It makes me feel good inside to know that I am creating revenue for the website that I visit, which helps cover the cost of providing that website. Tracking a user and giving targeting advertising increases the value of the advertising campaigns, which translates into more money for the website.
If we didn't have this, the web is going to become subscription-only very quickly.
Where your argument falls apart is that displaying advertisements and tracking users are mostly orthogonal problems. The print business has been doing OK without tracking users in magazines, and so does the TV business. They *do* track users, mind you, but they do so by doing surveys in which users *volunteer* information. They can then display targeted ads according to the three most relevant means of segmenting a market: sex, age and revenue.
Web advertisers, by contrast, decided it was a good thing to track each and every move and interaction from a user, in the name of improving ad responses. Yet, there's absolutely no valid reason whatsoever to favor automatic tracking and (widely mis-)inferring profiles, over periodically surveying users to know who they are in their words. I'd actually argue the contrary: things have gotten so bad and out of control with erroneous finger tapping on tablets, that ads are more irrelevant than ever. It's time for them to stop tracking and get back to the tried and tested techniques of segmenting markets.
Yet there are americans 'observing' elections in the middle-east and africa, but there it is normal because those regimes are corrupt. The fact that Europe is willing to send observers to the USA elections is maybe a sign that they think there is no real democracy there.
Or more simply, that the OSCE treaty, which was signed by the US, obliges its members to invite observers...
As a signing member of OSCE, the US must comply to the treaty's terms. This is irrespective of what Texas' AG quacks, since the legalese in international treaties supersedes national laws where applicable -- or at least that's how it's supposed to work anyway.
Hosting the repository, per your comment, is a long solved problem. Slightly more complex, but also solved, is processing installs and updates without making client devices crash.
These, however, are trivial compared to the absolute mess that billing and access restrictions introduce in the process. Let along remote support...
The problem with these companies mostly is that they think they've come up with better cryptographic security than tried and tested solutions, which is pathetic.
Consider teaming up with a seasoned negotiator with good business sense, or hiring an attorney -- or both. If there is any value in your dataset, those who got in touch with you will not reject fees, SLA's, reciprocal updates, etc. It all depends on how much data you have, and how accurate it is.
On a separate note: your site is disfunctional on my tablet. I'm left wondering what it's about or how it's supposed to work.
Methinks you're seriously underestimating the difficulty of creating what you've in mind.
There's nothing unusual about doing so, btw. Typically, this stems from over-thinking about the success case, while neglecting to think about what can go wrong. In real systems, basically everything that can go wrong eventually will. And things need to scale. Potentially massively.
This stuff is so hard, that not a single company out there gets it right. Not a single one. Not even Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, you name it. Also note that none of the various app stores even begin to try to touch support or custom-licensing with a 6-foot pole. Both are cesspools of problems in their right.
Anyway, regarding your worries about patent trolls: if you actually did pull it off, then IP and patent issues would be, IMHO, the least of your worries.
Don't even bother trying to secure the box beyond Microsft Security essentials. For good measure, maybe periodically hop to Trend Micro's site and run Housecall on it (in addition to MSE). But honestly, there's no chance in hell that a PC under the responsibility of an adolescent will come out clean after any material amount of time. He'll be downloading music, videos and games before you know it, and turning your laptop into a petri-dish before you know it.
The issue for China is there isn't enough high quality fly ash around to make the cement needed to build its railway network in a sustainable manner. Without the proper ash, rail tracks have a lifespan of a dozen years vs the usual century, and thus need to be constantly maintained and rebuilt. The whole adventure reeks of money wastage...
Le Canard's tone is satirical, but it's really an investigative journalism outfit on the ruling elite.
A great number of their stories and quotes are tipped by high profile public servants and ministers. (La Mare aux Canards, in particular, is a section comprising of the week's best quotes, quips and gaffes by French politicians; these are all tipped by the Elysée, ministers, members of parliament, and their various cabinet members; either in the hopes of getting press attention, or in the hopes of landing a nice banana peel under a colleague's feet.)
