I agree and I would add that in expert fields, such as philosophy of religion, they are very technically defined by experts. And all these words have fairly clear technical definitions. I'd suggest that when people deviate from this it is either out of ignorance or malice.
What utter bunkum. Language is not owned by jargon. You are more than welcome to buy your tomatoes in the vegetable aisle without an army of botanists descending upon you to beat you with technical definitions of a fruit, and to use bug spray on flies without an army of entymologists queuing to show you their definitions of "bug".
But I guess that's a matter of perspective and you've just never seen someone claim that atheism is a "faith" or a "belief?"
I'm probably the wrong person to ask -- because of my field of study, as far as I'm concerned "belief" is a very small word connotations-wise. You seem to think it carries many more connotations than I do. A Bayesian network and other reasoning systems are talked about as having beliefs. So if you tell me you have a "lack of beliefs", in a sense to me that sounds like you're saying you're very unconfident in whatever you think. If you've even got the confidence to answer the question "Do you think there's a God", then that sounds expressing a belief against the question.
"Faith" is a bit misapplied, in that "faith" in the way it is used ordinary speech tends to be in persons -- that they'll keep their promises. A person expressing faith in Christ is not merely saying "yeah, there was once this fellow called Jesus" but is expressing faith that Jesus will fulfil the promises that they believe he made.
In general, it's a good policy, to let people decide for themselves what they do believe in and what don't believe in, rather than "tagging" them and presuming to dictate to them such beliefs, or lack thereof.
You've taken a long departure from what's actually been said. The discussion was about the social meaning of words, words being tags that we apply to meanings. At no point did I dictate anybody's beliefs to them.
The only reason you can't apply science to religious questions is because religious types keep telling us "you can't".
No, the reason you can't apply science to religious questions is because science-types keep telling you you can't. The test for relevance would be in conflict with the test for evidence. Science relies on independently repeatable (somewhat mechanistic) experiments. God could turn up tomorrow, perform a dozen miracles for you in front of a dozen of your closest friends, and you still wouldn't be able to publish a scientific paper on it as it's not an independently repeatable experiment. Likewise it is extraordinarily hard to design a scientific question for the fundamental religious question of an afterlife!
For all religious questions that truly cannot be researched by science, neither is religion able to answer them.
Wrong. "Are all men created equal". The scientific answer "well, some are a bit shorter than others..." doesn't really capture what the philosophical and religious question addresses!
People can spend hours logic-chopping the definitions, but fundamentally words are socially defined. And generally, if you say "I believe there isn't a God" (ie, you think P(God) is very small, with high confidence), you'll be tagged atheist; whreas if you say "I'm not yet convinced there's a God, but I'm open to the possibility" (ie, you think P(God) is 0.5ish, with low confidence), you'll be tagged agnostic. A lot of the definitional logic-chopping appears to be atheists wanting the latter category, of which there are vastly more people, to be re-labelled "atheist" -- "hey, they said they don't affirmatively believe in God [yet]" -- to bulk up the numbers.
At the big-U's, of course there will be a latent aversion to prof's lecturing to a camera and reusing said lecture every semester. If I am just watching a video of a prof or reading his lecture notes online, it will be more difficult for the universities to justify the ever-more exorbitant admission cost if it's just delivered online (although most classes seem to be more of teaching yourself than the lecturer teaching you, but that's what college is about anyways, learning how to learn). College has been going online for awhile, but the question of 'should it be' is a reasonable one; will it save students money, or just dilute the college process into even more of a degree-mill spectacle than it already is? Or just create more busywork? I say it depends mostly on the context, subjectivity, and type of degree program.
I bet in 100 years our descendants will be asking what it was like to sit in a classroom with people and how weird it must have been to learn in a group.
I'm teaching a course at UQ that I've deployed some of my own teaching technology onto (hopefully rolling out to the masses soon... ok, maybe not 'masses' but a trickle'd be nice). Part of my theory is that "online" is not so much about pushing teaching out onto the web as it is about pulling the web into teaching. So in my course there's a fair amount of "web" interaction that happens right there in the lecture theatre (more as I add missing features), and that provides continuity that means the discussions you're having in the lecture can be continued out of the lecture, in revision, etc. Universities have never actually cared about owning content delivery -- more often than not the course textbook was not written by the lecturer. They care about delivering the teaching experience. So much so that in the course I'm teaching this semester, we decided to get the students to give about two-thirds of the talks (as tech conference talk+demo presentations) so they'd get some experience not just building tech but also explaining it and teaching their peers. Lectures aren't just about "reading out the notes", and online isn't just about "put a video on iTunes U or Lectopia.
