While it is people who do the speaking, they do so in the name of the corporation, if they act in official capacity. Legally speaking, it is the corporation that does the speaking. The speaker is, basically, the paper and ink on which a statement is printed. When you sue a newspaper for libel, you don't actually sue the physical paper, you sue the organisation that created it.
Same with corporations. The means through which they speak may be a human, but, for example, in the "iPad 4G" examples, it wasn't the web-designers who put that statement into the HTML pages that were sued, it was Apple. Because legally, that statement was made by Apple.
There should be no Free Speech for non-humans. A corporation does not have any political or human rights necessities for Free Speech because a) all the humans that make up the corporation already have that right and b) it isn't human, so human rights don't apply.
I understand the line needs to be defined and corporations will circumvent the issue by paying people to make their speech for them - but the law is pretty good at wiping the floor with people too obviously circumventing it.
You can't make adaptive colors in CSS, like a shadow color automatically calculated from another color.
On real browsers (i.e. anything except IE, at least up to 8, not sure about 9) you can come very close by using rgba colours for the shadow.
On top of that, you can't inherit from CSS classes so have to duplicate the same thing multiple times if you don't want to give each element multiple classes.
But giving elements multiple classes is kind of the whole idea. I regularily have one class that sets the layout stuff and one that sets colours, etc.
How about a new standard, replacing CSS, that truly allows separation of content and style in modern web apps?
Why? Just because it isn't perfect you want to replace it with something that for many years will be lagging behind?
It needs more than that to be a FB killer. It needs to integrate the social graph into the whole thing.
That's not all that difficult. What you need is a permission system allowing for more than "public" and "private". Basically, "friends" and "friends of friends", etc. as filesystem permissions. Then you store the users social graph data as a file in his folder. You also need a database file for postings and comments and that's the technical part. Nothing of that is black magic, scaling it to FB sizes is certainly a technical challenge.
Author is missing the elephant in the room. He's thinking Facebook exists to serve its users at all. It doesn't. The users aren't the customers, they're the product. Facebook treats its users like a meat plant treats its cattle: Just well enough that they make a good product.
Google could've really shaken up FB, but they opted to copy it instead.
I will tell you what will destroy Facebook: A FB-like Dropbox-frontend. Something that allows you to share whatever you want to share, blurring the boundary between local and cloud by making "the cloud" just a directory on your device.
Dropbox (or any other cloud service) has the potential to replace FB by integrating with any and all local apps, giving you a "share this" button on everything that simply puts the file into your Dropbox public folder and notifies your social graph.
The entire business model of Facebook is built on holding your data hostage. Unless they were to become really threatened, they would be stupid to change that.
But a company whose business model is built on charging you for sharing and storing data would have you as the customer, and interested in keeping you happy, not the advertisers. Of course, this also requires something much more difficult than passing a stupid law: A change in user mindset. People would have to get used (again) to actually paying for something.
The tyranny of the majority - you don't want 51% of the population to be able to casually strip the rights from the other 49%.
And you simply assume that you will find a 51% majority that would be willing to do this, yes?
Everywhere in history that I can recall, whenever fundamental rights were stripped away, the majority that did it far exceeded 51% and would have been more than enough for any required constitutional changes.
Manipulation of the masses
That is true, but is not at all different in a representative democracy, except that lobbyism is a lot cheaper and easier because the group you need to influence is far smaller and more homogeneous (i.e. the representatives).
but we should remember that it's NOT actually evidence that it can continue to work at scales such as the US
But neither does any evidence to the contrary exist.
We know from Switzerland that direct democracy does scale up well beyond the athenian city state. We don't yet know if it scales another order of magnitude, because no one has yet tried.
And remember that the Swiss have had this system for a long time, well before the Internet or even the phone network existed.
Honestly, direct democracy doesn't scale very well above a village level population, let alone a small city.
Honestly, that is pure propaganda. More important, representattive democracy doesn't solve that issue.
Switzerland shows that direct democracy works on a country level, if you want it to work. Pretty much every western country today shows that representative democracy doesn't work well, doesn't solve the complexity issue (because the representatives really aren't any smarter or more educated than the people electing them) and leads to massive amounts of corruption and bribery.
But, a lot of people have a vested interest in having a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. Namely, everyone who is involved on either side in the corruption, bribery and lobbyism that has come to dominate representative democracy.
But for direct democracy to really work you have to find a way to get the population just as engaged with reviewing the sanitary regulations.
No, you don't. It's perfectly ok if only the people who care one way or the other vote about it.
