No, because the FCC is always going to 1) identify themselves, 2) knock on the door and ask to see specific equipment or a specific transmission source, and 3) walk away and issue you a fine by mail if you say no. These Castle scenarios where 'FCC goons' bust into your house, RF detectors blazing, is pure fantasy. Furthermore, the Castle doctrine applies to a situation where you could reasonably believe you are in danger of physical harm in your own home. When is the FCC ever going to make you think you are at risk of physical harm? A guy with a clipboard knocking on your door and asking to see your HAM transmitter or CB radio is not justification for homicide.
No, they're planning on knocking on your door and asking to see your transmitter if they have triangulated a signal that violates FCC regs to your house. If you say no, they are going to fine you. No home invasions. They simply assert the right to inspect any equipment covered by their mandate to inspect transmission equipment. If you decline to let them perform the inspection, they will charge you with violating the regulations.
Why is everyone equating equating the right to inspect with no-knock raids? The FCC isn't going to kick in your door while you're trying to flush your transmitter. They're going to knock, ask to see the transmitter, and then go back to their office and issue you a fine by mail if you say no. The FCC has no interest in putting their agent's lives at risk in order to get someone to switch off their CB. All of this ranting about government goons and guns is just melodramatic bullshit. If the government wants to infringe on your rights, they'll do it through the legal system, not by kicking in doors. It's much more effective and much lower risk.
Whether or not this is infringement on your 4th Amendment rights actually depends greatly on how the law is applied. If the FCC is asserting the right to enter any house because there is a phone or a wireless device inside, it's obviously infringement. The FCC has lawyers, and knows this, so there's little chance they would adopt such a tactic. All of the cases mentioned in the article related to fairly powerful transmitters that were being used in a way such that the violation of FCC regs could be detected by someone miles from the source. That means that 1) by the time the FCC directionalizes the signal and shows up at your door, they already have probably cause and could get a warrant if they needed it, and 2) the FCC could reasonably assert in court that the device is not something that most people have in their house, and is a sophisticated enough device that the fairly uncontroversial right of administrative inspection to have a look at that particular piece of equipment.
The stock price will likely not reach those heights again not because Microsoft is fundamentally in trouble, but because the market primarily values growth. Microsoft already owns a piece of damn near every computer in the world, so there's really nowhere to go but down; their non-core offerings have, at best, a checkered history and don't inspire confidence in investors.
MS has been transitioning out of the 'growth' mold in the assessment of stock pickers for years. That's why the price is down, and is staying down. Paying out dividends is not a ploy to buoy the stock price, as the stock is already training at a premium way above the dividend value; paying dividends is just what a reasonable Board does in response to a huge excess of cash that can't be reasonably invested in growth. They're a publicly traded company and have to act in the interest of the shareholder.
As to their revenues... they took modest losses in one of the worst economies since the Depression, during a period when their last major product release is several years in the mirror, and people are holding out on major purchases as the next one comes into view. That's a pretty enviable position to most companies.
I know a lot of people who have done both. It depends a great deal on 1) what the masters program is, and 2) what kind of work you can get right now.
If the masters program consists of taking a few more classes, doing some problem sets, and a few small programming projects, skip it. Employers will (rightfully) lump you in along with every other undergrad or BS + MS who finished simply by following a pre-planned track.
If, on the other hand, you're actually doing independent work- working on some large, independent/group projects, doing real research, maybe getting your name on a paper or two and building some decent prototype/POC systems, then the masters may give you a real advantage, because you'll be able to talk about real experience working on projects, but still have a wider theoretical base than a lot of people fresh out of school. A really applied, hands on MS program gives you the best of both worlds, in a way. At some large companies, a MS is a gateway to higher-level work as an architect or other high-level designer/developer- whether by policy or by happenstance, most of the people you compete with for those positions will have post-grad degrees.
What kind of work can you get? Keep in mind that the hiring market is very competitive right now; you may see yourself dumped into a support/low grade technical positions as a fresh grad that doesn't provide great experience. If you can spend two years actually writing real code that gets used in a production system, the experience might be more valuable. If you're going to be doing tech support or fire-and-forget CGI forms for two years, the real world work might be much less useful to your ultimate career than doing the MS.
I came out with a BS and started working, but I had a degree from a well-reputed school and good internship experience. A lot of the guys I knew in my office had bachelors degrees from local schools, and they started out doing support and incidental minor scripting. My starting job was as an engineer, on the other hand. The lesson for me was that a solid education (which the MS can be a big part of) can leapfrog you past some of the duller entry-level busy work.
