I need proof that it effectively removes or disables itself once it's on there and has no possibility of later command-and-control and could not be directly co-opted by someone with bad intentions before I would call it white-hat. History is loaded with examples where someone or something appeared altruistic but turned out to be sinister in the end.
Probably because the legislative process forces portions of their budget be used for only certain things, and restricts how much can be spent on other things. The process is referred to as an earmark. Sometimes these work out well, if a legislative law compels an agency to do something that really needs to be done that the Executive doesn't want to do, and other times it works out badly, when an Executive needs to do something but the legislative law prohibits or restricts that thing from being done.
To put it into human terms, it's like if you have a $100,000/year salary, but you are not allowed to spend more than $10,000/year on rent. You're probably not going to be very happy with that kind of income but being limited to a residence that costs $833/month or less.
The mighty private innovators and job creators took 60 years to just try to *imitate* what government did over half a century ago, and that's only because the innovators copy what was done before??
All glory capitalism! Boo to socialism!
The Federal Government only funded the project. Douglas, Boeing, Chrysler, North American, and many other companies actually did the development and manufacturing.
The biggest difference between then and now is that back then, the government was willing to spend just about anything that it cost to make it happen, and had the purse to do so. Now, non-government entities, be they public companies, private companies, nonprofits, whatever, do not have the financial resources of the Federal Government, so they're trying to scale what we previously did fast an expensively to something that's not as fast to develop, but is a lot more affordable.
Basically it's not possible to audit to verify that they actually hired the person with the qualifications that they demanded of American workers when there no mandates for professional association to work in the field. Even vendor-accredited certifications (Microsoft, Cisco, etc) don't mean much if the published qualifications do not call for them, nor is there a requirement to have a post-secondary degree as there is no licensing model requiring it.
Right now, IT is a black-hole in that sense. Anyone can claim to work IT, there are no rules regarding who qualifies to work IT, and formal education and certification are not only not always necessary, sometimes they are not valued. Because of this it is very easy to skirt having any sort of outside hard qualifications in a job posting while putting inane crap in to disqualify people solely to remove them from contention regardless of the ability to actually do the job.
There's a real possibility that you are a better programmer than the average Microsoft programmer. Really.
Or more like he's a better programmer than the average programmer. Far too many do stuff like push to production, or edit in production, or just check in a quick "it should work" straight into source control without even compiling it.
That is a really scary thought, given how I've evaluated my programming knowledge and experience.
I don't know, I think it makes more sense to attack the Work Visa Program (or whatever it's actually called) since so many states are so anti-union right now.
There needs to be sane rules on the conditions that must be satisfied before skilled foreign workers are sought. There needs to be a demonstration of prevailing wage. There needs to be demonstrates increases in base salary after posted positions remain unfilled. There needs to be a rule requiring equal pay and benefits for Guest Workers based on prevailing wage and the treatment of others in the company, such that there is no cost benefit to using Guest Workers.
Only public projects are free. And this is IMO a fair model. If you want to hide your code from the public, it means in most cases that your software is closed source. And that usually means you make money with it, where its just fair to give github a small part of it, these are basic economic "supply chain" rules. Conversely, if your code is public, it most likely is open source as well. There is some public content on github which is not open source licensed, but most of it is.
And about learning git, it has a steep learning curve, but once you know it, its real fun. CVS isn't distributed, I really like git for its speed and features like git blame. Sadly many people think git == github.
If I want to hide my projects from the public I'm not going to put them on someone else's server.
things like going through error logs and doing online searches for error codes are for people whose time is worth less than the software is. If it takes me an hour to figure something out, I've already lost money as compared to just buying the latest version of Windows.
Sounds to me like you just don't know how to use the software, and that you don't have enough of an install-base to where you really do have to consider the software expense.