But since it theoretically remains a direct democracy you get none of the necessary controls and safeguards intentionally built into any sane representative democracy.
Such as?
I get very interested when people talk about "safeguards". Against what? The will of the people? Now that is a strange understanding of democracy you have there.
over the nasty mess of a large scale direct democracy.
Which you only know from propaganda talks and have never actually experienced anywhere at any time in your life, correct?
Liking one idea invented elsewhere so much you copy it isn't the same as being utterly devoid of vision and innovation to the point where having an original idea of your own is so rare, you can date astronomical events by it.
Google has plenty of ideas of its own. That's what matters.
Actually, my experience with actual CPA's has been that they're a pleasure to work with.
Good people in any area are a pleasure to work with. Saddly, there aren't all that many. I've enjoyed working against real pros more than working with average run-of-the-mill people.
You are right, it's a world-wide trend. That doesn't make it one inch better.
I wouldn't even mind - my other criticism of our current democracy is that most of our politicians, despite being career politicians are really amateurs in both the business of politics and whatever their ministry or other subject area is.
So, we get the worst of both world. People with almost not real-world knowledge, who are also quite bad at just being politicians.
Then think of how dynamic the German system is
Not as much as I'd like. The green party has been assimilated into the scam ever since SchrÃder. They're now playing all the same games, taking all the same kickbacks. The Pirate Party is where I personally place my hopes, but they are already showing signs of power games. I still hope they can shake that off and kick out the wrong people that are currently using the rapid growth to maneuver themselves into positions. But I wouldn't bet the farm on it.
Can you think of another country which could have a similar joke currently? Heck, Germany's current president is a former priest living undivorced with his new life partner. Germany doesn't have a first lady it has a first mistress.
And yet aside from that the guy is reactionist and fully integrated into the party system. He was a horrible choice, but few people have researched him beyond the picture the media painted. WeizÃcker was the last real president we had.
You see, these are the surfaces, it's the Spectacle (Hakim Bey) we get shown. But underneath it all, things don't look so diversified, multi-cultural or clean. The government is entirely driven by lobbyists. Heck, we had to have a scandal to make them (grudgingly!) stop having the laws written by lobbyists. That's a joke in most other countries, in Germany it was reality for years.
Seriously man show some fucking pride!
There are a lot of things in Germany that I am very, very proud of. Our government isn't on that list and hasn't been for a long time.
I've always wanted multiplayer in Elder Scrolls. But I was looking for cooperative multiplayer, as in playing with your SO, a few friends, something like that. 4, maybe 8 players max. (1-3 parties).
MMO? Really not sure about that. It will depend on how it's done, of course.
This European Commission seems to be just a bunch of criminal lobbyists all around
No, it's not. It's an extortion scheme set up by politicians so the lobbyists have yet another group of career politicians that they can't afford to not bribe.
In other words, it's not a bunch of criminal lobbyists, but their equally criminal counterparts.
You're a presumptuous idiot and someone had to say it.
Germany after WW2 was one of the most humble major countries in the world. Not a big surprise after being as completely demolished as it was. The visions of politicians of those times were mostly inwards, into building a society. Something modern politician sell-outs have forgotten: That human life doesn't happen in the market alone.
I do not agree with all of the politics of early post-WW2 Germany, but simply by listening to an interview with Helmut Schmidt and one with any of todays politicians you will notice a difference in quality of thought that is hard to describe, but impossible to miss. Check YouTube if you speak german. If you don't, the best I can sum it up as is that on the one side you have empty vessels speaking in pleasant generalities devoid of any content, and regularily showing off their utter ignorance of basically everything. Now switch to an interview with Schmidt and you have a guy who knows how to talk, knows his subject, and isn't afraid to say "I don't know enough about this to comment" if he doesn't, which is rare.
So desktop users will be sorta pushed to the sidelines, and then we're all supposed to live on our phones or something.
No, that's what marketing makes you believe. In reality, like all trends and hypes, those who go along with it will do well in the new market and those who stick with what's old and working well will do well in the old market. It's just that the old market isn't hip, so you don't read much about it in press releases and news (if there's still a difference).
Some of the biggest and most profitable markets are rarely in the news because they aren't sexy. Food companies are some of the biggest corporations in the world - Nestle has about the same revenue as Microsoft, Kraft has more revenue than Google and more than twice its profit, and so on - and yet you don't reach much about them. Big oil is often in the news for everything but their revenue and income - for starters, Shell has four times the revenue of Apple.