My advice would be: 1) Talk to people who have done the MS program. What did they do? Are there opportunities to do real research or project work that will set you apart from other people who took a ton of classes? 2) Apply for a few jobs and see what you can get. If you can get a job at a good company that will take an interest in your career development (usually means a larger company- small companies are very friendly, but often lack the resources to really develop their people) and will pay you well, that might be convincing for you. If you're going to be punching a clock doing work that doesn't advance your career (there are plenty of people with BS's in Software Engineering and Computer Science doing what is essentially tech support that could easily be done by someone with an associates degree or a self-study with an A+ cert), the MS will probably offer you better options. 3) Make a real assessment of what you're like as a student. Getting the most out of a MS program will require that you are able to manager yourself and challenge yourself, and take on big commitments without someone standing over you forcing you to do it. If that sounds like you, great. On the other hand, if you sat in the back of every classes and did fine while avoiding notice and not getting involved in much (frankly, I was this type of student!), a MS might end up just being a few more lines on your transcript without much to contribute.
Dude... Silicon Valley is widely touted as the best 'biking weather' region in the country. Yeah, we get an hour of drizzle every day in February, but then it stops raining entirely until December or so. I've lived in the mid-west too, and there's just no comparison in terms of biking weather. It rains more and harder, plus more unpredictably, you have ice and snow to contend with, and the humidity entails constant showering when you ride. Count your blessings for being a biker here, but don't go trying to tell people in Indiana that it isn't that bad. There are entire seasons back home when I wouldn't really consider biking a viable mode of transportation for any significant distance for someone who has to go to work. Out here? Any day of the year. Biking is great, but geography matters.
Bingo. Get rid of every bad teacher in every school system in one fell swoop, and what have you got? Utopia? Nope. A school system where the average class size is 67.
People claim that the union rules that favor seniority over performance discourage competent young people from becoming teachers. I've known dozens of current and former teachers, and they've never cited this as a reason for wanting to leave the profession. On the other hand, getting paid less than anyone else they know with a graduate degree, having to cope with students who don't want to be there and who were failed by the system a decade before you got them, having very little choice in their teaching methods and curriculum, being 'voluntold' for various after-hours activities without compensation, while not having any control or flexibility over your schedule drives a lot more off.
This is particularly evident in the math, science and technology fields. Even if you really enjoy teaching these subjects, there are very few incentives to go into teaching and a lot of disincentives. Until we make the occupation competitive with work in the private sector, it's going to continue to be marked by shortages and poor performers.
But this problem isn't checking a number theoretic property; it's applying a heuristic to a small pool of data points that may have been passed to you by a hostile reporter. Nothing indicates that this problem is significantly harder to provide a solution to programatically than to check programatically. Plus, the attacker gets a free oracle that tells you if you've created a good set of attack data. Let one real person register through the system, capture their data, and add a small amount of randomness to the timing and it would appear that you have permanently broken the system; I don't know how you could exclude an attacker doing that without also excluding a lot of actual users.
That still leaves the system vulnerable to a replay attack- modify the client-side JS to record the sequence of events in a successful login, and then play them back later. If you're using the timing between events to determine if a user is human, you have the problem that Ajax runs asynchronously; the timing between events being sent to the server isn't going to be the same as the timing between events. You'll probably also want to batch sending events so that you keep the app responsive. Both those things mean you need to record timing information in the data you send over, which means that you can't trust the timing data because it comes from the client.
You can make a derivative work from a public domain work and then license that under a more restrictive license. Happens all the time. Say, for instance, I was a creatively bankrupt entertainment company whose mascot was a disease carrying vermin. I could just dig up old public domain works- say, fairy tales, or stories by Victor Hugo- and make my own cinematic version of them- add a few musical numbers, perhaps. Then I assert copyright over the derivative work. Public domain doesn't travel with the content in the way the GFDL/CC licenses are- derivative works are considered new creations, provided that they are sufficiently different from the source.
Not everything will be dual licensed. In particular, this allows Wikipedia to incorporate a large amount of media (images, sound, and video) that are CC-BY-SA licensed but aren't GFDL licensed. It also allows other projects that use CC-BY-SA (like other Wikis) to incorporate Wikipedia material without having to comply with the GFDL.
I imagine attribution is necessary to make it possible to dual license with the GFDL going forward. GFDL requires attribution, which is one reason why things like preserving page history in an article merge are considered important; the page history is essentially the GFDL-required attribution list for the entire article.
