I don't know if it's an official plan, but it's a good strategy for the republicans. Whoever wins now is going to be blamed for the recession continuing and will find it hard to win next time. Whoever wins next time (hopefully) gets to take credit for the recovery (assuming that the next president does a moderately competent job) and so will get two terms and their party should get 3-4 in a row if they don't seriously screw up. Now, the Republican party may be too stupid to realise this, but I doubt it.
The left wing in the USA thinks that the government should control every aspect of your lives. The right wing thinks that this can be done more efficiently by the private sector. Both are authoritarian, it's just that your left wants to retain the illusion that you have some influence over your oppressors via elections, while the right wants to retain the illusion that you have some influence over your oppressors via marketplace competition.
The delegates, as I understand it, are not required to vote in that way, they are merely expected to, just as electoral college voters (from states that have not amended their constitutions to force them to vote in line with the population) are, theoretically, allowed to vote as they please for the President. I believe the plan is for the collective wishful thinking of Ron Paul supporters to overwhelm them and make them all switch to Paul at the last minute.
You have to be pretty close to see that a car has no tax disk. They make them a different colour every year, so it's about as easy to see if one has expired too (although, there's some significant overlap, so the colour just means that you need a closer look). If you're close enough to see the tax disk, you're almost certainly close enough to wave an RFID reader at the car.
Also, yes, piracy has ravaged the PC game business
Piracy has been rampant since the '80s (maybe earlier, but that's the earliest I remember). I only know people who stopped buying games, however, since publishers started pushing obnoxious DRM schemes. I bought two games between 2003 and 2010, and I regretted both. Since GOG.com started selling DRM-free games at a reasonable price (late 2010), I've bought 40. I decided I wouldn't give money to companies that were going to treat me like a criminal and give actual criminals a better experience. And no, I don't pirate, I just find other things to do with my time and money.
It really depends a lot on where you are. Before I moved, I was spending a bit less than that and living quite comfortably. Now, on the other side of the same country, that wouldn't even cover my rent (in a smaller flat).
This is a concern even with 'manual' cars. There have been a couple of instances over the past few years of remotely exploitable vulnerabilities in engine management systems, which would allow an attacker to make you accelerate or stop at very inconvenient moments, although probably not override the steering.
While $22.5m isn't much in comparison to Google's total profits, I wouldn't be surprised if it's more than they made as a result of this particular issue. It only affected users who use Safari, have a Google account, and have the privacy setting enabled, and even then it only allows them to collect marginally more data than normal, so it's not clear how valuable that extra data is. That said, a perhaps more fitting punishment would have been to require them to delete all personally identifying information about the users that they tracked, rather than a fine.
That's not the (unofficial) motto. The actual phrasing is 'don't be evil'. The crusaders and many other groups before and after committed atrocities that were fine because they weren't evil, they were just doing evil things in the cause of good. On a more mundane scale, it's easy to say that you do more good than evil and therefore you aren't being evil. Do no evil is a much stronger requirement than don't be evil.
There are lots of stories when it's on-topic to post about Apple's wrongdoings. This story is for posting about Google's. Let's not be partisan here, we can spend enough time flaming both. And probably even Microsoft if they ever manage to do something relevant again...
You're assuming a totally inelastic supply chain. In the case of water, there isn't one. Reservoirs and so on act as buffers. If they are being drained faster than they are being filled, then demand is outstripping supply.
Not sure about Netflix, but iPlayer HD is around 3.6Mb/s, so you really need at least 4Mb/s to make sure that you can keep the buffer full. 10Mb/s lets you stream video without having to make sure that nothing else is touching the connection. 20Mb/s is enough for a couple of people in the household to be watching video at the same time. Oh, and iPlayer HD is only 720p - and the bitrate and quality was chosen because most people on residential connections could watch it. They could easily stream at four times the bitrate, given a large enough potential audience to justify it.
When I went to university, getting 300KB/s downloads on the computer society machines was amazing (even more so because the bottleneck was usually either the 10Mb Ethernet of the last hop or the remote server). Moving out of university accommodation, my housemates and I decided it was worth paying extra for 1Mb/s. We stayed on the top tier for a while, then moved to the middle. When I got a place on my own, it was 10Mb/s. I recently moved, and my ISP won't even offer 10Mb/s in my new place, the slowest that they'll do is 30Mb/s. However, their upload speeds are much slower. The big advantage of the fibre connections is that they are either symmetric or a 1:2 up:down ratio. Even at a 1:10 ratio, with a 100Mb/s or 1Gb/s downstream the upstream becomes a useful speed. With something like a Freedom Box, you can host your own photos and videos, you don't need to upload them to a third party to be able to share them.
