Plenty of quotes, and sucks to be him right now. Maybe, just maybe he can work to get us better food supplies and get rid of Monsanto et al, and improve the world a little bit with all this attention?
It's not about business as much as it is about censorship. What you are forgetting is that the current group of Chinese students don't even know what tank man is, never mind what was happening in their own country when he stood in front of the tanks. Everyone seems to agree that Saddam Husein needed to be taken out because he was a bad man. The Chinese government is a bad government and everyone is politically dancing around this fact while trying to make money in China. Google is saying "hey, we have a motto and doing business with such a government is not in keeping with it". No matter who wins or loses, this stands to be a surrealistic highlight of the fact that there are bad people in the world, and the world is too small to allow them to corrupt such a large part of the world with censorship, secret police, and many other unsavory things. The mere existence of the Chinese government and who they will be supportive of creates a safe environment for more of the same to blossom in different places. It's not like the red scare or anything, but if they don't want to do business with anyone who will not also partake in ill treatment of their citizens, the world really needs to step up as a group and say NO, you're wrong and we won't play. That means that we should stop buying things made in China. period. If Google can say no, the rest of us should be saying no. If you want cheap goods, try another country of origin, just don't buy 'made in China' goods. Besides, your pets and children may live longer if you don't.
Because they are not sure what they are choosing, the process often goes like this: Oh? WTF? Well, I'm using MS Windows, don't I have to use MS Internet Explorer? Well, it's probably more compatible with other MS products, so I will just use IE.
There is reason to believe that network topology contributes to the damage done by viruses and malware. If malware gets into the network for marketing and you make it just as difficult for it to get from marketing to the customer service network as it was to get into the marketing network, you have added extra levels of security. There are too many networks that are designed so that once it gets to one machine it has carte blanche to go to any of them. Yes, the Titanic still sank, but compartmentalization was an idea with merit. You still have to do the edge network security too. This adds complexity to the network for certain, but the idea is to stop one infection from running rampant over the entire corporate IT infrastructure. If marketing is infected, shut it off, minimize damage.
You're right in that it's not strictly face-value news of the geek type, but lets face it, it affects nerds too. It may well affect them in large ways. All the new tech that has to be put in place for this may well bring healthcare to headlines on/. more often.
Can I interject here? the phrase '... but there "are" indie/alternative stations in...' is one of the most offensive ideas that I've actually listened to in a while. It at once sounds like you are both excusing the desperately bad situation by offering alternatives and trying to ignore the wrongfulness that is the current music industry.
It might be better said as 'even though the RIAA and music industry in general are evil bastards who want to control every aspect of the artists' content without properly compensating the artists, some people have rebelled and work through indie/alternative radio stations. The best way to tell the RIAA how you feel is to go see local artists in concert, pay for any self pressed CD's they have.
Perhaps ET will dress appropriately and drop himself in some backwater region and take up handyman work while talking to various local groups about stars and galaxies and destiny etc. if ET shows up, voluntarily or by force of accident.
It's just as likely that ET will have seen our broadcasts and decided this is not really the kind of neighborhood that they want to live in, never mind an occasional visit. Just the same, given mankind's penchant for xenophobia it's more likely than not that any ET who actually does visit will talk to the wrong person first. Many of us believe that wrong person will come from the very groups that claim the right to be the first person on the basis of national security.
ET may have already been here but was dismissed as the effects of salmonella or drugs creating a hallucination.
Whatever the case, there is a much higher probability that ET will not be happy with the local inhabitants on arrival than the probability that ET will arrive with a basket of goodies and a card welcoming Earth to the neighborhood.
Ok, I was agreeing with some of the posts but this thought that paper is a real world tool and the computer is not is patently false. Does your paper check your spelling or grammar? Does your paper assist you in accessing related materials to the content on it? Does your paper remind you to follow up on the context of the content on it? Oh, that's a special kind of paper, right? Does your paper allow you to transfer a copy of it's content nearly instantly to another person, or group of people? I'll stop there. There are many things that paper cannot do. Just because a computer is not an exact replica of paper in no way means it is inferior. There was a time that our brains were geared for riding horses and wagons. Thankfully we managed to adapt to car seats and not feeding horses and cleaning up horseshit from the driveway.
Yes, paper will still hold nostalgic appeal to many. Do you see anyone walking around with a cassette walkman these days?