How about this for a reason: the reason it's long is that the GFDL is encumbered by a number of clauses and options that are totally inappropriate for Wikipedia or a project like it. Their presence in the license terms can be confusing and off-putting to contributors (who will read things like 'We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for free software'), and contributes nothing to the project.
Some of those particular options present in the license make GFDL content incompatible with Wikipedia. That means that content that is brought in, even though it is ostensibly under the "right" license, has to be scrutinized to ensure that the particular GFDL options that are used aren't going to present problems down the road. The proposed CC license would have no such possible wrinkles.
The GP poster is correct that the CC license has no ideological preamble that goes into specific ideology; compare the GFDL and the CC license in question. The Wikipedia ethos/ideology and the Gnu Foundation take on things are not identical; therefore, it makes more sense to use a license that is not specifically tied to terms and ideas borrowed from GNU.
Finally, GFDL is a barrier to the incorporation of a lot of good, free material into Wikipedia. CC is a much more common licensing type for non-software related things, like photographs. Getting and keeping good, free images to illustrate articles is a constant struggle on Wikipedia. It is made more difficult by the fact that very few people are posting new images with GFDL licensing, but there are a lot of people (or at least a lot relative to people using GFDL) using a Creative Commons license. A lot of media resources that Wikipedia currently can't use would be made accessible by this change.
Because one of the conditions they agreed to when the submitted the work was that they granted permission for just such a change at a later date without their active consent. They essentially signed a contract that said 'by signing this contract, you grant us to change the contract that you signed in certain ways at a later date, without needing to ask you.' Terrible idea to agree to that if you're signing a real estate contract. Perfectly reasonable if you're donating content to a free encyclopedia that needs the flexibility to adapt to licenses that provide them with better options for distribution and incorporation of free content.
Fool! You've bought the oldest trick in the book, the 'blame the Mormons' line. I've heard through private sources that most Microsoft execs are actually vampires Jehova's Witnesses and are worried that alcohol consumption would dilute the blood volume they need for their artificial blood cloning experiments. All of Microsoft's purported 'software development' is just a front for establishing a solid breeding stock in the Seattle area so that the vampires can repopulate the Earth when the Conflicker virus finally triggers in 2012. Think you can prove me wrong? Then answer this: if Microsoft is really a software company why is their operating system such rubbish?
I think you're confusing a possible candidate for the historical inspiration for Atlantis with the Black Sea deluge theory. Santorini might have been Plato's inspiration for Atlantis, but the destruction caused was nowhere near early or widespread enough to have given rise to Sumerian myths.
I think since the dead plankton re-entered the food chain, the carbon that it sequestered will eventually be released through the respiration of the higher-level predators in a gaseous form that will again limit the ability of the ocean water to absorb carbon. The hope with sequestration was that the dead plankton would sink to the bottom, be covered quickly with sediment, and essentially become a permanent carbon deposit. It's like the difference between planting a tree, cutting it down, and burying it vs. cutting it down and burning it. I think the hope was by creating a huge, localized bloom, you would create more food than the food chain could absorb, but the food chain is proving more able to adapt to a sudden surge in food production than anticipated.
No, on several accounts. First of all, share holders aren't employees. They're ownership. If six guys own a gas station, and one guy feels he is being screwed by the other five, he can sue them and say that they are in violation of the ownership agreement, aren't paying him his share of the profits, have mismanaged money, etc. The other five guys can't do anything about that, because everyone who is an owner has a right to have their ownership rights defended.
Second, the bonuses in question were written into employment contracts. The inviolability of a contract between two parties is pretty much a bedrock principle of law in this country, though subject to legal review if the contract is grossly exploitative or entered into under duress or something like that. The gas station signed a contract in April that said "work for us for at least a year and a half, and we'll pay you a bonus." That contract was entered into by the officers of the company and the employee. Once that contract is established, it can't be modified without the consent of the parties involved, unless there's a contingency in the contract to allow some alteration. So if the contract is legit, new ownership can't say that they're going to set the contract aside. They have to honor the contract that was previously established.
Thirdly, the government essentially has a 'silent' stake in AIG, because if they were taking an active hand in running the company, Rush Limbaugh would have a massive aneurysm from yelling 'socialism!' at the top of his lungs for up to an hour at a time. He's a national treasure, so we can't have that. Instead, we have a half-assed agreement where the government bought a huge stake in this company, but isn't taking any role in its management. It's like if someone's grandmother bought 80% of a company, and then had a massive stroke that left her comatose, but she had failed to assign her power of attorney to anyone. The government, in this scenario, is the bedridden, comatose grandmother, on paper controlling vast amounts of money and power, but in practice unable to exercise any control over AIG or her bladder.