Various Linux distributions have been able to use their package management to automatically process updates sourced from a local mirror for longer than Microsoft has had that option. Linux distributions have had rich remote command-line capabilities since Linux's inception, Windows has only recently gotten that level of immersion with Powershell. Linux has had native-network GUI since its inception. Linux is less resource-intensive than Windows, so less hardware can do the same work. Linux has free integrated programming language compilation tools for just about every language in existence, so one can create any extra bits needed to translate or convert anything to anything else without having to make additional purchases.
Microsoft is currently King of the GUI, as far as server administration is concerned. That's good for them, but it means that people that only think they know what they're doing can really mess things up when they're incorrect.
It's the.com era all over again... "zomg, we have teh social" or whatever the daily buzzword is.
Yes it is. Lots of popular companies have either not figured out how to make a profit yet or have made their profits through means that were completely out of left-field.
There are three ways for an Internet company with no tangible products to make money as far as I can tell, the first is to charge the users for some service, the second is to present advertising to the user in exchange for money from the advertising entity, and the third is to collect statistics on the userbase and sell that data to others.
Github does not charge to host projects. Github therefore must use one of these three methods to make a profit if they don't start charging for use.
I do not understand the love for Github. Admittedly my direct experience with it was in the course of using a huge spaghetti-mess of a curriculum management program called Canvas, but I found it no easier than a traditional CVS repository and harder to use than the package management provided by my OS.
Admittedly I've only been to SF a few times, but I've never gotten the feeling that it has a strong car-culture, and that most of the car-culture that exists comes from transplants that had a strong car-culture where they came from.
I've found the subway and bus system relatively good and the taxi fares cheaper than if I had to pay to park.
Flat-out, the city was not laid-out for daily car use by its inhabitants, and houses with soft-story first floors with garages have proven to be dangerous with the earthquakes. If I had to live there I would probably think really hard about living further south on the peninsula or on Treasure Island if I wanted to keep vehicles, as the city itself is not conducive to it.
As for pedestrian accidents, It doesn't really matter if a pedestrian has the right-of-way if the vehicle cannot stop in time to avoid hitting them. From the perspective of the action that led to the accident perspective, pedestrians are probably at-fault for a lot of the accidents, even if legally the driver is at-fault, especially for narrow streets with parked cars as obstructions. Simply put, don't cross where it isn't safe to cross.
I think that we're going to need a definition here... What exactly is a COA?
There are already classes of manned aircraft that do not require the operator to have a pilot's license to operate. There are rules and the operators are required to follow those rules, but without a licensing requirement I expect that enforcement could be challenging sometimes.
If it's any consolation I agree that RC aircraft need reasonable restrictions. Operators need to not fly over property that they have not sought and received explicit permission to fly over. Operators need to not fly in heavily populated areas. Classes of RC aircraft need to be created so that there are sane rules governing relatively safe child toys as compared to larger amateur rigs and even bigger and more powerful professional rigs.
Slashdot has always interviewed, reported-on, and catered-to extremists. Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Eric Levenez, Linus Torvalds, even people on the opposite side like those associated with the MPAA and RIAA have been interviewed.
I was thinking Youtube too, but I've never played with the permissions to attempt to limit who can view a video.
Youtube's main advantage is that it runs through a web browser, so local applications are not necessary to watch. If the children or the current guardian are not technically savvy it's a lot easier to explaining logging-in to Youtube and then clicking on a link in an e-mail than it is to explain downloading and installing third party software.
Never thought I'd see my self typing that as usually I like using applications rather than "the web" for things, but in this case "the web" is probably the easiest solution.
Does the customer have to pay monetarily, or at least through downtime, for their error?
At least make 'em pay through equipment unavailability while it's fixed. Take the gear away from the customer site to fix it without providing a loaner, and attribute the problem to user-infected malware brought down from the world wide web as the problem while it's being serviced on the bench. They may get mad, but if it's documented that they shot themselves in the foot even if accidentally then maybe they'll learn not to do that.
"We incorrectly published a test update and are in the process of removing it," a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in an e-mail to Ars. The message included no other information.
