Read the post. That journal is one of the best journals in the World - look at the previous contributors mentioned in the post and tell me it's not a decent journal. Just because it's German, it doesn't mean it's "sub-par". Your post should be modded down for trolling, but unfortunately I expect it'll bubble up as "Informative".
Also, most US/British journals would refuse to publish not because they doubted the ability of the scientists to produce good quality data, but because they have a knee-jerk reaction that cold fusion is junk science.
Well done to this journal for actually taking it on.
They responded by talking about 'vexing issues' when they were pushed on the matter. Vexing indeed, that somebody is stuck in a cell for demanding democracy because you wanted to "look after shareholder's interests".
They say they were just complying with a "lawful request" but at some point you have to realise that certain counties are going to ask you to abide by laws you find distasteful and take the hit on not doing business in those countries. Would Yahoo have done a deal with South Africa in the 1980s? With Germany in the 1930s? Or would they have got stuck in, claiming they might be able to 'transform opinion' by way of allowing people to share (censored) pictures and arrange (authorised) events?
And they might say now that they are sorry for what happened, but they are still in China and they must in some part be willing to comply with future "legal requests" so there's a question: if the Chinese government asked for help tomorrow, would Yahoo! assist? Or would they risk being shut down in China? I suspect for all their hand-wringing, they'd hand over the paperwork but this time do their best to keep it quiet.
There's a line that Yahoo! crossed that Google is far from crossing just yet, and I think this story is indicative of how they might hope to keep it that way.
By laying out an independent moral framework aligned with UN declarations, it's possible for a multi-national to make a call on whether they can go into a country or not, or to what extent. If China wants to control and watch every bit, every byte, we as an International community with personal stakes in democracy and liberty have a role in saying they shouldn't have access to best-in-class technology whilst they want that.
The Chinese Government should not be granted the ability to be able to run surveillance over their population really well thanks to the work of engineers in Yahoo's or Google's HQ - we should be making them want this tech enough that they are prepared to compromise and grant rights to the population currently kept from them, so the tech can't be used against a population.
That's our job. Software runs civilisation. As software developers/companies, the moral imperative is with us. We are the arms manufacturers of the future, because the weapons will be software loaded with information as the ammo. We direct this gig. We don't realise it yet, but we do.
We should be saying "you don't get Google, you don't get yahoo, you don't get any of this, until you treat your people as we would wish to be treated, as we agreed by way of UN charters all mankind should be treated". Saying that by exposing China to this tech will somehow change how government works is like saying you can fix Darfur with some really noble op-ed pieces in the New York Times.
If I held Yahoo! stock, I'd sell it. I'd tell everybody else I know to sell it if they held it too. If Yahoo! say the only barometer of morality is how well the stock is doing, everybody needs to sell up and make it clear why: at that point the needle swings from "profitable to be in China" to "OMG! WTF are we doing in China? The stock is tanking!".
FWIW, I've not used a single Y! product (including flickr or upcoming) or API since they've become the henchmen of brutal dictatorships. I'd ask others to consider doing the same too.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the SOAP search results didn't come back with ads embedded in them. The AJAX API tools are capable of putting ad content in their results, as can the maps API because Google is controlling the display elements.
Given that Google want to run their business off the back of ad revenues, it should come as no surprise they're getting rid of services that don't allow them to sell lots and lots of ads. I also imagine that the cost of providing the SOAP interface was higher than any subscription fees would have brought in due to a small market. What's more, it would directly help their competitors pull in results from Google and run their own ads alongside it. The API was neat, but from a business perspective it was always an experiment at best.
Personally, I'd rather they brought something RESTful like Yahoo's interface or xml-rpc to the table, and charged us all a couple of cents per 100 queries, but that isn't going to happen any time soon.
Imagine it's February. It's cold outside - there is frost on the ground. It's early morning, and it's still dark outside. You have to go to work. Which one can you imagine being least hacked off about doing: going to the Perl job, or going to the.NET job?
Money is great if you're planning on saving it all up and doing something interesting with it. If you're just going to take money to do an awful job, and then splurge it on crap to make your life feel happier, it's a false economy.
I'd always tell somebody to take the job that is closest to what they would want to do in their spare time as possible. Nobody loves.NET that much. If you need the money, or you don't want to move/commute 120 miles, take the better paid job, but just realise what it is you might be giving up. That said, a move of 120 miles - or a couple of hours each way spent traveling - can be a big sacrifice in itself, so just think carefully about what you'd be sacrificing to do that.
Personally, I'd take the Perl job, but then that fits my personality better.
25% of British Muslims believe the 7/7 bombings were justified.
In one recent Slashdot poll, 26% of those replying to the poll said that the best way to keep papers together was "Blowtorch". Only 38% thought a stapler was the best way forward. See, the point I'm making is that depending on how you ask the question, who you ask the question of and what options you provide to answer with, you will sometimes get answers that mean anything less than 30% is just silly noise.
You're also ignoring the fact that 75% of British Muslims don't believe the 7/7 bombings were justified. Yet we as a society are starting to treat 100% of the population who look a bit sun-tanned as being co-conspirators.
When asked, "Is Britain my country?" only one in four British Muslims it is.
Actually, the report cited in one of the children posts is ambiguous on this. It isn't clear from the grammar if one in four believe Britain is "our country" or "their country". Given that a large number of those interviewed may have not been born here, that isn't surprising. I would be more interested to hear if one in four 2nd or 3rd generation Muslims answered "this is not my country, it is their country" and if that group were inner-city, Northern mill town, how much exposure they had to other cultures, etc. I also suspect that if you asked the White population "Do Muslims have a right to call Britain 'their' country if they were born here?" the figures would be far more shocking.