Because if you took an adjustable rate mortgage in order to buy a house, you were probably told at the time by your realtor or mortgage broker or sales agent (entirely unofficially of course, because legally they're not allowed to say this to you, but they do anyway): don't worry about the increased payment down the road. By the time the fixed intro rate expires, the increase in your housing value means that you'll have equity in the home, and you can re-finance to a new ARM or a fixed mortgage. There were thousands if not millions of people who got this same spiel from every financial adviser they asked over the last ten years or so. There were warnings, of course, buried in the fine print and incomprehensible to most people (fact: Buying a house is 50% more complicated than the next most complicated thing most people will ever do. Seriously.), but most folks just trusted the advice that they saw plastered all over the place.
Now that they're upside down on their mortgage and the credit market has tightened, there won't be a refinance in their future. That means they go from having a manageable mortgage payment to one that exceeds their ability to pay. Which means they will slowly but surely move into default unless their mortgage is renegotiated somehow. The more people move into default and foreclosure, the more houses get taken over and put up for sale by banks. This gluts the markets and drops home prices. Which means that when they go to get appraised for their re-fi, more and more people find that they are now upside down. And the cycle repeats, until it reaches bottom (home prices fall so low that a large number of worthy credit risks priced out of the market can now afford a house- this will happen in a few high-value markets like the coasts and major cities, but virtually nowhere else, because in most markets there are too few people who fit that description), or some intervention takes place to break the cycle.
So the bottom line is: no one reasonable ever plans on selling a car for more than they bought it for. On the other hand, selling a house for less than its previous purchase price (or less than the remaining loan amount) is usually a major disaster for your personal finances. ARM loans mean that upside down => no re-fi => more forclosures => lower prices => more people upside down. Finally, the scale of the two products is vastly different. Sell your car and still owe a couple grand on it? Sucks to be you, but most people can work that out. Sell your house and still owe $100k? That's not a loss that most people can withstand reasonably.
Of course, dumping stock options on everyone from new hires to CEOs was meant to tie company health to compensation in exactly that way. Instead, it created a generation of executives who day-trade on the fortunes of their own companies, trying to goose a little tick out of the company stock so they can pull the trigger on an options sale and generate a massive payout. Tying executive pay to a running longer range performance metric is a better idea, but in a sense it just pushes the horizon out a little farther; Congress has a horizon of two to six years or so (depending on which house and which state their in), but it hasn't produced any great commitment to real long term financial or political health in our government.
In a sense, a reversal of sort would be in the long-term interest of many companies. Tell a CEO: "Look, you can run us into the ground or make us the kings of Wall Street, but your compensation isn't going to exceed x% of the companies year-to-year growth." It would create an incentive for slow, steady expansion rather than big, flashy moves that send stock prices up. Unfortunately, there are too few long-term shareholders that would endorse such a scheme; most of them are, just like today's execs, just looking to tick the stock price up enough to make a nice return (and often a nice commission, since they're brokers and fund managers) when they trigger a sell.
Jared Diamond got one thing right in the book Collapse; if you want to meaningfully alter the behavior of corporations and the markets they move in, you have to change the laws relating to a corporations duties to its shareholders. Right now, there is nearly zero incentive for responsible, long-term behavior, while short-term shenanigans are heavily incentivized. Any wonder that this is what we ended up with?
I would imagine not. These are the sort of small-batch, high markup items that it might be worthwhile to continue producing. I'm guessing at the volume that these things are produced, there's not as much overhead, and less guess work about how much to push into the retail channel. What you won't see is manufacturers trying to guess if they need to press 10000 disks or 15000. "Limited-edition, hand numbered, pre-order only" are like free money for the developer, whereas physical media, boxes, freight, and retailers getting their cut is just a drag on profits.
"They'll" send tens of thousands overseas? When last I checked, NASA wasn't really given oversight of troop deployment and declarations of war. NASA knows, however, that the public has a low tolerance for highly visible and spectacular deaths, and that every time such a disaster takes place, the entire manned space program and space flight in general is set back by months or years, and given the budget environment and long-standing criticism of their agency may be threatened entirely.
There are dozens of missions that NASA could carry out that have a lower risk profile. What about this particular one is so significant that it's worth accepting the higher risk?
