The duty of the City Engineer should be at the very least to answer the questions of the community. This should be a basic and fundamental part of government service.
The community is concerned people might be at higher risk to injury or death without the installation of traffic signals at that intersection. That in itself should be reason enough to accept that some members in the community are going to contest the decision. Putting more detail into their complaint should be commended. Since they also have some technical competence, maybe the City Engineer should have better spent his time to type a more detailed explanation of why the traffic signal(s) won't be installed. At the least, the community members will feel that their concerns for safety have been sufficiently addressed and taken into consideration.
This is something I've been thinking about. I think it might make sense to have more liberal access to Internet services. Now, I am not a techie on networking so I'm probably quite short or (possibly!) wrong on the technical details, but here is my food for thought.
Say a group of residential users want Internet access. Rather than each pay $50 bucks a month to Bell, why not lease an dedicated line from an ISP. In this proposal, I would say the best solution would be to have independent ISPs administer the Internet access part of the Service. The dedicated line would be leased from Bell or Telus.
So the neighborhood pays for the leased line. Everyone shares a common access point. A contingency should be that if there are only a few users they each get a proportional access to the service. (if I'm the only person in my building to pay for the access, i would not get unfettered access to a T3 or OC-12 or whatever).
At least in this way, Bell instead of being the ISP, is only leasing and servicing the actual cable. The ISP part can be handled by another company. This I would hope would remove Bell from any conflict of interest.
The only thing that this idea leaves to discussion is Rogers and Shaw since I didn't use cable providers as an example (and yes, I know there are other Cable and Telephone companies in Canada doing the same thing.:) ).
One would hope that with such a powerful system in place, there would be safety measures to prevent a Wikileaks type incident with the investigation information. I would also hope extensive background checks are done on the people that have access to this information. With police corruption at hand and perhaps organized crime paying its way into departments, this seems like an ample opportunity for org. crime to influence the local PD to see if they have an FBI file or find out what's in their rival's FBI files.
I can't recall the titles of specific games (and yes, some of them do store screenshots of the games which can add some size to the save file) but I have played several games where save files are over 5 MB. And these were for popular PC, PS2 and Gamecube games.This goes for FPS as much as RPGs. So these save games can take a little while to download/upload. Console games on the whole tended to have the smallest save game files.
A cruise missile would seem a practical alternative in this case. Knowing that it cost several million each to fire, there is a lot of money invested in the Stealth tech. It would seem to me there would be an advantage of destroying the cockpit area, storage media, flight recorder and communications equipment among other things.
At least on the outset, it might make it easier for artists to market themselves. The easier it is to market themselves, the less there is a need for the RIAA.
I don't see this domain as an opportunity for piracy or copyright infringement. I think pirates already know where to get the material.
I do see this as an opportunity for artists that are not signed onto RIAA labels to get a bit more exposure. I would think it easier to search on search engines for.music domains and finding new artists. An example search might be "Rock and.music". Or to find an official website for an artist e.g. "Artist name and.music". Assuming of course there is some for of sanity with the use of the domain.
And what if some farts in the water near-by? I've been the witness of some rather obnoxious ones. And I felt a shockwave from one once - almost knocked me off my feet.
My point is, if someone with one of these powerful farts is swimming nearby, I'm rather certain the resultant underwater tsunami will be powerful enough to destroy the nuclear reactor. Heck, the nearby costal town(s) will be lucky if there is no flood damage.
At least on my Windows PC, I have enough experience and knowledge dealing with Viruses and such that I have a reasonably good idea if my computer is infected. Common sense, using the right apps and such help reduce the threat.
I don't have the experience or knowledge of handling this with my Smartphone (Blackberry). I'm more concerned given the sensitivity of the data that I exchange on this platform - personal and business calls as well as e-mail that I don't know what adequate protections to use on the phone. I've disabled Javascript on the phone for web browsing, don't access Flash content and I've only installed a few official apps from BB or dependable vendors.
What's worse if the general public that aren't very Tech or computer savvy. Presumably they are just as vulnerable or perhaps more so. My cousin who's a programmer has installed over 50 apps on his iPhone. I've read of people installing 100's of apps from the iStore or ditto with Jailbreaked phones.