Now, there are other types of taxes. Estate taxes, tariffs, capital gains taxes. Those are charged at different rates. Capital gains are charged at a rate ranging from 0 to 15%, Note that rich people pay a higher rate on gains than poor people, also. However, if a person makes 90% of his income from capital gains, and you average together the different types of taxes he pays, the overall tax burden on the rich guy might be lower.
This is deliberate. Capital gains taxes are low on purpose, because those drive investment.
Fundamentally what this means is that if you invest money (as only those with money are able to) you are taxed at a low rate but if you invest labour (as those without money are required to) you are taxed at a high rate.
The problem is then compounded because it is relatively easy for the wealthy to transform their salary into a capital gain (the reason tech CEOs often take $1 salaries is because salary is the least tax-efficient kind of remuneration, whereas getting paid in options has only a 15% tax rate).
Any dollar earned in the US is subject to taxation - regardless of the domicile of the company. The only benefit to forming an overseas shell corporation is to defer US taxation on money earned abroad; that's what Google, Apple, Microsoft and the like have foreign offices - they can keep the earnings overseas without paying US taxes. But for money earned in the US - regardless of the country of incorporation - there are US corporate income taxes to be paid. And if you're a US company, you also have to pay US taxes on money earned overseas. Thus you can see why companies set up overseas offices and subsidiaries.
You miss the point of the accounting. The companies also have overseas offices in order to charge the US parent company fees to lower the US company's taxable profits. "We earned $1 in the US, but we had to pay $0.99 in licensing fees to our Irish subsidiary. This was a necessary cost of doing business to earn the $1 so is deductible from out taxable profits. Accordingly we should only be taxed on $0.01 in the US, and the subsidiary should be taked on the $0.99 in Ireland... except it in turn has to pay some fees to another subsidiary..." Via accounting techniques called the "Double Irish" and "Dutch Sandwich" profits are relocated to tax-free regimes such as the Cayman Islands. Google's effective tax rate on its US earnings after this accounting in one recent year was a whopping 4%.
Without Linus Torvalds, there would be little or no open source software. Linus is hardly a rabid Stallmanite.
GNU tools were in widespread use before Linux (which famously used rather a lot of GNU), and are still in widespread use on systems other than just Linux. The GPL as a licence was already growing in popularity prior to Linux. As was the BSD, MIT, and other open source licences. Whereas the GPL licence itself owes its existence to Stallman and a spat over a printer driver.
The real reason this was done, was a result of a flaw of the system.
There are people with money and a vested interest in extending the copyright, but there are no organized groups with money lobbying against this. So, every time this rolls around in ANY country with a copyright system, it will get extended.
More to the point, the government itself has a vested interest in this. To a treasury analyst, you paying $10 for a Beatles album adds $10 to GDP. You downloading it for free adds zero to GDP. So, the mass copyright expiry of popular works looks like it "shrinks the economy by millions of dollars per year". One of the cases where economic measures get things backwards -- if the song is free, then the members of the economy have both the song and $10 to spend on something else (in consumer-benefit terms the economy has grown not shrunk), but economic measures merely count the dollar value of trade.
Windows 7 is a nice operating system, and is selling well. If they don't do something stupid like stop selling it when Windows 8 is released, they will do fine.
I suspect we should just consider the "Metro UI" as a very hyped gadget layer (like those HTML+JavaScript gadgets that both Windows and Mac have had for years now), but allowing them to be more complex, better performance, giving them a new "swipey" way of accessing them, and allowing you to run your Windows Phone 7 apps as Windows 8 gadgets. Dashboard/Sidebar redux.
I think MS is hoping this will be a tipping point where these HTML+JavaScript apps now become actually useful and usable, and that the portability of gadgets between Phone 7 and Windows 8 will be a market advantage. But I don't see any way in which this should detract from existing Windows 7 usefulness. Just if you're on a tablet, you'll be interacting with the dashboard much more, and if you're on a desktop you'll be interacting with the desktop much more.
I completed my enrollment the other day and am extremely psyched to have the opportunity to participate. Opted for the 'Basic' track as I don't have the time/energy for the whole enchilada. If they want to use my feedback to help develop a monetized version, that's fine with me; I get to learn cool stuff from smart people, and the provider of the service gets to improve their product.