Their follow-up investigative work is held to rather high standards because they frequently get sued for defamation. On occasion, they unearth true gems that can make or break a politician's career.
Years ago, I'd have suggested the usual suspects in the French media; Le Monde in particular. Lately, though, I've been wishing all the French press outfits a quick and painful death. They've been transcribing AFP, AP and Reuters news, à la 20 Minutes; and their opinion pieces are crap. Yet somehow, they expect people to pay for reading typos on their websites...
I doubt there's any weasel wording from Apple here. Insofar as I understood it, the setting is -- and can only be, for that matter -- only relevant to iAds. "Limit Ad Tracking" probably means: "Disable user-tracking for iAds. Third-party Ad networks won't care about this setting."
Then again, observing the material world relies on our sensory organs, where math rules unchallenged when it comes to causal thinking. Might it all be psychology?
Mandatory caps of this type worked fine for cars in EU countries, inasfar as I'm aware. The target gas consumption per km decreases over time, and car makers strive to beat it in order to avoid pollution-related taxes. This leads to more innovation and less energy consumption, for the benefit of everyone. As interesting side-effects, the targets conveniently keep low-tech cars made in China and India out of European markets, and the few who arguably get priced out of the car market end up riding bicycle or using mass-transit systems.
Whichever way the EU would legislate on this, assuming ever, competent GPU makers would likewise put more focus on reducing energy consumption. Fwiw, they need to do so anyway for laptops, tablets and smart phones. So imho, nothing to see, move along...
It appears that the one thing modern society can no longer tolerate is intolerance. (...) 'Our tolerance must never extend to tolerating religious hatred.'"
Best I'm aware, modern society tolerates intolerance including towards itself, and accommodates itself with the ludicrous side-effects for doing so (e.g. the TSA). The line it refuses to cross is when a lunatic blows himself up in the middle of a crowd for religious reasons. (One line it and its media arguably shouldn't have crossed, but did regardless, was to give special treatment and coverage to some criminals due to their religion.)
There are a select few religious nut jobs, by contrast, that cannot seem to tolerate anything that but their peers, and that have little to no sense of measure or humor. Enlightened societies, including the ones they live in, should make it a point to ridicule them until they become more tolerant and grow a sense of measure and humor.
whereas it was normal politics for the time and culture... how ignorant.
Actually, it was anything but normal for the time and culture.
Records from Ancient Israel, Greece, Cartage (former Phoenicians, who originated north of Israel) and Rome all indicate that getting married at age 12 for a girl was considered very young across the Mediterranean. The whole area -- courtesy of Greek and Phoenician colonists, Alexander the Great and later the Roman Empire -- formed a broad cultural unit spanning from the Atlantic to Ethiopia and Mesopotamia. Mecca was, in the 7th century, at the limit of this cultural unit: it was an important trading outpost on the camel route to current Yemen, which supplied Europe with Incense, and it had significant Christian and Jewish communities.
Consequently, there is little if any evidence that anyone in the area would consider it normal to wed a 6-year old or to shag a 9-year old. On the contrary, cultures in areas some might call "backward" today would suggest that the earliest appropriate marriage age for a girl then, before, or later, be it Mecca, in the middle of the desert, or anywhere else, broke down to whether a girl is of breeding age or not.
Imho, Ruby's sweet spot is in developing CLI tools (with Rake and Thor where relevant), rather than in developing full-fledged apps...
One of Ruby's issues is the language's flexibility and mutability. In some sense, this is Ruby's strength. In others, though, it's a door wide open for bugs related to internal state getting screwed up due to memory-related over optimizations. Not to mention Ruby's own bugs and inconsistencies in various areas, such as objects occasionally changing their object_id in completely unexpected ways, or not enforcing their frozen state. (*)
Another issue is the heaps of gems that you may end up depending upon without necessarily wanting to, either due to known bugs, the potential for bugs and quirks, or undesired and unexpected api changes that invariably creep in. Many gems are reasonably well maintained; others, less so. Things can quickly turn into a dependency nightmare -- especially if you're using Rails.
