It's been almost 20 years since I last wore a wrist-watch. This or something like it might actually make me do it again. I find it increasingly irritating to dig out my iPhone just to check the time.
I've been using this daily for so long I don't remember when it was added to Firefox.
But, who are you and what did you do to slashdot, the news for nerds site. You know, people who know how to use Google. People who don't look a piece of software and think the main menu is all there is to it. People who *gasp* might think about looking up keyboard shortcuts to a program they use every day just because.
And most importantly: Are we going to run individual articles for one keyboard shortcut from now on? Seriously, at least do what every other online magazine does when it doesn't have a good story for the day and lump 10 or so of them together into an article.
I think this is a personal low-point in the history of/.
Feasibility is a matter of desire (or need). If you really want to comply, you always can. I have never found one single case where compliance was truly impossible. If someone says he would like to... but he can't, that is ALWAYS a lie.
Credentials aside (I admit he has better than I gave him), if you post your "solution" on your blog instead of telling the people who can use it, you are stroking your ego, not trying to help.
I used to run the IT compliancy in a mid-size company (2500 employees). I know the technical and process options you have, and frankly, this should either not be possible at all (technology solution) or have been caught during auditing (process solution). This is the kind of stuff that Separation of Duties was invented to prevent.
It's not about stocks. Stocks are boring to the government.
It's about patents, technology, tech secrets, major trade deals, contracts, and so on.
Guess which European company has the most massive interest in security and installs six-digit hardware encryption routers in even minor switching rooms? No, it's not a bank. It's not a stock exchange, either. It's Airbus.
Here in Europe, it's been an open secret for almost two decades that our "american friends" are doing massive amounts of economic espionage on us.
Because your website needs more hits and the experts in Japan certainly never thought of some of the most obvious ideas, yes?
You may not be familiar with japanese culture. I am, at least a bit.
In the US, this admition would translate to "we can't be arsed to give it some attention". In Japan, this is a major loss of face and could well mean the end of someone's career.
This face thing is a major problem in many cases in Japan, because people won't admit to mistakes until they can't hide them anymore. Yes, even more so than in the West.
It would be fantastic if someone from the japanese geeks involved in the whole thing would read/. and rip your blog-wiseassing to shreds. Unfortunately, that's unlikely and so your ego can feed on a false sense of superiority.
Spam is the #1 problem of the information age, because information becomes meaningless when it is drowned in noise. The only reason that the Internet is still useable is because we are fighting a constant war on spam.
Imagine for a minute E-Mail without spam filters. I mean entirely without. No blacklisting, no taking spam ISPs offline, no IP filter, no greylisting, no spamassassin, no gmail you put in front of your real mail just for the filtering - absolutely nothing of that.
Now imagine search engines with no effort to filter out the spam. Imagine a Google that doesn't downrank spammy sites.
Imagine telemarketers being allowed to call you whenever they want, as often as they want.
If you have any imagination whatsoever, you'll agree that spam is a really huge issue. If you have really good imagination, you might want to apply for therapy after this traumatic minute.
First, the government added a tax to the power prices, to finance the subsidies on clean energy. Then, they dropped those subsidies much, much faster then they had promised. The tax, however, remains the same. At the same time, most industrial customers are exempt from the tax in addition to getting massive discounts by the energy companies (not unethical, that, it's typical for large bulk buyers to get discounts).
All of this results in consumers paying huge prices that have little to no relation to the actual cost of power.
Finally, the energy companies never played nice. The same companies that own most of the large baseline (coal, gas, nuclear) plants also own the power networks. For several years it was common practice of them to shut down wind and solar farms they didn't own by refusing to accept their power output into the grid. The official reason was fear of grid instability. The practice largely stopped when investigations found out it was mostly bullshit.
Some more info - I am a German living in Germany, and I've been following non-mainstream media on this very topic for quite a while.