So don't read the news when you want to know where the market is heading. The news only tell you where the hype is going, not where the money is.
It only makes sense that people using your software across devices will at least want a consistent UI, and it should be accessible no matter what type of device you are using.
No, it doesn't. Go visit User Interface Design 101. Consistency is one of several criteria, and more importantly it does not automatically mean consistency across media.
On my 27" desktop screen, I have vastly different UI requirements than on my 3.5" iPhone screen. The worst applications, from a user interface perspective, are those that were ported pretty much 1:1 from one to the other. iOS apps ported to the Mac with no major changes are just horrible to use on the desktop, as are Mac apps ported 1:1 to the iPhone. The best cross-device apps use very different layouts and UI mechanics. They easily bridge the gap by using the same icons, terms and metaphors and there is almost no learning time between them. That is good design, not trying to build a one-size-fits-everyone-badly interface.
1.) The method used to find the unattributed quotations is using a strong peer-review system. It's not the same thing as scientific peer-review, because it's not an experimental science but a document review. It has proven unassailable in previous cases.
2.) The basic rules broken here haven't changed. This is not a matter of how to quote your source, but that you need to list your source. The claim is that she has copied whole passages from other sources without indicating that fact, passing the text off as her own instead.
The problem is and never has been using ideas and deriving information from other sources. Much of science is about that. The problem is the wholesale verbatim lifting of entire passages (allowed) without marking them as quotes (not allowed).
What american readers probably don't know is how much politics and politicians have changed during the past 20 or so years.
Initially, the "new" West Germany after WW2 had a functional (not without faults, but functional) representative democracy. People with vision, connections and public support would rise to power. We didn't have the pseudo-aristocratic US system of clans and super-rich. In fact, none of the chancellors were very wealthy.
Then, the political elite started to close and shut out insiders. The majority of the people in positions of power today are career politicians, people who have worked a small part of their lives - if at all - outside of their political parties. For all the flaws they had, the old guard was a different kind of human. They were sometimes arrogant, often egomaniac, but they were in it for their vision of the future, not for the paycheck and the nice kickbacks from the lobbyists.
Our current government is just the worst of that kind. It has no vision whatsoever, no plan whatsoever and is purely reactive. We have satire magazines commenting the current political theatre with sentences like "sometimes I wonder why we are even doing satire anymore". You could take some of their talks straight from the protocol of the Bundestag (our parliament) and if you published it in a humor magazine, you'd love about it and applaud the author on a brilliant piece of mockery - except that they're serious.
There was indeed a former minister and hopeful to be next chancellor, a "superstar" of politics (which, these days, is about the same as being the winner of "Britain's Got Talent" or "American Idol") who had to drop out of politics because his Ph.D. was basically fraudulent. The affair damaged on of the most respected academics in his field, who had fallen for the young man's charm and trickery and issued the Ph.D. to him.
What was most telling, however, was how the political elite dealt with it. Basically, the MOTD was that it's not a big deal. Only massive and sustained public pressure finally made them carve in, one by one, until the guy had to step down. These are the people who want to lock you away for 5 years for downloading a DVD. "Shame" was the rallying cry at some demonstrations asking for the guy to step down.
Oh yeah, did I mention that he tried a comeback earlier this year? The political class mostly welcomed him back. The public didn't. He went away again. I have no doubt he'll be back.
Yes, shameless about sums up the assholes that currently rule us. And it doesn't matter which party.
Instead of doing more stuff, how about doing the stuff you should be doing better?
There have been complaints about the editing and story selection - the core aspects of/. - for many years now. It may not be true, but this second side-project feels like confirmation that one of the reasons this has never been fixed is that you're simply trying to make more money with more stuff.
I have taken a good look at this new offshot, and I can guarantee that it's the last look I have ever taken on it. I simply couldn't care less, even though I am the CEO of a small company, so I'm right there in your target audience.
But I don't come to/. for "business intelligence" (more on that in a second) and I don't expect any from/. and I don't trust/. as a source of any. One of the reasons loops back to the beginning: If you are not doing an excellent job in your core business, why should I expect you to do a good job in an offshot project?
As for "business intelligence" - that crap is a dime a dozen. If you want to enter the market, do something different. Like actual intelligence. The word largely means "information" these days, but it should mean more than that. A good intelligence source requires really good editing. And that is not exactly a strength of/.
I hope this dies a quick death and you will learn that you need to make your core business brilliant before even thinking about doing anything else.