You would have a point if we could not figure out how to put the conveniences of that paper tool into the electronic tools. Others have mentioned that more screen space is helping, some document handling systems are helping. More changes to come will further help.
On the whole, the paperless office does not yet exist because people don't want to change, and are reluctant to change because the new tools don't have all the conveniences we created for paper. Sure, there are legal requirements, but since the moment that early man put charcoal to stone we have had the problem of forgery. No system is perfect. Sticking with one that is not as good as the replacements is.... well, human.
Not only that but... ermmmm DUH! In a world of reality tv, real housewives, and shopping networks etc. why should anyone be _surprised_ that real vegetables will spend real money and real time trying to grow virtual vegetables?
We used to smirk at stamp collectors and train spotters. Now we have virtual farmers and others. The world has not changed, we simply have an easier way to collect data about people with odd hobbies, like stupid lawsuits, stupid patents, karaoke, leg warmer collecting, virtual farming, and many more.
Yes, I lumped together things that protect commerce in general, in one fashion or another. My original query was regarding another less costly and disruptive method to protect commerce.
I buy no versions of MS Word. There is nothing innately wrong with suggesting crowd sourcing of ideas to allow businesses to move forward rather than stagnate and die. Consumers do choose, and there is nothing wrong with telling manufacturers what we are willing to pay for. They spend a lot of money trying to figure that out on their own. Not too many of them are successful at it.
When established industries become prey for new technology, why do they resist and ask for protection? This is a fundamental question of society. We protect indigenous peoples. We have copyright and patents. We do much to preserve the old along with the new - backwards compatibility. Why do we not simply tell such industries that it's time to change and support them through the change? Yes, I get the whole free market thing, but rather than fight them to force them to accept change, why don't we offer them ideas and methods to change their business model to match the change in consumer requirements?
No, I'm not being trollish or suggesting stupidity. Why can't we crowd-source ideas for how these industries can recover from game changing technology? Must we wait for Jobs to tell us?
You are already modded insightful, but in most cases, such comments are taken as trollish. The UK is slightly ahead of the US in discriminatory practices made in the guise of respect to and for religions. It's insane. Inch by inch religions are weaseling their way into government. It won't be long before you have to be someone of faith to get treated as a citizen, be elected to office, or conduct business. Yes, many will say that sounds silly now, but Rome was not built in a day. We can see them laying foundation stones now, and protests like this are a high profile way to protest legally. I applaud it.
IT workers != IT professionals. The marketing directors admin does IT work for him, she is not a professional IT technician. Laptops AFAIK are not given out to those that deserve them so much as those who can't be required to sit in an office all day. Think about this for a minute. Are the tech savvy people in the office or on the road?
I think you are right, and there is no telling that one of the students won't code it in C to get those extra milliseconds. When there is a prize or bragging rights at stake, people (even kids) can be pretty relentless.
Actually, not all robot vehicles last like the Mars rovers. They are sensational robots. There are many robots that never return from their maiden voyage. ABE has done a lot of good. It will be good to know what did the robot in, but this is not a day to panic. I recently let go of my 21 year old Honda Accord. It had 222k miles on it. Closest it got to an earth quake was a fender bender. At least ABE has avoided the humiliation of being gutted and sold for parts or put on display in some museum where people can ask continuously "what's that?"
Perhaps we should institute a byte/per dollar lifetime achievement awards program for data collection robots? Certainly ABE would be in the record books for a long time, and with a higher rating than perhaps Hubble? Hard to say, but would be interesting.
It's better than that. Money for those ads has to come from somewhere and spending it on advertising rather than spending it on lowering the cost of R&D and lowering the cost of the drugs themselves is nothing short of greed beyond any hope of redemption. An ad for any medication whose side effects can be worse than the symptom they treat should not be allowed period. Making such a rule would simply change what side effects are reported though. The intent of Truth in advertising laws should be held to strict compliance with such things. Yes, they use a happy self confident man to advertise erectile dysfunction pills, and all the women who now want him, how his golf game is improved and on and on. They should advertise it truthfully: Yes, you now have an erection (for the next four+ hours) and you have to deal with that while your wife is nagging and bitching at you because you still didn't do all the other stuff that she wanted. While it may make your underwear fit tighter it will do absolutely nothing for her menopausal homicidal derangement.