The explanation came more than 12 hours after people around the world began receiving the software bulletin through the official Windows Update, raising widespread speculation that Microsoft's automatic patching mechanism was broken or, worse, had been compromised to attack end users. Fortunately, now that Microsoft has finally weighed in, that worst-case scenario can be ruled out.
I'm a little leery of the Microsoft claim. Admittedly I am perhaps a bit biased against Microsoft for their having integrated a web browser into their OS kernel such that the OS can be irrevocably compromised through a simple web page, but even without that history, that company is large enough that anyone in public relations to make the, "our bad," announcement might not have any idea what actually happened from a technical point of view. On top of that the formatting of the update doesn't give any clue that it's a test update either, as it appears to make no origin claims (at least by the article's included screen shot) and is simply strange.
Whenever I've done something as a test, I actually note in the comments that it's a damn test. I also note that I put it there. Microsoft might not want to publicly attribute something to a particular developer to intentionally obfuscate the development process from the user, but they still should have used something that identifies it as a test to the average person, and used something to make it clear to them that it's attributed to a specific person.
I'm willing to accept a couple of lines of small text on a page within a box labelled that it's an ad.
Come to think of it, had we not had ads with audio, ads that popped-up, ads that popped-under, ads that moved around on the screen to avoid the cursor, ads that spawned more ads, ads that hijacked DNS, ads that hijacked Windows Socket Services, I probably would have even been okay with a small number of appropriately-positioned graphical ads, basically the equivalent of a magazine or newspaper's ad content but with the potential for simple animated GIFs. Early on the advertisers fooled me once, I will not give them the opportunity to fool me again, as ad-blocking software, javascript-blocking software, and flash-blocking software will forever be used on any and all browsers that I run.
One of the big problems that religions have is a failure to speak-out and act-out against those who do horrible things in the name of the religion. Not all religions suffer this all of the time, but basically all religions have suffered this at some point in their existence.
It's further compounded when religion is itself not the actual cause, or when other causes that aren't religious are lumped-in with the religious cause, giving it weight. As an example, the systemic oppression of the Irish by the English for centuries that included far more factors than simply an Anglicanism versus Catholicism fight, which continued right up through the Troubles, where people that weren't even religious but identified with a religion used that religion as a vehicle to fan the flames of the fight, such that the religion was used as a wedge-issue to maintain the hostility among those who otherwise would be willing to accept peace.
I think we're seeing a lot of that in the Muslim world. A lot of moderate Muslims are not working to stop the radicals among them because the argument of religion or of sect gives them pause, even though the violent radicals are not actually following the religion and instead are essentially using it to further what they happen to want to do, and to convince others to either help (ie, the useful idiots) or to at least not interfere.
Unfortunately when religious sentiment is very strong in a region it seems to take relatively ruthless people to keep it in-check. When Iraq fell and Saddam Hussein was no longer being ruthless the floodgates opened. The same thing seems to be happening in Syria, where Assad has no power people are using their religion to justify their violence against others that have any kind of differing way of life or faith.
The moderates are the only ones that can put a stop to it, but only if they're willing, at a grass-roots level, to do so, and if they're willing to stop their religious leaders when they get out of line. Until that happens this cycle will perpetuate or will require counter-violence (ie, like Hussein, Assad, et al.) to reign it in.
Re:So when are they making something we can AFFORD
on
Tesla Unveils the Model X
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The term generally is halo car. In the past this has meant a car that was expensive when the company had inexpensive vehicles too, as the expensive one attracted attention and people would buy the cars they could actually afford.
I think they're trying to drive demand and pay for the development costs first, then once they've gotten manufacturing capacity and the technology developed, then they can afford to produce less expensive cars. Perhaps they're right, all other upstart electric car companies have failed when trying the bottom-up approach, maybe the top-down method will work better.
The other aspect to consider is the projected lifespan of these vehicles. I admit I don't know what it actually is, but if they're following a model like the Toyota Landcruiser, which for the bulk of its models was intended to have a 25 year lifespan even when used for its intended rough purpose. If the Teslas are intended to have similar lifespans but as road-going vehicles will see many more miles driven than an off-road Landcruiser, then the price for the vehicles might be as ridiculous as it seems at first.