Nope. Democracy is supposed to give you a way of overthrowing the government without having to kill lots of people (which tends to be bad for a society, leave it weak in the face of outside aggression, harm production, and, uh, kill lots of people). It doesn't give you options, it just provides a mechanism by which you can create options. Whether you choose to do so is up to you.
Thanks for that one/sarcasm...from now until the end of time, Google is going to be aware I searched the android market place for 'grindr' and think I'm a queermo.
So, which of the following are the reasons that this worries you?
You're in the closet and don't want to be accidentally outed by Google.
You're violently homophobic and frightened of anyone thinking you might be gay.
You are worried by the thought that Google's database about you may contain errors making it less valuable when they sell the use of your personal information to advertisers.
For a $0.99 game or app, Apple's 30% is cheaper than PayPal's 2.9% + 30, and also covers hosting and distribution and a little bit of advertising. For a $10 app, Apple's deal starts to look a lot less attractive...
I've been in web development for around 12 years now, and I most certainly do not remember ever having many nice things to say about IE
As the other poster said, you missed most of the development of the web. Between about 1996 and 2000, there were massive regular releases of browsers and people actually cared about upgrading because they got new features. There were also a lot of sites with 'Designed for IE' or 'Designed for Netscape' on them, so you typically had both installed so you could switch between them. Opera was either ad-supported or expensive, so the two free browsers were IE and Netscape. IE 3 was reasonable, but not especially exciting. Both IE4 and NS4 were massively hyped. I remember them both arriving on cover disks (too big to download on a modem) and trying them both. Netscape 4 was slow. IE4 came with the whole Active Desktop thing (which was slow), but was pretty reasonable. Oh, and didn't crash nearly as often as Netscape 4. IE 5 fixed most of the irritations with IE4, but Netscape was on their whole 'let's rewrite the whole thing from scratch' kick so didn't put out anything to compete with it. IE 6, again, was better.
I had to use Netscape 4.x on Linux machines in university, but at home I used IE for pretty much everything. By that point, Microsoft had pretty much all of the browser market and stopped caring. Mozilla (the open sourced Netscape) pushed out a release, but it was horrible and bloated. Oh, and buggy. And, because the mail and news client ran in the same XUL / XPCOM instance as the browser, when the browser crashed (as it did every few hours), it also killed the mail client and you lost any drafts you hadn't saved.
For a while, I used Mozilla for mail and IE for browsing (IE didn't crash very often, and when it did it didn't crash mail too). Then I bought Opera, and just used Mozilla for mail. Opera was definitely nicer than IE, but it was also quite expensive. I'm not sure if they still do, but back then they also sold it for FreeBSD and NetBSD on a couple of architectures.
You are missing the point of the header. It is something that is sent along with the initial HTTP request that expresses the user's desire. By itself, that's all it does. It can, however, be used in later legal proceedings. In the EU, for example, tracking someone after receiving an explicit opt-out is illegal. If someone can prove that you are tracking people who do not wish to be tracked then you are liable for large fines.
It won't screw Google over. The most relevant legislation with regard to DNT is the EU directive which says you must not track a user if they express a desire not to be tracked. However, if the header is sent by default, then Google can convincingly argue that the user has not expressed this desire. If, however, it is off by default, then this argument would be nonsense because the user must have explicitly enabled it.
I would love to see it as a setting with no default and a prompt when you install the browser, so that every user must make a conscious decision to either be tracked or not be tracked.
MS admitted to pilfering Google's results then they spun it as "their" customers agreed to be screens scraped via the Bing bar plugin
No they didn't. They admitted using the pages that users of the Bing toolbar navigate to as an input in their search results. Google does exactly the same thing with their toolbar, as did Yahoo back when they ran their own search engine, as did Altavista. The entire controversy is that Google believes that Microsoft should have added extra logic that discards results if the page is Google. Presumably Microsoft should also maintain a list of all pages on the web that are search engines and exclude them as well. Only Microsoft, of course - Google doesn't have to do this with their toolbar...