I'd be curious to know how difficult it would be to get rid of a virus or spyware on common smartphones since the OS isn't always reinstallable and I'm not sure if 'resetting' the phone to default values might install the original OS.
Having it in your shopping cart is one thing. I suggest you refresh your screen. Sorry to spoil all your fun. But, while you were busy posting about buying it on Slashdot, to get +5 funny.... I bought it.
I need to get that Harrier Jet from Pepsi now. I think it will make a nice accessory to my purchase.
The use of pesticides and fungicides to treat cinnamon trees will still pose an environmental problem perhaps even more so if there is an increased demand. And many of the countries where Cinnamon is grown, probably don't have the same environmental standards than 'Western' countries. That is, pesticides and fungicides that were banned by the EPA 50 years ago might still be used in these countries.
I love your idea. I'm going to use EXP points every time I do a task at work. Every time I level-up, I'll tell my boss and demand a raise. This is such a practical system I hadn't thought about it. I think I have more EXP points than my boss - so the argument will be on my side.
I don't have a MBP but I'm seriously considering buying one. I agee on all your points.
I only wonder, on a tangent, if Apple will eventually replace all of what we know of OSX (incl *nix CLI) with some form of iOS without the *nix for the desktop - so its one OS for Desktop, iPad, iPhone etc. It seems to be directed this way with the emphasis and plans for the App Store for desktop.
The hardware still kicks but, I'm just wondering how much longer the desktop OS will.
I'm not an engineer and not familiar if this exists or not. I'm wondering if the ocean, given the (at times) height and power of the waves would be sufficient to come up with some sort of hydro-electric method to power the engines? At least when moving in the ocean. They did afterall have steam engines and such on some earlier boats.These container ships are monsters in comparison. And obviously, in a harbour area they might need to switch to an alternate source. Still would it be practical / feasible to generate electricity to power these ships?
The asymmetry here also has to do with the words "Classified", "Secret" and "Top Secret" information - with the good ol' rubber stamp or digital designation of. People seem to have a somewhat high fascination with these terms without any understanding of what they mean. They just seem to think all of these classified files belong in a red folder, with some dude handling the files in a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. Therefore anything with these stamps is Cloak and Dagger / Secret Squirrel (yeah, I had to throw that one in). This makes this type of information seem worthwhile and noble to leak.
Because anything can be labelled as classified, especially I think in a theater of war, much of the classified data is rather uninteresting and likely useless information to the general public. So if its generally useless and uninteresting, there's no point in releasing it. This '7x bigger' leak will likely have the same percentage of useless or boring facts.
Given the size of this leak, I have to wonder if they are truly being cautious about releasing information. I'm not sure if anyone on Wikileaks would have any intelligence experience, so having Wikileaks "editors" review these documents on an 'educated' basis is dangerous. They might think nobody has died because of information that was leaked, but they have no possible way of confirming it either.
And, I don't think Al Qaeda really cares about classification of sensitive information. Its not like someone in AQ would lose their job because of an ignored rubber stamp. They don't care about administrative details. Bullets are cheaper anyways - and have the benefit of reducing the problem for the opposing side.
No kidding. I went to the economist website. It sounds even worse! I'd bet much of this is also to do with minor drug offences
"there's been a similar surge in private prison construction as the inmate population has tripled between 1987 and 2007: Inmates in private prisons now account for 9% of the total US prison population"
In a corporation, you not only have accounting, HR, managers, VPs and such looking over your budget but you also have investors. If it costs you too much to produce something of "equal" quality to a competitor, they will start asking questions. A problem with insecure code probably won't cost the company the entire business.
The NSA, I think, mostly has a black budget. There's only a few people who know how much, where and to whom (employees) this money goes to. So there's not really a budget you have to account for. A problem (leak) because of bad code or anything else could be damaging to National Security. It will also, likely, become a political embarrassment and one to the DoD, NSA/CIA establishments. The people who approve the budgets will almost undoubtedly approve expenses to account for increases in security in any area incl. programming.