Thirty percent of British Muslims would prefer to live under Sharia law than under British law.
As another poster pointed out, that means 70% would prefer not to. Given the importance of the Qu'uran in daily Islamic life, that's actually quite startling. Given that a considerable chunk of the more obvious Sharia laws are effectively Old Testament laws we consider immoral within secular society as well - concerning adultery, murder, theft - that's not that peculiar perhaps. As for the rest, the fact that 70% of Muslims don't want a law making it illegal to be homosexual, perhaps means that they're probably more progressive and left wing than the majority of the white population of Britain. They certainly seem a lot more relaxed with other people's opionions and lifestyles than most Daily Mail readers I've had the displeasure of dealing with.
Half of those British Muslims who express a preference for living under Sharia law say that, given the choice, they would move to a country governed by those laws.
That gives the game away. What do you think that means? "Given the choice"? Obviously this data is skewed by people who aren't actually bothered by foreign policy, sharia law, etc. but are venting their frustration at being disenfranchised and suffering economic hardship. Go drive around Tower Hamlets and then tell me it tallies that immigrants and asylum seekers are living it up as per the tabloid media fantasy. This data is bull, period. I can't take any of it seriously with the revelation of that figure.
Twenty-eight percent of Brirish Muslims hope for the U.K. one day to become a fundamentalist Islamic state.
I'd say more than 80% of Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph readers want the UK to become a fundamentalist Christian state. We already know that 50% or thereabouts of Americans want America to be a fundamentalist state devoted to Christiantity, so I'd say 72% of muslims saying they'd prefer Britain to be an open, free and secular state is actually showing incredible progressiveness.
What's more this data is seriously flawed as it is. If you're going to cite it, I really would like to see break-downs per economic bracket, location, age-group, second- or third-generation answers, etc. to get a clear answer. As it is, this has all the seriousness of a poll conducted right here on Slashdot. I.e. it's worthless, and the results found are those the questioner hoped for.
I think if/. is going to carry on running these stories we're going to need another vote on moderation: -1 BNP Bigot
So let me get this right: the plan was to wait until after the stock market closed Tuesday, then announce, so people don't run around dumping stock like headless chickens?
And The Reg, Reuters and Slashdot have got it now?
I love it when a plan comes toge... oh. Ah. Well, errrmmm.... if you work for Intel, have a GREAT weekend, and if you own shares, well, you've only got some 20+ hours trading to go before the announcement, so take your time...
It's not illegal to publish the article in the UK. Those people who are whining about UK laws being imposed on an American company miss the point.
However, if the defence can assert that because of media attention, no fair-minded jury can be found, it can be ruled that no fair trial can occur and the guys walk away scot-free. If a media outlet can be shown to have prejudiced enough people against the defendents, it doesn't matter if they're guilty or not - they walk.
The NYT are just making sure they don't end up being blamed for that happening. It's not that it's "illegal" at all. It's just publishing it can have consequences that the NYT publishers don't want to have to deal with. They can publish anything they want after the trial, it's just not a great idea to do so right now.
What if the car had a solar panel on its roof? Park up, let the photo-voltaic cells do their work. Hell, with the right circuitry you might just have a car there that never needs plugging into a wall socket, ever.
Before anybody starts talking about brand new revolutionary management techniques, they really need to go and read Ricardo Semler's books, or at the very least his Wikipedia entry and then tell me what HCL is doing is somehow way and above his techniques.
What this article presents is a very shallow clone of Semco's management policies. It's basically an electronic version of what you should have in your company anyway. Putting a ticketing system in place for employees to complain about the cafeteria is not revolutionary.
Changing the process so that managers are hired by those they will manage is revolutionary. Training every employee to be able to read the books, then give them access to the books 24x7 is revolutionary. Giving your employees that information about cash position and then telling them what every person in the company (including their bosses) is paid is revolutionary. Doing all of that and then allowing every employee to ask for whatever salary they want is revolutionary. Telling staff they don't have to turn up, just get the job done is revolutionary.
And whilst we're at it, if you want to really go over the top, I'd check out Gore Industries - makers of Goretex fabric - and their completely 100% flat management model, the 150-staff to a unit cap in place for reasons of evolutionary psychology, their attitude to what makes a leader/manager ("somebody is a leader when other people are following them") and you then realise what is revolutionary.
These guys are here for the PR, and what they're doing is not revolutionary, novel, unique or interesting. The fact that so many people think it is just shows you how poor most companies are at management. For me, the HCL system would be like going back in time by a decade or more... (no, I don't work for Semco or Gore - I have my own business being built using similar principles).
I'm not sure what the utility of this is right now. In theory I could send 5.12 terabits/sec down a cable by getting the laser to flash on and off twice as quickly. That doesn't mean I've encoded any data or that I've been able to process that data at the other end in a meaningful way.
It's great that the transmission hardware is up to silly speeds, but until you can take that incoming data and packet switch/route it properly, until there are servers that can process even a tenth of that data in a meaningful way, this isn't something that will affect anybody, anywhere, other than for the people involved whose paper will get published.
> Computing has been standing pretty much still over the last 15 years. The only really interesting thing that has happened was the internet.
That's like saying "Literature has been pretty much still over the last 2,500 years. The only really interesting thing that has happened was the printing press".