Personally, I'm kinda tempted to use their course to beta test my own software... I've been teaching a course this semester with a social semantic learning platform I originally came up with during my PhD. But it'd be interesting to go from 80+ of my own students using it for a course (there was an educational reason we needed it -- I didn't just foist it on the course for my own benefit) to seeing whether it also works for study groups on someone else's 80,000+ student course. (We're using a local server -- the public demo link on the blog is down at the mo but I'll put it back up in the next few days)
It looks a little like KnowIt are betting on the idea that if Stanford could offer 80,000 students a course why would you go to your local lesser-known uni. But a class of 80,00 is rather different from a class of 80. Universities have never differentiated themselves by having the best content -- they're more than happy to use someone else's textbook. So I still prefer my model at the mo -- where smaller classes intelligently share content, and where it's made simple for teachers to turn their existing materials into social semantic content, rather than need special interactive videos.
And yet, for others of us, it was our starting book back in the 80's.
More realistically I think for my generation in the UK, this was our starting book. But in mitigation, expecting six year olds to read Knuth might have been a bit much!
The assumption that I posses a mysterious "free will" that is somehow divorced from cause and effect(except in that it causes me to act) is simply too convenient to abandon!
It's not an assumption. It is a continuous first-hand subjective observation. I was going to post a sarcastic reply, but then I decided I really shouldn't be so mean -- after all, by your argument it wasn't your decision to post that.
A profit is far more than just making moneyIt shows that you are creating wealth.
Not true. "Pay us 10% everything or we'll torch your shop in the middle of the night" can be very profitable but creates no wealth. "Oh look, I just grew a banana. I'm feeling charitable, so why don't you have it" is unprofitable but creates wealth. That wealth creation goes hand in hand with profits is an assumption in many theories but it does not always hold in practice.
The title of the story is inflammatory as this MP is NOT the Australian Government. Apple was justified in not responding. A member of Parliament has no standing to ask such a question with the expectation of receiving an answer.
An MP has every standing. It is Parliament that represents the public and decides law. Government merely governs.
It is refreshing to see some people on Slashdot suggest that science just fills gaps with unsubstantiated assumptions sometimes instead of just complaining about organized religion doing that, as if it's exclusive.
You mean because we keep supposing that not only really are there Russell's tea sets and invisible pink unicorns (dark matter) but that there's five times as much of it as visible matter?
I'm a Mac fan, I don't own a Windows device at all, but seriously I think Apple might be staring down the barrel of a repeat of the 1980s and 1990s from next year -- when their market was commoditised by cheaper less crafted competition and Microsoft ate their lunch. PC + Windows was not nicer than Apple then either, but there were any number of manufacturers cranking them out in different configurations blitzing the market. Android has started trying to do this to iPhone, but Google's bet on Chromebooks is still too early -- the NC's time still hasn't quite come yet. But from next year, Windows 8 will be that "not nicer, but now it at last has a finger-touch interface and can run on low-power devices it does the job, and a hundred and one manufacturers can put out a thousand and one different products" swamping them out again. Laptops with touchscreens, pads, convertibles, desktops with touchscreens, pads in different sizes, pedestals, you name it, someone'll be shipping it running Windows 8 and the exact same set of programs that run on all of them, run in your company, run all the browser apps too because Chrome runs on Windows 8 too, run Flash if you want it, use a mouse, or a touchscreen, or a trackpad... Microsoft doesn't have to care about which ones do or don't sell because the manufacturers take the loss on that; so long as one or more of them are successful they're set. Most competitors are trying to aim a precision rifle at Apple to take them out; Microsoft is loading a cannon full of grape shot and getting every manufacturer in Asia to pay for the ammunition.
All the full article really says is that someone could tie a MAC address to a location. So? Knowing your MAC address gives me almost no information about you -- nothing personally identifiable, anyways, unless I have an unrelated method of attaching your MAC to you personally (such as having physical access to your phone...). So the information is entirely useless for someone trying to invade your privacy, unless there's something I'm missing (that wasn't included in the article).
I suspect there's one or two employers that would be tempted to search for "which of my employees are having affairs with each other" (which pairs of phones occasionally spend the night in the same location). Other searches like "who's interviewed at our competitors?", "who's potentially got an alcohol problem (phone is frequently in the pub)", "who's got medical issues", etc, would also be very possible.