What happens when everybody just throws their hands up and says "Fuck it"? Bing gets their results from Google and Google gets their results from Bing
You make it sound like they're just forwarding their query straight to Bing. That's not what happens. A user of the Bing toolbar has to search for the term with Google first. Google's results will be forwarded to Bing if the user clicks on them. This is then used as one data point in the Bing search database. In Google's manufactured example, it was a page with contrived search terms that returned no results on Google or Bing previously and so this was the only data point that Bing had. On any other search, it would have been a single data point among many others and so would have had a much lower rating, as the Google results themselves confirmed.
Note that the EU, where both Google and Microsoft do a lot of business, have database rights as a legal concept, and so directly copying from Google would be illegal. Google didn't file a lawsuit, because they would have had no case, as they determined internally after someone a bit less prone to hyperbole reviewed their first engineer's experiment.
But it's okay when one is an up and comer, right? You people would be at Google's throats if they had been busted jacking results from one of their smaller competitors.
Google does this a lot more openly. They actually spider the search pages for a number of domain-specific search engines - sometimes the search results pages crop up in indexes, more often the things that they link to do. And, guess what, no one is up in arms about it because it's exactly what every search engine has always done. That is the entire point of getting users to install a toolbar: it lets you track them and use their navigation to refine your search results. If someone installs your toolbar and then uses a rival search engine (which, I hope you'll agree, is a pretty weird thing to do - generally you only install these things if you're using them as your default search engine) then you will, of course, get some pollution in your results.
I can write code a lot faster if I don't care about maintaining it in a few years' time than if I do. There are times when getting something finished quickly is the most important goal, because you need to use it right now, but you'll throw it away soon after. There are also times when getting something structurally correct is far more important, because you (or, ideally, someone else), will be working on that same codebase 10-20 years down the road. And there are also a lot of situations somewhere in the middle, where you need something with well-defined modularity, but it's okay to put ugly hacks inside the modules for later refactoring because, while you hope you'll be working on it in 10 years time, you won't if the company goes bust in six months because it has no product to ship. A lot of developers are much better at one extreme of this spectrum than the other and it's a mistake to hire someone who excels at one to do the opposite.
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I don't know if it's an official plan, but it's a good strategy for the republicans. Whoever wins now is going to be blamed for the recession continuing and will find it hard to win next time. Whoever wins next time (hopefully) gets to take credit for the recovery (assuming that the next president does a moderately competent job) and so will get two terms and their party should get 3-4 in a row if they don't seriously screw up. Now, the Republican party may be too stupid to realise this, but I doubt it.
The left wing in the USA thinks that the government should control every aspect of your lives. The right wing thinks that this can be done more efficiently by the private sector. Both are authoritarian, it's just that your left wants to retain the illusion that you have some influence over your oppressors via elections, while the right wants to retain the illusion that you have some influence over your oppressors via marketplace competition.
The delegates, as I understand it, are not required to vote in that way, they are merely expected to, just as electoral college voters (from states that have not amended their constitutions to force them to vote in line with the population) are, theoretically, allowed to vote as they please for the President. I believe the plan is for the collective wishful thinking of Ron Paul supporters to overwhelm them and make them all switch to Paul at the last minute.
There are plenty of political forums to discuss non-tech stuff.
You mean like politics.slashdot.org, where this was posted?
Its not remotely related to tech or topics that slashdot normally covers
Seriously? Have you been on a deep space mission and not read Slashdot since 2000 or something?
You have to be pretty close to see that a car has no tax disk. They make them a different colour every year, so it's about as easy to see if one has expired too (although, there's some significant overlap, so the colour just means that you need a closer look). If you're close enough to see the tax disk, you're almost certainly close enough to wave an RFID reader at the car.
So? Make the web client use Silverlight. It doesn't need to use open standards any more than Skype itself does.
Also, yes, piracy has ravaged the PC game business
Piracy has been rampant since the '80s (maybe earlier, but that's the earliest I remember). I only know people who stopped buying games, however, since publishers started pushing obnoxious DRM schemes. I bought two games between 2003 and 2010, and I regretted both. Since GOG.com started selling DRM-free games at a reasonable price (late 2010), I've bought 40. I decided I wouldn't give money to companies that were going to treat me like a criminal and give actual criminals a better experience. And no, I don't pirate, I just find other things to do with my time and money.
It really depends a lot on where you are. Before I moved, I was spending a bit less than that and living quite comfortably. Now, on the other side of the same country, that wouldn't even cover my rent (in a smaller flat).
