Don't forget that guy in New Zealand who designed and built an inexpensive home-built cruise missile that could be launched from a pickup truck. It wasn't big, but it was effectively unstoppable and theoretically pretty easy to launch and escape without getting caught.
The important part here, is that he built a guidance system for it. Adapt that for a small drone platform, and suddenly you don't need to be at the controls or within visual range of the thing.
They have been unable to make their smartphones work in the consumer market, and they've burned a lot of bridges with their corporate customers.
So... given the track record of being unable to judge the market and put out a solid, single product the company was focused on, they expect to succeed at putting out a variety of products with which they have no experience and know nothing about the market?
Good luck. I expect Waterloo will have some good commercial real estate freed up soon.
Wow. I guess you live somewhere warm, because nobody around here is taking down lights until March at least. In most cases, they're simply frozen to the house until then.
Besides, it's nice to have a colourful light show when the days are consistently overcast and short.
> It looks about the size of a smart phone. All you really need is something the size of a shuffle but with a microSD slot.
If you have a smart phone... why would you need a music player? The modern smart phone is pretty much a portable general purpose computer, and one of the things it can do is store and play audio at or beyond the fidelity capability of headphones.
In the history of bad IT ideas, bitcoin is near the top of the list. The nerd factor is the only thing going for it.
I don't think that's true. It's an incomplete, awful implementation with a community made of a bunch of sometime technically-adept, usually socially-inept, often blinded by greed fanatics.
That doesn't mean the idea of a trustless distributed ledger isn't completely useless, just that none of the current implementations are ever going to be successful in the long term. They've done pretty well at transferring money from 'little people' to Chinese mining operations and scammers around the world, though. They're so good at it, the victims keep cheering the effort on and recruiting new victims.
I work in a unionized environment. All wages are in contractual 'bands', every job is evaluated and placed in an appropriate band based on required skill, risk, shift, education, etc.
This means that, within the band, we all know each other's pay if we bother to look up a job classification and leaf through to the most recent contract's appendix.
We all seem to continue working without being at each other's throats.
Indeed. Snowden should release a letter of regret to the NSA, thanking them for their interest but indicating he can neither confirm nor deny possession of any NSA files as a matter of personal security.
Actually, I think your analysis is off. Their real problem, in my opinion, is that they never got their systems working smoothly.
Configuring a BB server is a bitch, and it all depends on connectivity to RIM, which is a dumbass move. Then they put out several generations of handset that failed during normal use due to design flaws, and then they rolled out BB10 which doesn't sync as well as the older system, and crippled their companion tablets in the process instead of providing the software upgrade they'd promised.
If they'd have run their corporate and consumer sides as seperate platforms, done some decent usability and QA testing, made sure their systems required only connectivity to their home server with a phone-home to RIM only to register a BBM address... they'd probably still own the corporate world. Instead, they screwed up each time they made a change - improving some things, but damaging others.
When all the employees (and, more importantly, the management) want Android/iOS, it's very, very important to keep the techies happy so we can articulate why BlackBerry is a much better choice for security, control, and TCO. We can't do that anymore, at least not strongly enough to justify sticking with the BlackBerry platform.
If you try to strike this woman down, every woman with a militant feminist agenda will stand up and scream 'patriarchy!'.
The best you can hope for is that ignoring her leads to the problem going away - because keeping her in the limelight is almost certainly going to result in people creating policies to 'protect' everyone, and the reasonable voices will be drowned out, partially because they don't make as good news copy and partially because the reasonable people generally have something other than 'advocacy' to engage in, and are busy with it.
Pycon put out a statement that it was regrettable somebody was oversensitive and overreacted to something mildly offensive.
That under these particular circumstances it might have been best if the offended party had expressed the fact that she was offended directly to those offending her (as they were not the least bit threatening) or perhaps escalated it to Pycon security.
That Adria Richards was banned from all future events for violating Pycon privacy policies and making a hostile environment for all attendees, and the developers banned for a year for their part.
Imagine a world where Pycon did that, and stated that there would be no changes in policy as a result of the 'donglegate' effect, because no Pycon policy was an issue in the events as they unfolded.
I need an AI to watch the video for me, erase the boring stuff and duplicate things, and flag and tag everything else based on date & time & categories and people involved, transcribe all conversations, do OCR on everything in front of me, plus make a nice searchable index.
Otherwise I'll never be able to find anything interesting out of the giant heap of boring in my life if I'm ever so lucky as to have something worth reliving actually happen to me.
China benefits from a functional United States. So long as the benefits outweigh any prize that would remove them in the taking, Americans are fairly safe from Chinese attack.
Institutions of higher learning across country should issue a joint statement banning that publisher's books from being sold in on-campus bookstores (new or used) or being required material in any course.
