Signing a petition is very much like grabbing a sign and picketing. On the flip side it is similar to casting a ballot. I don't know which side to agree with on this one.
Remember that a petition, picket and ballot are all fundamentally attempts to exert influence by sheer weight of numbers. Therefore the key consideration is whether the accuracy of the numbers can be verified.
Picketing numbers can be verified by a simple physical count. They can wear masks if they like. No further information about the picketers is required since a physical count is very strong assurance.
However, it's not enough to verify a ballot by simply recounting the bits of paper. You also need to have controls over those bits of paper, to make sure those bits of paper actually reflect the intentions of the population voting. You also need to be able to demonstrate those controls are effective (i.e. work and were properly in use).
The need to separate the vote from knowledge of the voter requires an extraordinary amount of controls over the ballot box. You have controls of controls of controls, and then throw in some independents to observe (which is another control).
With a petition, there is no effective control whatsoever. It's not even worth recounting the number of signatures just to check the totals agree. Literally the only thing you can do is a substantive test: take a sample of names from the list, call them up and ask them both if they signed the petition and if they knew what they were signing. That means the names have to be on there.
Are there any precedents for a UK trade organization attempting to use an American law to force an American company to take down links to UK-copyrighted material?
You are subject to the law of the land that you are doing what you are doing in and no other. In this particular example yes Google has a UK operation and BPI may have an alternate option in using UK law against that, but had there been no UK operations, the only choice would be for the BPI to use American law. In this case I suspect BPI is going for the parent because firstly that is always preferable (if you get an order against a parent, it is easier to apply it to all the subs then vice-versa) and especially when it is in the jurisdiction of more convenient laws. There will also be numerous examples of a UK company using US law against the US operations of another UK company (and they'll have cherry-picked the state too).
Copyrights are under international treaty which means UK copyrights basically apply in the US as if they were works completed in the US by a US citizen.
sigh, sorry my stupid little brother saw i was still logged in and decided to insult people using my account
Nice to see siblings giving credit where it's due; I suspect most people would consider it a blunt but fair assessment of the typical Slashdot comment (counting my own).
Not from Glasgow by any chance? He'd fit right in.
I don't understand this anti-intellectual campaign. Is it so hard to understand that if you don't have a degree then chances are you don't know what you are talking about?
"Chances are" is not the same as "definitively".
A degree is a certificate. It provides other people with a reasonable level of positive assurance that it's holder has a sufficient level of knowledge, a sufficient ability to form knowledge and sufficient motivation to have obtained it.
The assertion does not work the other way around. That could only be true if the education system was the only source for obtaining that level of knowledge, and the testing system would have to be perfect so that all persons of that level of ability and motivation would certainly obtain a degree. The reality is the education system is not perfect and it is entirely possible to learn independently.
We all make similar mistakes (usually whilst well aware of the fallacy) in our daily lives because it is often a useful/lazy rule of thumb that works well enough in certain situations - there is correlation and statistically you will be right more often than not. But, when making a positive assertion about the entire population you cannot discount the outliers.
On a similar theme, acknowledging that non-degree holders can be smart and knowledgeable (with far more than "a decent grasp") is not the same as being "anti-intellectual". Again you are confusing one assertion for another in a non-binary situation. Based on your post I'm inclined to assume that you are also confusing anti-elitism for anti-intellectualism (again their seems to be a high correlation of elitists being intellectuals, though that's not necessarily to say intellectuals are elitists).
Since in their hurried excitement TFA didn't report (or even ask) if this applied to other Android / Sense phones, I see them on my HTC Desire. Anyone using an Android phone without Sense (that is, any non-HTC made Android phone) willing to report? We're all assuming Sense, and it seems likely, but I've not seen any kind of confirmation.
The images aren't there to be sent back to HTC or whatever, they're just thumbnails for the fancypants UI. But there is an unintended security/privacy risk - that a malicious app could upload them, because apps can read anywhere on the SD card (if the app info says they can access the SD card, they can read all of it). OP is quite the dramatisation though, I read it to suggest shenanigans due to that folder being specifically and strangely excluded from the factory reset. That's not the case, the folder is on the SD card none of which is wiped on a factory reset - only the phone's storage is. If you're selling it with your phone (of any kind) you should know to also wipe the SD card.
Also, we don't know what the deletion policy is i.e. how much space they might eventually taking up, this is probably making a bit of an effort to imagine possibilities to complain about.
Another comment suggests "Can be fixed by deleting the folder.bookmark_thumb1 and create an empty txt file.bookmark_thumb1" (which, since being lackadaisical seems to be the in thing, I can't be bothered testing to confirm).
Just to be clear, what is causing this huge increase? I find it weird that there isn't some more general outcry, why is it limited to UCL? That's a huge jump, completely abnormal for a commercial entity, and TFA is oddly scant on this rather significant bit of context.