For those that don't feel that they can turn off the TV, just record everything and watch it on time-delay, skipping ahead when the commercials come on.
We've been nursing-along a CRT TV for some time now, in part because I have a widescreen HD tube. Unfortunately even the HD tube lacks an ATSC tuner, so we've used one of the coupon-boxes from several years ago to tune to receive. The ATSC tuner has finally died its final death after having had its capacitors replaced twice- we really haven't missed having TV. Still have a computer hooked up to the TV and can watch things that we choose to watch, but no more planning life around the TV schedule.
(2) Of the few self-identified "makers" I've conversed with for any period of time, most of them have in fact come across as pretentious dilettantes who don't really know much of anything about traditional crafts. Yet they act like all of their knowledge is so powerful and deep. I'm not claiming my sample is representative, but it is what I've observed.
...
I also don't consider that most of my skills qualify me for any special title -- they're just general purpose things that any person should be familiar with, like basic woodworking, mechanical know-how, electronics, etc. Just because I've built some of my own things out of wood and tend to take apart an electric device to try to fix it (rather than throwing it out right away and buying a new one) doesn't grant me any special status -- it's just living life and being a well-rounded person with some practical skills.
That's the bulk of what bothers me. I've built projects in wood, in metal, and in plastic for myself and helping others. That makes me a hobbyist in these fields, not an expert or anyone deserving of a title. I spend a lot of time researching what I'm going to do because I don't have the training to know how to do it right. Without that training I don't deserve any special title.
As far as actual learned trades are concerned, I professionally service computers and electronic devices down to some component-level work like replacing blown capacitors and occasionally soldering-in wires to bypass damaged PCB traces, and I can work with higher level systems like servers and switches. These professional skills have their own titles. I could be called an electronics tech, or a computer tech, or a network engineer and have a legitimate claim to any of those titles through my work. I don't need a title like, "Maker," to make me feel better about myself.
The marketing hype that goes with it is what gets to me. The idea that this is somehow a new thing is a really annoying thing.
EXACTLY!
Go learn how to do all of the cool things that you want! Build all kinds of nifty things! Just don't assume that you're somehow better or more capable when most of the rest of us have just been relatively silently doing these things for years or decades, or pretend that what you're doing is somehow new or novel or unique.
Trouble is, they're wanting to trademark it so that they can prevent people from making toys. Having actually built a Police Box to 85% scale with full detail including light-up signs and a strobing light as a shed around my upright air compressor, I can tell you that even if there is demand for Police Boxes, the difficulty in building them properly where they'd be worth buying/selling is so high and the material costs are so high that manufacturers would have to charge five figures to make it profitable if it's sufficiently detailed. That means they're seeking trademark to prevent the sale of toys and scale models, not to prevent the sale of actual to-size or close-to-size real things.
I can see them being able to prohibit the sale of Police Boxes that are labelled "TARDIS" or are advertised with "Doctor Who" out of Trademark, but beyond that they shouldn't be able to restrict the sale of Police Boxes because they copied someone else's existing design.
Please, read Dava Sobel's book, Longitude, about the trials and travails of Harrison -- it's a tremendous read. And if you ever get to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich (England), look at the Harrison models, they are amazing.
This is a guy who was a Maker -- self taught and more.
They aren't the Harrison models, they're the actual clocks he built. What I found interesting is that the final winning device, the H4, is arguably a really large pocket watch rather than a traditional clock, and was the first device to be unaffected by the motions of the vessel in the water, which were what caused all previous models to fail when they otherwise worked on land.
This guy wasn't a Maker, he actually knew how to do things and how to use hand tools to achieve his goals. He was an inventor that knew how to work in the practical world, at least as far as the principles of mechanics are concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
I need proof that it effectively removes or disables itself once it's on there and has no possibility of later command-and-control and could not be directly co-opted by someone with bad intentions before I would call it white-hat. History is loaded with examples where someone or something appeared altruistic but turned out to be sinister in the end.