This is a concern even with 'manual' cars. There have been a couple of instances over the past few years of remotely exploitable vulnerabilities in engine management systems, which would allow an attacker to make you accelerate or stop at very inconvenient moments, although probably not override the steering.
While $22.5m isn't much in comparison to Google's total profits, I wouldn't be surprised if it's more than they made as a result of this particular issue. It only affected users who use Safari, have a Google account, and have the privacy setting enabled, and even then it only allows them to collect marginally more data than normal, so it's not clear how valuable that extra data is. That said, a perhaps more fitting punishment would have been to require them to delete all personally identifying information about the users that they tracked, rather than a fine.
That's not the (unofficial) motto. The actual phrasing is 'don't be evil'. The crusaders and many other groups before and after committed atrocities that were fine because they weren't evil, they were just doing evil things in the cause of good. On a more mundane scale, it's easy to say that you do more good than evil and therefore you aren't being evil. Do no evil is a much stronger requirement than don't be evil.
There are lots of stories when it's on-topic to post about Apple's wrongdoings. This story is for posting about Google's. Let's not be partisan here, we can spend enough time flaming both. And probably even Microsoft if they ever manage to do something relevant again...
You think we're dumb enough to turn water plants, then turn them into oil, so we can backfill wells for water?
That depends, will the required subsidies get someone in a marginal state reelected next election?
You're assuming a totally inelastic supply chain. In the case of water, there isn't one. Reservoirs and so on act as buffers. If they are being drained faster than they are being filled, then demand is outstripping supply.
Not sure about Netflix, but iPlayer HD is around 3.6Mb/s, so you really need at least 4Mb/s to make sure that you can keep the buffer full. 10Mb/s lets you stream video without having to make sure that nothing else is touching the connection. 20Mb/s is enough for a couple of people in the household to be watching video at the same time. Oh, and iPlayer HD is only 720p - and the bitrate and quality was chosen because most people on residential connections could watch it. They could easily stream at four times the bitrate, given a large enough potential audience to justify it.
When I went to university, getting 300KB/s downloads on the computer society machines was amazing (even more so because the bottleneck was usually either the 10Mb Ethernet of the last hop or the remote server). Moving out of university accommodation, my housemates and I decided it was worth paying extra for 1Mb/s. We stayed on the top tier for a while, then moved to the middle. When I got a place on my own, it was 10Mb/s. I recently moved, and my ISP won't even offer 10Mb/s in my new place, the slowest that they'll do is 30Mb/s. However, their upload speeds are much slower. The big advantage of the fibre connections is that they are either symmetric or a 1:2 up:down ratio. Even at a 1:10 ratio, with a 100Mb/s or 1Gb/s downstream the upstream becomes a useful speed. With something like a Freedom Box, you can host your own photos and videos, you don't need to upload them to a third party to be able to share them.
Nope. Democracy is supposed to give you a way of overthrowing the government without having to kill lots of people (which tends to be bad for a society, leave it weak in the face of outside aggression, harm production, and, uh, kill lots of people). It doesn't give you options, it just provides a mechanism by which you can create options. Whether you choose to do so is up to you.
Thanks for that one /sarcasm ...from now until the end of time, Google is going to be aware I searched the android market place for 'grindr' and think I'm a queermo.
So, which of the following are the reasons that this worries you?
For a $0.99 game or app, Apple's 30% is cheaper than PayPal's 2.9% + 30, and also covers hosting and distribution and a little bit of advertising. For a $10 app, Apple's deal starts to look a lot less attractive...
I've been in web development for around 12 years now, and I most certainly do not remember ever having many nice things to say about IE
As the other poster said, you missed most of the development of the web. Between about 1996 and 2000, there were massive regular releases of browsers and people actually cared about upgrading because they got new features. There were also a lot of sites with 'Designed for IE' or 'Designed for Netscape' on them, so you typically had both installed so you could switch between them. Opera was either ad-supported or expensive, so the two free browsers were IE and Netscape. IE 3 was reasonable, but not especially exciting. Both IE4 and NS4 were massively hyped. I remember them both arriving on cover disks (too big to download on a modem) and trying them both. Netscape 4 was slow. IE4 came with the whole Active Desktop thing (which was slow), but was pretty reasonable. Oh, and didn't crash nearly as often as Netscape 4. IE 5 fixed most of the irritations with IE4, but Netscape was on their whole 'let's rewrite the whole thing from scratch' kick so didn't put out anything to compete with it. IE 6, again, was better.