Solar and wind are exploding, much quicker than anyone expected. In fact, so quickly that it has the government in panic, probably courtesy of the big energy corporations. You see, most solar and wind power is decentralized, deployed in small batches by thousands of small companies or private owners. The plans for big off-shore wind parks are moving ahead much, much more slowly.
So, the government broke their own promises, retro-actively(!!!) changed the law and reduced the subsidies for clean energy. When you read "subsidies" you should realize that both coal and nuclear are also heavily subsidized. With the recent changes, more so then renewable energy. In addition, a law that exempts the really huge energy users in the industry was massively expanded and these days most energy-heavy industrial users are exempt from energy taxes. This makes electrical power a lot cheaper for them then for the consumer, who of course needs to pay for the difference. The purpose of this is obviously to reduce public support for renewable energy, because it has all been accompanied by a massive PR campaign about rising energy costs.
The fact is that the actual price of electricity has come down. If you look at the power exchange (like a stock exchange, just for energy prices), there were days when the price of electrical power was negative for several hours. Yes, that's right, there was so much energy being produced that the producers paid you for taking it off their hands. Sounds insane, isn't - electrical energy can't be stored easily, and you can't just make it vanish. If supply and demand aren't in balance, the stability of the energy network is in danger.
Of course, private consumers didn't notice and weren't given cheap energy. See above.
There's a massive political tug-of-war going on within Germany right now. On the one hand there are hundreds of mostly small or medium-sized companies that are driving the renewable energy market, building and installing wind turbines and solar panels. On the other hand are about half a dozen big old energy-power companies who simply missed the boat and are still heavily invested into coal and nuclear. There's a whole story there about the Germany government's flip-flopping on nuclear power over the years, too much to include in this post.
They must not understand the concept of a digital backup copy. You can take digital files of even gigantic sizes and copy them within minutes. They'd need to destroy every single copy at the same time before someone made another copy. No intimidation tactic is going to work at this point. There are copies around the world of what Snowden took with him.
It does depend on the size. Half a TB isn't copied quite that quickly.
But who else thinks the release of the latest Wikileaks insurance file and the destruction of the Snowden hard drives is eerily close in time?
Not in the "coloured boxes, click here" sense. Not that I know of.
There were a couple attempts at dumbed-down programming languages, but MS is the master of giving PHBs just enough computing power to mess things up horribly (Excel, I'm looking at you).
You can make a halfway decent website. Anything that is even slightly complicated requires code. And once you involve a database and dynamic content, you're deep into a territory where you really want to get it done by someone who knows what the fuck he's doing.
And especially the casual market needs quality products. Easy-of-use doesn't come from a shoddily thrown-together piece of crap, it comes from polish and HCI design and usability testing and all that other professional stuff.
Yes, creating software without having to know shit about software development has been the wet dream of the business monkeys at MS ever since they took the company over from the geeks.
But of course it doesn't work. Never has, never will. If you don't feel like putting up with those weird geek types who don't follow your MBA pseudo-logic and bullshit bingo, then get out of the computer business into something where actually knowing anything doesn't matter. Like, say, banking.
Contrary what they want you to believe, money is largely irrelevant. If it would all disappear tomorrow, we'd have a few uneasy days, and quite a bit of chaos, but unless there's a mass panic, everyone would pretty much just keep on going until someone figures out what to do about it, and so nothing much would really change.
But if all the major embedded OS were to crash tomorrow and refuse to reboot, most of our world would come to a halt.
Or in other words: If Unix became sentient and moved away to another galaxy, we'd be fucked. Your phone wouldn't work, half of the world's computers wouldn't work, but you'd hardly notice because all the others are down as well because most of the power plants would be gone, along with most of the factories, transportation networks, traffic controls and probably the water and sewage system, too.
Unix is running the world. There's a stupid, fragile, overpriced PC OS from some small indie software maker in some backwater place near Seattle, but everything else is Unix. Whether it's Linux, OS X, BSD, iOS, Android, or one of the surviving big Unix players, there's really not all that much out there that isn't a Unix.