Probably because the legislative process forces portions of their budget be used for only certain things, and restricts how much can be spent on other things. The process is referred to as an earmark. Sometimes these work out well, if a legislative law compels an agency to do something that really needs to be done that the Executive doesn't want to do, and other times it works out badly, when an Executive needs to do something but the legislative law prohibits or restricts that thing from being done.
To put it into human terms, it's like if you have a $100,000/year salary, but you are not allowed to spend more than $10,000/year on rent. You're probably not going to be very happy with that kind of income but being limited to a residence that costs $833/month or less.
The mighty private innovators and job creators took 60 years to just try to *imitate* what government did over half a century ago, and that's only because the innovators copy what was done before??
All glory capitalism! Boo to socialism!
The Federal Government only funded the project. Douglas, Boeing, Chrysler, North American, and many other companies actually did the development and manufacturing.
The biggest difference between then and now is that back then, the government was willing to spend just about anything that it cost to make it happen, and had the purse to do so. Now, non-government entities, be they public companies, private companies, nonprofits, whatever, do not have the financial resources of the Federal Government, so they're trying to scale what we previously did fast an expensively to something that's not as fast to develop, but is a lot more affordable.
Basically it's not possible to audit to verify that they actually hired the person with the qualifications that they demanded of American workers when there no mandates for professional association to work in the field. Even vendor-accredited certifications (Microsoft, Cisco, etc) don't mean much if the published qualifications do not call for them, nor is there a requirement to have a post-secondary degree as there is no licensing model requiring it.
Right now, IT is a black-hole in that sense. Anyone can claim to work IT, there are no rules regarding who qualifies to work IT, and formal education and certification are not only not always necessary, sometimes they are not valued. Because of this it is very easy to skirt having any sort of outside hard qualifications in a job posting while putting inane crap in to disqualify people solely to remove them from contention regardless of the ability to actually do the job.
Or more like he's a better programmer than the average programmer. Far too many do stuff like push to production, or edit in production, or just check in a quick "it should work" straight into source control without even compiling it.
That is a really scary thought, given how I've evaluated my programming knowledge and experience.
I don't know, I think it makes more sense to attack the Work Visa Program (or whatever it's actually called) since so many states are so anti-union right now.
There needs to be sane rules on the conditions that must be satisfied before skilled foreign workers are sought. There needs to be a demonstration of prevailing wage. There needs to be demonstrates increases in base salary after posted positions remain unfilled. There needs to be a rule requiring equal pay and benefits for Guest Workers based on prevailing wage and the treatment of others in the company, such that there is no cost benefit to using Guest Workers.
Github does not charge to host projects. Github therefore must use one of these three methods to make a profit if they don't start charging for use.
It does: https://github.com/pricing
Only public projects are free. And this is IMO a fair model. If you want to hide your code from the public, it means in most cases that your software is closed source. And that usually means you make money with it, where its just fair to give github a small part of it, these are basic economic "supply chain" rules. Conversely, if your code is public, it most likely is open source as well. There is some public content on github which is not open source licensed, but most of it is.
And about learning git, it has a steep learning curve, but once you know it, its real fun. CVS isn't distributed, I really like git for its speed and features like git blame. Sadly many people think git == github.
If I want to hide my projects from the public I'm not going to put them on someone else's server.
things like going through error logs and doing online searches for error codes are for people whose time is worth less than the software is. If it takes me an hour to figure something out, I've already lost money as compared to just buying the latest version of Windows.
Sounds to me like you just don't know how to use the software, and that you don't have enough of an install-base to where you really do have to consider the software expense.
Various Linux distributions have been able to use their package management to automatically process updates sourced from a local mirror for longer than Microsoft has had that option. Linux distributions have had rich remote command-line capabilities since Linux's inception, Windows has only recently gotten that level of immersion with Powershell. Linux has had native-network GUI since its inception. Linux is less resource-intensive than Windows, so less hardware can do the same work. Linux has free integrated programming language compilation tools for just about every language in existence, so one can create any extra bits needed to translate or convert anything to anything else without having to make additional purchases.