I know you're probably joking but con artists are not really "artists" in the sense that it generally takes true skill and cunning to successfully pull of a con. I think the biggest part is having the basic lack of respect and not caring about what is legal. Caring about whether or not you get caught probably doesn't factor into the decision making process. I think many very law-abiding Slashdotters and the general public can with very little effort pull of a con job. Its just 1) they respect others 2) respect the law 3) like their life enough they don't want to spend a lot of time in prison etc.
Just one example (though this is a much bigger one, there are probably thousands of smaller con jobs pulled off every day): You can't possibly convince me that, all the people who bought sub-prime mortgages for example (which I think was a form of a con job.... legal or not) was because they were stupid or slow. There's some rather wealthy, middle to upper class people that got rolled up into the mess and lost their houses.
I've been using computers since the C64 as a kid. I'm geeky enough to use Slashdot. I've used Linux on and off since Slackware 7"ish" (w/ all the version # skipping). Dabbled with some CS classes. I've used MS Dos . through all versions of Windows and used OS X for 4 years..... So I think I at least have some geek credentials to post this.
I mostly stopped playing games so I don't have much use for Windows. I've preferred to use OS X but didn't want to keep my Mac. OS X is genius it really "just" works. And I've spent far less time troubleshooting and resolving issues than I ever have with Windows or Linux. I've been trying REALLY hard to move over to a PC-based 'Nix based OS for a few years now but I'm finding it a bit hard.
I think I'm of the age, have the computer knowledge necessary and have the desire enough to switch that I'm a likely target user. You need some (somewhat)geeky people (like me:) ) for now to more readily adopt 'Nixes. Depending on what you do, Granny is probably ok to check e-mail with some KDE or Gnome based distro. I'm also finding it easier to automate and simplify some daily tasks with the command line (I use a lot of the reg-ex tools Sed, AWK and dabbling with Perl and Python - nothing fancy though. The Windows scripting and command line tools is an utterly and confusing mess, I won't touch it with a 10-foot pole. This *alone* has me as an easy convert.
Here's my beefs over the years which has prevented me from switching. I note over the years as I've not tried recently to install Slackware, Ubuntu, SUSE or FreeBSD (yes, I've tried a few) or such that it might be fixed now. Some of this might not be technically accurate. So at least, try to understand that this is a general overview. I'm not asking how to fix it, but rather these are probably some of the problems people have.
1) Drivers. Some things just don't work right out of the box. I haven't tried X.org in last year-or-so, but my ATI card has been a major PITA to get working. I've seen (too) many postings on "How do I get my trackpad working" or get this working. Recompiling the kernel is somewhat challenging if you have to get to that level. Choosing the wrong option or ommitting something can FOOBAR the kernel and you have to Google till you get it right. Every kernel is a walking target.
At times, never the same result or problem from 2.4.15 to 2.4.16. That what was working on.15 for example might not work on.16 with the same options selected.
2) Too many choices of distros. I fully agree choice tends to be a good thing. But the init scripts, directory structure, system management tools (SUSE, RH, Ubuntu) all different. On top of that, each app tends to work out of the box for only a few specific distros. If you want it to work with yours, you have to wait till someone puts it in the package manager. This is where Windows and OS X have a definite advantage.
3) When X crashes or there's some problem with the xinitrc or adding an extra mouse button or adding pretty font support, its meant spending some time reading about how to install it. OS X kinda self repairs itself, and with Windows all else fails reinstall it. If there's a problem with X to begin with, reinstalling just means the same thing will be there after you reinstall. There's been more then a few times when I've just said "Screw that" and went back to using Windows.
4) There's a bit too much Windows-like emulation with the apps in KDE, GNOME and such. Apple tends to think well.... this is ok but we should do this, this and this different. If some of the apps are 'cool' and do things just Neat enough it might entice people to think, Linux is cool, i should check this out.
5) Partitioning / File management / permissions difficult. This has gotten better I think over the years with the file managers with KDE, GNOME, Xfce and such. I just find when you do ls -la on / that you get a confusing directory structure.
"2. trading tax.. Tax all trades by a negligible amount. Firms that actually invest will not be affected."