Well, first off, you're admitting that switzerland is socialist where you were initially claiming that no one would say that. So... did you lie or what? Because you seem to have known all along they were pretty socialist.
What I wrote was "looks socialistic", not "is socialist". Are you insulting on purpose or do you not grasp the difference?
As to having democracy while the US doesn't... back that argument up please. What does that mean? Explain to me why they have democracy and we don't? I think you'll have a very hard time making that argument and not looking foolish.
The swiss vote on everything importan themselves, thus, from greek demos + kratia = government by the people. The US never was a democracy, it has always been a republic - from latin res publica = public issue. The difference is important, but vital. In a democracy, the people govern themselves, for good or ill. In a republic, a governing body or class rules in the interest of the people. The republic is the nanny state concept, not the democracy. In fact, it is by definition a nanny state, because it treats its people as if they were kids and need to be ruled for their own benefit.
And that's the spirit that has come to dominance in most western democracies. Open your eyes and look at how politicians treat their people. Like children or imbeciles.
But personally, I'm not responsible for that.
This lack of responsibility is exactly why corporations act like psychopaths. Because that is what psychopaths are - humans with a mental defect that causes total lack of responsibility. Not my words, there's been an actual study of psychologists comparing corporate and (human) psychopath behaviour patterns.
The regulation and taxes in greece drive business out of the country.
You have no idea about what's going on in greece. I don't have much myself, but what I have shows that things are more complicated than that. Not a surprise for anyone who's been watching things for a while. Wherever the IWF got involved, things quickly went from bad to worse.
So let me ask you point blank. Do you want to be unemployed? And if you choose to be unemployed, why is it my responsibility to take care of you? You chose to live on the street and eat garbage. You had the option to do otherwise. Why are you making bad decisions and then demanding that other people bail you out for them?
Again, you make too many assumptions and your ignorance should shame you. If you care, I do in fact own a small company. And I personally (i.e. me, not my company) paid more in income taxes last year than most people have in yearly salary. Before founding my own company, I worked as a direct report to the CFO of a company with a revenue of over a billion. So I think I do have a bit of qualification to speak about taxes.
Also, you might want to re-think that sentence with "anti corporate attitude". This isn't about corporations pro or contra. It's about equality and fairness. Every buck the large corporations don't pay in taxes, the small corporations (like mine) have to shoulder. I'm a strong believer in everyone contributing his fair share. I do. Why doesn't Microsoft, why doesn't Apple, why doesn't Google? Do you realize that their record profits are massively subsidised by the general public?
If you had actually read and understood anything I wrote, you'd have realized I am not asking for special, extra or especially high taxes for corporations or large corporations. What I am asking is that they pay their taxes just like everyone else. This competition of districts, counties and even entire nations is just pathetic.
As to Switzerland, it is a socialist country. They have as much socialism in Switzerland as they do in Sweden.
Yeah, right. I tell you what they do have that America (and lots of Europe) doesn't anymore: Democracy. And that means - shocking, I know - that the government is for the people. Sorry that it looks socialistic to americans if the government actually cares about the citizen.
As to corporate taxes, here you might want to really consider not even having them.
The minute corporations give their personhood and all their other rights back, and make a binding, if-we-break-it-we-get-automatically-dissolved guarantee to never ever take any influence on politics again. Otherwise, the rule is that if you want to play with the adults, you pay your taxes.
Because it wants to take away something they love dearly: Money.
People, wake up. If you want to attribute ethical terms to a corporation, the first thing you need to do is change the measure applied. Replace "good" with "profit" and "bad" with "loss". That is the ethics of a corporation. Not because they are evil, but because the law mandates it.
Do you know what makes taxes rise and rise and rise?
Exceptions. Tax breaks, deals, whatever you call them. For everyone who doesn't pay his share, everyone else has to pay more to get the same total.
Some economist in Switzerland - certainly not a country you could accuse of socialism - made a study years ago that we could cut both corporate and personal income tax to a flat 25% if everyone paid them in full. Right now, the highest income tax bracket in my country is 49%. But the more money you make, the less you actually pay, because there are more and more ways to dodge it.
Ok, is there anything that we as the Internet community can do? Blacklisting these crap new domains on our own DNS servers sounds like a good step forward, but it won't have any kind of wider impact. Any way to make them not work for a good part of the world? Without impacting the legitimate TLDs?
First thing I can come up with is finding a meme - they are obviously not gTLDs and vTLDs (for vanity-TLDs) doesn't quite capture it. How about sTLD, for stupid-TLD and with an intentional close similarity to STD?