Heck, even most of the RTOS are Unix or Unix-like these days. Gaming consoles seem to be the only area of computing not dominated by Unix. Funny, gaming is also the only reason I still have a Bootcamp partition.:-)
Especially since web traffic is a comparatively small part of overall Internet traffic these days. Yes, I used to work for an ISP and I had numbers broken down by port and protocol in front of me. It's been two years, but I don't think anything dramatic has changed.
So, if it's 40% of web traffic, that translates to somewhere around 5-10% of total traffic. Still massive for one company.
When you give someone money that they didn't earn, it's fair to attach strings to that money.
Your conclusion is correct. Your assumption isn't. I have earned any unemployment money I might get all my life, by paying into the system. In my country, there is an amount deducted from your monthly wage specifically to cover unemployment. It's basically an insurance system, except that it's state-run.
So yes, anyone who did work before becoming unemployed did in fact earn that money.
In fact most people simply gain more resistant to advertising the more blatant it is.
That's not true. We all think it is, but it isn't. Marketing has gone to great lengths to feed us a bunch of lies, so we don't jeopardise the core business model.
In-your-face advertisement works very, very well. Maybe not in the sense of promoting a product, but for establishing a brand and creating imaginary brand presence, it is fantastic.
Oh come on, other people are not making decisions for you just because they show you an advertisement.
Again, you would be surprised how effective advertisement is and how little it takes to swing a decision one way or the other. Sure, if you are dead-set on something else from the go, no ad will convince you otherwise, but most people aren't on most matters.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been almost 20 years since I last wore a wrist-watch. This or something like it might actually make me do it again. I find it increasingly irritating to dig out my iPhone just to check the time.
be nice to each other, kids. no fighting. and get off my lawn.
TLDR: CTRL+Shift+T restores tabs you accidentally closed.
It also restores tabs you intentionally closed. Ain't that great? Can we get another article about that? Fuck, I hope I didn't give him an idea.
Uh... yes?
I've been using this daily for so long I don't remember when it was added to Firefox.
But, who are you and what did you do to slashdot, the news for nerds site. You know, people who know how to use Google. People who don't look a piece of software and think the main menu is all there is to it. People who *gasp* might think about looking up keyboard shortcuts to a program they use every day just because.
And most importantly: Are we going to run individual articles for one keyboard shortcut from now on? Seriously, at least do what every other online magazine does when it doesn't have a good story for the day and lump 10 or so of them together into an article.
I think this is a personal low-point in the history of /.
What are you gonna do?
Move the UN to Switzerland.
Feasibility is a matter of desire (or need). If you really want to comply, you always can. I have never found one single case where compliance was truly impossible. If someone says he would like to... but he can't, that is ALWAYS a lie.
Bingo
Credentials aside (I admit he has better than I gave him), if you post your "solution" on your blog instead of telling the people who can use it, you are stroking your ego, not trying to help.
It also means the auditing systems failed.
I used to run the IT compliancy in a mid-size company (2500 employees). I know the technical and process options you have, and frankly, this should either not be possible at all (technology solution) or have been caught during auditing (process solution). This is the kind of stuff that Separation of Duties was invented to prevent.
It's not about stocks. Stocks are boring to the government.
It's about patents, technology, tech secrets, major trade deals, contracts, and so on.
Guess which European company has the most massive interest in security and installs six-digit hardware encryption routers in even minor switching rooms? No, it's not a bank. It's not a stock exchange, either. It's Airbus.
Here in Europe, it's been an open secret for almost two decades that our "american friends" are doing massive amounts of economic espionage on us.
Because your website needs more hits and the experts in Japan certainly never thought of some of the most obvious ideas, yes?
You may not be familiar with japanese culture. I am, at least a bit.
In the US, this admition would translate to "we can't be arsed to give it some attention".
In Japan, this is a major loss of face and could well mean the end of someone's career.
This face thing is a major problem in many cases in Japan, because people won't admit to mistakes until they can't hide them anymore. Yes, even more so than in the West.