The problem MS has is that they still don't "get" the web. They still think the way to ship software is once every 5 years, and involves sending a master CD off to a big factory where they put copies of the CDs into little boxes and then fly them all around the World.
If instead they said "OK, we know where we want to be in 5 years, let's release an update online to subscribers once a month, increment by increment" and adopted agile methodologies, right now we'd have something not a million miles away from Vista and they'd have had 5 years worth of subscriber fees in the bank.
They need to learn how to do software releases the way Google, Flickr, Amazon and Yahoo do. The way Linux, *BSD and virtually everything on Sourceforge does. Not this archaic system that leads to buggy code, frustrated developers and users who give up and drift away to the code written by the guys who are punching harder, higher and faster.
Agile development - MS need to go and read some books.
Europeans don't hate the US, and what contempt they do have for the US is that it is not 'too free' but rather it's too hypocritical. Everything in the US is owned by an elite few, even religious morality. If you're not Christian (or at least Jewish), you're persona non grata, if you don't want to salute a piece of graphic design denoting some red and white stripes and blue square with some stars on it you are deemed "evil". The rest of the World cares about humanity first, the nation state second. The US cares about the nation state and doesn't give a damn about humanity, or at least that's the perception.
"Cowboy culture"? More like "Knuckle-dragging, flag-waving, Creationist, Christian Zealot culture". No thanks, we'll pass on you having any more influence over the Internet. Please hand it over to the grown-ups now before you vote in another moron who thinks we should all be crying for the little baby Jesus...
If you have a tuning crystal (or equivalent) you have to pay unless you can prove it has never been used for the purpose of receiving TV programs. So, unless you live in a Faraday cage and can prove you have no way of receiving the programs, you have to pay.
Having a TV you never turn on does not exempt you. Not having an aerial does not exempt you. Using your TV for other things and never watching TV does not exempt you.
Imagine yourself in 5 years time. The web browser has all this stuff on it which means it is as good an interface as any other GUI widget stack. Firefox or Safari or IE or whatever effectively is the window manager with tabbed browsing and links to your favourite 'applications'.
The interface is fluid, keyboard shortcuts working fine and everything is as responsive as it is right now in your current desktop. Your applications are used over the web - you don't have to worry about software upgrades or fixing your parent's computer after some installation as everything is done by your ISP.
Can you see that future? What is stopping it from happening?
You're right, the browser is a crap interface. If you actually understood the technology being described, you would realise that it is an improvement to the interface to make all those things happen.
The browser is a bad interface right now. JSON helps to make it a more suitable interface. Go figure.
It also means it is the perfect point of attack for people who want to read all your e-mail. If I can find a buffer overflow in their code and send you a mail, can I get your private key sent back to me without you knowing?
A live cop isn't saying "well the distance between the corners of his lips is the same as Suspect X, his pupils are the same distance apart as Suspect X, his ears in relation to his other features are the same size and shape as Suspect X therefore he must be Suspect X" thereby triggering your immediate arrest and detention whilst you try to prove you are not Suspect X.
Meanwhile, Suspect X is walking around freely wearing some prosphetics that alter the shape of his nose, ears, corners of his lips, etc.
I've recently lost about 5Kgs of weight, and my face, particularly the shape, is quite different. I look at pictures of myself just 3 months old and even I look quite different. Even friends who see me every day comment on it.
This technology could be flawed by people just gaining and losing weight. Look at pictures of people who have lost a lot of weight and you'll see their cheeks, chin, even lips all look completely different. If this system is so "accurate" it can distinguish between identical twins, what happens when people eat too many twinkies or lose a few kgs?
There is a difference between a brutal, corrupt and oppresive force preventing the masses from knowing what their government are really up to, in order to prevent a revolution (censorship, a la China, North Korea, Fox News) and a broadcaster not being prepared to pay for the rights to Internet broadcast of somebody's legitimately owned IPR.
Grow up. This is not censorship. It's licensing. Confusing the two makes you look stupid, your arguments weak, and provides ammunition to those whom you may have a legitiamte gripe with regarding IPR whilst reducing the travesty of true censorship to something akin to you not being able to watch some TV.
I'm actually pretty disgusted that you've used the word censorship like this. This will get modded down as trolling, but I really think you guys need to get things into perspective. I feel sick.
And perhaps with your cameraphone take a quick picture of said receipt as proof to a party you voted for them, and to pick up your payment?
Any system which verifies how you voted is open to abuse. Ballot papers are more secure in this respect as they don't indicate how you voted - you could put an X in the box, take your photo, then spoil the paper. The system you suggest actually encourages corruption as it is a receipt AFTER the vote has definitely been cast and therefore a picture of it is worth money.
... of a letter I read in a now long-defunct weekly computer magazine in the UK called New Computer Express. Printed on cheap paper, it attempted to cover all available platforms in one 80-page weekly magazine. This included everything from ZX Spectrums to the then quite new 486 PCs. Macs, Amigas, Ataris, Amstrad CPCs, you name it, they all had their corner in there. Great magazine. Only problem was, their letters page looked like the flamewar from hell...
One guy wrote in saying he had got fed of up how his friend was always boasting about his Amiga 500 and how it was vastly superior to any other machine on the planet, especially this individual's ZX81 Spectrum. So convinced was he, he proposed a test. He offered the letter-writer his Amiga 500 for free if he could come up with one test, any test of his choice, where the ZX81 outperformed the Amiga.