Slashdot Mirror
That is wrong.
While it is people who do the speaking, they do so in the name of the corporation, if they act in official capacity. Legally speaking, it is the corporation that does the speaking. The speaker is, basically, the paper and ink on which a statement is printed. When you sue a newspaper for libel, you don't actually sue the physical paper, you sue the organisation that created it.
Same with corporations. The means through which they speak may be a human, but, for example, in the "iPad 4G" examples, it wasn't the web-designers who put that statement into the HTML pages that were sued, it was Apple. Because legally, that statement was made by Apple.
There should be no Free Speech for non-humans. A corporation does not have any political or human rights necessities for Free Speech because a) all the humans that make up the corporation already have that right and b) it isn't human, so human rights don't apply.
I understand the line needs to be defined and corporations will circumvent the issue by paying people to make their speech for them - but the law is pretty good at wiping the floor with people too obviously circumventing it.
You can't make adaptive colors in CSS, like a shadow color automatically calculated from another color.
On real browsers (i.e. anything except IE, at least up to 8, not sure about 9) you can come very close by using rgba colours for the shadow.
On top of that, you can't inherit from CSS classes so have to duplicate the same thing multiple times if you don't want to give each element multiple classes.
But giving elements multiple classes is kind of the whole idea. I regularily have one class that sets the layout stuff and one that sets colours, etc.
How about a new standard, replacing CSS, that truly allows separation of content and style in modern web apps?
Why? Just because it isn't perfect you want to replace it with something that for many years will be lagging behind?
It needs more than that to be a FB killer. It needs to integrate the social graph into the whole thing.
That's not all that difficult. What you need is a permission system allowing for more than "public" and "private". Basically, "friends" and "friends of friends", etc. as filesystem permissions. Then you store the users social graph data as a file in his folder. You also need a database file for postings and comments and that's the technical part. Nothing of that is black magic, scaling it to FB sizes is certainly a technical challenge.
Bwuahaha... yeah, right.
Author is missing the elephant in the room. He's thinking Facebook exists to serve its users at all. It doesn't. The users aren't the customers, they're the product. Facebook treats its users like a meat plant treats its cattle: Just well enough that they make a good product.
Google could've really shaken up FB, but they opted to copy it instead.
I will tell you what will destroy Facebook: A FB-like Dropbox-frontend. Something that allows you to share whatever you want to share, blurring the boundary between local and cloud by making "the cloud" just a directory on your device.
Dropbox (or any other cloud service) has the potential to replace FB by integrating with any and all local apps, giving you a "share this" button on everything that simply puts the file into your Dropbox public folder and notifies your social graph.
The entire business model of Facebook is built on holding your data hostage. Unless they were to become really threatened, they would be stupid to change that.
But a company whose business model is built on charging you for sharing and storing data would have you as the customer, and interested in keeping you happy, not the advertisers. Of course, this also requires something much more difficult than passing a stupid law: A change in user mindset. People would have to get used (again) to actually paying for something.
The tyranny of the majority - you don't want 51% of the population to be able to casually strip the rights from the other 49%.
And you simply assume that you will find a 51% majority that would be willing to do this, yes?
Everywhere in history that I can recall, whenever fundamental rights were stripped away, the majority that did it far exceeded 51% and would have been more than enough for any required constitutional changes.
Manipulation of the masses
That is true, but is not at all different in a representative democracy, except that lobbyism is a lot cheaper and easier because the group you need to influence is far smaller and more homogeneous (i.e. the representatives).
but we should remember that it's NOT actually evidence that it can continue to work at scales such as the US
But neither does any evidence to the contrary exist.
We know from Switzerland that direct democracy does scale up well beyond the athenian city state. We don't yet know if it scales another order of magnitude, because no one has yet tried.
And remember that the Swiss have had this system for a long time, well before the Internet or even the phone network existed.
Honestly, direct democracy doesn't scale very well above a village level population, let alone a small city.
Honestly, that is pure propaganda. More important, representattive democracy doesn't solve that issue.
Switzerland shows that direct democracy works on a country level, if you want it to work.
Pretty much every western country today shows that representative democracy doesn't work well, doesn't solve the complexity issue (because the representatives really aren't any smarter or more educated than the people electing them) and leads to massive amounts of corruption and bribery.
But, a lot of people have a vested interest in having a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. Namely, everyone who is involved on either side in the corruption, bribery and lobbyism that has come to dominate representative democracy.
But for direct democracy to really work you have to find a way to get the population just as engaged with reviewing the sanitary regulations.