Why is it 'mad'? I don't understand why people have such issues with this. Its just a damn number. If it really irks you so much just add a decimal point to the start of it in your head and move on.
It's not just a damn number. By convention in typical software versioning, version X.Y.Z means:
- X: major version number - Y: minor version number - Z: bug fix version number
Taking a house analogy:
- The major version number is akin to the building itself; it's the overall architecture. You bump this when you basically tear part or all of the whole thing down and rebuild it on more solid foundations. - The minor version number is akin to the interior floor plan, plumbing, cabling, etc.; it's the API. You bump this when you introduce new features, or change or deprecate existing ones. - The bug fix version is akin to everyday maintenance and the interior design; it should have zero impact on whatever is interfaced with or relying upon your software. You bump this when you find something defective and make it work the way it should.
You could argue that consumers don't care, and that power users will be well aware of what's really in a new version, and thus that not conforming to the above convention is no big deal. That argument completely falls apart, however, when you consider the system admin or the advanced user who ends up asking himself whether he should upgrade a non-conforming piece of software on a computer or not. If the latter two need to waste time on a BS versioning scheme, they'll replace the offending piece of software as soon as they get the chance for peace of mind.
Slashdot Mirror
It makes me feel good inside to know that I am creating revenue for the website that I visit, which helps cover the cost of providing that website. Tracking a user and giving targeting advertising increases the value of the advertising campaigns, which translates into more money for the website.
If we didn't have this, the web is going to become subscription-only very quickly.
Where your argument falls apart is that displaying advertisements and tracking users are mostly orthogonal problems. The print business has been doing OK without tracking users in magazines, and so does the TV business. They *do* track users, mind you, but they do so by doing surveys in which users *volunteer* information. They can then display targeted ads according to the three most relevant means of segmenting a market: sex, age and revenue.
Web advertisers, by contrast, decided it was a good thing to track each and every move and interaction from a user, in the name of improving ad responses. Yet, there's absolutely no valid reason whatsoever to favor automatic tracking and (widely mis-)inferring profiles, over periodically surveying users to know who they are in their words. I'd actually argue the contrary: things have gotten so bad and out of control with erroneous finger tapping on tablets, that ads are more irrelevant than ever. It's time for them to stop tracking and get back to the tried and tested techniques of segmenting markets.
Yet there are americans 'observing' elections in the middle-east and africa, but there it is normal because those regimes are corrupt. The fact that Europe is willing to send observers to the USA elections is maybe a sign that they think there is no real democracy there.
Or more simply, that the OSCE treaty, which was signed by the US, obliges its members to invite observers...
Where does this obligation come from?
As a signing member of OSCE, the US must comply to the treaty's terms. This is irrespective of what Texas' AG quacks, since the legalese in international treaties supersedes national laws where applicable -- or at least that's how it's supposed to work anyway.
Hosting the repository, per your comment, is a long solved problem. Slightly more complex, but also solved, is processing installs and updates without making client devices crash.
These, however, are trivial compared to the absolute mess that billing and access restrictions introduce in the process. Let along remote support...
Uh huh? As in "No Wifi. Less space than a nomad. Lame."?
We know how that worked out for Apple...
The problem with these companies mostly is that they think they've come up with better cryptographic security than tried and tested solutions, which is pathetic.
FTFY.
Consider teaming up with a seasoned negotiator with good business sense, or hiring an attorney -- or both. If there is any value in your dataset, those who got in touch with you will not reject fees, SLA's, reciprocal updates, etc. It all depends on how much data you have, and how accurate it is.
On a separate note: your site is disfunctional on my tablet. I'm left wondering what it's about or how it's supposed to work.