Googling around a bit I hit this, which follows the old-skool "journalism" thing of finding out what the other side has to say:
The problem, according to NPG, is that CDL has "been on a very large, unsustainable discount for many years," and other subscribers "are subsidising them." UC's libraries now receive an 88% discount on journal list prices, and NPG wants to bring it closer to 50%, the letter says. It asks the universities to compare the proposed new download price for NPG papers, $0.56, with what UC pays for other publishers' articles. The company is also "utterly confused" by UC's estimate of the value of UC authors' papers.
The point is we're preaching to the choir. People already concerned about fuel economy are making a big effort for little gains, while at the other end of the scale there is potential for a big payoff from relatively little effort.
The argument is that using a measurement that actually tells people what they think mpg is telling them, you remove a lot of error from the system.
It's a good point. People are told that mpg measures fuel efficiency and they make a natural assumption that mpg is a good measure that works like a good measure should. People know how a measure should work and if they bothered to think about it would correctly complain that mpg is a stupid measure.
Part of this is due to the public perception of McKinnon being that he's a "bumbling nerd", the asperger's thing merely being seen as medical confirmation.
But there's other things going on here. It's not at all about him facing some appropriate punishment, all his supporters simply want that to be decided and carried out in the UK.
His claims that he practically wandered in, left a few embarrassing messages and that's about it is widely believed. The accusations of damages are thought to be more the cost of the US putting in place security which needed to have been there anyway. The US justice system does not seem to be very highly regarded by Americans, and even allowing for the normal distrust of any foreign justice system, internationally the opinion is even lower. (Even if it is just due to the anomalies that get reported - UK papers tend to print articles about ridiculously lenient UK sentences, American media tends to report the ridiculously harsh ones, whatever, this is an observation of perception, I'm not claiming that is or isn't a fair assessment of reality).
This is amply reinforced by the US's mishandling of the situation. It seems attorneys do not do diplomacy, you say 2-4 years, but US authorities said life and that some want to see him "fry" for "the biggest computer hack of all time". Charging him as a cyber-terrorist very likely didn't help, internationally (and certainly here on/.) there's not a lot of trust for the US when the T-word comes up. The perception is that the US are all fired up up to beat up on him as hard as they possibly can because they're embarrassed and he's to be made an example of. This is fundamentally opposite to the UK sentiment towards justice.
On to domestic UK issues, there was the resentment over the one-sided (at least on paper) extradition treaty with the US. Note also when the act was committed there was no extradition treaty covering this, so the game has changed after the event, and it's widely believed that the US deliberately delayed action to take advantage of this, which as the saying goes, simply isn't cricket. There is also, especially at the time, annoyance at other countries' lack of extraditing people to the UK (ironically, it seems in practice the US has actually been throwing them over to us with vigour).
Then there's the UK government mishandling. Like the way the appeal was arrogantly and off-handedly thrown out by the disliked then-Home Secretary Jacquie Smith. This gave the papers an opportunity to have a go at her and the tired Labour government widely felt to be all too autocratic.
It's now considered a test of the new government's principles, its thumb on the pulse and its willingness to stand up to the US.
I'm not sure how much of this is the doings of his lawyer's PR efforts, but time and again the case has being striking a nerve on numerous issues and he's been on the front pages for years now. It's got to the point that if he does get extradited despite that level of support it's definitely going to seem like something is very wrong somewhere.
Why does the Engadget article say the phone will be available for $199 for the 16gb model? Is that for an unlocked phone that YOU own, or is that just the down payment for the lease agreement masquerading as a call plan?
An unlocked HTC Desire costs £400 in UK. The 16gb 3GS unlocked is £650 ($940), though £440 for PAYG, which has no committment but is locked to a carrier so you don't fully own it.
No they cannot enforce it in terms of sending in the bailiffs. But they can withhold the degree, which is substantially more threatening. Maybe you could get it back via the courts, but I wouldn't bet on it and it really will not do you any favours when your next potential boss calls for a reference.
Universities (the good ones anyway) in the UK are about the research and the students are a pest they tolerate for the funding. Departments are ran on egos and committee politics. Bow to the egos and pay the fine, or appeal if you think you can manipulate the committee politics (highly unlikely unless you are at least phd student who knows the committees, or are friends with somebody who donated a building recently).
I'm no engineer but my reading of TFA suggests -1 Troll is a little harsh.
Cavallaro explained the car is able to move faster than the wind because the propeller is not turned by the wind. The wind pushes the vehicle forward, and once moving the wheels turn the propeller. The propeller spins in the opposite direction to that expected, pushing the wind backwards, which in turn pushes the car forwards, turning the wheels, and thus turning the propeller faster still.
OK I'm speculating in my ignorance here, but isn't this basically saying the wind pushes the car forward initially slower than the wind, but building up momentum that it later utilises to power the propeller (activating stored energy)? The initial bit is fundamentally the same as pushing a (non-propeller) vehicle up a slope to store the energy. Or simply compressing a spring or whatever.
Or you could try going into a bookie and placing a bet, which is unenforceable. Google for your bookie of choice with the words "refuse to pay out" for plenty examples.