The Speccy-owner, sat down, had a think, realised what to do and called his friend over with his Amiga for the test to begin. The friend arrived, and was summoned to the back garden. The Speccy-owner took his ZX81 frisbee-style and flung it across the garden, landing it perfectly in a compost heap.
The Amiga owner stared at him, spun around with his Amiga, tried throwing it, fell over under the weight, the machine smashing into several pieces. The speccy owner picked up, cleaned off and plugged in his ZX81, and was playing Manic Miner in minutes. The Amiga owner was told to take his trash and go home, which he did, crying...
When it comes to destruction tests, you have to ask "what's the point?". My media cards are normally well protected inside cameras or PCs and are unlikely to be dipped in cola or nailed to trees. However, it's always interesting to see how things work outside of the environment for which they were designed, just like that ZX81 and Amiga 500.
Where is the roadmap for low-power consumption chips that can operate either fanless, or with low less cooling gear?
I survived just fine on a PII for several years until recently biting the bullet and getting myself a P4 box in a Shutttle Zen XPC case (relatively quiet). I seriously considered getting myself an EPIA box as my main machine, simply because it would be lower power (therefore cheaper to run), silent and enough umph to use mutt, firefox and ssh into the server kit where the real work is done. The only reason I ended up with a P4 is because a friend had a 3GHz one going very cheap.
I want less power, not more. The idea I should overclock, buy liquid cooling systems and should pay a ridiculous amount so I can play some games? I'm sorry, what planet are you all on?
People are saying Turner is the proverbial kettle calling the pot black. They miss the point.
Yes, he built CNN but no longer owns it. He has no control of AOL Time Warner, and if he did it is quite clear they would be a very different company. The empire building is not his doing. I've read a lot of interviews with Turner, and he strikes me as a bombastic and determined man, but he has always been against "The Big Guys" and trying to battle for "The Little Guys" because he's always seen himself as the little guy. Go read a history of CNN to see what I mean.
As for the general point of this article, he has a point. The company that disturbs me the most actually is Disney. Down in Florida they have effectively got their own government for several hundred thousand square acres, they have a town in which they control everything (called Celebration IIRC), they have changed state law so that nobody can be declared dead on Disney property, and have interests in more government projects than an entertainment company really should. They are literally, not figuratively, a law unto themselves. How the hell did that happen? How can you compare Turner's business interests with that lot?
On a day when I have readjusted my outlook on life in general after reading the slashdot article and associated links on Joe Trippi, thinking about this stuff just makes me mad quite frankly.
... I only discovered it a few months ago, and what really struck me was not only was the quality quite high, but the technology itself. The wiki concept is rather striking.
So then I got to thinking, what if instead of using wikis to have a homepage, or an encyclopedia or a text book - a site recording fact - if you had something recording ideas and thoughts.
You know, you come up with ideas for say coding projects, or even just things that should be made and you know you're not going to do anything with them, and you want to let them form into something more with other people. So you go to sites like ShouldExist.org and bandy them around.
But what if you did it as a wiki? And you didn't restrict it to your software todo lists? And what if you could write fiction there and hold debates? And you know, muck about with other people's idea and perhaps form them into something that could happen?
So a few weeks ago, I got hold of Mediawiki, the software used by Wikipedia, and setup VagueWare.com. And it's starting to work. It's good fun. Open source think tank. A kind of a "Bazaar" in the ESR sense for thoughts and ideas.
So for me, the best thing about wikipedia is not the 300,000 articles, all of them quite good, but it's the software underneath it. It's allowed me and my friends to build a big playpen that anybody can join in with.
So, well done for 300,000 articles, but most of all, thanks for the best wiki software on the planet. My life would be worse off without it.:-)
No, not quite. He's in charge of the Home Office. The Home Office is not like "Homeland Security". It's much, much, MUCH bigger than that. Homeland Security is basically the equivalent of MI5/Special Branch which whilst coming under the juridstciotn of the Home Office is tiny in comparison to the rest of the organisation.
Think of it this way - you have lots of functions that are carried out by various ministries - the MoD looks after Defence, the Foreign Office sorts out diplomatic affairs (and intelligence agencies), Dept of Health looks after the NHS, etc., etc.
Anything that is left over, goes to the Home Office. This includes all law enforcement (at all levels), part stake in MI5, and anything else nobody else is prepared to take responsibility for. It is a MASSIVE department, dwarfing every other UK government department.
Blunkett, whilst in charge of the Home Office has introduced some interesting laws. Nearly all of them specifically remove civil liberties from the UK citizen, and he has announced an ID card that will eventually replace driver's licenses, passports, etc. and will carry biometric data. A corresponding matchup of the data is held on government computers, it's use is ill-defined, in short, it's a hideous idea that is being lobbied for by a company that stands to make a lot of money out of it.
Using the same argument, why should taxpayers pay for the enforcement of the law regarding bank robberies instead of the banks? Or murder? Surely, if I get murdered, it's my responsibility to bequeath enough money to ensure my killer is caught?
$5 million is a tiny, tiny fraction of the amount of tax revenue the entire movie industry (studios, distributors, cinemas, actors, crew, etc.) bring in annually. In short, by paying their taxes, the film industry is in fact paying for the enforcement of these laws. The "why should taxpayers pay?" line is so broken, you really go and do some very, very basic study of economics.
Slashdot Mirror
Talk about xenophobic racism.