Microsoft: That's not a screwup. THIS is a screwup!
According to the article, Google and Skyhook were doing exactly this screwup as recently as last month, when CNET published an article about them doing it.
Financial modelling projects that the tower will pay off its purchase price in just 11 years - and the engineering team are shooting for a structure that will stand for 80 years or more.
That's a 6.5% annual return on investment. This is why I think direct government investment in solar energy plants would be a very good idea. It is dang hard to get a relatively high-risk company requiring a large amount of initial capital investment funded by a VC if the projected return is only 6.5%pa. Well done EnviroMission for managing to do that. For government, however, 6.5% p.a is effectively revenue-neutral (earns a bit more than the interest on the bonds to fund it) but with compelling societal benefits of building expertise in clean technology, reducing pollution, diversifying energy production, reducing reliance on fuel imports, etc.
Remember when because some of your colleagues were on ICQ or AOL but some were on Yahoo Messenger but some were on MSN but some had started to move to Skype etc you ended up having to have accounts with all of them because you don't control which account the person you need to speak to likes to use? And the techies amongst us started wanting tools like Kopete to deal with our plurality of accounts? That's the direction I see social networks going in. Already there are people who are Facebook friends whose Facebook status updates come from their Twitter app. Meanwhile many Twitter posts are there to point me to blog articles on blogs that I could also individually follow using RSS. And all those social communities hasn't, for instance, stopped me doing the old fashioned form of community of visiting and commenting on sites I like, like Slashdot. One more social network does not necessarily mean death to the rest. I don't see Twitter and Facebook following Bebo and MySpace into insignificance. It means yet another system I'll need to have an account on because people I need/want to follow/talk to use it. It does not mean I have a new single account that I consider to be my identity -- "me on the web" -- it means I'll have (well, if someone sends me an invite) an additional personally identifiable account on the Web. I think interoperability between social networks is going to be the next big battleground.
Given the effort Google have gone to to hire across an awful lot of Sun's staff since the transition, it does seem very strange they didn't just buy them in the first place, getting the staff, patents, and getting rid of the need to try to create a split between Dalvik and Java. I guess they just balked at buying the hardware side, but as I understood it they could have resold that part to HP fairly easily.
Shit, didn't mean to lump create in there. Take however long you want with that.
If you're not making money off something within 2-3 years of putting it out there, tough luck. Have fun flipping burgers.
You might want to look up how many years it was before YouTube turned a profit. They were loss-making all the way up to being acquired for $1.65 billion, and remained loss-making for some years after that too. If that's flipping burgers, man those are some gold-plated burgers!
It turns out that "the rich" pay the majority of the taxes. Thus any meaningful tax cut, for any purpose, will cut taxes for "the rich" more than it will cut taxes for "the poor".
There have been several times in the history of the USA where the overall tax rate was lowered, and tax revenues went up. This is because "the rich" moved money out of tax shelters and started investing it, which grew GNP. In other words, tax revenue went up because government was collecting a lower rate on a much larger amount of money. And "the rich" paid more taxes than they paid before.
Times genuinely have changed. If you reduce tax on the rich by $1, there is a much greater likelihood of that $1 being exported overseas (spent or invested outside the US) than if you reduce tax on the poor by $1. Trickle-down is leaky. Trickle-up isn't.
That must be some heretical Pastafarian sect. Traditional Pastafarians wear pirate hats, not strainers.
I just think it'd be fun to see the follow-up each time he's pulled over for any kind of traffic check in the next five years. Excuse me, sir can I see your license please. Thank you. Yes, it's all in order, except... why aren't you wearing your confessional pasta strainer today? Go on, you said it's a religious requirement, put it on!
You can do this with any software. Scammers have been selling virus-loaded copies of Microsoft Office since the days of dial-up.
It's a badly written article, but this is potentially a harder problem to tackle for a popular OSS project than for a popular software vendor:
It's much easier for the scammers to get open source code to distribute, so popular OSS projects look like low-hanging fruit to scammers
If the scammers don't use the trademark in an illegal manner, the scammers can truthfully claim they have a license to distribute the program. For instance, they can dodge GPL violations by only aggregating their adware and spyware. (Their installer secretly installs it, but it's a completely separate program from the OSS software.)
There generally are multiple legitimate sources for an OSS project (their own website, mirror sites that reduce the download strain on their website, debian repositories, rpm repositories, etc). It's easier for a scammer to confuse a non-techy that their own website could be a legit source for this.