I gather the forthcoming Whole of Government Accounts will be broadly similar. Most importantly, they will be using International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and hopefully understandable if you're comfortable enough with the consolidated accounts of a major UK company (and yes even the US is crawling towards adopting IFRS). I'm not sure what the score is here, I thought these were meant to be done for 2006/07 but apparently 2009/10 will be the first set, I think they spent a few years just moving in this direction.
Publication of this Coins data is something different but is a major disclosure. It's almost certainly not going to be of any direct use to the taxpaying public, but for journalists and anybody wanting details on something specific then wow.
I am a little hesitant however. Not many people understand financial information and even fewer are able of putting it in the context of an organisation so massive as the UK government, and UK newspapers and other interested bodies are well versed in manipulating ignorance to their own ends. Even with the best of intentions, the volume of detail here is such that not even a team of researchers has much chance of putting it into context.
There's two key themes of the article and both are inadequately covered by the OP.
1. Criticism of China's mismanagement of their water resource, principally with reference to the humanitarian results.
2. The impact on industry if:
a) China continues to mismanage, in which case industry in China is going to have a major problem.
b) China begins to manage, in which case there is going to be a huge opportunity for water supply industries.
Industry itself is given some of the blame but their focus is rightly on the government. It is their responsibility for telling Intel that they cannot build a factory there because there is insufficient water for everyone else. Sure, maybe Intel should install a desalination plant or whatever, but the government is supposed to be demanding that as a requirement for building the factory, not relying on Intel deciding it would be a nice thing to do. Even if Intel suddenly had a case of the guilts and built a plant, all that would happen is someone else builds a factory to utilise the water Intel are no longer using. It would be a totally pointless gesture unless part of a government plan.
Am I missing something? Like the section where he did the obvious thing and correlated degrees and economy? Most obviously there's the overall level of economic activity, but the type of economic activity will also be a major player. He points out Nashville has a high density, a quick Googling suggests this is a major healthcare/biotech centre. He also mentions Seattle where apparently the biggest employer is the University of Washington, is another a healthcare/biotech hub though there's also MS, Boeing... San Fran has Silicon Valley, Stanford, a financial centre, oh and apparently is also a healthcare/biotech hub (not sure how much the tourism sector plays into this).
The theory that there is economic value to having smart people together rests on the assumption that smart people collaborate with each other.
It's called employment. Doing business. Economics.
He notes concern over places where urban areas have higher degree density. People do commute, more in some places than others (he is using census i.e. residence data). On top of that, some places have planning/zoning that specifically encourage out-of-centre business parks. You'll still have high concentration of where smart people work in both central and urban areas.
It's becoming increasingly accepted that there is real economic value to bringing a lot of smart and entrepreneurial people together in the same place.
This isn't exactly new, isn't it the reason for the development of the scientific method?
Much of what TFA talks about sounds like confirmation bias (mixed with a little doublethink). This is a natural human trait to place more weight on something that confirms what we already thought, and we use it all the time is a useful rule of thumb that enables us to avoid wasting time - most of the time we were right all along, or at least conveniently wrong. An unfortunate by-product is that we rely too much on a small amount of assurance (considering something proven fact rather than merely an assumption that we've found some dubious support for). Secondly, we are both lazy and do not like to be wrong so are prone to not only biasing our little test sample but also of warping potentially conflicting results into something that either can be discounted or even confirms our fallacy (e.g. ad hominem - "that jerk denied it so it must be true").
People do this so extensively that if you pay attention to your communications you'll probably discover yourself manipulating what you say because you predict the behaviour and seek to counter or exploit it. Probably more subtly than can be seen on the average Slashdot submission though.
This is also a major issue with the internet where we can very easy find information to suit our predispositions, while the volume and general unreliability of information reinforces our willingness to discount anything that conflicts. That is why some people bemoan the death of newspapers where articles were long, informed and reliable enough to have a chance of convincing you of something using facts, logic and reason. Contrast to Digg.
One of the more trite and oft-repeated maxims in the software industry goes something like this: We're not focusing on security because our customers aren't asking for it.
Most people don't ask for security because they already assume there is a certain minimum security. The vast majority of things people do is very heavily regulated, though government, industry codes and at a minimum market forces. It's also deeply implicit in corporate branding - the whole point of which is "trust us".
Yeah. You won't need more than 1Gig of RAM, and the slowest processor processor you can get with a Windows 7 bundle should be plenty enough for IE, Office, and Adobe Reader, which is pretty much the basics across the board in the Corporate world.
Sigh. That's possibly true if "corporate world" runs Excel one window at a time. But most of us don't.
Here's what was running all at once for most of today, bearing in mind that Windows eats most of that first gig:
- 2x large excel files
- Accounts production main module (productivity software)
- Accounts production module
- Tax module
- Sage or Quickbooks (client bookkeeping package; if client doesn't do their housekeeping it can be slow enough by itself on a 2gb machine)
- Outlook
- Norton
- In and out of: IE (yes, work use), Word, Adobe Reader, various other apps frequently.
The C2Duo isn't much of an issue, most of the time it's almost idle but in office work it's the 100% peaks that matter. It's irritating (and usually leads to a break in thought and then chatting) while the whole system is unresponsive when the productivity software is producing a report, but OK that only happens say every hour or so and our software is quite CPU intensive at this.