I would agree but, I presume you are advocating such regulation in the U.S. Unless other countries share the same view and tax the heck out of HFTs the problem is not going to go away. I could see the EU and Canada joining in, but there are many other questionable countries that probably won't participate. In fact some might even *want* to participate if only to effect the American exchanges.
I think a combination of both your proposed ideas would work best. The trading tax will prevent Americans from HFT on domestic and foreign markets and the random dealy (assuming we are dealing with domestic exchanges only) will prevent those that aren't encumbered by the taxation from even being able to HFT. The "random" delays would need to be in the range of more than a few minutes.
I might suggest something like being required to have an HFT account if you want to participate in these kinds of trades. And in order to execute, have something on the level of a captcha system where once the delay to be able to trade again expires, you can't make a trade until the captca is entered and have one that can't be detected by the programs. This might make HFT suck more for the HFTers.
"I have faith they were meeting the appropriate metric goals at a 1400 tanks/month pace for diversity training, staff meetings, coffee consumption, memos distributed per week, slashdot first posts"
Looks at your user ID... you've been hear a long time.
I agree with you. I worded it that way though as I am keenly aware some people are really sensitive to this matter. Besides, if you take a few REALLY good pictures you don't need 2000 of them in the first place. Or a video will do just as well.
I think you have to determine what is important to *you*. I've whittled down the books, photos and music, movies, notes, etc that are important to me first and foremost. It makes organizing, cataloging and backing up the information easier. I'm not suggesting if you have 2000 photos of your kid to get rid of them. But shurely, there's some information junk lying around that you don't need anymore. It might also mean reading books just lying around and deciding if they are keepers or just make some notes of what you read and then recycle (or better yet) donate the book to the library or a friend.
The fact is, if you think you have a little OCD, chances are your life is disorganized. I'm there somewhat too. But, in the last few weeks, I've done a lot of the above. I have to say, its made my life easier, less weight on my shoulders and I've been able to accomplish more. I don't have OCD, but I can tell you that this is certainly rewarding to accomplish.
I haven't found the best way to organize it yet. I'm struggling a bit with backups and debating wether keeping digital or "analog" (paper, print) copies of my information is the best.
I'm statrting to wonder if MS would actually be *allowed* to run its own App Store. Granted they kind of do this for XBox, but I'm talking about a full-on App store instead of going to thousands of different shareware providers. It might make sense for a different company to do this. But I'm sure the DOJ would have a bug up its ass the second MS did this. Apple on the other hand...... wonder if or when they might take issue.
As an aside to your comments. Yes, I would agree, MS is looking like a better alternative for (consumer) desktops, at least for some of us with the nerd creds. I'm not sure Joe user cares. I had a Mac, now I'm using a Windows desktop. I was going to buy an Apple laptop as a replacement for the desktop. Now I'm not so sure about Apple now.... probably going to go with a Windows or Linux/BSD setup on the laptop instead.
Apple likes to maintain its image of being the little angel of the computing world. I remember the reason I bought a Mac a few years ago, was that it was "Open" and DRM free, and Apple wasn't going to do the whole TPM chip thing like the rest of the PC market. It seems Apple is amassing a huge wad of cash by doing the same thing through draconian software lockout on its hardware and software - mobile and desktop. No thanks Apple.
I'm not really sure the Canadian government is willing to play such a strong hand (or any hand for that matter) with China. I think much of our foreign policy of late is a laissez-faire attitude. I think the only think it would achieve is domestic news converge of the Canadian reaction to the news. Most Chinese will probably never hear of the trade restriction.
OTOH, I would agree going to the international bodies is the best choice. IMO, I think the reason it would work is that even if in spirit or law doesn't achieve much, the Chinese don't want to be smeared in the internationally. As cash rich as they are, they still the international community to like them to have import/export trading to work in their favor.
Where I think the true shame is, it is that China has been 'cornering' the market in mining these minerals not because of their rarity, but their ability to vastly underpay workers and save money in operations by ignoring many safety protocol. I truly wonder what %age of the workers know what they are mining in any detail.
Slashdot Mirror
+5 insightful.