If you have PAD and never knew it, see a doctor. If you are also all but dead we have a medication that may be able to make your life worth living for a couple of more months. If you have PAD and want a couple of side effects that make you wish you were dead, we have a medication that may be able to help you.
If you don't think you can afford this medicine, don't worry, we have a way to scam the insurance industry, after all, we've helped pay for most of their vacation homes for the last 35 years.
Disclaimer: We are in the business of making money for the 'treatment' of medical conditions. If you are looking for a cure, please see your doctor, priest, or feel free to ignore our company altogether. Not all drugs are made with such callous intentions, but all drugs made by us are made this way. Not all drugs can treat all symptoms, so generally, if you have consistent breathing it is not possible to determine if this drug will affect you in a positive way, consult your doctor for more information for this symptom. If this medication makes you feel and look like any person in our advertisements, please call our marketing department: allow 30-45 rings as they may be sleeping.
Chantix is a non-nicotine stop smoking treatment. If you want help to stop smoking see your doctor. He may prescribe Chantix. Remember thalidomide? We do too. Chantix may have some side effects if you are not already suffering from mental disorders. These side effects may make you wish you had suffered from mental health disorders prior to taking Chantix. It make also make your neighbors wish you had been on mental health medicines before taking Chantix. If you are in the random 53% of people who are not totally fucked over by this medication, you might be one of the lucky ones to get headaches and diarrhea. For those symptoms, please see your doctor as we have medications for those symptoms also.
These medications are worse than unethical, in many cases they are advertising a chance for you to die. Yes, die. Any medication with a side effect of death is nothing more than Russian roulette with insurance company assistance in buying the bullets. Every disclaimer for medications should have two measures for side effects: one that lists the possible side effects, and one that lists the total number of marketing people who tested the drug and which if any of them suffered from side effects. Yes, I said it. All testing should be repeated on Marketing Group members and sales if they are involved etc. It must be reported what percentage of company employees who tested the drug also suffered side effects.
I thought I had remembered that too. One of those fun-filled-but-fail-at-a-party facts I have stuffed away. The boys still own Google, or enough of it to decide it's course over any objections by share holders et al.
I feel certain that if Google pulls out of China, they're fucked, so to speak. How then can MS or Yahoo be seen as non-corrupt if they stay? While it's political in nature it has a certain PR value to it as well. Baidu, while fairly well used is basically by Chinese, for Chinese, about Chinese. Outside of China its usefulness falls very quickly. Inside of China it filters whatever it's told to filter. The Chinese, it seems, remain isolationist. Now if we could only paint Walmart et al as evil for doing business with the Chinese. If you want to see the Chinese people free, help motivate them to be angry with their government. Right now, Chinese school children can look at a picture of tank man and not know what it is. Stopping a little censorship won't change that. There needs to be enough anger to spill the blood of tyrants.
I'm afraid that probably won't come till there is no jobs, no money to buy food, no exports income, and no way to buy food from across the border. Culturally, China (as stated above) is stagnate-ish, stuck in their ways, isolationist culturally. You have to do a lot of shaking to get those nuts to fall out of the tree. It may take a lot more people like those running Google to shake the tree hard enough. I hate to say it, but a good international news-making incident might be enough to encourage North Americans to stop buying Chinese made goods. If that hurts North American retailers in the short term, it will hopefully hurt Chinese manufacturers in the long term. A tricky game to say the least, but if you want to play it without guns somebody has to get shot with something in the somewhere at some point.
Perhaps if/b/tards and fag hating Christians stopped their normal crap long enough to petition our government to inspect 100% of incoming goods from China at a cost to the manufacturer it might make a difference to their bottom line, our pets' and children's lives, and the world over all ? It would be awful if Google were to rank stories about Chinese goods higher than they have been doing... don't you think? wink wink nudge nudge
The "PR shitstorm" is way way over-hyped, it would be simple for the news to simply state "Toyota has confirmed an issue effecting the engine speed controls, and have issued a recall. If this happens to you while driving Toyota advises drivers to shift the car into neutral and engage the 4 ways and pull over in a safe location. If your car has a push button start be aware that you will need to hold it down for up to 5 seconds to shut down the engine." The fact that some people have died as a result of poor driving ability is no different than every fall here when it snows and some dumb person forgets that snow is slippery, a terrible thing to have happen, but usually 100% their fault.
You don't know much about the main stream media in the US, do you?