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No, because the FCC is always going to 1) identify themselves, 2) knock on the door and ask to see specific equipment or a specific transmission source, and 3) walk away and issue you a fine by mail if you say no. These Castle scenarios where 'FCC goons' bust into your house, RF detectors blazing, is pure fantasy. Furthermore, the Castle doctrine applies to a situation where you could reasonably believe you are in danger of physical harm in your own home. When is the FCC ever going to make you think you are at risk of physical harm? A guy with a clipboard knocking on your door and asking to see your HAM transmitter or CB radio is not justification for homicide.
No, they're planning on knocking on your door and asking to see your transmitter if they have triangulated a signal that violates FCC regs to your house. If you say no, they are going to fine you. No home invasions. They simply assert the right to inspect any equipment covered by their mandate to inspect transmission equipment. If you decline to let them perform the inspection, they will charge you with violating the regulations.
Why is everyone equating equating the right to inspect with no-knock raids? The FCC isn't going to kick in your door while you're trying to flush your transmitter. They're going to knock, ask to see the transmitter, and then go back to their office and issue you a fine by mail if you say no. The FCC has no interest in putting their agent's lives at risk in order to get someone to switch off their CB. All of this ranting about government goons and guns is just melodramatic bullshit. If the government wants to infringe on your rights, they'll do it through the legal system, not by kicking in doors. It's much more effective and much lower risk.
Whether or not this is infringement on your 4th Amendment rights actually depends greatly on how the law is applied. If the FCC is asserting the right to enter any house because there is a phone or a wireless device inside, it's obviously infringement. The FCC has lawyers, and knows this, so there's little chance they would adopt such a tactic. All of the cases mentioned in the article related to fairly powerful transmitters that were being used in a way such that the violation of FCC regs could be detected by someone miles from the source. That means that 1) by the time the FCC directionalizes the signal and shows up at your door, they already have probably cause and could get a warrant if they needed it, and 2) the FCC could reasonably assert in court that the device is not something that most people have in their house, and is a sophisticated enough device that the fairly uncontroversial right of administrative inspection to have a look at that particular piece of equipment.
The stock price will likely not reach those heights again not because Microsoft is fundamentally in trouble, but because the market primarily values growth. Microsoft already owns a piece of damn near every computer in the world, so there's really nowhere to go but down; their non-core offerings have, at best, a checkered history and don't inspire confidence in investors.
MS has been transitioning out of the 'growth' mold in the assessment of stock pickers for years. That's why the price is down, and is staying down. Paying out dividends is not a ploy to buoy the stock price, as the stock is already training at a premium way above the dividend value; paying dividends is just what a reasonable Board does in response to a huge excess of cash that can't be reasonably invested in growth. They're a publicly traded company and have to act in the interest of the shareholder.
As to their revenues... they took modest losses in one of the worst economies since the Depression, during a period when their last major product release is several years in the mirror, and people are holding out on major purchases as the next one comes into view. That's a pretty enviable position to most companies.
I know a lot of people who have done both. It depends a great deal on 1) what the masters program is, and 2) what kind of work you can get right now.
If the masters program consists of taking a few more classes, doing some problem sets, and a few small programming projects, skip it. Employers will (rightfully) lump you in along with every other undergrad or BS + MS who finished simply by following a pre-planned track.
If, on the other hand, you're actually doing independent work- working on some large, independent/group projects, doing real research, maybe getting your name on a paper or two and building some decent prototype/POC systems, then the masters may give you a real advantage, because you'll be able to talk about real experience working on projects, but still have a wider theoretical base than a lot of people fresh out of school. A really applied, hands on MS program gives you the best of both worlds, in a way. At some large companies, a MS is a gateway to higher-level work as an architect or other high-level designer/developer- whether by policy or by happenstance, most of the people you compete with for those positions will have post-grad degrees.
What kind of work can you get? Keep in mind that the hiring market is very competitive right now; you may see yourself dumped into a support/low grade technical positions as a fresh grad that doesn't provide great experience. If you can spend two years actually writing real code that gets used in a production system, the experience might be more valuable. If you're going to be doing tech support or fire-and-forget CGI forms for two years, the real world work might be much less useful to your ultimate career than doing the MS.
I came out with a BS and started working, but I had a degree from a well-reputed school and good internship experience. A lot of the guys I knew in my office had bachelors degrees from local schools, and they started out doing support and incidental minor scripting. My starting job was as an engineer, on the other hand. The lesson for me was that a solid education (which the MS can be a big part of) can leapfrog you past some of the duller entry-level busy work.