The duty of the City Engineer should be at the very least to answer the questions of the community. This should be a basic and fundamental part of government service.
The community is concerned people might be at higher risk to injury or death without the installation of traffic signals at that intersection. That in itself should be reason enough to accept that some members in the community are going to contest the decision. Putting more detail into their complaint should be commended. Since they also have some technical competence, maybe the City Engineer should have better spent his time to type a more detailed explanation of why the traffic signal(s) won't be installed. At the least, the community members will feel that their concerns for safety have been sufficiently addressed and taken into consideration.
This is something I've been thinking about. I think it might make sense to have more liberal access to Internet services. Now, I am not a techie on networking so I'm probably quite short or (possibly!) wrong on the technical details, but here is my food for thought.
Say a group of residential users want Internet access. Rather than each pay $50 bucks a month to Bell, why not lease an dedicated line from an ISP. In this proposal, I would say the best solution would be to have independent ISPs administer the Internet access part of the Service. The dedicated line would be leased from Bell or Telus.
So the neighborhood pays for the leased line. Everyone shares a common access point. A contingency should be that if there are only a few users they each get a proportional access to the service. (if I'm the only person in my building to pay for the access, i would not get unfettered access to a T3 or OC-12 or whatever).
At least in this way, Bell instead of being the ISP, is only leasing and servicing the actual cable. The ISP part can be handled by another company. This I would hope would remove Bell from any conflict of interest.
The only thing that this idea leaves to discussion is Rogers and Shaw since I didn't use cable providers as an example (and yes, I know there are other Cable and Telephone companies in Canada doing the same thing. :) ).
One would hope that with such a powerful system in place, there would be safety measures to prevent a Wikileaks type incident with the investigation information. I would also hope extensive background checks are done on the people that have access to this information. With police corruption at hand and perhaps organized crime paying its way into departments, this seems like an ample opportunity for org. crime to influence the local PD to see if they have an FBI file or find out what's in their rival's FBI files.
I can't recall the titles of specific games (and yes, some of them do store screenshots of the games which can add some size to the save file) but I have played several games where save files are over 5 MB. And these were for popular PC, PS2 and Gamecube games.This goes for FPS as much as RPGs. So these save games can take a little while to download/upload. Console games on the whole tended to have the smallest save game files.
A cruise missile would seem a practical alternative in this case. Knowing that it cost several million each to fire, there is a lot of money invested in the Stealth tech. It would seem to me there would be an advantage of destroying the cockpit area, storage media, flight recorder and communications equipment among other things.
At least on the outset, it might make it easier for artists to market themselves. The easier it is to market themselves, the less there is a need for the RIAA.
I don't see this domain as an opportunity for piracy or copyright infringement. I think pirates already know where to get the material.
I do see this as an opportunity for artists that are not signed onto RIAA labels to get a bit more exposure. I would think it easier to search on search engines for .music domains and finding new artists. An example search might be "Rock and .music". Or to find an official website for an artist e.g. "Artist name and .music". Assuming of course there is some for of sanity with the use of the domain.
And what if some farts in the water near-by? I've been the witness of some rather obnoxious ones. And I felt a shockwave from one once - almost knocked me off my feet.
My point is, if someone with one of these powerful farts is swimming nearby, I'm rather certain the resultant underwater tsunami will be powerful enough to destroy the nuclear reactor. Heck, the nearby costal town(s) will be lucky if there is no flood damage.
At least on my Windows PC, I have enough experience and knowledge dealing with Viruses and such that I have a reasonably good idea if my computer is infected. Common sense, using the right apps and such help reduce the threat.
I don't have the experience or knowledge of handling this with my Smartphone (Blackberry). I'm more concerned given the sensitivity of the data that I exchange on this platform - personal and business calls as well as e-mail that I don't know what adequate protections to use on the phone. I've disabled Javascript on the phone for web browsing, don't access Flash content and I've only installed a few official apps from BB or dependable vendors.
What's worse if the general public that aren't very Tech or computer savvy. Presumably they are just as vulnerable or perhaps more so. My cousin who's a programmer has installed over 50 apps on his iPhone. I've read of people installing 100's of apps from the iStore or ditto with Jailbreaked phones.