I had to use Netscape 4.x on Linux machines in university, but at home I used IE for pretty much everything. By that point, Microsoft had pretty much all of the browser market and stopped caring. Mozilla (the open sourced Netscape) pushed out a release, but it was horrible and bloated. Oh, and buggy. And, because the mail and news client ran in the same XUL / XPCOM instance as the browser, when the browser crashed (as it did every few hours), it also killed the mail client and you lost any drafts you hadn't saved.
For a while, I used Mozilla for mail and IE for browsing (IE didn't crash very often, and when it did it didn't crash mail too). Then I bought Opera, and just used Mozilla for mail. Opera was definitely nicer than IE, but it was also quite expensive. I'm not sure if they still do, but back then they also sold it for FreeBSD and NetBSD on a couple of architectures.
You are missing the point of the header. It is something that is sent along with the initial HTTP request that expresses the user's desire. By itself, that's all it does. It can, however, be used in later legal proceedings. In the EU, for example, tracking someone after receiving an explicit opt-out is illegal. If someone can prove that you are tracking people who do not wish to be tracked then you are liable for large fines.
It won't screw Google over. The most relevant legislation with regard to DNT is the EU directive which says you must not track a user if they express a desire not to be tracked. However, if the header is sent by default, then Google can convincingly argue that the user has not expressed this desire. If, however, it is off by default, then this argument would be nonsense because the user must have explicitly enabled it.
I would love to see it as a setting with no default and a prompt when you install the browser, so that every user must make a conscious decision to either be tracked or not be tracked.
MS admitted to pilfering Google's results then they spun it as "their" customers agreed to be screens scraped via the Bing bar plugin
No they didn't. They admitted using the pages that users of the Bing toolbar navigate to as an input in their search results. Google does exactly the same thing with their toolbar, as did Yahoo back when they ran their own search engine, as did Altavista. The entire controversy is that Google believes that Microsoft should have added extra logic that discards results if the page is Google. Presumably Microsoft should also maintain a list of all pages on the web that are search engines and exclude them as well. Only Microsoft, of course - Google doesn't have to do this with their toolbar...
What happens when everybody just throws their hands up and says "Fuck it"? Bing gets their results from Google and Google gets their results from Bing
You make it sound like they're just forwarding their query straight to Bing. That's not what happens. A user of the Bing toolbar has to search for the term with Google first. Google's results will be forwarded to Bing if the user clicks on them. This is then used as one data point in the Bing search database. In Google's manufactured example, it was a page with contrived search terms that returned no results on Google or Bing previously and so this was the only data point that Bing had. On any other search, it would have been a single data point among many others and so would have had a much lower rating, as the Google results themselves confirmed.
Note that the EU, where both Google and Microsoft do a lot of business, have database rights as a legal concept, and so directly copying from Google would be illegal. Google didn't file a lawsuit, because they would have had no case, as they determined internally after someone a bit less prone to hyperbole reviewed their first engineer's experiment.
But it's okay when one is an up and comer, right? You people would be at Google's throats if they had been busted jacking results from one of their smaller competitors.
Google does this a lot more openly. They actually spider the search pages for a number of domain-specific search engines - sometimes the search results pages crop up in indexes, more often the things that they link to do. And, guess what, no one is up in arms about it because it's exactly what every search engine has always done. That is the entire point of getting users to install a toolbar: it lets you track them and use their navigation to refine your search results. If someone installs your toolbar and then uses a rival search engine (which, I hope you'll agree, is a pretty weird thing to do - generally you only install these things if you're using them as your default search engine) then you will, of course, get some pollution in your results.
I can write code a lot faster if I don't care about maintaining it in a few years' time than if I do. There are times when getting something finished quickly is the most important goal, because you need to use it right now, but you'll throw it away soon after. There are also times when getting something structurally correct is far more important, because you (or, ideally, someone else), will be working on that same codebase 10-20 years down the road. And there are also a lot of situations somewhere in the middle, where you need something with well-defined modularity, but it's okay to put ugly hacks inside the modules for later refactoring because, while you hope you'll be working on it in 10 years time, you won't if the company goes bust in six months because it has no product to ship. A lot of developers are much better at one extreme of this spectrum than the other and it's a mistake to hire someone who excels at one to do the opposite.