Read the post. That journal is one of the best journals in the World - look at the previous contributors mentioned in the post and tell me it's not a decent journal. Just because it's German, it doesn't mean it's "sub-par". Your post should be modded down for trolling, but unfortunately I expect it'll bubble up as "Informative".
Also, most US/British journals would refuse to publish not because they doubted the ability of the scientists to produce good quality data, but because they have a knee-jerk reaction that cold fusion is junk science.
Well done to this journal for actually taking it on.
Whilst Google are up for a bit of censorship, Yahoo! actively assist the Chinese in tracking down dissidents and getting them put behind bars
They responded by talking about 'vexing issues' when they were pushed on the matter. Vexing indeed, that somebody is stuck in a cell for demanding democracy because you wanted to "look after shareholder's interests".
They say they were just complying with a "lawful request" but at some point you have to realise that certain counties are going to ask you to abide by laws you find distasteful and take the hit on not doing business in those countries. Would Yahoo have done a deal with South Africa in the 1980s? With Germany in the 1930s? Or would they have got stuck in, claiming they might be able to 'transform opinion' by way of allowing people to share (censored) pictures and arrange (authorised) events?
And they might say now that they are sorry for what happened, but they are still in China and they must in some part be willing to comply with future "legal requests" so there's a question: if the Chinese government asked for help tomorrow, would Yahoo! assist? Or would they risk being shut down in China? I suspect for all their hand-wringing, they'd hand over the paperwork but this time do their best to keep it quiet.
There's a line that Yahoo! crossed that Google is far from crossing just yet, and I think this story is indicative of how they might hope to keep it that way.
By laying out an independent moral framework aligned with UN declarations, it's possible for a multi-national to make a call on whether they can go into a country or not, or to what extent. If China wants to control and watch every bit, every byte, we as an International community with personal stakes in democracy and liberty have a role in saying they shouldn't have access to best-in-class technology whilst they want that.
The Chinese Government should not be granted the ability to be able to run surveillance over their population really well thanks to the work of engineers in Yahoo's or Google's HQ - we should be making them want this tech enough that they are prepared to compromise and grant rights to the population currently kept from them, so the tech can't be used against a population.
That's our job. Software runs civilisation. As software developers/companies, the moral imperative is with us. We are the arms manufacturers of the future, because the weapons will be software loaded with information as the ammo. We direct this gig. We don't realise it yet, but we do.
We should be saying "you don't get Google, you don't get yahoo, you don't get any of this, until you treat your people as we would wish to be treated, as we agreed by way of UN charters all mankind should be treated". Saying that by exposing China to this tech will somehow change how government works is like saying you can fix Darfur with some really noble op-ed pieces in the New York Times.
If I held Yahoo! stock, I'd sell it. I'd tell everybody else I know to sell it if they held it too. If Yahoo! say the only barometer of morality is how well the stock is doing, everybody needs to sell up and make it clear why: at that point the needle swings from "profitable to be in China" to "OMG! WTF are we doing in China? The stock is tanking!".
FWIW, I've not used a single Y! product (including flickr or upcoming) or API since they've become the henchmen of brutal dictatorships. I'd ask others to consider doing the same too.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the SOAP search results didn't come back with ads embedded in them. The AJAX API tools are capable of putting ad content in their results, as can the maps API because Google is controlling the display elements.
Given that Google want to run their business off the back of ad revenues, it should come as no surprise they're getting rid of services that don't allow them to sell lots and lots of ads. I also imagine that the cost of providing the SOAP interface was higher than any subscription fees would have brought in due to a small market. What's more, it would directly help their competitors pull in results from Google and run their own ads alongside it. The API was neat, but from a business perspective it was always an experiment at best.
Personally, I'd rather they brought something RESTful like Yahoo's interface or xml-rpc to the table, and charged us all a couple of cents per 100 queries, but that isn't going to happen any time soon.
Imagine it's February. It's cold outside - there is frost on the ground. It's early morning, and it's still dark outside. You have to go to work. Which one can you imagine being least hacked off about doing: going to the Perl job, or going to the .NET job?
.NET that much. If you need the money, or you don't want to move/commute 120 miles, take the better paid job, but just realise what it is you might be giving up. That said, a move of 120 miles - or a couple of hours each way spent traveling - can be a big sacrifice in itself, so just think carefully about what you'd be sacrificing to do that.
Money is great if you're planning on saving it all up and doing something interesting with it. If you're just going to take money to do an awful job, and then splurge it on crap to make your life feel happier, it's a false economy.
I'd always tell somebody to take the job that is closest to what they would want to do in their spare time as possible. Nobody loves
Personally, I'd take the Perl job, but then that fits my personality better.
25% of British Muslims believe the 7/7 bombings were justified.
In one recent Slashdot poll, 26% of those replying to the poll said that the best way to keep papers together was "Blowtorch". Only 38% thought a stapler was the best way forward. See, the point I'm making is that depending on how you ask the question, who you ask the question of and what options you provide to answer with, you will sometimes get answers that mean anything less than 30% is just silly noise.
You're also ignoring the fact that 75% of British Muslims don't believe the 7/7 bombings were justified. Yet we as a society are starting to treat 100% of the population who look a bit sun-tanned as being co-conspirators.
When asked, "Is Britain my country?" only one in four British Muslims it is.