Microsoft is currently King of the GUI, as far as server administration is concerned. That's good for them, but it means that people that only think they know what they're doing can really mess things up when they're incorrect.
It's the .com era all over again ... "zomg, we have teh social" or whatever the daily buzzword is.
Yes it is. Lots of popular companies have either not figured out how to make a profit yet or have made their profits through means that were completely out of left-field.
There are three ways for an Internet company with no tangible products to make money as far as I can tell, the first is to charge the users for some service, the second is to present advertising to the user in exchange for money from the advertising entity, and the third is to collect statistics on the userbase and sell that data to others.
Github does not charge to host projects. Github therefore must use one of these three methods to make a profit if they don't start charging for use.
I do not understand the love for Github. Admittedly my direct experience with it was in the course of using a huge spaghetti-mess of a curriculum management program called Canvas, but I found it no easier than a traditional CVS repository and harder to use than the package management provided by my OS.
Admittedly I've only been to SF a few times, but I've never gotten the feeling that it has a strong car-culture, and that most of the car-culture that exists comes from transplants that had a strong car-culture where they came from.
I've found the subway and bus system relatively good and the taxi fares cheaper than if I had to pay to park.
Flat-out, the city was not laid-out for daily car use by its inhabitants, and houses with soft-story first floors with garages have proven to be dangerous with the earthquakes. If I had to live there I would probably think really hard about living further south on the peninsula or on Treasure Island if I wanted to keep vehicles, as the city itself is not conducive to it.
As for pedestrian accidents, It doesn't really matter if a pedestrian has the right-of-way if the vehicle cannot stop in time to avoid hitting them. From the perspective of the action that led to the accident perspective, pedestrians are probably at-fault for a lot of the accidents, even if legally the driver is at-fault, especially for narrow streets with parked cars as obstructions. Simply put, don't cross where it isn't safe to cross.
I think that we're going to need a definition here... What exactly is a COA?
There are already classes of manned aircraft that do not require the operator to have a pilot's license to operate. There are rules and the operators are required to follow those rules, but without a licensing requirement I expect that enforcement could be challenging sometimes.
If it's any consolation I agree that RC aircraft need reasonable restrictions. Operators need to not fly over property that they have not sought and received explicit permission to fly over. Operators need to not fly in heavily populated areas. Classes of RC aircraft need to be created so that there are sane rules governing relatively safe child toys as compared to larger amateur rigs and even bigger and more powerful professional rigs.
Slashdot has always interviewed, reported-on, and catered-to extremists. Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Eric Levenez, Linus Torvalds, even people on the opposite side like those associated with the MPAA and RIAA have been interviewed.
I was thinking Youtube too, but I've never played with the permissions to attempt to limit who can view a video.
Youtube's main advantage is that it runs through a web browser, so local applications are not necessary to watch. If the children or the current guardian are not technically savvy it's a lot easier to explaining logging-in to Youtube and then clicking on a link in an e-mail than it is to explain downloading and installing third party software.
Never thought I'd see my self typing that as usually I like using applications rather than "the web" for things, but in this case "the web" is probably the easiest solution.
Does the customer have to pay monetarily, or at least through downtime, for their error?
At least make 'em pay through equipment unavailability while it's fixed. Take the gear away from the customer site to fix it without providing a loaner, and attribute the problem to user-infected malware brought down from the world wide web as the problem while it's being serviced on the bench. They may get mad, but if it's documented that they shot themselves in the foot even if accidentally then maybe they'll learn not to do that.
"We incorrectly published a test update and are in the process of removing it," a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in an e-mail to Ars. The message included no other information.
The explanation came more than 12 hours after people around the world began receiving the software bulletin through the official Windows Update, raising widespread speculation that Microsoft's automatic patching mechanism was broken or, worse, had been compromised to attack end users. Fortunately, now that Microsoft has finally weighed in, that worst-case scenario can be ruled out.