I'd be curious to know how difficult it would be to get rid of a virus or spyware on common smartphones since the OS isn't always reinstallable and I'm not sure if 'resetting' the phone to default values might install the original OS.
Having it in your shopping cart is one thing. I suggest you refresh your screen. Sorry to spoil all your fun. But, while you were busy posting about buying it on Slashdot, to get +5 funny .... I bought it.
I need to get that Harrier Jet from Pepsi now. I think it will make a nice accessory to my purchase.
The use of pesticides and fungicides to treat cinnamon trees will still pose an environmental problem perhaps even more so if there is an increased demand. And many of the countries where Cinnamon is grown, probably don't have the same environmental standards than 'Western' countries. That is, pesticides and fungicides that were banned by the EPA 50 years ago might still be used in these countries.
I love your idea. I'm going to use EXP points every time I do a task at work. Every time I level-up, I'll tell my boss and demand a raise. This is such a practical system I hadn't thought about it. I think I have more EXP points than my boss - so the argument will be on my side.
I don't have a MBP but I'm seriously considering buying one. I agee on all your points.
I only wonder, on a tangent, if Apple will eventually replace all of what we know of OSX (incl *nix CLI) with some form of iOS without the *nix for the desktop - so its one OS for Desktop, iPad, iPhone etc. It seems to be directed this way with the emphasis and plans for the App Store for desktop.
The hardware still kicks but, I'm just wondering how much longer the desktop OS will.
I'm not an engineer and not familiar if this exists or not. I'm wondering if the ocean, given the (at times) height and power of the waves would be sufficient to come up with some sort of hydro-electric method to power the engines? At least when moving in the ocean. They did afterall have steam engines and such on some earlier boats.These container ships are monsters in comparison. And obviously, in a harbour area they might need to switch to an alternate source. Still would it be practical / feasible to generate electricity to power these ships?
The asymmetry here also has to do with the words "Classified", "Secret" and "Top Secret" information - with the good ol' rubber stamp or digital designation of. People seem to have a somewhat high fascination with these terms without any understanding of what they mean. They just seem to think all of these classified files belong in a red folder, with some dude handling the files in a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. Therefore anything with these stamps is Cloak and Dagger / Secret Squirrel (yeah, I had to throw that one in). This makes this type of information seem worthwhile and noble to leak.
Because anything can be labelled as classified, especially I think in a theater of war, much of the classified data is rather uninteresting and likely useless information to the general public. So if its generally useless and uninteresting, there's no point in releasing it. This '7x bigger' leak will likely have the same percentage of useless or boring facts.
Given the size of this leak, I have to wonder if they are truly being cautious about releasing information. I'm not sure if anyone on Wikileaks would have any intelligence experience, so having Wikileaks "editors" review these documents on an 'educated' basis is dangerous. They might think nobody has died because of information that was leaked, but they have no possible way of confirming it either.
And, I don't think Al Qaeda really cares about classification of sensitive information. Its not like someone in AQ would lose their job because of an ignored rubber stamp. They don't care about administrative details. Bullets are cheaper anyways - and have the benefit of reducing the problem for the opposing side.
No kidding. I went to the economist website. It sounds even worse! I'd bet much of this is also to do with minor drug offences
"there's been a similar surge in private prison construction as the inmate population has tripled between 1987 and 2007: Inmates in private prisons now account for 9% of the total US prison population"
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/08/private_prisons
In a corporation, you not only have accounting, HR, managers, VPs and such looking over your budget but you also have investors. If it costs you too much to produce something of "equal" quality to a competitor, they will start asking questions. A problem with insecure code probably won't cost the company the entire business.
The NSA, I think, mostly has a black budget. There's only a few people who know how much, where and to whom (employees) this money goes to. So there's not really a budget you have to account for. A problem (leak) because of bad code or anything else could be damaging to National Security. It will also, likely, become a political embarrassment and one to the DoD, NSA/CIA establishments. The people who approve the budgets will almost undoubtedly approve expenses to account for increases in security in any area incl. programming.
Dear Aunt Martha,
I know you are upset about this piece mentioning you specifically by name but .......