There are a couple of things that should be mentioned here. NASA has shown what it takes to make very small, very good code. Sure, they too have failures, but 'nearly' bug free code is quite expensive. Second, writing code is not quite like trying to create a hand crafted dashboard, if the dashboard fades, no one dies. Embedded software is quite a different beast from your normal desktop applications. When you add motion control and interaction with the code, it difference between them gets even more complex. Software in vehicles should be two things:
Open - let lots of folk see what could be wrong Audited - audited to meet specific standards of safety and operation. Not quite the self-defeating government regulations, but more of a case by case issue: if the software has control or input to the control mechanism for the engine, braking system, suspension etc. it must meet minimum standard testing requirements. Any action that _could_ arbitrarily apply mechanical action must be tested and controlled beyond all reasonable testing/doubt. Everything should be tested, down to a pet chewing on the control cable harness.
Consumers are encouraged to think the vehicles they buy are safe and require no special knowledge of engineering or mechanics to operate. As long as they are given to think that, then passenger vehicles should be made to be just this way.
The problem for Toyota now is multifaceted. One, they have a PR shitstorm to deal with. Two, there is a dollar effect of this problem. Three, it's now on the shoulders of Toyota to get this part right for the rest of the passenger vehicle making industry.
It's possible that they might walk away from this fire with only minor long term burns and the reputation for building the safest vehicles. BUT, reading the article of this post and paying attention while doing so is necessary... IMO
And that is exactly what will happen. They are too easy to break, lose, steal, and then there is the forgot it at home, forgot to charge it, and myriad ways to defeat the system.
A second thought: Do companies actually still pay for cell phones? Is that a perk I should be asking for?
I agree. My first program was on a TI-99 in basic. I had to learn how the syntax was required to be, and what functions were available. As I moved on, I learned the same things for the next language, and rinse/repeat as necessary. None of these experiences have formed my thought into "this is the only way it can be done" thinking. We might as well say that people who have learned to use MS Windows are ruined forever. Stupid is as stupid does.... meh
Slashdot Mirror
Plenty of quotes, and sucks to be him right now. Maybe, just maybe he can work to get us better food supplies and get rid of Monsanto et al, and improve the world a little bit with all this attention?
It's not about business as much as it is about censorship. What you are forgetting is that the current group of Chinese students don't even know what tank man is, never mind what was happening in their own country when he stood in front of the tanks. Everyone seems to agree that Saddam Husein needed to be taken out because he was a bad man. The Chinese government is a bad government and everyone is politically dancing around this fact while trying to make money in China. Google is saying "hey, we have a motto and doing business with such a government is not in keeping with it". No matter who wins or loses, this stands to be a surrealistic highlight of the fact that there are bad people in the world, and the world is too small to allow them to corrupt such a large part of the world with censorship, secret police, and many other unsavory things. The mere existence of the Chinese government and who they will be supportive of creates a safe environment for more of the same to blossom in different places. It's not like the red scare or anything, but if they don't want to do business with anyone who will not also partake in ill treatment of their citizens, the world really needs to step up as a group and say NO, you're wrong and we won't play. That means that we should stop buying things made in China. period. If Google can say no, the rest of us should be saying no. If you want cheap goods, try another country of origin, just don't buy 'made in China' goods. Besides, your pets and children may live longer if you don't.
And it's a shame that transparency and accountability have to be mandated by law. This is the one step forward.... wait for the two steps back.
Because they are not sure what they are choosing, the process often goes like this: Oh? WTF? Well, I'm using MS Windows, don't I have to use MS Internet Explorer? Well, it's probably more compatible with other MS products, so I will just use IE.
There is reason to believe that network topology contributes to the damage done by viruses and malware. If malware gets into the network for marketing and you make it just as difficult for it to get from marketing to the customer service network as it was to get into the marketing network, you have added extra levels of security. There are too many networks that are designed so that once it gets to one machine it has carte blanche to go to any of them. Yes, the Titanic still sank, but compartmentalization was an idea with merit. You still have to do the edge network security too. This adds complexity to the network for certain, but the idea is to stop one infection from running rampant over the entire corporate IT infrastructure. If marketing is infected, shut it off, minimize damage.
You're right in that it's not strictly face-value news of the geek type, but lets face it, it affects nerds too. It may well affect them in large ways. All the new tech that has to be put in place for this may well bring healthcare to headlines on /. more often.