No, you don't. It's perfectly ok if only the people who care one way or the other vote about it.
But since it theoretically remains a direct democracy you get none of the necessary controls and safeguards intentionally built into any sane representative democracy.
Such as?
I get very interested when people talk about "safeguards". Against what? The will of the people? Now that is a strange understanding of democracy you have there.
over the nasty mess of a large scale direct democracy.
Which you only know from propaganda talks and have never actually experienced anywhere at any time in your life, correct?
Liking one idea invented elsewhere so much you copy it isn't the same as being utterly devoid of vision and innovation to the point where having an original idea of your own is so rare, you can date astronomical events by it.
Google has plenty of ideas of its own. That's what matters.
Actually, my experience with actual CPA's has been that they're a pleasure to work with.
Good people in any area are a pleasure to work with. Saddly, there aren't all that many. I've enjoyed working against real pros more than working with average run-of-the-mill people.
Name one country where that isn't the case.
You are right, it's a world-wide trend. That doesn't make it one inch better.
I wouldn't even mind - my other criticism of our current democracy is that most of our politicians, despite being career politicians are really amateurs in both the business of politics and whatever their ministry or other subject area is.
So, we get the worst of both world. People with almost not real-world knowledge, who are also quite bad at just being politicians.
Then think of how dynamic the German system is
Not as much as I'd like. The green party has been assimilated into the scam ever since SchrÃder. They're now playing all the same games, taking all the same kickbacks. The Pirate Party is where I personally place my hopes, but they are already showing signs of power games. I still hope they can shake that off and kick out the wrong people that are currently using the rapid growth to maneuver themselves into positions. But I wouldn't bet the farm on it.
Can you think of another country which could have a similar joke currently? Heck, Germany's current president is a former priest living undivorced with his new life partner. Germany doesn't have a first lady it has a first mistress.
And yet aside from that the guy is reactionist and fully integrated into the party system. He was a horrible choice, but few people have researched him beyond the picture the media painted. WeizÃcker was the last real president we had.
You see, these are the surfaces, it's the Spectacle (Hakim Bey) we get shown. But underneath it all, things don't look so diversified, multi-cultural or clean. The government is entirely driven by lobbyists. Heck, we had to have a scandal to make them (grudgingly!) stop having the laws written by lobbyists. That's a joke in most other countries, in Germany it was reality for years.
Seriously man show some fucking pride!
There are a lot of things in Germany that I am very, very proud of. Our government isn't on that list and hasn't been for a long time.
I'm torn here.
I've always wanted multiplayer in Elder Scrolls. But I was looking for cooperative multiplayer, as in playing with your SO, a few friends, something like that. 4, maybe 8 players max. (1-3 parties).
MMO? Really not sure about that. It will depend on how it's done, of course.
Strong, heavy men charging at each other full power repeatedly does damage. Who'd have thought? Never saw that coming...
This European Commission seems to be just a bunch of criminal lobbyists all around
No, it's not. It's an extortion scheme set up by politicians so the lobbyists have yet another group of career politicians that they can't afford to not bribe.
In other words, it's not a bunch of criminal lobbyists, but their equally criminal counterparts.
You're a presumptuous idiot and someone had to say it.
Germany after WW2 was one of the most humble major countries in the world. Not a big surprise after being as completely demolished as it was. The visions of politicians of those times were mostly inwards, into building a society. Something modern politician sell-outs have forgotten: That human life doesn't happen in the market alone.
I do not agree with all of the politics of early post-WW2 Germany, but simply by listening to an interview with Helmut Schmidt and one with any of todays politicians you will notice a difference in quality of thought that is hard to describe, but impossible to miss. Check YouTube if you speak german. If you don't, the best I can sum it up as is that on the one side you have empty vessels speaking in pleasant generalities devoid of any content, and regularily showing off their utter ignorance of basically everything. Now switch to an interview with Schmidt and you have a guy who knows how to talk, knows his subject, and isn't afraid to say "I don't know enough about this to comment" if he doesn't, which is rare.
So desktop users will be sorta pushed to the sidelines, and then we're all supposed to live on our phones or something.
No, that's what marketing makes you believe. In reality, like all trends and hypes, those who go along with it will do well in the new market and those who stick with what's old and working well will do well in the old market. It's just that the old market isn't hip, so you don't read much about it in press releases and news (if there's still a difference).