Memory (and, to a lesser extent, HDD speeds) is much more significant because, on my 2gb machine, the swapfile is constantly grinding. While working within one app it's OK and almost entertaining to watch figures flutter across the page like a train station arrivals board as I change a number somewhere amid a wash of formulae. But I'm flicking between all these apps constantly and there is a real delay as it parks one app onto the drive and reloads another back into memory.
We have a couple of laptops with 3gb ram and 7200rpm SATA drives and they are a hell of a lot faster. Incidentally the cost of adding an extra 1gb ram to the Dell PC I just had a quick look at is less than 1 hour at my chargeout rate - if it saves me 15 seconds PER DAY waiting for the computer it pays for itself within a year*, and I reckon it would save me easily 5 minutes per day (a fair chunk just on boot).
The thing to remember is computers are (supposedly) productivity tools, being utilised most of the working day by - in most cases - the most expensive running cost in the business by several orders of magnitude. The hardware is cheap, the person using it certainly is not.
(*In case you're working that out, yes we do get great holidays in the UK compared to NA. Well, amount of holiday time, perhaps not quality of actual holiday. Alternately, if you're wondering what kind of loser actually works that out, well I did hint I was an accountant with plenty time sitting around waiting for computers).
I think you're misinterpreting there. Most people firstly express what they at least claim to be prepared to spend their money on, detail how that is not on offer and then go on to describe how they achieve what they want through piracy as an alternative.
The first part is their right as a consumer while the latter is never argued to be a right but rather an ability. Perhaps the confusion arises from that ability strengthening their bargaining position (however unfairly) with respect to their consumer rights.
Personally, I respect the right of creators to own their ideas more than I respect the right to consume because I respect creators more than consumers. It takes ingenuity to create but none to consume
A consumer is in a position to consume because he has already created. Maybe he has created something for his own consumption or maybe he has traded it for something else to consume. Piracy is an exception that proves the general rule, because as explained earlier people feel compelled to justify why they have departed from it.
There was actually a time in this country, before "deregulation" when banks made money from taking in deposits, lending that money out and charging interest.
Yep, and loans were much more expensive, which is why there was deregulation.
That was it: deposits and loans. And they were able to get rich beyond imagining from that simple, honest business model. They built huge, ornate buildings with cupolas and pillars and marble floors that squeaked when you walked on them. There made so much money that they built gilded temples with a tiny fraction of the profits. Generation after generation, they just got rich, bless their hearts.
That's broadly correct but misleading. Banks needed fancy HQ's here and there because it was critical to demonstrate a strong asset-base to the depositors, who had very little protection back then. Also, "rich beyond imagining" in companies can only be expressed in ratios; a £50 billion (9 zeros) profit always sounds like an obscene amount but if you have a trillion (12 zeros) in equity (most of which will be investment by your and my pension company) then this is just a 5% return. Spending $10m each year for a couple of fancy buildings borders on trivial in comparison yet is important marketing (not forgetting most of those buildings will appreciate in value anyway). Marble pillars was not frivolous boasting.
But then came "deregulation" when banks decided that the unimaginable wealth they could accumulate from the "deposits and loans" model was just not sexy enough. They needed more. Their shareholders demanded more.
Then came deregulation and all sorts of competition. Once, if Ford needed money they went to a bank. Now, they and anyone else go direct to the market and sell bonds - they have their own personal bank called their treasury department. Likewise anyone with significant deposits buys bonds instead of make bank deposits. There is hardly anything in the deposits & lending business that there once was. They aren't making money on your deposits any more so they cannot use that to subsidize the expense of administrating your account. It's true that there's a lot of disgraceful banking fees going on, but then what we actually do as customers is not take accounts with honest up-front fees but instead try to be cheap and go with the account that we hope we can get free. We say we want one thing but our actions discourage it.
We need to be a lot more careful with proposed banking regulation than the current mood. Not every bank was causing problems in the recent crisis. Several banks prudently kept clear of the sub-prime market. They watched their competitors leaping ahead and fought strong competitive pressure to get in on the game. They still suffered a lot of hurt because the entire economy crashed, but they were strong enough to weather it without bail-outs.
Again our words and our actions utterly contradict. We say that banks should have been taking this safer strategy then we prop up the bad guys and punish the good. The good guys SHOULD now be the only ones left standing, reaping the rewards of using the safer, stronger, wiser strategy. But no, we saved the bad guys instead. We denied the good guys their justice, their rewards for doing exactly what we say we want banks to do.
Now good banks are being done over again by having to suffer all this extra regulation and costs. We're even talking about special bank taxes. So you have banks who ran up massive losses, which they can use to offset against future profits - how long until they are paying any tax? The good guys have much smaller losses so will suffer these extra taxes proportionally far more and far sooner than the bad guys.
Without wanting to seem anti-regulation, there is a good argument that regulations tend to set both the floor and the ceiling on standards. If that bar isn't high enough, nobody will surpass it to reach to the necessary point. Any failure has the response - the defence - that all was within regulations.