I'm a little leery of the Microsoft claim. Admittedly I am perhaps a bit biased against Microsoft for their having integrated a web browser into their OS kernel such that the OS can be irrevocably compromised through a simple web page, but even without that history, that company is large enough that anyone in public relations to make the, "our bad," announcement might not have any idea what actually happened from a technical point of view. On top of that the formatting of the update doesn't give any clue that it's a test update either, as it appears to make no origin claims (at least by the article's included screen shot) and is simply strange.
Whenever I've done something as a test, I actually note in the comments that it's a damn test. I also note that I put it there. Microsoft might not want to publicly attribute something to a particular developer to intentionally obfuscate the development process from the user, but they still should have used something that identifies it as a test to the average person, and used something to make it clear to them that it's attributed to a specific person.
I think you forgot to check, "Post Anonymously"...
Still, I appreciate the sentiment, thanks for the chuckle.
I'm willing to accept a couple of lines of small text on a page within a box labelled that it's an ad.
Come to think of it, had we not had ads with audio, ads that popped-up, ads that popped-under, ads that moved around on the screen to avoid the cursor, ads that spawned more ads, ads that hijacked DNS, ads that hijacked Windows Socket Services, I probably would have even been okay with a small number of appropriately-positioned graphical ads, basically the equivalent of a magazine or newspaper's ad content but with the potential for simple animated GIFs. Early on the advertisers fooled me once, I will not give them the opportunity to fool me again, as ad-blocking software, javascript-blocking software, and flash-blocking software will forever be used on any and all browsers that I run.
One of the big problems that religions have is a failure to speak-out and act-out against those who do horrible things in the name of the religion. Not all religions suffer this all of the time, but basically all religions have suffered this at some point in their existence.
It's further compounded when religion is itself not the actual cause, or when other causes that aren't religious are lumped-in with the religious cause, giving it weight. As an example, the systemic oppression of the Irish by the English for centuries that included far more factors than simply an Anglicanism versus Catholicism fight, which continued right up through the Troubles, where people that weren't even religious but identified with a religion used that religion as a vehicle to fan the flames of the fight, such that the religion was used as a wedge-issue to maintain the hostility among those who otherwise would be willing to accept peace.
I think we're seeing a lot of that in the Muslim world. A lot of moderate Muslims are not working to stop the radicals among them because the argument of religion or of sect gives them pause, even though the violent radicals are not actually following the religion and instead are essentially using it to further what they happen to want to do, and to convince others to either help (ie, the useful idiots) or to at least not interfere.
Unfortunately when religious sentiment is very strong in a region it seems to take relatively ruthless people to keep it in-check. When Iraq fell and Saddam Hussein was no longer being ruthless the floodgates opened. The same thing seems to be happening in Syria, where Assad has no power people are using their religion to justify their violence against others that have any kind of differing way of life or faith.
The moderates are the only ones that can put a stop to it, but only if they're willing, at a grass-roots level, to do so, and if they're willing to stop their religious leaders when they get out of line. Until that happens this cycle will perpetuate or will require counter-violence (ie, like Hussein, Assad, et al.) to reign it in.
The term generally is halo car. In the past this has meant a car that was expensive when the company had inexpensive vehicles too, as the expensive one attracted attention and people would buy the cars they could actually afford.
I think they're trying to drive demand and pay for the development costs first, then once they've gotten manufacturing capacity and the technology developed, then they can afford to produce less expensive cars. Perhaps they're right, all other upstart electric car companies have failed when trying the bottom-up approach, maybe the top-down method will work better.
The other aspect to consider is the projected lifespan of these vehicles. I admit I don't know what it actually is, but if they're following a model like the Toyota Landcruiser, which for the bulk of its models was intended to have a 25 year lifespan even when used for its intended rough purpose. If the Teslas are intended to have similar lifespans but as road-going vehicles will see many more miles driven than an off-road Landcruiser, then the price for the vehicles might be as ridiculous as it seems at first.