My advice would be:
1) Talk to people who have done the MS program. What did they do? Are there opportunities to do real research or project work that will set you apart from other people who took a ton of classes?
2) Apply for a few jobs and see what you can get. If you can get a job at a good company that will take an interest in your career development (usually means a larger company- small companies are very friendly, but often lack the resources to really develop their people) and will pay you well, that might be convincing for you. If you're going to be punching a clock doing work that doesn't advance your career (there are plenty of people with BS's in Software Engineering and Computer Science doing what is essentially tech support that could easily be done by someone with an associates degree or a self-study with an A+ cert), the MS will probably offer you better options.
3) Make a real assessment of what you're like as a student. Getting the most out of a MS program will require that you are able to manager yourself and challenge yourself, and take on big commitments without someone standing over you forcing you to do it. If that sounds like you, great. On the other hand, if you sat in the back of every classes and did fine while avoiding notice and not getting involved in much (frankly, I was this type of student!), a MS might end up just being a few more lines on your transcript without much to contribute.
Dude... Silicon Valley is widely touted as the best 'biking weather' region in the country. Yeah, we get an hour of drizzle every day in February, but then it stops raining entirely until December or so. I've lived in the mid-west too, and there's just no comparison in terms of biking weather. It rains more and harder, plus more unpredictably, you have ice and snow to contend with, and the humidity entails constant showering when you ride. Count your blessings for being a biker here, but don't go trying to tell people in Indiana that it isn't that bad. There are entire seasons back home when I wouldn't really consider biking a viable mode of transportation for any significant distance for someone who has to go to work. Out here? Any day of the year. Biking is great, but geography matters.
Bingo. Get rid of every bad teacher in every school system in one fell swoop, and what have you got? Utopia? Nope. A school system where the average class size is 67.
People claim that the union rules that favor seniority over performance discourage competent young people from becoming teachers. I've known dozens of current and former teachers, and they've never cited this as a reason for wanting to leave the profession. On the other hand, getting paid less than anyone else they know with a graduate degree, having to cope with students who don't want to be there and who were failed by the system a decade before you got them, having very little choice in their teaching methods and curriculum, being 'voluntold' for various after-hours activities without compensation, while not having any control or flexibility over your schedule drives a lot more off.
This is particularly evident in the math, science and technology fields. Even if you really enjoy teaching these subjects, there are very few incentives to go into teaching and a lot of disincentives. Until we make the occupation competitive with work in the private sector, it's going to continue to be marked by shortages and poor performers.
But this problem isn't checking a number theoretic property; it's applying a heuristic to a small pool of data points that may have been passed to you by a hostile reporter. Nothing indicates that this problem is significantly harder to provide a solution to programatically than to check programatically. Plus, the attacker gets a free oracle that tells you if you've created a good set of attack data. Let one real person register through the system, capture their data, and add a small amount of randomness to the timing and it would appear that you have permanently broken the system; I don't know how you could exclude an attacker doing that without also excluding a lot of actual users.
That still leaves the system vulnerable to a replay attack- modify the client-side JS to record the sequence of events in a successful login, and then play them back later. If you're using the timing between events to determine if a user is human, you have the problem that Ajax runs asynchronously; the timing between events being sent to the server isn't going to be the same as the timing between events. You'll probably also want to batch sending events so that you keep the app responsive. Both those things mean you need to record timing information in the data you send over, which means that you can't trust the timing data because it comes from the client.
You can make a derivative work from a public domain work and then license that under a more restrictive license. Happens all the time. Say, for instance, I was a creatively bankrupt entertainment company whose mascot was a disease carrying vermin. I could just dig up old public domain works- say, fairy tales, or stories by Victor Hugo- and make my own cinematic version of them- add a few musical numbers, perhaps. Then I assert copyright over the derivative work. Public domain doesn't travel with the content in the way the GFDL/CC licenses are- derivative works are considered new creations, provided that they are sufficiently different from the source.
Not everything will be dual licensed. In particular, this allows Wikipedia to incorporate a large amount of media (images, sound, and video) that are CC-BY-SA licensed but aren't GFDL licensed. It also allows other projects that use CC-BY-SA (like other Wikis) to incorporate Wikipedia material without having to comply with the GFDL.
I imagine attribution is necessary to make it possible to dual license with the GFDL going forward. GFDL requires attribution, which is one reason why things like preserving page history in an article merge are considered important; the page history is essentially the GFDL-required attribution list for the entire article.