Can I interject here? the phrase ' ... but there "are" indie/alternative stations in...' is one of the most offensive ideas that I've actually listened to in a while. It at once sounds like you are both excusing the desperately bad situation by offering alternatives and trying to ignore the wrongfulness that is the current music industry.
It might be better said as 'even though the RIAA and music industry in general are evil bastards who want to control every aspect of the artists' content without properly compensating the artists, some people have rebelled and work through indie/alternative radio stations. The best way to tell the RIAA how you feel is to go see local artists in concert, pay for any self pressed CD's they have.
How is this a flaw in the Emergency Response System if the change initiated by a government committee is how the incidents were classified wrongly?
Perhaps ET will dress appropriately and drop himself in some backwater region and take up handyman work while talking to various local groups about stars and galaxies and destiny etc. if ET shows up, voluntarily or by force of accident.
It's just as likely that ET will have seen our broadcasts and decided this is not really the kind of neighborhood that they want to live in, never mind an occasional visit. Just the same, given mankind's penchant for xenophobia it's more likely than not that any ET who actually does visit will talk to the wrong person first. Many of us believe that wrong person will come from the very groups that claim the right to be the first person on the basis of national security.
ET may have already been here but was dismissed as the effects of salmonella or drugs creating a hallucination.
Whatever the case, there is a much higher probability that ET will not be happy with the local inhabitants on arrival than the probability that ET will arrive with a basket of goodies and a card welcoming Earth to the neighborhood.
Ok, I was agreeing with some of the posts but this thought that paper is a real world tool and the computer is not is patently false.
Does your paper check your spelling or grammar? Does your paper assist you in accessing related materials to the content on it? Does your paper remind you to follow up on the context of the content on it? Oh, that's a special kind of paper, right? Does your paper allow you to transfer a copy of it's content nearly instantly to another person, or group of people? I'll stop there. There are many things that paper cannot do. Just because a computer is not an exact replica of paper in no way means it is inferior. There was a time that our brains were geared for riding horses and wagons. Thankfully we managed to adapt to car seats and not feeding horses and cleaning up horseshit from the driveway.
Yes, paper will still hold nostalgic appeal to many. Do you see anyone walking around with a cassette walkman these days?
You would have a point if we could not figure out how to put the conveniences of that paper tool into the electronic tools. Others have mentioned that more screen space is helping, some document handling systems are helping. More changes to come will further help.
On the whole, the paperless office does not yet exist because people don't want to change, and are reluctant to change because the new tools don't have all the conveniences we created for paper. Sure, there are legal requirements, but since the moment that early man put charcoal to stone we have had the problem of forgery. No system is perfect. Sticking with one that is not as good as the replacements is .... well, human.
Not only that but ... ermmmm DUH!
In a world of reality tv, real housewives, and shopping networks etc. why should anyone be _surprised_ that real vegetables will spend real money and real time trying to grow virtual vegetables?
We used to smirk at stamp collectors and train spotters. Now we have virtual farmers and others. The world has not changed, we simply have an easier way to collect data about people with odd hobbies, like stupid lawsuits, stupid patents, karaoke, leg warmer collecting, virtual farming, and many more.
Or maybe they are just bored at work?
Yes, I lumped together things that protect commerce in general, in one fashion or another. My original query was regarding another less costly and disruptive method to protect commerce.
I buy no versions of MS Word. There is nothing innately wrong with suggesting crowd sourcing of ideas to allow businesses to move forward rather than stagnate and die. Consumers do choose, and there is nothing wrong with telling manufacturers what we are willing to pay for. They spend a lot of money trying to figure that out on their own. Not too many of them are successful at it.
When established industries become prey for new technology, why do they resist and ask for protection? This is a fundamental question of society. We protect indigenous peoples. We have copyright and patents. We do much to preserve the old along with the new - backwards compatibility. Why do we not simply tell such industries that it's time to change and support them through the change? Yes, I get the whole free market thing, but rather than fight them to force them to accept change, why don't we offer them ideas and methods to change their business model to match the change in consumer requirements?
No, I'm not being trollish or suggesting stupidity. Why can't we crowd-source ideas for how these industries can recover from game changing technology? Must we wait for Jobs to tell us?
It's just a question.
