Let's say your statistic is correct, and that what hit Fukushima was the feared 1 in 1000 year event. What damaged has it really caused, long term though? And lest we forget, we are talking about a very old reactor design which was past EOL.
Not the same. Different markets. And this is 25 years later. The market dynamics are completely different, and the choice of hardware that WIndows gave is not helping in this regard. Whilst many people will buy their Android phones and find them completely satisfactory, software makers have to choose between trying to make games work on as many handsets as possible to take advantage of the deep Android market, or intentionally ignoring a large portion of the market, not optimise their software for these handsets and fragment the market. It may not turn out to be as much of a problem as feared but, depending on the relative popularity of the better handsets compared to the more basic ones, it may mean that games have to be detuned to run on as much hardware as possible.
For millions of years, parents were able to influence their children because individually, they had a lot more influence in their large community, and kids grew up around their parents, worked with them, and generally did stuff with them. Now, parents can hardly influence the environment around their kids. It's now luck of the draw, whether your kids turns out good or not.
I have my own computer/human based leap year story. This was probably human error, but still.
I was contracted at a company for the month of February, and was granted network access until then. I left the office on the 28, having left the computer to do a run (would take 8 hours, wasn't waiting and no remote access). At midnight, the system revoked my access, my jobs failed to complete, and I walked in in the morning to find that I had effectively wasted my second last day on my contract.
I mean, seriously, who revokes systems access at midnight? What happened to a grace period at the end? (If they really didn't want me in, all they had to do was to physically deny me the access). And seriously, if you are giving access for the month of February (or March, or April etc), and you really really have to revoke access as soon as the person leaves, Revoke it on the 1st of the next month.
They did for while - if you got a launch PS3. No one else did. Microsoft didn't even try, and it doesn't seem to have hurt them. So Sony responded, and removed it.
This is such a geek perspective to an issue. That is like saying Sony had portable players before Apple. Yes they did, but they sucked. And maybe they ought to have waited a little until the technology matured. The public perception is nearly always right, much as geeks hate to admit it. The public want to buy something that can take their pictures, and in the 90s, print them. Nowadays, they want them on Flickr or Facebook. The first that they made a digital camera first is a complete red herring. Apple made one too, but still failed abysmally. The public is much more receptive to new ideas and brands than people give them credit for. Apple was not a very strong brand in the mid to late 90s. Now they are the top brand in the world. Blackberry pretty much didn't exist as a phone maker 12 years ago, but at one point was the hottest mobile brand in the world. Many companies' problem is that they focus too much on the bottom line. The products might as well be designed by the finance department. At times, companies need to bet on a product, and nowadays, it seem big companies are too timid to do that. Kodak was timid. It had its lunch taken away. Let this be a warning to any company on not going big. Go big or go home as they say.
This sounds like one of those roundabout justifications that people want to give when they feel like they should follow what the bible says, but don't really want to give away their stuff, or they want to become really really fabulously wealthy. Oh, and they belong to some fundamentalist Christian organisation that insists on interpreting the bible literally. So if the eye of a needle is too small, then they invent another eye, which just so happens to be big enough for a wealthy person to be able to walk through, provided they do not attempt to take everything they own with them.
Which when you think about it is really silly because when one dies, they don't tend to take their wealth with them to heaven, unless one believes inheritance tax is some sort of taking wealth to heaven, and then you don't want that, because you might then not be able to walk through this pretty large eye of a rather large needle.
Or maybe, the bible was really talking about the metaphors of an eye and a needle that most people would understand without having to study hard for years upon years until they weasled into such an interpretation. The people that were being preached to were certainly not your average genius.
You would only vacate an election if the guy not playing fair won. So if he loses, he still gets banned, and gets some jail time thrown in. I wonder how many "second stringers" would want to face jail time to be guinea pigs.
I understand the intent behind ASBOs. They are supposed to be a halfway house of sorts. And they do have the effect of preventing the criminalisation of behaviour that is antisocial and that can feel threatening to others. A good example is the gang culture. Now, no one wants to criminalise people walking in groups (at least I don't), but gangs (of you people I must add) most certainly walks in groups and do cause a nuisance, engage in threatening behaviour and in some cases commit crimes. ASBOs can specifically disallow them from congregating in a certain area, and if they are followed, they can make the community feel like (and maybe be) a safer place. But what do we care here on Slashdot. It's not like most of us live in these rough neighbourhoods, so let them have freedom to walk in groups and cause a nuisance. It doesn't affect us.
School uniforms can have another really useful benefit - they reduce the differences between kids in a good way. Allowing kids to wear their own clothes to school fuels the kind of hierarchical society in schools where the haves and the have nots are distinguished by their dressing. They needlessly cause pressure on parents to supply their kids with the latest and greatest fashion so that their kids do not look out of place. And schools do not have to police what students are wearing as much.