How about this for a reason: the reason it's long is that the GFDL is encumbered by a number of clauses and options that are totally inappropriate for Wikipedia or a project like it. Their presence in the license terms can be confusing and off-putting to contributors (who will read things like 'We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for free software'), and contributes nothing to the project.
Some of those particular options present in the license make GFDL content incompatible with Wikipedia. That means that content that is brought in, even though it is ostensibly under the "right" license, has to be scrutinized to ensure that the particular GFDL options that are used aren't going to present problems down the road. The proposed CC license would have no such possible wrinkles.
The GP poster is correct that the CC license has no ideological preamble that goes into specific ideology; compare the GFDL and the CC license in question. The Wikipedia ethos/ideology and the Gnu Foundation take on things are not identical; therefore, it makes more sense to use a license that is not specifically tied to terms and ideas borrowed from GNU.
Finally, GFDL is a barrier to the incorporation of a lot of good, free material into Wikipedia. CC is a much more common licensing type for non-software related things, like photographs. Getting and keeping good, free images to illustrate articles is a constant struggle on Wikipedia. It is made more difficult by the fact that very few people are posting new images with GFDL licensing, but there are a lot of people (or at least a lot relative to people using GFDL) using a Creative Commons license. A lot of media resources that Wikipedia currently can't use would be made accessible by this change.
Because one of the conditions they agreed to when the submitted the work was that they granted permission for just such a change at a later date without their active consent. They essentially signed a contract that said 'by signing this contract, you grant us to change the contract that you signed in certain ways at a later date, without needing to ask you.' Terrible idea to agree to that if you're signing a real estate contract. Perfectly reasonable if you're donating content to a free encyclopedia that needs the flexibility to adapt to licenses that provide them with better options for distribution and incorporation of free content.
Fool! You've bought the oldest trick in the book, the 'blame the Mormons' line. I've heard through private sources that most Microsoft execs are actually vampires Jehova's Witnesses and are worried that alcohol consumption would dilute the blood volume they need for their artificial blood cloning experiments. All of Microsoft's purported 'software development' is just a front for establishing a solid breeding stock in the Seattle area so that the vampires can repopulate the Earth when the Conflicker virus finally triggers in 2012. Think you can prove me wrong? Then answer this: if Microsoft is really a software company why is their operating system such rubbish?
We're through the looking glass, people.
I think you're confusing a possible candidate for the historical inspiration for Atlantis with the Black Sea deluge theory. Santorini might have been Plato's inspiration for Atlantis, but the destruction caused was nowhere near early or widespread enough to have given rise to Sumerian myths.
I think since the dead plankton re-entered the food chain, the carbon that it sequestered will eventually be released through the respiration of the higher-level predators in a gaseous form that will again limit the ability of the ocean water to absorb carbon. The hope with sequestration was that the dead plankton would sink to the bottom, be covered quickly with sediment, and essentially become a permanent carbon deposit. It's like the difference between planting a tree, cutting it down, and burying it vs. cutting it down and burning it. I think the hope was by creating a huge, localized bloom, you would create more food than the food chain could absorb, but the food chain is proving more able to adapt to a sudden surge in food production than anticipated.
No, on several accounts. First of all, share holders aren't employees. They're ownership. If six guys own a gas station, and one guy feels he is being screwed by the other five, he can sue them and say that they are in violation of the ownership agreement, aren't paying him his share of the profits, have mismanaged money, etc. The other five guys can't do anything about that, because everyone who is an owner has a right to have their ownership rights defended.
Second, the bonuses in question were written into employment contracts. The inviolability of a contract between two parties is pretty much a bedrock principle of law in this country, though subject to legal review if the contract is grossly exploitative or entered into under duress or something like that. The gas station signed a contract in April that said "work for us for at least a year and a half, and we'll pay you a bonus." That contract was entered into by the officers of the company and the employee. Once that contract is established, it can't be modified without the consent of the parties involved, unless there's a contingency in the contract to allow some alteration. So if the contract is legit, new ownership can't say that they're going to set the contract aside. They have to honor the contract that was previously established.
Thirdly, the government essentially has a 'silent' stake in AIG, because if they were taking an active hand in running the company, Rush Limbaugh would have a massive aneurysm from yelling 'socialism!' at the top of his lungs for up to an hour at a time. He's a national treasure, so we can't have that. Instead, we have a half-assed agreement where the government bought a huge stake in this company, but isn't taking any role in its management. It's like if someone's grandmother bought 80% of a company, and then had a massive stroke that left her comatose, but she had failed to assign her power of attorney to anyone. The government, in this scenario, is the bedridden, comatose grandmother, on paper controlling vast amounts of money and power, but in practice unable to exercise any control over AIG or her bladder.