It would be fantastic if someone from the japanese geeks involved in the whole thing would read /. and rip your blog-wiseassing to shreds. Unfortunately, that's unlikely and so your ego can feed on a false sense of superiority.
If you can read german, there's a good collection of articles here:
http://www.heise.de/tp/news/enews/default.html
Then you are an idiot.
Spam is the #1 problem of the information age, because information becomes meaningless when it is drowned in noise. The only reason that the Internet is still useable is because we are fighting a constant war on spam.
Imagine for a minute E-Mail without spam filters. I mean entirely without. No blacklisting, no taking spam ISPs offline, no IP filter, no greylisting, no spamassassin, no gmail you put in front of your real mail just for the filtering - absolutely nothing of that.
Now imagine search engines with no effort to filter out the spam. Imagine a Google that doesn't downrank spammy sites.
Imagine telemarketers being allowed to call you whenever they want, as often as they want.
If you have any imagination whatsoever, you'll agree that spam is a really huge issue. If you have really good imagination, you might want to apply for therapy after this traumatic minute.
The price is rigged in multiple ways.
First, the government added a tax to the power prices, to finance the subsidies on clean energy.
Then, they dropped those subsidies much, much faster then they had promised. The tax, however, remains the same.
At the same time, most industrial customers are exempt from the tax in addition to getting massive discounts by the energy companies (not unethical, that, it's typical for large bulk buyers to get discounts).
All of this results in consumers paying huge prices that have little to no relation to the actual cost of power.
Finally, the energy companies never played nice. The same companies that own most of the large baseline (coal, gas, nuclear) plants also own the power networks. For several years it was common practice of them to shut down wind and solar farms they didn't own by refusing to accept their power output into the grid. The official reason was fear of grid instability. The practice largely stopped when investigations found out it was mostly bullshit.
Some more info - I am a German living in Germany, and I've been following non-mainstream media on this very topic for quite a while.
Solar and wind are exploding, much quicker than anyone expected. In fact, so quickly that it has the government in panic, probably courtesy of the big energy corporations. You see, most solar and wind power is decentralized, deployed in small batches by thousands of small companies or private owners. The plans for big off-shore wind parks are moving ahead much, much more slowly.
So, the government broke their own promises, retro-actively(!!!) changed the law and reduced the subsidies for clean energy. When you read "subsidies" you should realize that both coal and nuclear are also heavily subsidized. With the recent changes, more so then renewable energy.
In addition, a law that exempts the really huge energy users in the industry was massively expanded and these days most energy-heavy industrial users are exempt from energy taxes. This makes electrical power a lot cheaper for them then for the consumer, who of course needs to pay for the difference. The purpose of this is obviously to reduce public support for renewable energy, because it has all been accompanied by a massive PR campaign about rising energy costs.
The fact is that the actual price of electricity has come down. If you look at the power exchange (like a stock exchange, just for energy prices), there were days when the price of electrical power was negative for several hours. Yes, that's right, there was so much energy being produced that the producers paid you for taking it off their hands. Sounds insane, isn't - electrical energy can't be stored easily, and you can't just make it vanish. If supply and demand aren't in balance, the stability of the energy network is in danger.
Of course, private consumers didn't notice and weren't given cheap energy. See above.
There's a massive political tug-of-war going on within Germany right now. On the one hand there are hundreds of mostly small or medium-sized companies that are driving the renewable energy market, building and installing wind turbines and solar panels. On the other hand are about half a dozen big old energy-power companies who simply missed the boat and are still heavily invested into coal and nuclear. There's a whole story there about the Germany government's flip-flopping on nuclear power over the years, too much to include in this post.
They must not understand the concept of a digital backup copy. You can take digital files of even gigantic sizes and copy them within minutes. They'd need to destroy every single copy at the same time before someone made another copy. No intimidation tactic is going to work at this point. There are copies around the world of what Snowden took with him.
It does depend on the size. Half a TB isn't copied quite that quickly.