I hope they repeat the free Portal with the Linux client. I've gotten my computer-illiterate flatmates ("roomies" or whatever) using Ubuntu (utterly painless except for iTunes) and Portal could enable the next step - from the Facebook "games" they're mostly bored of to real ones.
P.S. Mac users who have ignored games up to now: most of the titles in the/. post are pretty much dead now really, but:
- Portal is arguably the most fun little 1 player game available, and is strongly recommended whether free or not;
- HL2 is arguably the highest quality full-size 1 player game available, a little dated but still well worth it;
- TF2 is arguably the most fun multiplayer game that still has lots (and lots!) of full servers to play on, so many there are plenty of servers suitable for new players.
(well, of the first-person type games anyway, which tend to be the most popular)
Never mind technology, look at behaviour. Anything we don't understand is at best disregarded as "ritual" and at worst some elaborate fantasy is concocted that we don't have, nor could possibly hope to obtain, any evidence to support. (Not that I can be bothered to put in some evidence to support this argument, but this is/. after all).
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that a petition, picket and ballot are all fundamentally attempts to exert influence by sheer weight of numbers. Therefore the key consideration is whether the accuracy of the numbers can be verified.
Picketing numbers can be verified by a simple physical count. They can wear masks if they like. No further information about the picketers is required since a physical count is very strong assurance.
However, it's not enough to verify a ballot by simply recounting the bits of paper. You also need to have controls over those bits of paper, to make sure those bits of paper actually reflect the intentions of the population voting. You also need to be able to demonstrate those controls are effective (i.e. work and were properly in use).
The need to separate the vote from knowledge of the voter requires an extraordinary amount of controls over the ballot box. You have controls of controls of controls, and then throw in some independents to observe (which is another control).
With a petition, there is no effective control whatsoever. It's not even worth recounting the number of signatures just to check the totals agree. Literally the only thing you can do is a substantive test: take a sample of names from the list, call them up and ask them both if they signed the petition and if they knew what they were signing. That means the names have to be on there.
truth
I LOL'd
You are subject to the law of the land that you are doing what you are doing in and no other. In this particular example yes Google has a UK operation and BPI may have an alternate option in using UK law against that, but had there been no UK operations, the only choice would be for the BPI to use American law. In this case I suspect BPI is going for the parent because firstly that is always preferable (if you get an order against a parent, it is easier to apply it to all the subs then vice-versa) and especially when it is in the jurisdiction of more convenient laws. There will also be numerous examples of a UK company using US law against the US operations of another UK company (and they'll have cherry-picked the state too).
Copyrights are under international treaty which means UK copyrights basically apply in the US as if they were works completed in the US by a US citizen.
Nice to see siblings giving credit where it's due; I suspect most people would consider it a blunt but fair assessment of the typical Slashdot comment (counting my own).
Not from Glasgow by any chance? He'd fit right in.
"Chances are" is not the same as "definitively".
A degree is a certificate. It provides other people with a reasonable level of positive assurance that it's holder has a sufficient level of knowledge, a sufficient ability to form knowledge and sufficient motivation to have obtained it.
The assertion does not work the other way around. That could only be true if the education system was the only source for obtaining that level of knowledge, and the testing system would have to be perfect so that all persons of that level of ability and motivation would certainly obtain a degree. The reality is the education system is not perfect and it is entirely possible to learn independently.
We all make similar mistakes (usually whilst well aware of the fallacy) in our daily lives because it is often a useful/lazy rule of thumb that works well enough in certain situations - there is correlation and statistically you will be right more often than not. But, when making a positive assertion about the entire population you cannot discount the outliers.
On a similar theme, acknowledging that non-degree holders can be smart and knowledgeable (with far more than "a decent grasp") is not the same as being "anti-intellectual". Again you are confusing one assertion for another in a non-binary situation. Based on your post I'm inclined to assume that you are also confusing anti-elitism for anti-intellectualism (again their seems to be a high correlation of elitists being intellectuals, though that's not necessarily to say intellectuals are elitists).
Since in their hurried excitement TFA didn't report (or even ask) if this applied to other Android / Sense phones, I see them on my HTC Desire. Anyone using an Android phone without Sense (that is, any non-HTC made Android phone) willing to report? We're all assuming Sense, and it seems likely, but I've not seen any kind of confirmation.
The images aren't there to be sent back to HTC or whatever, they're just thumbnails for the fancypants UI. But there is an unintended security/privacy risk - that a malicious app could upload them, because apps can read anywhere on the SD card (if the app info says they can access the SD card, they can read all of it). OP is quite the dramatisation though, I read it to suggest shenanigans due to that folder being specifically and strangely excluded from the factory reset. That's not the case, the folder is on the SD card none of which is wiped on a factory reset - only the phone's storage is. If you're selling it with your phone (of any kind) you should know to also wipe the SD card.
Also, we don't know what the deletion policy is i.e. how much space they might eventually taking up, this is probably making a bit of an effort to imagine possibilities to complain about.