Many OSS projects often don't have an army of international lawyers to pursue the scammers, just a few overworked and underpaid people at FSF and EFF
Whereas it'd be easier for a software vendor to show commercial harm to a court or the police, as they can just point to the lost revenues
All goes to show that the life of an OSS project, nobly getting their software to you freely, ain't always as easy as it should be.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree and I would add that in expert fields, such as philosophy of religion, they are very technically defined by experts. And all these words have fairly clear technical definitions. I'd suggest that when people deviate from this it is either out of ignorance or malice.
What utter bunkum. Language is not owned by jargon. You are more than welcome to buy your tomatoes in the vegetable aisle without an army of botanists descending upon you to beat you with technical definitions of a fruit, and to use bug spray on flies without an army of entymologists queuing to show you their definitions of "bug".
But I guess that's a matter of perspective and you've just never seen someone claim that atheism is a "faith" or a "belief?"
I'm probably the wrong person to ask -- because of my field of study, as far as I'm concerned "belief" is a very small word connotations-wise. You seem to think it carries many more connotations than I do. A Bayesian network and other reasoning systems are talked about as having beliefs. So if you tell me you have a "lack of beliefs", in a sense to me that sounds like you're saying you're very unconfident in whatever you think. If you've even got the confidence to answer the question "Do you think there's a God", then that sounds expressing a belief against the question.
"Faith" is a bit misapplied, in that "faith" in the way it is used ordinary speech tends to be in persons -- that they'll keep their promises. A person expressing faith in Christ is not merely saying "yeah, there was once this fellow called Jesus" but is expressing faith that Jesus will fulfil the promises that they believe he made.
In general, it's a good policy, to let people decide for themselves what they do believe in and what don't believe in, rather than "tagging" them and presuming to dictate to them such beliefs, or lack thereof.
You've taken a long departure from what's actually been said. The discussion was about the social meaning of words, words being tags that we apply to meanings. At no point did I dictate anybody's beliefs to them.
The only reason you can't apply science to religious questions is because religious types keep telling us "you can't".
No, the reason you can't apply science to religious questions is because science-types keep telling you you can't. The test for relevance would be in conflict with the test for evidence. Science relies on independently repeatable (somewhat mechanistic) experiments. God could turn up tomorrow, perform a dozen miracles for you in front of a dozen of your closest friends, and you still wouldn't be able to publish a scientific paper on it as it's not an independently repeatable experiment. Likewise it is extraordinarily hard to design a scientific question for the fundamental religious question of an afterlife!
For all religious questions that truly cannot be researched by science, neither is religion able to answer them.
Wrong. "Are all men created equal". The scientific answer "well, some are a bit shorter than others..." doesn't really capture what the philosophical and religious question addresses!
People can spend hours logic-chopping the definitions, but fundamentally words are socially defined. And generally, if you say "I believe there isn't a God" (ie, you think P(God) is very small, with high confidence), you'll be tagged atheist; whreas if you say "I'm not yet convinced there's a God, but I'm open to the possibility" (ie, you think P(God) is 0.5ish, with low confidence), you'll be tagged agnostic. A lot of the definitional logic-chopping appears to be atheists wanting the latter category, of which there are vastly more people, to be re-labelled "atheist" -- "hey, they said they don't affirmatively believe in God [yet]" -- to bulk up the numbers.
At the big-U's, of course there will be a latent aversion to prof's lecturing to a camera and reusing said lecture every semester. If I am just watching a video of a prof or reading his lecture notes online, it will be more difficult for the universities to justify the ever-more exorbitant admission cost if it's just delivered online (although most classes seem to be more of teaching yourself than the lecturer teaching you, but that's what college is about anyways, learning how to learn). College has been going online for awhile, but the question of 'should it be' is a reasonable one; will it save students money, or just dilute the college process into even more of a degree-mill spectacle than it already is? Or just create more busywork? I say it depends mostly on the context, subjectivity, and type of degree program.
I bet in 100 years our descendants will be asking what it was like to sit in a classroom with people and how weird it must have been to learn in a group.