Actually, the report cited in one of the children posts is ambiguous on this. It isn't clear from the grammar if one in four believe Britain is "our country" or "their country". Given that a large number of those interviewed may have not been born here, that isn't surprising. I would be more interested to hear if one in four 2nd or 3rd generation Muslims answered "this is not my country, it is their country" and if that group were inner-city, Northern mill town, how much exposure they had to other cultures, etc. I also suspect that if you asked the White population "Do Muslims have a right to call Britain 'their' country if they were born here?" the figures would be far more shocking.
Thirty percent of British Muslims would prefer to live under Sharia law than under British law.
As another poster pointed out, that means 70% would prefer not to. Given the importance of the Qu'uran in daily Islamic life, that's actually quite startling. Given that a considerable chunk of the more obvious Sharia laws are effectively Old Testament laws we consider immoral within secular society as well - concerning adultery, murder, theft - that's not that peculiar perhaps. As for the rest, the fact that 70% of Muslims don't want a law making it illegal to be homosexual, perhaps means that they're probably more progressive and left wing than the majority of the white population of Britain. They certainly seem a lot more relaxed with other people's opionions and lifestyles than most Daily Mail readers I've had the displeasure of dealing with.
Half of those British Muslims who express a preference for living under Sharia law say that, given the choice, they would move to a country governed by those laws.
That gives the game away. What do you think that means? "Given the choice"? Obviously this data is skewed by people who aren't actually bothered by foreign policy, sharia law, etc. but are venting their frustration at being disenfranchised and suffering economic hardship. Go drive around Tower Hamlets and then tell me it tallies that immigrants and asylum seekers are living it up as per the tabloid media fantasy. This data is bull, period. I can't take any of it seriously with the revelation of that figure.
Twenty-eight percent of Brirish Muslims hope for the U.K. one day to become a fundamentalist Islamic state.
I'd say more than 80% of Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph readers want the UK to become a fundamentalist Christian state. We already know that 50% or thereabouts of Americans want America to be a fundamentalist state devoted to Christiantity, so I'd say 72% of muslims saying they'd prefer Britain to be an open, free and secular state is actually showing incredible progressiveness.
What's more this data is seriously flawed as it is. If you're going to cite it, I really would like to see break-downs per economic bracket, location, age-group, second- or third-generation answers, etc. to get a clear answer. As it is, this has all the seriousness of a poll conducted right here on Slashdot. I.e. it's worthless, and the results found are those the questioner hoped for.
I think if /. is going to carry on running these stories we're going to need another vote on moderation: -1 BNP Bigot
So let me get this right: the plan was to wait until after the stock market closed Tuesday, then announce, so people don't run around dumping stock like headless chickens?
And The Reg, Reuters and Slashdot have got it now?
I love it when a plan comes toge... oh. Ah. Well, errrmmm.... if you work for Intel, have a GREAT weekend, and if you own shares, well, you've only got some 20+ hours trading to go before the announcement, so take your time...
It's not illegal to publish the article in the UK. Those people who are whining about UK laws being imposed on an American company miss the point. However, if the defence can assert that because of media attention, no fair-minded jury can be found, it can be ruled that no fair trial can occur and the guys walk away scot-free. If a media outlet can be shown to have prejudiced enough people against the defendents, it doesn't matter if they're guilty or not - they walk. The NYT are just making sure they don't end up being blamed for that happening. It's not that it's "illegal" at all. It's just publishing it can have consequences that the NYT publishers don't want to have to deal with. They can publish anything they want after the trial, it's just not a great idea to do so right now.
What if the car had a solar panel on its roof? Park up, let the photo-voltaic cells do their work. Hell, with the right circuitry you might just have a car there that never needs plugging into a wall socket, ever.
Ricardo Semler.
Before anybody starts talking about brand new revolutionary management techniques, they really need to go and read Ricardo Semler's books, or at the very least his Wikipedia entry and then tell me what HCL is doing is somehow way and above his techniques.
What this article presents is a very shallow clone of Semco's management policies. It's basically an electronic version of what you should have in your company anyway. Putting a ticketing system in place for employees to complain about the cafeteria is not revolutionary.
Changing the process so that managers are hired by those they will manage is revolutionary. Training every employee to be able to read the books, then give them access to the books 24x7 is revolutionary. Giving your employees that information about cash position and then telling them what every person in the company (including their bosses) is paid is revolutionary. Doing all of that and then allowing every employee to ask for whatever salary they want is revolutionary. Telling staff they don't have to turn up, just get the job done is revolutionary.
And whilst we're at it, if you want to really go over the top, I'd check out Gore Industries - makers of Goretex fabric - and their completely 100% flat management model, the 150-staff to a unit cap in place for reasons of evolutionary psychology, their attitude to what makes a leader/manager ("somebody is a leader when other people are following them") and you then realise what is revolutionary.
These guys are here for the PR, and what they're doing is not revolutionary, novel, unique or interesting. The fact that so many people think it is just shows you how poor most companies are at management. For me, the HCL system would be like going back in time by a decade or more... (no, I don't work for Semco or Gore - I have my own business being built using similar principles).
I'm not sure what the utility of this is right now. In theory I could send 5.12 terabits/sec down a cable by getting the laser to flash on and off twice as quickly. That doesn't mean I've encoded any data or that I've been able to process that data at the other end in a meaningful way.
It's great that the transmission hardware is up to silly speeds, but until you can take that incoming data and packet switch/route it properly, until there are servers that can process even a tenth of that data in a meaningful way, this isn't something that will affect anybody, anywhere, other than for the people involved whose paper will get published.
> Computing has been standing pretty much still over the last 15 years. The only really interesting thing that has happened was the internet.