If you think one in 6 Americans chose poverty, then you are seriously deluded. Your country has a problem. The rich have commandeered all the resources of the country, and realistically, those 50 million people have to work for them or not work at all. They do not have land (they were born without it), they do not have access to the means of production, and they do not have capital, or access to capital to be able to work themselves out of the mess they are in. Even access to education, the key tool by which the poor could lift themselves out of poverty, is now dependent on money. So basically, they have no realistic hope of competing with the haves.
The American economy is now dominated by super large corporations and there is no way for most small businesses to compete.Yes, a few thousands out of the 50 million may be able to pick themselves out of
I don't think anyone is advocating getting rid of capitalism, but its excesses must surely be tempered. There are many examples of countries that are fantastically wealthy, and yet seem to have a much better balance between wealth and poverty than the USA. Countries were pretty much no one can be bankrupted by medical bills, where access to quality education is based on ability and hard work, rather than whether or not an 18 year old can afford it. America seems to believe it is OK to punish children for the sins of their parents.
Doesn't have to be the elite who suffer. In Russia, it was the landowners. They were thrown in gulags in Siberia.
I am a big fan of capitalism. I think communism is a response to excesses, and the world is moving towards that. I recently watched a programme called Panorama on the BBC. The program was looking at the plight of the poor in the USA. The indignity of American citizens having to queue up in the small hours of the morning to get a chance to see a doctor who will work for free was shocking. And that is to a guy who is from Zimbabwe. The wealthiest country in the world, and people live in tents and its OK?!
Once the poor have nothing to lose, they will start a revolution. They will make the tea partiers and the occupiers look like a walk in the park. Do you know the reason that the west has seen a long sustained period of peace? It's because everyone had something to lose if the peace was broken. Once people feel like they don't have a stake in America, and believe me, many people now don't, they will make life hard for everyone else.
Then the US buys the debt (basically repays the debt at a very low price), and afterwards borrows properly again. China would be stupid to reduce the price of US dollars.
If your own vote is not verifiable, then there is nothing stopping them swapping your ballot papers for fake ones. Ever heard of vote rigging. Since you don't know which ballot paper you marked (to preserve secrecy) there is plausible deniability of any tampering.
How very sanctimonious. If you really feel that bad about Apple (and you didn't divest because you felt Apple had no upside left) then you should really give up all the gains you made because you profited from it. Yes, you should donate it to charity. Until you do that, you are just a man (or woman) with a high horse, trying to preach what you do not practice. You profited from it.
Like it or not, Apple is doing more for the poor people of China than is, well, pretty much anyone else. Those people have jobs and do not have to wait for charity. They do not have to work the rice paddies. Stop applying your first world standards to people in decidedly third world situations. It does not help. Their wages are already rising higher than yours, and mine, and inflation. Long may it be so.
Maybe we need to get rid of the secret ballot then. People should be allowed to vote through an entity they trust to keep score properly. So you should line up in front of the blue or red voting machine and cast your vote there. Interested parties can observe that the count increments correctly when a vote is cast. The only reason rigging is possible is because votes are secret.
How are they manipulated? Do you think Chinese leaders have made their country poor so that they can pay their workers a pittance?
China is mostly a poor country. There is such poverty as you are not likely to see in the US. No one is going to offer such poor people a wage comparable to one offered in the USA. I come from a poor country myself, and the working conditions, when I go back home to visit, are such as I would not want to ever work in. Until those countries take themselves out of poverty, you are going to get those bad working conditions. The only thing that will stop those bad conditions is economic progress. China is on its way to doing that. Unfortunately, it is not this generation that will see those benefits, just like the generation of children who worked in mines in the UK did not see the benefits of an industrialised Britain, or the slaves in America did not see the benefits of an industrialised US.
This is not relativising. The only thing that keeps them in jobs is the fact that they are willing to work for so little, and in such conditions. If we impose much higher standards and pay on them, they lose their jobs, because all of the advantages of employing them vanish. Then what? We send them aid? That would be even worse. Aid destroys countries. I have seen it first hand.
How is pirating a game (yes I used the pirate word) the same as legally and freely downloading a Linux distro. There are many good reasons to buy games nowadays, not least if you want to play online. And movies, well, if your time is worth little, and you are still watching movies on the laptop, then maybe. And if you are into watching more than the average big budget blockbuster, you may find that your choices are severely limited.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say your statistic is correct, and that what hit Fukushima was the feared 1 in 1000 year event. What damaged has it really caused, long term though? And lest we forget, we are talking about a very old reactor design which was past EOL.
Can you name the devices that sell as well then?