They're against academic freedom, they can kiss academic support goodbye, right?
My Playbook does VOIP and video calling. The app was free, too.
BBM is through a tethered connection to my phone, though my Playbook has an option for its own cellular data connection. I've no idea if that would make it BBM capable, I'm not going to pay for a second connection to find out when the Bluetooth link reaches throughout my home and my office.
You can load Android apps on it if you wish, though you do need a bit of knowledge or just some Google-Fu to find the instructions on how to do it.
Also, still 800 million years before the Earth becomes too hot to be inhabitable. We're probably fine not even putting up some kind of shielding for a few million years yet, so long as nothing happens to radically change the atmosphere's heat retention or albedo.
>If we're worried about Earth not being in the habitable zone it's far easier to do something to change the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth* than to move the planet.
Except that the Sun is heating up and expanding. The day will come when the Earth will be inside the Sun... probably not for very long, though.
I expect that for a longer term solution, moving the Earth further from the Sun is both more practical and more effective that attempting to shield it.
No matter what a corporation pays, they just pass the expense on to the consumer.
The only time corporate tax works is when it taxes a company who's primary income is in another nation. How often does that happen?
In the end, there's only one true income source to tax, and that's citizens. You can tax them on what they own, what they make, and what they do. That's it. Everything else is juggling accounts so it's harder to tell it's all coming out of the same wallet.
Depends on the crime. Crime of passion? Never. Violent crime due to rage issues / drugs / etc. Never.
All sorts of other crimes can be deterred if the threat of punishment outweighs the perceived cost. Not 100% of the time, but it'll reduce offence rates.
While I agree rehabilitation is a worthy goal, the PRIMARY goal of a justice system should be to prevent offenses. Towards that end punishment is used as a deterrent, detention is used to remove opportunity, and rehabilitation is used to remove motive.
Once somebody has commited a crime, *society* comes first, not the convicted criminal.
That's different from what has allegedly occured here, of course, where excessive punishment that many would call torture has preceded trial.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget that guy in New Zealand who designed and built an inexpensive home-built cruise missile that could be launched from a pickup truck. It wasn't big, but it was effectively unstoppable and theoretically pretty easy to launch and escape without getting caught.
The important part here, is that he built a guidance system for it. Adapt that for a small drone platform, and suddenly you don't need to be at the controls or within visual range of the thing.
They have been unable to make their smartphones work in the consumer market, and they've burned a lot of bridges with their corporate customers.
So... given the track record of being unable to judge the market and put out a solid, single product the company was focused on, they expect to succeed at putting out a variety of products with which they have no experience and know nothing about the market?
Good luck. I expect Waterloo will have some good commercial real estate freed up soon.
Wow. I guess you live somewhere warm, because nobody around here is taking down lights until March at least. In most cases, they're simply frozen to the house until then.
Besides, it's nice to have a colourful light show when the days are consistently overcast and short.
> It looks about the size of a smart phone. All you really need is something the size of a shuffle but with a microSD slot.
If you have a smart phone... why would you need a music player? The modern smart phone is pretty much a portable general purpose computer, and one of the things it can do is store and play audio at or beyond the fidelity capability of headphones.
And... yeah, read that the way I meant it, and not with the error in the second paragraph that totally reversed my intended meaning. Damnit.
In the history of bad IT ideas, bitcoin is near the top of the list. The nerd factor is the only thing going for it.
I don't think that's true. It's an incomplete, awful implementation with a community made of a bunch of sometime technically-adept, usually socially-inept, often blinded by greed fanatics.
That doesn't mean the idea of a trustless distributed ledger isn't completely useless, just that none of the current implementations are ever going to be successful in the long term. They've done pretty well at transferring money from 'little people' to Chinese mining operations and scammers around the world, though. They're so good at it, the victims keep cheering the effort on and recruiting new victims.
I work in a unionized environment. All wages are in contractual 'bands', every job is evaluated and placed in an appropriate band based on required skill, risk, shift, education, etc.
This means that, within the band, we all know each other's pay if we bother to look up a job classification and leaf through to the most recent contract's appendix.
We all seem to continue working without being at each other's throats.
Indeed. Snowden should release a letter of regret to the NSA, thanking them for their interest but indicating he can neither confirm nor deny possession of any NSA files as a matter of personal security.
I read all I needed to with Howard Taylor's review - weak sci-fi could have been saved by pretty visuals, ruined by shakey-cam.
They can't advertise it enough to convince me, now. I wouldn't even pirate a shakey-cam movie.
Actually, I think your analysis is off. Their real problem, in my opinion, is that they never got their systems working smoothly.
Configuring a BB server is a bitch, and it all depends on connectivity to RIM, which is a dumbass move. Then they put out several generations of handset that failed during normal use due to design flaws, and then they rolled out BB10 which doesn't sync as well as the older system, and crippled their companion tablets in the process instead of providing the software upgrade they'd promised.