That's like saying "Literature has been pretty much still over the last 2,500 years. The only really interesting thing that has happened was the printing press".
The problem MS has is that they still don't "get" the web. They still think the way to ship software is once every 5 years, and involves sending a master CD off to a big factory where they put copies of the CDs into little boxes and then fly them all around the World.
If instead they said "OK, we know where we want to be in 5 years, let's release an update online to subscribers once a month, increment by increment" and adopted agile methodologies, right now we'd have something not a million miles away from Vista and they'd have had 5 years worth of subscriber fees in the bank.
They need to learn how to do software releases the way Google, Flickr, Amazon and Yahoo do. The way Linux, *BSD and virtually everything on Sourceforge does. Not this archaic system that leads to buggy code, frustrated developers and users who give up and drift away to the code written by the guys who are punching harder, higher and faster.
Agile development - MS need to go and read some books.
Europeans don't hate the US, and what contempt they do have for the US is that it is not 'too free' but rather it's too hypocritical. Everything in the US is owned by an elite few, even religious morality. If you're not Christian (or at least Jewish), you're persona non grata, if you don't want to salute a piece of graphic design denoting some red and white stripes and blue square with some stars on it you are deemed "evil". The rest of the World cares about humanity first, the nation state second. The US cares about the nation state and doesn't give a damn about humanity, or at least that's the perception. "Cowboy culture"? More like "Knuckle-dragging, flag-waving, Creationist, Christian Zealot culture". No thanks, we'll pass on you having any more influence over the Internet. Please hand it over to the grown-ups now before you vote in another moron who thinks we should all be crying for the little baby Jesus...
Incorrect.
If you have a tuning crystal (or equivalent) you have to pay unless you can prove it has never been used for the purpose of receiving TV programs. So, unless you live in a Faraday cage and can prove you have no way of receiving the programs, you have to pay.
Having a TV you never turn on does not exempt you. Not having an aerial does not exempt you. Using your TV for other things and never watching TV does not exempt you.
The license is for capability, not use.
Imagine yourself in 5 years time. The web browser has all this stuff on it which means it is as good an interface as any other GUI widget stack. Firefox or Safari or IE or whatever effectively is the window manager with tabbed browsing and links to your favourite 'applications'.
The interface is fluid, keyboard shortcuts working fine and everything is as responsive as it is right now in your current desktop. Your applications are used over the web - you don't have to worry about software upgrades or fixing your parent's computer after some installation as everything is done by your ISP.
Can you see that future? What is stopping it from happening?
You're right, the browser is a crap interface. If you actually understood the technology being described, you would realise that it is an improvement to the interface to make all those things happen.
The browser is a bad interface right now. JSON helps to make it a more suitable interface. Go figure.
It also means it is the perfect point of attack for people who want to read all your e-mail. If I can find a buffer overflow in their code and send you a mail, can I get your private key sent back to me without you knowing?
A live cop isn't saying "well the distance between the corners of his lips is the same as Suspect X, his pupils are the same distance apart as Suspect X, his ears in relation to his other features are the same size and shape as Suspect X therefore he must be Suspect X" thereby triggering your immediate arrest and detention whilst you try to prove you are not Suspect X.
Meanwhile, Suspect X is walking around freely wearing some prosphetics that alter the shape of his nose, ears, corners of his lips, etc.
I've recently lost about 5Kgs of weight, and my face, particularly the shape, is quite different. I look at pictures of myself just 3 months old and even I look quite different. Even friends who see me every day comment on it.
This technology could be flawed by people just gaining and losing weight. Look at pictures of people who have lost a lot of weight and you'll see their cheeks, chin, even lips all look completely different. If this system is so "accurate" it can distinguish between identical twins, what happens when people eat too many twinkies or lose a few kgs?
There is a difference between a brutal, corrupt and oppresive force preventing the masses from knowing what their government are really up to, in order to prevent a revolution (censorship, a la China, North Korea, Fox News) and a broadcaster not being prepared to pay for the rights to Internet broadcast of somebody's legitimately owned IPR.
Grow up. This is not censorship. It's licensing. Confusing the two makes you look stupid, your arguments weak, and provides ammunition to those whom you may have a legitiamte gripe with regarding IPR whilst reducing the travesty of true censorship to something akin to you not being able to watch some TV.
I'm actually pretty disgusted that you've used the word censorship like this. This will get modded down as trolling, but I really think you guys need to get things into perspective. I feel sick.
And perhaps with your cameraphone take a quick picture of said receipt as proof to a party you voted for them, and to pick up your payment? Any system which verifies how you voted is open to abuse. Ballot papers are more secure in this respect as they don't indicate how you voted - you could put an X in the box, take your photo, then spoil the paper. The system you suggest actually encourages corruption as it is a receipt AFTER the vote has definitely been cast and therefore a picture of it is worth money.
... of a letter I read in a now long-defunct weekly computer magazine in the UK called New Computer Express. Printed on cheap paper, it attempted to cover all available platforms in one 80-page weekly magazine. This included everything from ZX Spectrums to the then quite new 486 PCs. Macs, Amigas, Ataris, Amstrad CPCs, you name it, they all had their corner in there. Great magazine. Only problem was, their letters page looked like the flamewar from hell...
One guy wrote in saying he had got fed of up how his friend was always boasting about his Amiga 500 and how it was vastly superior to any other machine on the planet, especially this individual's ZX81 Spectrum. So convinced was he, he proposed a test. He offered the letter-writer his Amiga 500 for free if he could come up with one test, any test of his choice, where the ZX81 outperformed the Amiga.