Another comment suggests "Can be fixed by deleting the folder .bookmark_thumb1 and create an empty txt file .bookmark_thumb1" (which, since being lackadaisical seems to be the in thing, I can't be bothered testing to confirm).
Just to be clear, what is causing this huge increase? I find it weird that there isn't some more general outcry, why is it limited to UCL? That's a huge jump, completely abnormal for a commercial entity, and TFA is oddly scant on this rather significant bit of context.
Googling around a bit I hit this, which follows the old-skool "journalism" thing of finding out what the other side has to say:
The point is we're preaching to the choir. People already concerned about fuel economy are making a big effort for little gains, while at the other end of the scale there is potential for a big payoff from relatively little effort.
The argument is that using a measurement that actually tells people what they think mpg is telling them, you remove a lot of error from the system.
It's a good point. People are told that mpg measures fuel efficiency and they make a natural assumption that mpg is a good measure that works like a good measure should. People know how a measure should work and if they bothered to think about it would correctly complain that mpg is a stupid measure.
Part of this is due to the public perception of McKinnon being that he's a "bumbling nerd", the asperger's thing merely being seen as medical confirmation.
But there's other things going on here. It's not at all about him facing some appropriate punishment, all his supporters simply want that to be decided and carried out in the UK.
His claims that he practically wandered in, left a few embarrassing messages and that's about it is widely believed. The accusations of damages are thought to be more the cost of the US putting in place security which needed to have been there anyway. The US justice system does not seem to be very highly regarded by Americans, and even allowing for the normal distrust of any foreign justice system, internationally the opinion is even lower. (Even if it is just due to the anomalies that get reported - UK papers tend to print articles about ridiculously lenient UK sentences, American media tends to report the ridiculously harsh ones, whatever, this is an observation of perception, I'm not claiming that is or isn't a fair assessment of reality).
This is amply reinforced by the US's mishandling of the situation. It seems attorneys do not do diplomacy, you say 2-4 years, but US authorities said life and that some want to see him "fry" for "the biggest computer hack of all time". Charging him as a cyber-terrorist very likely didn't help, internationally (and certainly here on /.) there's not a lot of trust for the US when the T-word comes up. The perception is that the US are all fired up up to beat up on him as hard as they possibly can because they're embarrassed and he's to be made an example of. This is fundamentally opposite to the UK sentiment towards justice.
On to domestic UK issues, there was the resentment over the one-sided (at least on paper) extradition treaty with the US. Note also when the act was committed there was no extradition treaty covering this, so the game has changed after the event, and it's widely believed that the US deliberately delayed action to take advantage of this, which as the saying goes, simply isn't cricket. There is also, especially at the time, annoyance at other countries' lack of extraditing people to the UK (ironically, it seems in practice the US has actually been throwing them over to us with vigour).
Then there's the UK government mishandling. Like the way the appeal was arrogantly and off-handedly thrown out by the disliked then-Home Secretary Jacquie Smith. This gave the papers an opportunity to have a go at her and the tired Labour government widely felt to be all too autocratic.
It's now considered a test of the new government's principles, its thumb on the pulse and its willingness to stand up to the US.
I'm not sure how much of this is the doings of his lawyer's PR efforts, but time and again the case has being striking a nerve on numerous issues and he's been on the front pages for years now. It's got to the point that if he does get extradited despite that level of support it's definitely going to seem like something is very wrong somewhere.
Why does the Engadget article say the phone will be available for $199 for the 16gb model? Is that for an unlocked phone that YOU own, or is that just the down payment for the lease agreement masquerading as a call plan?
An unlocked HTC Desire costs £400 in UK. The 16gb 3GS unlocked is £650 ($940), though £440 for PAYG, which has no committment but is locked to a carrier so you don't fully own it.
No they cannot enforce it in terms of sending in the bailiffs. But they can withhold the degree, which is substantially more threatening. Maybe you could get it back via the courts, but I wouldn't bet on it and it really will not do you any favours when your next potential boss calls for a reference.
Universities (the good ones anyway) in the UK are about the research and the students are a pest they tolerate for the funding. Departments are ran on egos and committee politics. Bow to the egos and pay the fine, or appeal if you think you can manipulate the committee politics (highly unlikely unless you are at least phd student who knows the committees, or are friends with somebody who donated a building recently).
I'm no engineer but my reading of TFA suggests -1 Troll is a little harsh.
OK I'm speculating in my ignorance here, but isn't this basically saying the wind pushes the car forward initially slower than the wind, but building up momentum that it later utilises to power the propeller (activating stored energy)? The initial bit is fundamentally the same as pushing a (non-propeller) vehicle up a slope to store the energy. Or simply compressing a spring or whatever.
Or you could try going into a bookie and placing a bet, which is unenforceable. Google for your bookie of choice with the words "refuse to pay out" for plenty examples.