I know you're probably joking but con artists are not really "artists" in the sense that it generally takes true skill and cunning to successfully pull of a con. I think the biggest part is having the basic lack of respect and not caring about what is legal. Caring about whether or not you get caught probably doesn't factor into the decision making process. I think many very law-abiding Slashdotters and the general public can with very little effort pull of a con job. Its just 1) they respect others 2) respect the law 3) like their life enough they don't want to spend a lot of time in prison etc.
Just one example (though this is a much bigger one, there are probably thousands of smaller con jobs pulled off every day): .... legal or not) was because they were stupid or slow. There's some rather wealthy, middle to upper class people that got rolled up into the mess and lost their houses.
You can't possibly convince me that, all the people who bought sub-prime mortgages for example (which I think was a form of a con job
I've been using computers since the C64 as a kid. I'm geeky enough to use Slashdot. I've used Linux on and off since Slackware 7"ish" (w/ all the version # skipping). Dabbled with some CS classes. I've used MS Dos . through all versions of Windows and used OS X for 4 years. .... So I think I at least have some geek credentials to post this.
I mostly stopped playing games so I don't have much use for Windows. I've preferred to use OS X but didn't want to keep my Mac. OS X is genius it really "just" works. And I've spent far less time troubleshooting and resolving issues than I ever have with Windows or Linux. I've been trying REALLY hard to move over to a PC-based 'Nix based OS for a few years now but I'm finding it a bit hard.
I think I'm of the age, have the computer knowledge necessary and have the desire enough to switch that I'm a likely target user. You need some (somewhat)geeky people (like me :) ) for now to more readily adopt 'Nixes. Depending on what you do, Granny is probably ok to check e-mail with some KDE or Gnome based distro. I'm also finding it easier to automate and simplify some daily tasks with the command line (I use a lot of the reg-ex tools Sed, AWK and dabbling with Perl and Python - nothing fancy though. The Windows scripting and command line tools is an utterly and confusing mess, I won't touch it with a 10-foot pole. This *alone* has me as an easy convert.
Here's my beefs over the years which has prevented me from switching. I note over the years as I've not tried recently to install Slackware, Ubuntu, SUSE or FreeBSD (yes, I've tried a few) or such that it might be fixed now. Some of this might not be technically accurate. So at least, try to understand that this is a general overview. I'm not asking how to fix it, but rather these are probably some of the problems people have.
1) Drivers. Some things just don't work right out of the box. I haven't tried X.org in last year-or-so, but my ATI card has been a major PITA to get working. I've seen (too) many postings on "How do I get my trackpad working" or get this working. Recompiling the kernel is somewhat challenging if you have to get to that level. Choosing the wrong option or ommitting something can FOOBAR the kernel and you have to Google till you get it right. Every kernel is a walking target.
At times, never the same result or problem from 2.4.15 to 2.4.16. That what was working on .15 for example might not work on .16 with the same options selected.
2) Too many choices of distros. I fully agree choice tends to be a good thing. But the init scripts, directory structure, system management tools (SUSE, RH, Ubuntu) all different. On top of that, each app tends to work out of the box for only a few specific distros. If you want it to work with yours, you have to wait till someone puts it in the package manager. This is where Windows and OS X have a definite advantage.
3) When X crashes or there's some problem with the xinitrc or adding an extra mouse button or adding pretty font support, its meant spending some time reading about how to install it. OS X kinda self repairs itself, and with Windows all else fails reinstall it. If there's a problem with X to begin with, reinstalling just means the same thing will be there after you reinstall. There's been more then a few times when I've just said "Screw that" and went back to using Windows.
4) There's a bit too much Windows-like emulation with the apps in KDE, GNOME and such. Apple tends to think well .... this is ok but we should do this, this and this different. If some of the apps are 'cool' and do things just Neat enough it might entice people to think, Linux is cool, i should check this out.
5) Partitioning / File management / permissions difficult. This has gotten better I think over the years with the file managers with KDE, GNOME, Xfce and such. I just find when you do ls -la on / that you get a confusing directory structure.