The Speccy-owner, sat down, had a think, realised what to do and called his friend over with his Amiga for the test to begin. The friend arrived, and was summoned to the back garden. The Speccy-owner took his ZX81 frisbee-style and flung it across the garden, landing it perfectly in a compost heap.
The Amiga owner stared at him, spun around with his Amiga, tried throwing it, fell over under the weight, the machine smashing into several pieces. The speccy owner picked up, cleaned off and plugged in his ZX81, and was playing Manic Miner in minutes. The Amiga owner was told to take his trash and go home, which he did, crying...
When it comes to destruction tests, you have to ask "what's the point?". My media cards are normally well protected inside cameras or PCs and are unlikely to be dipped in cola or nailed to trees. However, it's always interesting to see how things work outside of the environment for which they were designed, just like that ZX81 and Amiga 500.
Where is the roadmap for low-power consumption chips that can operate either fanless, or with low less cooling gear?
I survived just fine on a PII for several years until recently biting the bullet and getting myself a P4 box in a Shutttle Zen XPC case (relatively quiet). I seriously considered getting myself an EPIA box as my main machine, simply because it would be lower power (therefore cheaper to run), silent and enough umph to use mutt, firefox and ssh into the server kit where the real work is done. The only reason I ended up with a P4 is because a friend had a 3GHz one going very cheap.
I want less power, not more. The idea I should overclock, buy liquid cooling systems and should pay a ridiculous amount so I can play some games? I'm sorry, what planet are you all on?
People are saying Turner is the proverbial kettle calling the pot black. They miss the point.
Yes, he built CNN but no longer owns it. He has no control of AOL Time Warner, and if he did it is quite clear they would be a very different company. The empire building is not his doing. I've read a lot of interviews with Turner, and he strikes me as a bombastic and determined man, but he has always been against "The Big Guys" and trying to battle for "The Little Guys" because he's always seen himself as the little guy. Go read a history of CNN to see what I mean.
As for the general point of this article, he has a point. The company that disturbs me the most actually is Disney. Down in Florida they have effectively got their own government for several hundred thousand square acres, they have a town in which they control everything (called Celebration IIRC), they have changed state law so that nobody can be declared dead on Disney property, and have interests in more government projects than an entertainment company really should. They are literally, not figuratively, a law unto themselves. How the hell did that happen? How can you compare Turner's business interests with that lot?
On a day when I have readjusted my outlook on life in general after reading the slashdot article and associated links on Joe Trippi, thinking about this stuff just makes me mad quite frankly.
... I only discovered it a few months ago, and what really struck me was not only was the quality quite high, but the technology itself. The wiki concept is rather striking.
:-)
So then I got to thinking, what if instead of using wikis to have a homepage, or an encyclopedia or a text book - a site recording fact - if you had something recording ideas and thoughts.
You know, you come up with ideas for say coding projects, or even just things that should be made and you know you're not going to do anything with them, and you want to let them form into something more with other people. So you go to sites like ShouldExist.org and bandy them around.
But what if you did it as a wiki? And you didn't restrict it to your software todo lists? And what if you could write fiction there and hold debates? And you know, muck about with other people's idea and perhaps form them into something that could happen?
So a few weeks ago, I got hold of Mediawiki, the software used by Wikipedia, and setup VagueWare.com. And it's starting to work. It's good fun. Open source think tank. A kind of a "Bazaar" in the ESR sense for thoughts and ideas.
So for me, the best thing about wikipedia is not the 300,000 articles, all of them quite good, but it's the software underneath it. It's allowed me and my friends to build a big playpen that anybody can join in with.
So, well done for 300,000 articles, but most of all, thanks for the best wiki software on the planet. My life would be worse off without it.
No, not quite. He's in charge of the Home Office. The Home Office is not like "Homeland Security". It's much, much, MUCH bigger than that. Homeland Security is basically the equivalent of MI5/Special Branch which whilst coming under the juridstciotn of the Home Office is tiny in comparison to the rest of the organisation.
Think of it this way - you have lots of functions that are carried out by various ministries - the MoD looks after Defence, the Foreign Office sorts out diplomatic affairs (and intelligence agencies), Dept of Health looks after the NHS, etc., etc.
Anything that is left over, goes to the Home Office. This includes all law enforcement (at all levels), part stake in MI5, and anything else nobody else is prepared to take responsibility for. It is a MASSIVE department, dwarfing every other UK government department.
Blunkett, whilst in charge of the Home Office has introduced some interesting laws. Nearly all of them specifically remove civil liberties from the UK citizen, and he has announced an ID card that will eventually replace driver's licenses, passports, etc. and will carry biometric data. A corresponding matchup of the data is held on government computers, it's use is ill-defined, in short, it's a hideous idea that is being lobbied for by a company that stands to make a lot of money out of it.
Using the same argument, why should taxpayers pay for the enforcement of the law regarding bank robberies instead of the banks? Or murder? Surely, if I get murdered, it's my responsibility to bequeath enough money to ensure my killer is caught?
$5 million is a tiny, tiny fraction of the amount of tax revenue the entire movie industry (studios, distributors, cinemas, actors, crew, etc.) bring in annually. In short, by paying their taxes, the film industry is in fact paying for the enforcement of these laws. The "why should taxpayers pay?" line is so broken, you really go and do some very, very basic study of economics.