I gather the forthcoming Whole of Government Accounts will be broadly similar. Most importantly, they will be using International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and hopefully understandable if you're comfortable enough with the consolidated accounts of a major UK company (and yes even the US is crawling towards adopting IFRS). I'm not sure what the score is here, I thought these were meant to be done for 2006/07 but apparently 2009/10 will be the first set, I think they spent a few years just moving in this direction.
Publication of this Coins data is something different but is a major disclosure. It's almost certainly not going to be of any direct use to the taxpaying public, but for journalists and anybody wanting details on something specific then wow.
I am a little hesitant however. Not many people understand financial information and even fewer are able of putting it in the context of an organisation so massive as the UK government, and UK newspapers and other interested bodies are well versed in manipulating ignorance to their own ends. Even with the best of intentions, the volume of detail here is such that not even a team of researchers has much chance of putting it into context.
There's two key themes of the article and both are inadequately covered by the OP.
1. Criticism of China's mismanagement of their water resource, principally with reference to the humanitarian results.
2. The impact on industry if:
a) China continues to mismanage, in which case industry in China is going to have a major problem.
b) China begins to manage, in which case there is going to be a huge opportunity for water supply industries.
Industry itself is given some of the blame but their focus is rightly on the government. It is their responsibility for telling Intel that they cannot build a factory there because there is insufficient water for everyone else. Sure, maybe Intel should install a desalination plant or whatever, but the government is supposed to be demanding that as a requirement for building the factory, not relying on Intel deciding it would be a nice thing to do. Even if Intel suddenly had a case of the guilts and built a plant, all that would happen is someone else builds a factory to utilise the water Intel are no longer using. It would be a totally pointless gesture unless part of a government plan.
Am I missing something? Like the section where he did the obvious thing and correlated degrees and economy? Most obviously there's the overall level of economic activity, but the type of economic activity will also be a major player. He points out Nashville has a high density, a quick Googling suggests this is a major healthcare/biotech centre. He also mentions Seattle where apparently the biggest employer is the University of Washington, is another a healthcare/biotech hub though there's also MS, Boeing... San Fran has Silicon Valley, Stanford, a financial centre, oh and apparently is also a healthcare/biotech hub (not sure how much the tourism sector plays into this).
It's called employment. Doing business. Economics.
He notes concern over places where urban areas have higher degree density. People do commute, more in some places than others (he is using census i.e. residence data). On top of that, some places have planning/zoning that specifically encourage out-of-centre business parks. You'll still have high concentration of where smart people work in both central and urban areas.
*Golf clap*
I'm using Open DNS and since yesterday Google keeps offering to translate everything into Dutch (I'm in UK)
This isn't exactly new, isn't it the reason for the development of the scientific method?
Much of what TFA talks about sounds like confirmation bias (mixed with a little doublethink). This is a natural human trait to place more weight on something that confirms what we already thought, and we use it all the time is a useful rule of thumb that enables us to avoid wasting time - most of the time we were right all along, or at least conveniently wrong. An unfortunate by-product is that we rely too much on a small amount of assurance (considering something proven fact rather than merely an assumption that we've found some dubious support for). Secondly, we are both lazy and do not like to be wrong so are prone to not only biasing our little test sample but also of warping potentially conflicting results into something that either can be discounted or even confirms our fallacy (e.g. ad hominem - "that jerk denied it so it must be true").
People do this so extensively that if you pay attention to your communications you'll probably discover yourself manipulating what you say because you predict the behaviour and seek to counter or exploit it. Probably more subtly than can be seen on the average Slashdot submission though.
This is also a major issue with the internet where we can very easy find information to suit our predispositions, while the volume and general unreliability of information reinforces our willingness to discount anything that conflicts. That is why some people bemoan the death of newspapers where articles were long, informed and reliable enough to have a chance of convincing you of something using facts, logic and reason. Contrast to Digg.
Most people don't ask for security because they already assume there is a certain minimum security. The vast majority of things people do is very heavily regulated, though government, industry codes and at a minimum market forces. It's also deeply implicit in corporate branding - the whole point of which is "trust us".
Sigh. That's possibly true if "corporate world" runs Excel one window at a time. But most of us don't.
Here's what was running all at once for most of today, bearing in mind that Windows eats most of that first gig:
- 2x large excel files
- Accounts production main module (productivity software)
- Accounts production module
- Tax module
- Sage or Quickbooks (client bookkeeping package; if client doesn't do their housekeeping it can be slow enough by itself on a 2gb machine)
- Outlook
- Norton
- In and out of: IE (yes, work use), Word, Adobe Reader, various other apps frequently.
The C2Duo isn't much of an issue, most of the time it's almost idle but in office work it's the 100% peaks that matter. It's irritating (and usually leads to a break in thought and then chatting) while the whole system is unresponsive when the productivity software is producing a report, but OK that only happens say every hour or so and our software is quite CPU intensive at this.
Memory (and, to a lesser extent, HDD speeds) is much more significant because, on my 2gb machine, the swapfile is constantly grinding. While working within one app it's OK and almost entertaining to watch figures flutter across the page like a train station arrivals board as I change a number somewhere amid a wash of formulae. But I'm flicking between all these apps constantly and there is a real delay as it parks one app onto the drive and reloads another back into memory.