Methinks you're seriously underestimating the difficulty of creating what you've in mind.
There's nothing unusual about doing so, btw. Typically, this stems from over-thinking about the success case, while neglecting to think about what can go wrong. In real systems, basically everything that can go wrong eventually will. And things need to scale. Potentially massively.
This stuff is so hard, that not a single company out there gets it right. Not a single one. Not even Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, you name it. Also note that none of the various app stores even begin to try to touch support or custom-licensing with a 6-foot pole. Both are cesspools of problems in their right.
Anyway, regarding your worries about patent trolls: if you actually did pull it off, then IP and patent issues would be, IMHO, the least of your worries.
Don't even bother trying to secure the box beyond Microsft Security essentials. For good measure, maybe periodically hop to Trend Micro's site and run Housecall on it (in addition to MSE). But honestly, there's no chance in hell that a PC under the responsibility of an adolescent will come out clean after any material amount of time. He'll be downloading music, videos and games before you know it, and turning your laptop into a petri-dish before you know it.
The issue for China is there isn't enough high quality fly ash around to make the cement needed to build its railway network in a sustainable manner. Without the proper ash, rail tracks have a lifespan of a dozen years vs the usual century, and thus need to be constantly maintained and rebuilt. The whole adventure reeks of money wastage...
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/01/is-china-overreaching-on-high-speed-rail/69490/
It's about man-goat hybrids?
Le Canard's tone is satirical, but it's really an investigative journalism outfit on the ruling elite.
A great number of their stories and quotes are tipped by high profile public servants and ministers. (La Mare aux Canards, in particular, is a section comprising of the week's best quotes, quips and gaffes by French politicians; these are all tipped by the Elysée, ministers, members of parliament, and their various cabinet members; either in the hopes of getting press attention, or in the hopes of landing a nice banana peel under a colleague's feet.)
Their follow-up investigative work is held to rather high standards because they frequently get sued for defamation. On occasion, they unearth true gems that can make or break a politician's career.
Years ago, I'd have suggested the usual suspects in the French media; Le Monde in particular. Lately, though, I've been wishing all the French press outfits a quick and painful death. They've been transcribing AFP, AP and Reuters news, à la 20 Minutes; and their opinion pieces are crap. Yet somehow, they expect people to pay for reading typos on their websites...
No need to be that extreme... A hefty fine for companies that do it and another to the carriers that put the calls through should be enough.
I doubt there's any weasel wording from Apple here. Insofar as I understood it, the setting is -- and can only be, for that matter -- only relevant to iAds. "Limit Ad Tracking" probably means: "Disable user-tracking for iAds. Third-party Ad networks won't care about this setting."
Then again, observing the material world relies on our sensory organs, where math rules unchallenged when it comes to causal thinking. Might it all be psychology?
640kB should be enough for anybody.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Misattributed
Mandatory caps of this type worked fine for cars in EU countries, inasfar as I'm aware. The target gas consumption per km decreases over time, and car makers strive to beat it in order to avoid pollution-related taxes. This leads to more innovation and less energy consumption, for the benefit of everyone. As interesting side-effects, the targets conveniently keep low-tech cars made in China and India out of European markets, and the few who arguably get priced out of the car market end up riding bicycle or using mass-transit systems.
Whichever way the EU would legislate on this, assuming ever, competent GPU makers would likewise put more focus on reducing energy consumption. Fwiw, they need to do so anyway for laptops, tablets and smart phones. So imho, nothing to see, move along...
If your nephew has access to an iOS device, try Cargobot:
http://twolivesleft.com/CargoBot/
At that age, that being said, kids usually prefer Cut the Rope:
http://www.zeptolab.com/ctr/
The latter isn't technically programming, but it certainly teaches them problem solving.
I can see the privacy raminifications of using Google or Facebook. But Apple? Seriously?
It appears that the one thing modern society can no longer tolerate is intolerance. (...) 'Our tolerance must never extend to tolerating religious hatred.'"