Not the same. Different markets. And this is 25 years later. The market dynamics are completely different, and the choice of hardware that WIndows gave is not helping in this regard. Whilst many people will buy their Android phones and find them completely satisfactory, software makers have to choose between trying to make games work on as many handsets as possible to take advantage of the deep Android market, or intentionally ignoring a large portion of the market, not optimise their software for these handsets and fragment the market. It may not turn out to be as much of a problem as feared but, depending on the relative popularity of the better handsets compared to the more basic ones, it may mean that games have to be detuned to run on as much hardware as possible.
Dismal failure? What other device in its class sells anywhere near as well?
I think you meant Khronometer
For millions of years, parents were able to influence their children because individually, they had a lot more influence in their large community, and kids grew up around their parents, worked with them, and generally did stuff with them. Now, parents can hardly influence the environment around their kids. It's now luck of the draw, whether your kids turns out good or not.
I have my own computer/human based leap year story. This was probably human error, but still.
I was contracted at a company for the month of February, and was granted network access until then. I left the office on the 28, having left the computer to do a run (would take 8 hours, wasn't waiting and no remote access). At midnight, the system revoked my access, my jobs failed to complete, and I walked in in the morning to find that I had effectively wasted my second last day on my contract.
I mean, seriously, who revokes systems access at midnight? What happened to a grace period at the end? (If they really didn't want me in, all they had to do was to physically deny me the access). And seriously, if you are giving access for the month of February (or March, or April etc), and you really really have to revoke access as soon as the person leaves, Revoke it on the 1st of the next month.
Rant over.
They did for while - if you got a launch PS3. No one else did. Microsoft didn't even try, and it doesn't seem to have hurt them. So Sony responded, and removed it.
This is such a geek perspective to an issue. That is like saying Sony had portable players before Apple. Yes they did, but they sucked. And maybe they ought to have waited a little until the technology matured. The public perception is nearly always right, much as geeks hate to admit it. The public want to buy something that can take their pictures, and in the 90s, print them. Nowadays, they want them on Flickr or Facebook. The first that they made a digital camera first is a complete red herring. Apple made one too, but still failed abysmally. The public is much more receptive to new ideas and brands than people give them credit for. Apple was not a very strong brand in the mid to late 90s. Now they are the top brand in the world. Blackberry pretty much didn't exist as a phone maker 12 years ago, but at one point was the hottest mobile brand in the world. Many companies' problem is that they focus too much on the bottom line. The products might as well be designed by the finance department. At times, companies need to bet on a product, and nowadays, it seem big companies are too timid to do that. Kodak was timid. It had its lunch taken away. Let this be a warning to any company on not going big. Go big or go home as they say.
Take it from me, you probably are. I would know, I grew up in a developing country.
This sounds like one of those roundabout justifications that people want to give when they feel like they should follow what the bible says, but don't really want to give away their stuff, or they want to become really really fabulously wealthy. Oh, and they belong to some fundamentalist Christian organisation that insists on interpreting the bible literally. So if the eye of a needle is too small, then they invent another eye, which just so happens to be big enough for a wealthy person to be able to walk through, provided they do not attempt to take everything they own with them.
Which when you think about it is really silly because when one dies, they don't tend to take their wealth with them to heaven, unless one believes inheritance tax is some sort of taking wealth to heaven, and then you don't want that, because you might then not be able to walk through this pretty large eye of a rather large needle.
Or maybe, the bible was really talking about the metaphors of an eye and a needle that most people would understand without having to study hard for years upon years until they weasled into such an interpretation. The people that were being preached to were certainly not your average genius.
You would only vacate an election if the guy not playing fair won. So if he loses, he still gets banned, and gets some jail time thrown in. I wonder how many "second stringers" would want to face jail time to be guinea pigs.
I understand the intent behind ASBOs. They are supposed to be a halfway house of sorts. And they do have the effect of preventing the criminalisation of behaviour that is antisocial and that can feel threatening to others. A good example is the gang culture. Now, no one wants to criminalise people walking in groups (at least I don't), but gangs (of you people I must add) most certainly walks in groups and do cause a nuisance, engage in threatening behaviour and in some cases commit crimes. ASBOs can specifically disallow them from congregating in a certain area, and if they are followed, they can make the community feel like (and maybe be) a safer place. But what do we care here on Slashdot. It's not like most of us live in these rough neighbourhoods, so let them have freedom to walk in groups and cause a nuisance. It doesn't affect us.
School uniforms can have another really useful benefit - they reduce the differences between kids in a good way. Allowing kids to wear their own clothes to school fuels the kind of hierarchical society in schools where the haves and the have nots are distinguished by their dressing. They needlessly cause pressure on parents to supply their kids with the latest and greatest fashion so that their kids do not look out of place. And schools do not have to police what students are wearing as much.
Kindergarten kids chose that?