I'm teaching a course at UQ that I've deployed some of my own teaching technology onto (hopefully rolling out to the masses soon... ok, maybe not 'masses' but a trickle'd be nice). Part of my theory is that "online" is not so much about pushing teaching out onto the web as it is about pulling the web into teaching. So in my course there's a fair amount of "web" interaction that happens right there in the lecture theatre (more as I add missing features), and that provides continuity that means the discussions you're having in the lecture can be continued out of the lecture, in revision, etc. Universities have never actually cared about owning content delivery -- more often than not the course textbook was not written by the lecturer. They care about delivering the teaching experience. So much so that in the course I'm teaching this semester, we decided to get the students to give about two-thirds of the talks (as tech conference talk+demo presentations) so they'd get some experience not just building tech but also explaining it and teaching their peers. Lectures aren't just about "reading out the notes", and online isn't just about "put a video on iTunes U or Lectopia.
Now, there are other types of taxes. Estate taxes, tariffs, capital gains taxes. Those are charged at different rates. Capital gains are charged at a rate ranging from 0 to 15%, Note that rich people pay a higher rate on gains than poor people, also. However, if a person makes 90% of his income from capital gains, and you average together the different types of taxes he pays, the overall tax burden on the rich guy might be lower.
This is deliberate. Capital gains taxes are low on purpose, because those drive investment.
Fundamentally what this means is that if you invest money (as only those with money are able to) you are taxed at a low rate but if you invest labour (as those without money are required to) you are taxed at a high rate.
The problem is then compounded because it is relatively easy for the wealthy to transform their salary into a capital gain (the reason tech CEOs often take $1 salaries is because salary is the least tax-efficient kind of remuneration, whereas getting paid in options has only a 15% tax rate).
Any dollar earned in the US is subject to taxation - regardless of the domicile of the company. The only benefit to forming an overseas shell corporation is to defer US taxation on money earned abroad; that's what Google, Apple, Microsoft and the like have foreign offices - they can keep the earnings overseas without paying US taxes. But for money earned in the US - regardless of the country of incorporation - there are US corporate income taxes to be paid. And if you're a US company, you also have to pay US taxes on money earned overseas. Thus you can see why companies set up overseas offices and subsidiaries.
You miss the point of the accounting. The companies also have overseas offices in order to charge the US parent company fees to lower the US company's taxable profits. "We earned $1 in the US, but we had to pay $0.99 in licensing fees to our Irish subsidiary. This was a necessary cost of doing business to earn the $1 so is deductible from out taxable profits. Accordingly we should only be taxed on $0.01 in the US, and the subsidiary should be taked on the $0.99 in Ireland... except it in turn has to pay some fees to another subsidiary..." Via accounting techniques called the "Double Irish" and "Dutch Sandwich" profits are relocated to tax-free regimes such as the Cayman Islands. Google's effective tax rate on its US earnings after this accounting in one recent year was a whopping 4%.
Without Linus Torvalds, there would be little or no open source software. Linus is hardly a rabid Stallmanite.
GNU tools were in widespread use before Linux (which famously used rather a lot of GNU), and are still in widespread use on systems other than just Linux. The GPL as a licence was already growing in popularity prior to Linux. As was the BSD, MIT, and other open source licences. Whereas the GPL licence itself owes its existence to Stallman and a spat over a printer driver.
The real reason this was done, was a result of a flaw of the system.
There are people with money and a vested interest in extending the copyright, but there are no organized groups with money lobbying against this. So, every time this rolls around in ANY country with a copyright system, it will get extended.
More to the point, the government itself has a vested interest in this. To a treasury analyst, you paying $10 for a Beatles album adds $10 to GDP. You downloading it for free adds zero to GDP. So, the mass copyright expiry of popular works looks like it "shrinks the economy by millions of dollars per year". One of the cases where economic measures get things backwards -- if the song is free, then the members of the economy have both the song and $10 to spend on something else (in consumer-benefit terms the economy has grown not shrunk), but economic measures merely count the dollar value of trade.
Windows 7 is a nice operating system, and is selling well. If they don't do something stupid like stop selling it when Windows 8 is released, they will do fine.
I suspect we should just consider the "Metro UI" as a very hyped gadget layer (like those HTML+JavaScript gadgets that both Windows and Mac have had for years now), but allowing them to be more complex, better performance, giving them a new "swipey" way of accessing them, and allowing you to run your Windows Phone 7 apps as Windows 8 gadgets. Dashboard/Sidebar redux.
I think MS is hoping this will be a tipping point where these HTML+JavaScript apps now become actually useful and usable, and that the portability of gadgets between Phone 7 and Windows 8 will be a market advantage. But I don't see any way in which this should detract from existing Windows 7 usefulness. Just if you're on a tablet, you'll be interacting with the dashboard much more, and if you're on a desktop you'll be interacting with the desktop much more.