Isn't the more common parlance "marks?" You're the mark! Err, Customer!
The polite term is subscriber. Doesn't indicate as much about the direction of the transaction.
Yep.
For those that don't feel that they can turn off the TV, just record everything and watch it on time-delay, skipping ahead when the commercials come on.
We've been nursing-along a CRT TV for some time now, in part because I have a widescreen HD tube. Unfortunately even the HD tube lacks an ATSC tuner, so we've used one of the coupon-boxes from several years ago to tune to receive. The ATSC tuner has finally died its final death after having had its capacitors replaced twice- we really haven't missed having TV. Still have a computer hooked up to the TV and can watch things that we choose to watch, but no more planning life around the TV schedule.
(2) Of the few self-identified "makers" I've conversed with for any period of time, most of them have in fact come across as pretentious dilettantes who don't really know much of anything about traditional crafts. Yet they act like all of their knowledge is so powerful and deep. I'm not claiming my sample is representative, but it is what I've observed.
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I also don't consider that most of my skills qualify me for any special title -- they're just general purpose things that any person should be familiar with, like basic woodworking, mechanical know-how, electronics, etc. Just because I've built some of my own things out of wood and tend to take apart an electric device to try to fix it (rather than throwing it out right away and buying a new one) doesn't grant me any special status -- it's just living life and being a well-rounded person with some practical skills.
That's the bulk of what bothers me. I've built projects in wood, in metal, and in plastic for myself and helping others. That makes me a hobbyist in these fields, not an expert or anyone deserving of a title. I spend a lot of time researching what I'm going to do because I don't have the training to know how to do it right. Without that training I don't deserve any special title.
As far as actual learned trades are concerned, I professionally service computers and electronic devices down to some component-level work like replacing blown capacitors and occasionally soldering-in wires to bypass damaged PCB traces, and I can work with higher level systems like servers and switches. These professional skills have their own titles. I could be called an electronics tech, or a computer tech, or a network engineer and have a legitimate claim to any of those titles through my work. I don't need a title like, "Maker," to make me feel better about myself.
The marketing hype that goes with it is what gets to me. The idea that this is somehow a new thing is a really annoying thing.
EXACTLY!
Go learn how to do all of the cool things that you want! Build all kinds of nifty things! Just don't assume that you're somehow better or more capable when most of the rest of us have just been relatively silently doing these things for years or decades, or pretend that what you're doing is somehow new or novel or unique.
Trouble is, they're wanting to trademark it so that they can prevent people from making toys. Having actually built a Police Box to 85% scale with full detail including light-up signs and a strobing light as a shed around my upright air compressor, I can tell you that even if there is demand for Police Boxes, the difficulty in building them properly where they'd be worth buying/selling is so high and the material costs are so high that manufacturers would have to charge five figures to make it profitable if it's sufficiently detailed. That means they're seeking trademark to prevent the sale of toys and scale models, not to prevent the sale of actual to-size or close-to-size real things.
I can see them being able to prohibit the sale of Police Boxes that are labelled "TARDIS" or are advertised with "Doctor Who" out of Trademark, but beyond that they shouldn't be able to restrict the sale of Police Boxes because they copied someone else's existing design.
Please, read Dava Sobel's book, Longitude, about the trials and travails of Harrison -- it's a tremendous read. And if you ever get to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich (England), look at the Harrison models, they are amazing. This is a guy who was a Maker -- self taught and more.
They aren't the Harrison models, they're the actual clocks he built. What I found interesting is that the final winning device, the H4, is arguably a really large pocket watch rather than a traditional clock, and was the first device to be unaffected by the motions of the vessel in the water, which were what caused all previous models to fail when they otherwise worked on land.
This guy wasn't a Maker, he actually knew how to do things and how to use hand tools to achieve his goals. He was an inventor that knew how to work in the practical world, at least as far as the principles of mechanics are concerned.