People laid off during the downturn chose that?
If you think one in 6 Americans chose poverty, then you are seriously deluded. Your country has a problem. The rich have commandeered all the resources of the country, and realistically, those 50 million people have to work for them or not work at all. They do not have land (they were born without it), they do not have access to the means of production, and they do not have capital, or access to capital to be able to work themselves out of the mess they are in. Even access to education, the key tool by which the poor could lift themselves out of poverty, is now dependent on money. So basically, they have no realistic hope of competing with the haves.
The American economy is now dominated by super large corporations and there is no way for most small businesses to compete.Yes, a few thousands out of the 50 million may be able to pick themselves out of
I don't think anyone is advocating getting rid of capitalism, but its excesses must surely be tempered. There are many examples of countries that are fantastically wealthy, and yet seem to have a much better balance between wealth and poverty than the USA. Countries were pretty much no one can be bankrupted by medical bills, where access to quality education is based on ability and hard work, rather than whether or not an 18 year old can afford it. America seems to believe it is OK to punish children for the sins of their parents.
Doesn't have to be the elite who suffer. In Russia, it was the landowners. They were thrown in gulags in Siberia.
I am a big fan of capitalism. I think communism is a response to excesses, and the world is moving towards that. I recently watched a programme called Panorama on the BBC. The program was looking at the plight of the poor in the USA. The indignity of American citizens having to queue up in the small hours of the morning to get a chance to see a doctor who will work for free was shocking. And that is to a guy who is from Zimbabwe. The wealthiest country in the world, and people live in tents and its OK?!
Once the poor have nothing to lose, they will start a revolution. They will make the tea partiers and the occupiers look like a walk in the park. Do you know the reason that the west has seen a long sustained period of peace? It's because everyone had something to lose if the peace was broken. Once people feel like they don't have a stake in America, and believe me, many people now don't, they will make life hard for everyone else.
Then the US buys the debt (basically repays the debt at a very low price), and afterwards borrows properly again. China would be stupid to reduce the price of US dollars.
You have such a specialised use case that they should not even bother optimising the _default_ desktop for you. Just saying.
If your own vote is not verifiable, then there is nothing stopping them swapping your ballot papers for fake ones. Ever heard of vote rigging. Since you don't know which ballot paper you marked (to preserve secrecy) there is plausible deniability of any tampering.
How very sanctimonious. If you really feel that bad about Apple (and you didn't divest because you felt Apple had no upside left) then you should really give up all the gains you made because you profited from it. Yes, you should donate it to charity. Until you do that, you are just a man (or woman) with a high horse, trying to preach what you do not practice. You profited from it.
Like it or not, Apple is doing more for the poor people of China than is, well, pretty much anyone else. Those people have jobs and do not have to wait for charity. They do not have to work the rice paddies. Stop applying your first world standards to people in decidedly third world situations. It does not help. Their wages are already rising higher than yours, and mine, and inflation. Long may it be so.
Not easier, cheaper.
How the heck is pirating easier than opening iTunes, or searching in Amazon, and searching for the song you want, and clicking on the buy button.
The lengths people go to to justify themselves!
Maybe we need to get rid of the secret ballot then. People should be allowed to vote through an entity they trust to keep score properly. So you should line up in front of the blue or red voting machine and cast your vote there. Interested parties can observe that the count increments correctly when a vote is cast. The only reason rigging is possible is because votes are secret.
How are they manipulated? Do you think Chinese leaders have made their country poor so that they can pay their workers a pittance?
China is mostly a poor country. There is such poverty as you are not likely to see in the US. No one is going to offer such poor people a wage comparable to one offered in the USA. I come from a poor country myself, and the working conditions, when I go back home to visit, are such as I would not want to ever work in. Until those countries take themselves out of poverty, you are going to get those bad working conditions. The only thing that will stop those bad conditions is economic progress. China is on its way to doing that. Unfortunately, it is not this generation that will see those benefits, just like the generation of children who worked in mines in the UK did not see the benefits of an industrialised Britain, or the slaves in America did not see the benefits of an industrialised US.
This is not relativising. The only thing that keeps them in jobs is the fact that they are willing to work for so little, and in such conditions. If we impose much higher standards and pay on them, they lose their jobs, because all of the advantages of employing them vanish. Then what? We send them aid? That would be even worse. Aid destroys countries. I have seen it first hand.
How is pirating a game (yes I used the pirate word) the same as legally and freely downloading a Linux distro. There are many good reasons to buy games nowadays, not least if you want to play online. And movies, well, if your time is worth little, and you are still watching movies on the laptop, then maybe. And if you are into watching more than the average big budget blockbuster, you may find that your choices are severely limited.
Most Linux distros lack a sustainable business model. They expect people to pay for something they can get for free.