If they'd have run their corporate and consumer sides as seperate platforms, done some decent usability and QA testing, made sure their systems required only connectivity to their home server with a phone-home to RIM only to register a BBM address... they'd probably still own the corporate world. Instead, they screwed up each time they made a change - improving some things, but damaging others.
When all the employees (and, more importantly, the management) want Android/iOS, it's very, very important to keep the techies happy so we can articulate why BlackBerry is a much better choice for security, control, and TCO. We can't do that anymore, at least not strongly enough to justify sticking with the BlackBerry platform.
If you try to strike this woman down, every woman with a militant feminist agenda will stand up and scream 'patriarchy!'.
The best you can hope for is that ignoring her leads to the problem going away - because keeping her in the limelight is almost certainly going to result in people creating policies to 'protect' everyone, and the reasonable voices will be drowned out, partially because they don't make as good news copy and partially because the reasonable people generally have something other than 'advocacy' to engage in, and are busy with it.
Pycon put out a statement that it was regrettable somebody was oversensitive and overreacted to something mildly offensive.
That under these particular circumstances it might have been best if the offended party had expressed the fact that she was offended directly to those offending her (as they were not the least bit threatening) or perhaps escalated it to Pycon security.
That Adria Richards was banned from all future events for violating Pycon privacy policies and making a hostile environment for all attendees, and the developers banned for a year for their part.
Imagine a world where Pycon did that, and stated that there would be no changes in policy as a result of the 'donglegate' effect, because no Pycon policy was an issue in the events as they unfolded.
I need an AI to watch the video for me, erase the boring stuff and duplicate things, and flag and tag everything else based on date & time & categories and people involved, transcribe all conversations, do OCR on everything in front of me, plus make a nice searchable index.
Otherwise I'll never be able to find anything interesting out of the giant heap of boring in my life if I'm ever so lucky as to have something worth reliving actually happen to me.
China benefits from a functional United States. So long as the benefits outweigh any prize that would remove them in the taking, Americans are fairly safe from Chinese attack.
Institutions of higher learning across country should issue a joint statement banning that publisher's books from being sold in on-campus bookstores (new or used) or being required material in any course.
They're against academic freedom, they can kiss academic support goodbye, right?
It's not like there aren't other publishers.
My Playbook does VOIP and video calling. The app was free, too.
BBM is through a tethered connection to my phone, though my Playbook has an option for its own cellular data connection. I've no idea if that would make it BBM capable, I'm not going to pay for a second connection to find out when the Bluetooth link reaches throughout my home and my office.
You can load Android apps on it if you wish, though you do need a bit of knowledge or just some Google-Fu to find the instructions on how to do it.
Procrastinator. :P
Also, still 800 million years before the Earth becomes too hot to be inhabitable. We're probably fine not even putting up some kind of shielding for a few million years yet, so long as nothing happens to radically change the atmosphere's heat retention or albedo.
>If we're worried about Earth not being in the habitable zone it's far easier to do something to change the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth* than to move the planet.
Except that the Sun is heating up and expanding. The day will come when the Earth will be inside the Sun... probably not for very long, though.
I expect that for a longer term solution, moving the Earth further from the Sun is both more practical and more effective that attempting to shield it.
Boy, are you presenting a logical, reasoned argument backed up by history to the wrong crowd.
Slashdot's really gone downhill since I last was hanging around. It's getting more like Fark every day.
Now, what are we going to do for a living after everything's been automated?
This isn't the problem. The real problem is, 'How are we going to allocate resources without work as a measurement of worth?'
This astroturfing paid for by Microsoft.
No matter what a corporation pays, they just pass the expense on to the consumer.
The only time corporate tax works is when it taxes a company who's primary income is in another nation. How often does that happen?
In the end, there's only one true income source to tax, and that's citizens. You can tax them on what they own, what they make, and what they do. That's it. Everything else is juggling accounts so it's harder to tell it's all coming out of the same wallet.
I assume NPR is satellite, not FM? OK, add another antenna connection to the dock.
Depends on the crime. Crime of passion? Never. Violent crime due to rage issues / drugs / etc. Never.
All sorts of other crimes can be deterred if the threat of punishment outweighs the perceived cost. Not 100% of the time, but it'll reduce offence rates.
While I agree rehabilitation is a worthy goal, the PRIMARY goal of a justice system should be to prevent offenses. Towards that end punishment is used as a deterrent, detention is used to remove opportunity, and rehabilitation is used to remove motive.
Once somebody has commited a crime, *society* comes first, not the convicted criminal.
That's different from what has allegedly occured here, of course, where excessive punishment that many would call torture has preceded trial.