"2. trading tax.. Tax all trades by a negligible amount. Firms that actually invest will not be affected."
I would agree but, I presume you are advocating such regulation in the U.S. Unless other countries share the same view and tax the heck out of HFTs the problem is not going to go away. I could see the EU and Canada joining in, but there are many other questionable countries that probably won't participate. In fact some might even *want* to participate if only to effect the American exchanges.
I think a combination of both your proposed ideas would work best. The trading tax will prevent Americans from HFT on domestic and foreign markets and the random dealy (assuming we are dealing with domestic exchanges only) will prevent those that aren't encumbered by the taxation from even being able to HFT. The "random" delays would need to be in the range of more than a few minutes.
I might suggest something like being required to have an HFT account if you want to participate in these kinds of trades. And in order to execute, have something on the level of a captcha system where once the delay to be able to trade again expires, you can't make a trade until the captca is entered and have one that can't be detected by the programs. This might make HFT suck more for the HFTers.
"I have faith they were meeting the appropriate metric goals at a 1400 tanks/month pace for diversity training, staff meetings, coffee consumption, memos distributed per week, slashdot first posts"
Looks at your user ID ... you've been hear a long time.
I agree with you. I worded it that way though as I am keenly aware some people are really sensitive to this matter. Besides, if you take a few REALLY good pictures you don't need 2000 of them in the first place. Or a video will do just as well.
I think you have to determine what is important to *you*. I've whittled down the books, photos and music, movies, notes, etc that are important to me first and foremost. It makes organizing, cataloging and backing up the information easier. I'm not suggesting if you have 2000 photos of your kid to get rid of them. But shurely, there's some information junk lying around that you don't need anymore. It might also mean reading books just lying around and deciding if they are keepers or just make some notes of what you read and then recycle (or better yet) donate the book to the library or a friend.
The fact is, if you think you have a little OCD, chances are your life is disorganized. I'm there somewhat too. But, in the last few weeks, I've done a lot of the above. I have to say, its made my life easier, less weight on my shoulders and I've been able to accomplish more. I don't have OCD, but I can tell you that this is certainly rewarding to accomplish.
I haven't found the best way to organize it yet. I'm struggling a bit with backups and debating wether keeping digital or "analog" (paper, print) copies of my information is the best.
I'm statrting to wonder if MS would actually be *allowed* to run its own App Store. Granted they kind of do this for XBox, but I'm talking about a full-on App store instead of going to thousands of different shareware providers. It might make sense for a different company to do this. But I'm sure the DOJ would have a bug up its ass the second MS did this. Apple on the other hand ...... wonder if or when they might take issue.
As an aside to your comments. Yes, I would agree, MS is looking like a better alternative for (consumer) desktops, at least for some of us with the nerd creds. I'm not sure Joe user cares. I had a Mac, now I'm using a Windows desktop. I was going to buy an Apple laptop as a replacement for the desktop. Now I'm not so sure about Apple now .... probably going to go with a Windows or Linux/BSD setup on the laptop instead.
Apple likes to maintain its image of being the little angel of the computing world. I remember the reason I bought a Mac a few years ago, was that it was "Open" and DRM free, and Apple wasn't going to do the whole TPM chip thing like the rest of the PC market. It seems Apple is amassing a huge wad of cash by doing the same thing through draconian software lockout on its hardware and software - mobile and desktop. No thanks Apple.
I'm not really sure the Canadian government is willing to play such a strong hand (or any hand for that matter) with China. I think much of our foreign policy of late is a laissez-faire attitude. I think the only think it would achieve is domestic news converge of the Canadian reaction to the news. Most Chinese will probably never hear of the trade restriction.
OTOH, I would agree going to the international bodies is the best choice. IMO, I think the reason it would work is that even if in spirit or law doesn't achieve much, the Chinese don't want to be smeared in the internationally. As cash rich as they are, they still the international community to like them to have import/export trading to work in their favor.
Where I think the true shame is, it is that China has been 'cornering' the market in mining these minerals not because of their rarity, but their ability to vastly underpay workers and save money in operations by ignoring many safety protocol. I truly wonder what %age of the workers know what they are mining in any detail.