We have a couple of laptops with 3gb ram and 7200rpm SATA drives and they are a hell of a lot faster. Incidentally the cost of adding an extra 1gb ram to the Dell PC I just had a quick look at is less than 1 hour at my chargeout rate - if it saves me 15 seconds PER DAY waiting for the computer it pays for itself within a year*, and I reckon it would save me easily 5 minutes per day (a fair chunk just on boot).
The thing to remember is computers are (supposedly) productivity tools, being utilised most of the working day by - in most cases - the most expensive running cost in the business by several orders of magnitude. The hardware is cheap, the person using it certainly is not.
(*In case you're working that out, yes we do get great holidays in the UK compared to NA. Well, amount of holiday time, perhaps not quality of actual holiday. Alternately, if you're wondering what kind of loser actually works that out, well I did hint I was an accountant with plenty time sitting around waiting for computers).
P.S. FUCK YOU Norton.
I think you're misinterpreting there. Most people firstly express what they at least claim to be prepared to spend their money on, detail how that is not on offer and then go on to describe how they achieve what they want through piracy as an alternative.
The first part is their right as a consumer while the latter is never argued to be a right but rather an ability. Perhaps the confusion arises from that ability strengthening their bargaining position (however unfairly) with respect to their consumer rights.
A consumer is in a position to consume because he has already created. Maybe he has created something for his own consumption or maybe he has traded it for something else to consume. Piracy is an exception that proves the general rule, because as explained earlier people feel compelled to justify why they have departed from it.
Yep, and loans were much more expensive, which is why there was deregulation.
That's broadly correct but misleading. Banks needed fancy HQ's here and there because it was critical to demonstrate a strong asset-base to the depositors, who had very little protection back then. Also, "rich beyond imagining" in companies can only be expressed in ratios; a £50 billion (9 zeros) profit always sounds like an obscene amount but if you have a trillion (12 zeros) in equity (most of which will be investment by your and my pension company) then this is just a 5% return. Spending $10m each year for a couple of fancy buildings borders on trivial in comparison yet is important marketing (not forgetting most of those buildings will appreciate in value anyway). Marble pillars was not frivolous boasting.
Then came deregulation and all sorts of competition. Once, if Ford needed money they went to a bank. Now, they and anyone else go direct to the market and sell bonds - they have their own personal bank called their treasury department. Likewise anyone with significant deposits buys bonds instead of make bank deposits. There is hardly anything in the deposits & lending business that there once was. They aren't making money on your deposits any more so they cannot use that to subsidize the expense of administrating your account. It's true that there's a lot of disgraceful banking fees going on, but then what we actually do as customers is not take accounts with honest up-front fees but instead try to be cheap and go with the account that we hope we can get free. We say we want one thing but our actions discourage it.
We need to be a lot more careful with proposed banking regulation than the current mood. Not every bank was causing problems in the recent crisis. Several banks prudently kept clear of the sub-prime market. They watched their competitors leaping ahead and fought strong competitive pressure to get in on the game. They still suffered a lot of hurt because the entire economy crashed, but they were strong enough to weather it without bail-outs.
Again our words and our actions utterly contradict. We say that banks should have been taking this safer strategy then we prop up the bad guys and punish the good. The good guys SHOULD now be the only ones left standing, reaping the rewards of using the safer, stronger, wiser strategy. But no, we saved the bad guys instead. We denied the good guys their justice, their rewards for doing exactly what we say we want banks to do.
Now good banks are being done over again by having to suffer all this extra regulation and costs. We're even talking about special bank taxes. So you have banks who ran up massive losses, which they can use to offset against future profits - how long until they are paying any tax? The good guys have much smaller losses so will suffer these extra taxes proportionally far more and far sooner than the bad guys.
Without wanting to seem anti-regulation, there is a good argument that regulations tend to set both the floor and the ceiling on standards. If that bar isn't high enough, nobody will surpass it to reach to the necessary point. Any failure has the response - the defence - that all was within regulations.
Regulating better isn't simply regulating more.
I hope they repeat the free Portal with the Linux client. I've gotten my computer-illiterate flatmates ("roomies" or whatever) using Ubuntu (utterly painless except for iTunes) and Portal could enable the next step - from the Facebook "games" they're mostly bored of to real ones.
P.S. Mac users who have ignored games up to now: most of the titles in the /. post are pretty much dead now really, but:
- Portal is arguably the most fun little 1 player game available, and is strongly recommended whether free or not;
- HL2 is arguably the highest quality full-size 1 player game available, a little dated but still well worth it;
- TF2 is arguably the most fun multiplayer game that still has lots (and lots!) of full servers to play on, so many there are plenty of servers suitable for new players.
(well, of the first-person type games anyway, which tend to be the most popular)
Never mind technology, look at behaviour. Anything we don't understand is at best disregarded as "ritual" and at worst some elaborate fantasy is concocted that we don't have, nor could possibly hope to obtain, any evidence to support. (Not that I can be bothered to put in some evidence to support this argument, but this is /. after all).