But who else thinks the release of the latest Wikileaks insurance file and the destruction of the Snowden hard drives is eerily close in time?
Not in the "coloured boxes, click here" sense. Not that I know of.
There were a couple attempts at dumbed-down programming languages, but MS is the master of giving PHBs just enough computing power to mess things up horribly (Excel, I'm looking at you).
You can make a halfway decent website. Anything that is even slightly complicated requires code. And once you involve a database and dynamic content, you're deep into a territory where you really want to get it done by someone who knows what the fuck he's doing.
And especially the casual market needs quality products. Easy-of-use doesn't come from a shoddily thrown-together piece of crap, it comes from polish and HCI design and usability testing and all that other professional stuff.
Yes, creating software without having to know shit about software development has been the wet dream of the business monkeys at MS ever since they took the company over from the geeks.
But of course it doesn't work. Never has, never will. If you don't feel like putting up with those weird geek types who don't follow your MBA pseudo-logic and bullshit bingo, then get out of the computer business into something where actually knowing anything doesn't matter. Like, say, banking.
Contrary what they want you to believe, money is largely irrelevant. If it would all disappear tomorrow, we'd have a few uneasy days, and quite a bit of chaos, but unless there's a mass panic, everyone would pretty much just keep on going until someone figures out what to do about it, and so nothing much would really change.
But if all the major embedded OS were to crash tomorrow and refuse to reboot, most of our world would come to a halt.
Or in other words: If Unix became sentient and moved away to another galaxy, we'd be fucked. Your phone wouldn't work, half of the world's computers wouldn't work, but you'd hardly notice because all the others are down as well because most of the power plants would be gone, along with most of the factories, transportation networks, traffic controls and probably the water and sewage system, too.
Most ridiculous article ever.
Unix is running the world. There's a stupid, fragile, overpriced PC OS from some small indie software maker in some backwater place near Seattle, but everything else is Unix. Whether it's Linux, OS X, BSD, iOS, Android, or one of the surviving big Unix players, there's really not all that much out there that isn't a Unix.
Heck, even most of the RTOS are Unix or Unix-like these days. Gaming consoles seem to be the only area of computing not dominated by Unix. Funny, gaming is also the only reason I still have a Bootcamp partition. :-)
Aside from the inherent stupidity - have these people heard of bookmarks?
The, I don't know for sure, probably 3rd feature or so the very first browser got?
If they really are that dumb, making friends has never been easier - just show them how bookmarks work. They'll think you are a computing god. :-/
Especially since web traffic is a comparatively small part of overall Internet traffic these days. Yes, I used to work for an ISP and I had numbers broken down by port and protocol in front of me. It's been two years, but I don't think anything dramatic has changed.
So, if it's 40% of web traffic, that translates to somewhere around 5-10% of total traffic. Still massive for one company.
When you give someone money that they didn't earn, it's fair to attach strings to that money.
Your conclusion is correct. Your assumption isn't. I have earned any unemployment money I might get all my life, by paying into the system. In my country, there is an amount deducted from your monthly wage specifically to cover unemployment. It's basically an insurance system, except that it's state-run.
So yes, anyone who did work before becoming unemployed did in fact earn that money.
Please don't put a kid into the world if you plan to put it up for adoption from the start.
I know people who were adopted, including my ex-gf. Not knowing your real parents can be a major issue, especially during any kind of identity crisis.
In fact most people simply gain more resistant to advertising the more blatant it is.
That's not true. We all think it is, but it isn't. Marketing has gone to great lengths to feed us a bunch of lies, so we don't jeopardise the core business model.
In-your-face advertisement works very, very well. Maybe not in the sense of promoting a product, but for establishing a brand and creating imaginary brand presence, it is fantastic.
Oh come on, other people are not making decisions for you just because they show you an advertisement.
Again, you would be surprised how effective advertisement is and how little it takes to swing a decision one way or the other. Sure, if you are dead-set on something else from the go, no ad will convince you otherwise, but most people aren't on most matters.