You are already modded insightful, but in most cases, such comments are taken as trollish. The UK is slightly ahead of the US in discriminatory practices made in the guise of respect to and for religions. It's insane. Inch by inch religions are weaseling their way into government. It won't be long before you have to be someone of faith to get treated as a citizen, be elected to office, or conduct business. Yes, many will say that sounds silly now, but Rome was not built in a day. We can see them laying foundation stones now, and protests like this are a high profile way to protest legally. I applaud it.
And we can expect to see iPhone work-alikes in 3.. 2.. 1..
Seriously, I find this rather funny. We might soon be able to call it the tarnished halo effect?
IT workers != IT professionals. The marketing directors admin does IT work for him, she is not a professional IT technician. Laptops AFAIK are not given out to those that deserve them so much as those who can't be required to sit in an office all day. Think about this for a minute. Are the tech savvy people in the office or on the road?
I think you are right, and there is no telling that one of the students won't code it in C to get those extra milliseconds. When there is a prize or bragging rights at stake, people (even kids) can be pretty relentless.
Actually, not all robot vehicles last like the Mars rovers. They are sensational robots. There are many robots that never return from their maiden voyage. ABE has done a lot of good. It will be good to know what did the robot in, but this is not a day to panic. I recently let go of my 21 year old Honda Accord. It had 222k miles on it. Closest it got to an earth quake was a fender bender. At least ABE has avoided the humiliation of being gutted and sold for parts or put on display in some museum where people can ask continuously "what's that?"
Perhaps we should institute a byte/per dollar lifetime achievement awards program for data collection robots? Certainly ABE would be in the record books for a long time, and with a higher rating than perhaps Hubble? Hard to say, but would be interesting.
It's better than that. Money for those ads has to come from somewhere and spending it on advertising rather than spending it on lowering the cost of R&D and lowering the cost of the drugs themselves is nothing short of greed beyond any hope of redemption. An ad for any medication whose side effects can be worse than the symptom they treat should not be allowed period. Making such a rule would simply change what side effects are reported though. The intent of Truth in advertising laws should be held to strict compliance with such things. Yes, they use a happy self confident man to advertise erectile dysfunction pills, and all the women who now want him, how his golf game is improved and on and on. They should advertise it truthfully: Yes, you now have an erection (for the next four+ hours) and you have to deal with that while your wife is nagging and bitching at you because you still didn't do all the other stuff that she wanted. While it may make your underwear fit tighter it will do absolutely nothing for her menopausal homicidal derangement.
If you have PAD and never knew it, see a doctor. If you are also all but dead we have a medication that may be able to make your life worth living for a couple of more months. If you have PAD and want a couple of side effects that make you wish you were dead, we have a medication that may be able to help you.
If you don't think you can afford this medicine, don't worry, we have a way to scam the insurance industry, after all, we've helped pay for most of their vacation homes for the last 35 years.
Disclaimer: We are in the business of making money for the 'treatment' of medical conditions. If you are looking for a cure, please see your doctor, priest, or feel free to ignore our company altogether. Not all drugs are made with such callous intentions, but all drugs made by us are made this way. Not all drugs can treat all symptoms, so generally, if you have consistent breathing it is not possible to determine if this drug will affect you in a positive way, consult your doctor for more information for this symptom. If this medication makes you feel and look like any person in our advertisements, please call our marketing department: allow 30-45 rings as they may be sleeping.
Chantix is a non-nicotine stop smoking treatment. If you want help to stop smoking see your doctor. He may prescribe Chantix. Remember thalidomide? We do too. Chantix may have some side effects if you are not already suffering from mental disorders. These side effects may make you wish you had suffered from mental health disorders prior to taking Chantix. It make also make your neighbors wish you had been on mental health medicines before taking Chantix. If you are in the random 53% of people who are not totally fucked over by this medication, you might be one of the lucky ones to get headaches and diarrhea. For those symptoms, please see your doctor as we have medications for those symptoms also.
These medications are worse than unethical, in many cases they are advertising a chance for you to die. Yes, die. Any medication with a side effect of death is nothing more than Russian roulette with insurance company assistance in buying the bullets. Every disclaimer for medications should have two measures for side effects: one that lists the possible side effects, and one that lists the total number of marketing people who tested the drug and which if any of them suffered from side effects. Yes, I said it. All testing should be repeated on Marketing Group members and sales if they are involved etc.
It must be reported what percentage of company employees who tested the drug also suffered side effects.