I completed my enrollment the other day and am extremely psyched to have the opportunity to participate. Opted for the 'Basic' track as I don't have the time/energy for the whole enchilada. If they want to use my feedback to help develop a monetized version, that's fine with me; I get to learn cool stuff from smart people, and the provider of the service gets to improve their product.
Personally, I'm kinda tempted to use their course to beta test my own software... I've been teaching a course this semester with a social semantic learning platform I originally came up with during my PhD. But it'd be interesting to go from 80+ of my own students using it for a course (there was an educational reason we needed it -- I didn't just foist it on the course for my own benefit) to seeing whether it also works for study groups on someone else's 80,000+ student course. (We're using a local server -- the public demo link on the blog is down at the mo but I'll put it back up in the next few days)
It looks a little like KnowIt are betting on the idea that if Stanford could offer 80,000 students a course why would you go to your local lesser-known uni. But a class of 80,00 is rather different from a class of 80. Universities have never differentiated themselves by having the best content -- they're more than happy to use someone else's textbook. So I still prefer my model at the mo -- where smaller classes intelligently share content, and where it's made simple for teachers to turn their existing materials into social semantic content, rather than need special interactive videos.
But we'll see. It's going to be fun.
And yet, for others of us, it was our starting book back in the 80's.
More realistically I think for my generation in the UK, this was our starting book. But in mitigation, expecting six year olds to read Knuth might have been a bit much!
The assumption that I posses a mysterious "free will" that is somehow divorced from cause and effect(except in that it causes me to act) is simply too convenient to abandon!
It's not an assumption. It is a continuous first-hand subjective observation. I was going to post a sarcastic reply, but then I decided I really shouldn't be so mean -- after all, by your argument it wasn't your decision to post that.
A profit is far more than just making moneyIt shows that you are creating wealth.
Not true. "Pay us 10% everything or we'll torch your shop in the middle of the night" can be very profitable but creates no wealth. "Oh look, I just grew a banana. I'm feeling charitable, so why don't you have it" is unprofitable but creates wealth. That wealth creation goes hand in hand with profits is an assumption in many theories but it does not always hold in practice.
The title of the story is inflammatory as this MP is NOT the Australian Government. Apple was justified in not responding. A member of Parliament has no standing to ask such a question with the expectation of receiving an answer.
An MP has every standing. It is Parliament that represents the public and decides law. Government merely governs.
It is refreshing to see some people on Slashdot suggest that science just fills gaps with unsubstantiated assumptions sometimes instead of just complaining about organized religion doing that, as if it's exclusive.
You mean because we keep supposing that not only really are there Russell's tea sets and invisible pink unicorns (dark matter) but that there's five times as much of it as visible matter?
I'm a Mac fan, I don't own a Windows device at all, but seriously I think Apple might be staring down the barrel of a repeat of the 1980s and 1990s from next year -- when their market was commoditised by cheaper less crafted competition and Microsoft ate their lunch. PC + Windows was not nicer than Apple then either, but there were any number of manufacturers cranking them out in different configurations blitzing the market. Android has started trying to do this to iPhone, but Google's bet on Chromebooks is still too early -- the NC's time still hasn't quite come yet. But from next year, Windows 8 will be that "not nicer, but now it at last has a finger-touch interface and can run on low-power devices it does the job, and a hundred and one manufacturers can put out a thousand and one different products" swamping them out again. Laptops with touchscreens, pads, convertibles, desktops with touchscreens, pads in different sizes, pedestals, you name it, someone'll be shipping it running Windows 8 and the exact same set of programs that run on all of them, run in your company, run all the browser apps too because Chrome runs on Windows 8 too, run Flash if you want it, use a mouse, or a touchscreen, or a trackpad ... Microsoft doesn't have to care about which ones do or don't sell because the manufacturers take the loss on that; so long as one or more of them are successful they're set. Most competitors are trying to aim a precision rifle at Apple to take them out; Microsoft is loading a cannon full of grape shot and getting every manufacturer in Asia to pay for the ammunition.
All the full article really says is that someone could tie a MAC address to a location. So? Knowing your MAC address gives me almost no information about you -- nothing personally identifiable, anyways, unless I have an unrelated method of attaching your MAC to you personally (such as having physical access to your phone...). So the information is entirely useless for someone trying to invade your privacy, unless there's something I'm missing (that wasn't included in the article).