Because soon, you won't be able to afford internet access.
Because if you took an adjustable rate mortgage in order to buy a house, you were probably told at the time by your realtor or mortgage broker or sales agent (entirely unofficially of course, because legally they're not allowed to say this to you, but they do anyway): don't worry about the increased payment down the road. By the time the fixed intro rate expires, the increase in your housing value means that you'll have equity in the home, and you can re-finance to a new ARM or a fixed mortgage. There were thousands if not millions of people who got this same spiel from every financial adviser they asked over the last ten years or so. There were warnings, of course, buried in the fine print and incomprehensible to most people (fact: Buying a house is 50% more complicated than the next most complicated thing most people will ever do. Seriously.), but most folks just trusted the advice that they saw plastered all over the place.
Now that they're upside down on their mortgage and the credit market has tightened, there won't be a refinance in their future. That means they go from having a manageable mortgage payment to one that exceeds their ability to pay. Which means they will slowly but surely move into default unless their mortgage is renegotiated somehow. The more people move into default and foreclosure, the more houses get taken over and put up for sale by banks. This gluts the markets and drops home prices. Which means that when they go to get appraised for their re-fi, more and more people find that they are now upside down. And the cycle repeats, until it reaches bottom (home prices fall so low that a large number of worthy credit risks priced out of the market can now afford a house- this will happen in a few high-value markets like the coasts and major cities, but virtually nowhere else, because in most markets there are too few people who fit that description), or some intervention takes place to break the cycle.
So the bottom line is: no one reasonable ever plans on selling a car for more than they bought it for. On the other hand, selling a house for less than its previous purchase price (or less than the remaining loan amount) is usually a major disaster for your personal finances. ARM loans mean that upside down => no re-fi => more forclosures => lower prices => more people upside down. Finally, the scale of the two products is vastly different. Sell your car and still owe a couple grand on it? Sucks to be you, but most people can work that out. Sell your house and still owe $100k? That's not a loss that most people can withstand reasonably.
Of course, dumping stock options on everyone from new hires to CEOs was meant to tie company health to compensation in exactly that way. Instead, it created a generation of executives who day-trade on the fortunes of their own companies, trying to goose a little tick out of the company stock so they can pull the trigger on an options sale and generate a massive payout. Tying executive pay to a running longer range performance metric is a better idea, but in a sense it just pushes the horizon out a little farther; Congress has a horizon of two to six years or so (depending on which house and which state their in), but it hasn't produced any great commitment to real long term financial or political health in our government.
In a sense, a reversal of sort would be in the long-term interest of many companies. Tell a CEO: "Look, you can run us into the ground or make us the kings of Wall Street, but your compensation isn't going to exceed x% of the companies year-to-year growth." It would create an incentive for slow, steady expansion rather than big, flashy moves that send stock prices up. Unfortunately, there are too few long-term shareholders that would endorse such a scheme; most of them are, just like today's execs, just looking to tick the stock price up enough to make a nice return (and often a nice commission, since they're brokers and fund managers) when they trigger a sell.
Jared Diamond got one thing right in the book Collapse; if you want to meaningfully alter the behavior of corporations and the markets they move in, you have to change the laws relating to a corporations duties to its shareholders. Right now, there is nearly zero incentive for responsible, long-term behavior, while short-term shenanigans are heavily incentivized. Any wonder that this is what we ended up with?
What has gone wrong in Slavic countries that they have a pet name for syphilis?
I would imagine not. These are the sort of small-batch, high markup items that it might be worthwhile to continue producing. I'm guessing at the volume that these things are produced, there's not as much overhead, and less guess work about how much to push into the retail channel. What you won't see is manufacturers trying to guess if they need to press 10000 disks or 15000. "Limited-edition, hand numbered, pre-order only" are like free money for the developer, whereas physical media, boxes, freight, and retailers getting their cut is just a drag on profits.
Maybe he learned something from going blind the first time...
"They'll" send tens of thousands overseas? When last I checked, NASA wasn't really given oversight of troop deployment and declarations of war. NASA knows, however, that the public has a low tolerance for highly visible and spectacular deaths, and that every time such a disaster takes place, the entire manned space program and space flight in general is set back by months or years, and given the budget environment and long-standing criticism of their agency may be threatened entirely.
There are dozens of missions that NASA could carry out that have a lower risk profile. What about this particular one is so significant that it's worth accepting the higher risk?