Some of the biggest and most profitable markets are rarely in the news because they aren't sexy. Food companies are some of the biggest corporations in the world - Nestle has about the same revenue as Microsoft, Kraft has more revenue than Google and more than twice its profit, and so on - and yet you don't reach much about them. Big oil is often in the news for everything but their revenue and income - for starters, Shell has four times the revenue of Apple.
So don't read the news when you want to know where the market is heading. The news only tell you where the hype is going, not where the money is.
It only makes sense that people using your software across devices will at least want a consistent UI, and it should be accessible no matter what type of device you are using.
No, it doesn't. Go visit User Interface Design 101. Consistency is one of several criteria, and more importantly it does not automatically mean consistency across media.
On my 27" desktop screen, I have vastly different UI requirements than on my 3.5" iPhone screen. The worst applications, from a user interface perspective, are those that were ported pretty much 1:1 from one to the other. iOS apps ported to the Mac with no major changes are just horrible to use on the desktop, as are Mac apps ported 1:1 to the iPhone. The best cross-device apps use very different layouts and UI mechanics. They easily bridge the gap by using the same icons, terms and metaphors and there is almost no learning time between them. That is good design, not trying to build a one-size-fits-everyone-badly interface.
Mozilla Ponders Major Firefox UI Refresh
Oh, is it another month already?
Whoever put the apes in charge of Mozilla, please translate the following message to chimpanzee or banana or whatever:
You don't need a fresh UI. You need a good UI, and then you need to stick with it.
1.) The method used to find the unattributed quotations is using a strong peer-review system. It's not the same thing as scientific peer-review, because it's not an experimental science but a document review. It has proven unassailable in previous cases.
2.) The basic rules broken here haven't changed. This is not a matter of how to quote your source, but that you need to list your source. The claim is that she has copied whole passages from other sources without indicating that fact, passing the text off as her own instead.
The problem is and never has been using ideas and deriving information from other sources. Much of science is about that. The problem is the wholesale verbatim lifting of entire passages (allowed) without marking them as quotes (not allowed).
What american readers probably don't know is how much politics and politicians have changed during the past 20 or so years.
Initially, the "new" West Germany after WW2 had a functional (not without faults, but functional) representative democracy. People with vision, connections and public support would rise to power. We didn't have the pseudo-aristocratic US system of clans and super-rich. In fact, none of the chancellors were very wealthy.
Then, the political elite started to close and shut out insiders. The majority of the people in positions of power today are career politicians, people who have worked a small part of their lives - if at all - outside of their political parties.
For all the flaws they had, the old guard was a different kind of human. They were sometimes arrogant, often egomaniac, but they were in it for their vision of the future, not for the paycheck and the nice kickbacks from the lobbyists.
Our current government is just the worst of that kind. It has no vision whatsoever, no plan whatsoever and is purely reactive. We have satire magazines commenting the current political theatre with sentences like "sometimes I wonder why we are even doing satire anymore". You could take some of their talks straight from the protocol of the Bundestag (our parliament) and if you published it in a humor magazine, you'd love about it and applaud the author on a brilliant piece of mockery - except that they're serious.
There was indeed a former minister and hopeful to be next chancellor, a "superstar" of politics (which, these days, is about the same as being the winner of "Britain's Got Talent" or "American Idol") who had to drop out of politics because his Ph.D. was basically fraudulent. The affair damaged on of the most respected academics in his field, who had fallen for the young man's charm and trickery and issued the Ph.D. to him.
What was most telling, however, was how the political elite dealt with it. Basically, the MOTD was that it's not a big deal. Only massive and sustained public pressure finally made them carve in, one by one, until the guy had to step down.
These are the people who want to lock you away for 5 years for downloading a DVD. "Shame" was the rallying cry at some demonstrations asking for the guy to step down.
Oh yeah, did I mention that he tried a comeback earlier this year? The political class mostly welcomed him back. The public didn't. He went away again. I have no doubt he'll be back.
Yes, shameless about sums up the assholes that currently rule us. And it doesn't matter which party.
Instead of doing more stuff, how about doing the stuff you should be doing better?
There have been complaints about the editing and story selection - the core aspects of /. - for many years now. It may not be true, but this second side-project feels like confirmation that one of the reasons this has never been fixed is that you're simply trying to make more money with more stuff.
I have taken a good look at this new offshot, and I can guarantee that it's the last look I have ever taken on it. I simply couldn't care less, even though I am the CEO of a small company, so I'm right there in your target audience.
But I don't come to /. for "business intelligence" (more on that in a second) and I don't expect any from /. and I don't trust /. as a source of any. One of the reasons loops back to the beginning: If you are not doing an excellent job in your core business, why should I expect you to do a good job in an offshot project?