I suspect there's one or two employers that would be tempted to search for "which of my employees are having affairs with each other" (which pairs of phones occasionally spend the night in the same location). Other searches like "who's interviewed at our competitors?", "who's potentially got an alcohol problem (phone is frequently in the pub)", "who's got medical issues", etc, would also be very possible.
Google: I caused a screwup.
Microsoft: That's not a screwup. THIS is a screwup!
According to the article, Google and Skyhook were doing exactly this screwup as recently as last month, when CNET published an article about them doing it.
FTA:
Financial modelling projects that the tower will pay off its purchase price in just 11 years - and the engineering team are shooting for a structure that will stand for 80 years or more.
That's a 6.5% annual return on investment. This is why I think direct government investment in solar energy plants would be a very good idea. It is dang hard to get a relatively high-risk company requiring a large amount of initial capital investment funded by a VC if the projected return is only 6.5%pa. Well done EnviroMission for managing to do that. For government, however, 6.5% p.a is effectively revenue-neutral (earns a bit more than the interest on the bonds to fund it) but with compelling societal benefits of building expertise in clean technology, reducing pollution, diversifying energy production, reducing reliance on fuel imports, etc.
Remember when because some of your colleagues were on ICQ or AOL but some were on Yahoo Messenger but some were on MSN but some had started to move to Skype etc you ended up having to have accounts with all of them because you don't control which account the person you need to speak to likes to use? And the techies amongst us started wanting tools like Kopete to deal with our plurality of accounts? That's the direction I see social networks going in. Already there are people who are Facebook friends whose Facebook status updates come from their Twitter app. Meanwhile many Twitter posts are there to point me to blog articles on blogs that I could also individually follow using RSS. And all those social communities hasn't, for instance, stopped me doing the old fashioned form of community of visiting and commenting on sites I like, like Slashdot. One more social network does not necessarily mean death to the rest. I don't see Twitter and Facebook following Bebo and MySpace into insignificance. It means yet another system I'll need to have an account on because people I need/want to follow/talk to use it. It does not mean I have a new single account that I consider to be my identity -- "me on the web" -- it means I'll have (well, if someone sends me an invite) an additional personally identifiable account on the Web. I think interoperability between social networks is going to be the next big battleground.
Given the effort Google have gone to to hire across an awful lot of Sun's staff since the transition, it does seem very strange they didn't just buy them in the first place, getting the staff, patents, and getting rid of the need to try to create a split between Dalvik and Java. I guess they just balked at buying the hardware side, but as I understood it they could have resold that part to HP fairly easily.
Shit, didn't mean to lump create in there. Take however long you want with that.
If you're not making money off something within 2-3 years of putting it out there, tough luck. Have fun flipping burgers.
You might want to look up how many years it was before YouTube turned a profit. They were loss-making all the way up to being acquired for $1.65 billion, and remained loss-making for some years after that too. If that's flipping burgers, man those are some gold-plated burgers!
It turns out that "the rich" pay the majority of the taxes. Thus any meaningful tax cut, for any purpose, will cut taxes for "the rich" more than it will cut taxes for "the poor".
There have been several times in the history of the USA where the overall tax rate was lowered, and tax revenues went up. This is because "the rich" moved money out of tax shelters and started investing it, which grew GNP. In other words, tax revenue went up because government was collecting a lower rate on a much larger amount of money. And "the rich" paid more taxes than they paid before.
Times genuinely have changed. If you reduce tax on the rich by $1, there is a much greater likelihood of that $1 being exported overseas (spent or invested outside the US) than if you reduce tax on the poor by $1. Trickle-down is leaky. Trickle-up isn't.
That must be some heretical Pastafarian sect. Traditional Pastafarians wear pirate hats, not strainers.
I just think it'd be fun to see the follow-up each time he's pulled over for any kind of traffic check in the next five years.
Excuse me, sir can I see your license please. Thank you. Yes, it's all in order, except... why aren't you wearing your confessional pasta strainer today? Go on, you said it's a religious requirement, put it on!
You can do this with any software. Scammers have been selling virus-loaded copies of Microsoft Office since the days of dial-up.
It's a badly written article, but this is potentially a harder problem to tackle for a popular OSS project than for a popular software vendor:
All goes to show that the life of an OSS project, nobly getting their software to you freely, ain't always as easy as it should be.