I thought I had remembered that too. One of those fun-filled-but-fail-at-a-party facts I have stuffed away. The boys still own Google, or enough of it to decide it's course over any objections by share holders et al.
I feel certain that if Google pulls out of China, they're fucked, so to speak. How then can MS or Yahoo be seen as non-corrupt if they stay? While it's political in nature it has a certain PR value to it as well. Baidu, while fairly well used is basically by Chinese, for Chinese, about Chinese. Outside of China its usefulness falls very quickly. Inside of China it filters whatever it's told to filter. The Chinese, it seems, remain isolationist. Now if we could only paint Walmart et al as evil for doing business with the Chinese. If you want to see the Chinese people free, help motivate them to be angry with their government. Right now, Chinese school children can look at a picture of tank man and not know what it is. Stopping a little censorship won't change that. There needs to be enough anger to spill the blood of tyrants.
I'm afraid that probably won't come till there is no jobs, no money to buy food, no exports income, and no way to buy food from across the border. Culturally, China (as stated above) is stagnate-ish, stuck in their ways, isolationist culturally. You have to do a lot of shaking to get those nuts to fall out of the tree. It may take a lot more people like those running Google to shake the tree hard enough. I hate to say it, but a good international news-making incident might be enough to encourage North Americans to stop buying Chinese made goods. If that hurts North American retailers in the short term, it will hopefully hurt Chinese manufacturers in the long term. A tricky game to say the least, but if you want to play it without guns somebody has to get shot with something in the somewhere at some point.
Perhaps if /b/tards and fag hating Christians stopped their normal crap long enough to petition our government to inspect 100% of incoming goods from China at a cost to the manufacturer it might make a difference to their bottom line, our pets' and children's lives, and the world over all ? It would be awful if Google were to rank stories about Chinese goods higher than they have been doing... don't you think? wink wink nudge nudge
The "PR shitstorm" is way way over-hyped, it would be simple for the news to simply state "Toyota has confirmed an issue effecting the engine speed controls, and have issued a recall. If this happens to you while driving Toyota advises drivers to shift the car into neutral and engage the 4 ways and pull over in a safe location. If your car has a push button start be aware that you will need to hold it down for up to 5 seconds to shut down the engine." The fact that some people have died as a result of poor driving ability is no different than every fall here when it snows and some dumb person forgets that snow is slippery, a terrible thing to have happen, but usually 100% their fault.
You don't know much about the main stream media in the US, do you?
There are a couple of things that should be mentioned here. NASA has shown what it takes to make very small, very good code. Sure, they too have failures, but 'nearly' bug free code is quite expensive. Second, writing code is not quite like trying to create a hand crafted dashboard, if the dashboard fades, no one dies. Embedded software is quite a different beast from your normal desktop applications. When you add motion control and interaction with the code, it difference between them gets even more complex. Software in vehicles should be two things:
Open - let lots of folk see what could be wrong
Audited - audited to meet specific standards of safety and operation. Not quite the self-defeating government regulations, but more of a case by case issue: if the software has control or input to the control mechanism for the engine, braking system, suspension etc. it must meet minimum standard testing requirements. Any action that _could_ arbitrarily apply mechanical action must be tested and controlled beyond all reasonable testing/doubt. Everything should be tested, down to a pet chewing on the control cable harness.
Consumers are encouraged to think the vehicles they buy are safe and require no special knowledge of engineering or mechanics to operate. As long as they are given to think that, then passenger vehicles should be made to be just this way.
The problem for Toyota now is multifaceted. One, they have a PR shitstorm to deal with. Two, there is a dollar effect of this problem. Three, it's now on the shoulders of Toyota to get this part right for the rest of the passenger vehicle making industry.
It's possible that they might walk away from this fire with only minor long term burns and the reputation for building the safest vehicles. BUT, reading the article of this post and paying attention while doing so is necessary... IMO
And that is exactly what will happen. They are too easy to break, lose, steal, and then there is the forgot it at home, forgot to charge it, and myriad ways to defeat the system.
A second thought: Do companies actually still pay for cell phones? Is that a perk I should be asking for?
I agree. My first program was on a TI-99 in basic. I had to learn how the syntax was required to be, and what functions were available. As I moved on, I learned the same things for the next language, and rinse/repeat as necessary. None of these experiences have formed my thought into "this is the only way it can be done" thinking. We might as well say that people who have learned to use MS Windows are ruined forever. Stupid is as stupid does.... meh