Best I'm aware, modern society tolerates intolerance including towards itself, and accommodates itself with the ludicrous side-effects for doing so (e.g. the TSA). The line it refuses to cross is when a lunatic blows himself up in the middle of a crowd for religious reasons. (One line it and its media arguably shouldn't have crossed, but did regardless, was to give special treatment and coverage to some criminals due to their religion.)
There are a select few religious nut jobs, by contrast, that cannot seem to tolerate anything that but their peers, and that have little to no sense of measure or humor. Enlightened societies, including the ones they live in, should make it a point to ridicule them until they become more tolerant and grow a sense of measure and humor.
whereas it was normal politics for the time and culture... how ignorant.
Actually, it was anything but normal for the time and culture.
Records from Ancient Israel, Greece, Cartage (former Phoenicians, who originated north of Israel) and Rome all indicate that getting married at age 12 for a girl was considered very young across the Mediterranean. The whole area -- courtesy of Greek and Phoenician colonists, Alexander the Great and later the Roman Empire -- formed a broad cultural unit spanning from the Atlantic to Ethiopia and Mesopotamia. Mecca was, in the 7th century, at the limit of this cultural unit: it was an important trading outpost on the camel route to current Yemen, which supplied Europe with Incense, and it had significant Christian and Jewish communities.
Consequently, there is little if any evidence that anyone in the area would consider it normal to wed a 6-year old or to shag a 9-year old. On the contrary, cultures in areas some might call "backward" today would suggest that the earliest appropriate marriage age for a girl then, before, or later, be it Mecca, in the middle of the desert, or anywhere else, broke down to whether a girl is of breeding age or not.
Uh huh. Try the line with the gsub! call now.
Imho, Ruby's sweet spot is in developing CLI tools (with Rake and Thor where relevant), rather than in developing full-fledged apps...
One of Ruby's issues is the language's flexibility and mutability. In some sense, this is Ruby's strength. In others, though, it's a door wide open for bugs related to internal state getting screwed up due to memory-related over optimizations. Not to mention Ruby's own bugs and inconsistencies in various areas, such as objects occasionally changing their object_id in completely unexpected ways, or not enforcing their frozen state. (*)
Another issue is the heaps of gems that you may end up depending upon without necessarily wanting to, either due to known bugs, the potential for bugs and quirks, or undesired and unexpected api changes that invariably creep in. Many gems are reasonably well maintained; others, less so. Things can quickly turn into a dependency nightmare -- especially if you're using Rails.
It's a really fun language, that being said.
(*) For instance:
foo = ['bar', 'baz'].freeze
foo[0] = 'baz'
foo[0].gsub!('bar', 'baz')
Why is it 'mad'? I don't understand why people have such issues with this. Its just a damn number. If it really irks you so much just add a decimal point to the start of it in your head and move on.
It's not just a damn number. By convention in typical software versioning, version X.Y.Z means:
- X: major version number
- Y: minor version number
- Z: bug fix version number
Taking a house analogy:
- The major version number is akin to the building itself; it's the overall architecture. You bump this when you basically tear part or all of the whole thing down and rebuild it on more solid foundations.
- The minor version number is akin to the interior floor plan, plumbing, cabling, etc.; it's the API. You bump this when you introduce new features, or change or deprecate existing ones.
- The bug fix version is akin to everyday maintenance and the interior design; it should have zero impact on whatever is interfaced with or relying upon your software. You bump this when you find something defective and make it work the way it should.
You could argue that consumers don't care, and that power users will be well aware of what's really in a new version, and thus that not conforming to the above convention is no big deal. That argument completely falls apart, however, when you consider the system admin or the advanced user who ends up asking himself whether he should upgrade a non-conforming piece of software on a computer or not. If the latter two need to waste time on a BS versioning scheme, they'll replace the offending piece of software as soon as they get the chance for peace of mind.
On this side of the pond, we're paying a bit under $8/gallon...