.
If anything, the anti-Assange witch-hunt is worse than the anti Snowden one. And I think it sets a very dangerous precedent to let nations go fishing for people who annoy them from outside their borders. And while people like Assange and Kim Dotcom may, themselves, be douchebags; I think it's more important to look past that at the bigger picture. A nations's laws should end at its borders. Period. Full stop. If it's a crime in Australia for one of their citizens to release the secrets of other countries, or a crime under New Zealand law for a resident to violate a foreign copyright, fine; then Australia or New Zealand should do the arresting and prosecuting. But the US should be told to go pound sand.
What project managers and "development methodology" types want is predictability and repeatability. And to achieve it they're willing to sacrifice productivity.
To be honest, I can see where they're coming from. I've done my share of diving into legacy systems that have been hacked together on-the-fly by other people and trying to sort things out so I can duplicate it (For instance, migrating a ten year old app from datacenter to AWS.). And when the documentation is lacking, it is rather painful.
Then again, I've also worked for a government contractor that was SEI level 3 certified and trying for 4. And I think I generated about a page and a half of paperwork per line of code.
There must be a happy medium between the two. Where exactly that is, I'm not sure.