As for "business intelligence" - that crap is a dime a dozen. If you want to enter the market, do something different. Like actual intelligence. The word largely means "information" these days, but it should mean more than that. A good intelligence source requires really good editing. And that is not exactly a strength of /.
I hope this dies a quick death and you will learn that you need to make your core business brilliant before even thinking about doing anything else.
Well, first off, you're admitting that switzerland is socialist where you were initially claiming that no one would say that. So... did you lie or what? Because you seem to have known all along they were pretty socialist.
What I wrote was "looks socialistic", not "is socialist". Are you insulting on purpose or do you not grasp the difference?
As to having democracy while the US doesn't... back that argument up please. What does that mean? Explain to me why they have democracy and we don't? I think you'll have a very hard time making that argument and not looking foolish.
The swiss vote on everything importan themselves, thus, from greek demos + kratia = government by the people. The US never was a democracy, it has always been a republic - from latin res publica = public issue. The difference is important, but vital. In a democracy, the people govern themselves, for good or ill. In a republic, a governing body or class rules in the interest of the people.
The republic is the nanny state concept, not the democracy. In fact, it is by definition a nanny state, because it treats its people as if they were kids and need to be ruled for their own benefit.
And that's the spirit that has come to dominance in most western democracies. Open your eyes and look at how politicians treat their people. Like children or imbeciles.
But personally, I'm not responsible for that.
This lack of responsibility is exactly why corporations act like psychopaths. Because that is what psychopaths are - humans with a mental defect that causes total lack of responsibility. Not my words, there's been an actual study of psychologists comparing corporate and (human) psychopath behaviour patterns.
The regulation and taxes in greece drive business out of the country.
You have no idea about what's going on in greece. I don't have much myself, but what I have shows that things are more complicated than that. Not a surprise for anyone who's been watching things for a while. Wherever the IWF got involved, things quickly went from bad to worse.
So let me ask you point blank. Do you want to be unemployed? And if you choose to be unemployed, why is it my responsibility to take care of you? You chose to live on the street and eat garbage. You had the option to do otherwise. Why are you making bad decisions and then demanding that other people bail you out for them?
Again, you make too many assumptions and your ignorance should shame you. If you care, I do in fact own a small company. And I personally (i.e. me, not my company) paid more in income taxes last year than most people have in yearly salary. Before founding my own company, I worked as a direct report to the CFO of a company with a revenue of over a billion. So I think I do have a bit of qualification to speak about taxes.
Also, you might want to re-think that sentence with "anti corporate attitude". This isn't about corporations pro or contra. It's about equality and fairness. Every buck the large corporations don't pay in taxes, the small corporations (like mine) have to shoulder. I'm a strong believer in everyone contributing his fair share. I do. Why doesn't Microsoft, why doesn't Apple, why doesn't Google? Do you realize that their record profits are massively subsidised by the general public?
If you had actually read and understood anything I wrote, you'd have realized I am not asking for special, extra or especially high taxes for corporations or large corporations. What I am asking is that they pay their taxes just like everyone else. This competition of districts, counties and even entire nations is just pathetic.
As to Switzerland, it is a socialist country. They have as much socialism in Switzerland as they do in Sweden.
Yeah, right. I tell you what they do have that America (and lots of Europe) doesn't anymore: Democracy. And that means - shocking, I know - that the government is for the people. Sorry that it looks socialistic to americans if the government actually cares about the citizen.
As to corporate taxes, here you might want to really consider not even having them.
The minute corporations give their personhood and all their other rights back, and make a binding, if-we-break-it-we-get-automatically-dissolved guarantee to never ever take any influence on politics again. Otherwise, the rule is that if you want to play with the adults, you pay your taxes.
why does Apple hate America?
Because it wants to take away something they love dearly: Money.
People, wake up. If you want to attribute ethical terms to a corporation, the first thing you need to do is change the measure applied. Replace "good" with "profit" and "bad" with "loss". That is the ethics of a corporation. Not because they are evil, but because the law mandates it.
Do you know what makes taxes rise and rise and rise?
Exceptions. Tax breaks, deals, whatever you call them. For everyone who doesn't pay his share, everyone else has to pay more to get the same total.
Some economist in Switzerland - certainly not a country you could accuse of socialism - made a study years ago that we could cut both corporate and personal income tax to a flat 25% if everyone paid them in full. Right now, the highest income tax bracket in my country is 49%. But the more money you make, the less you actually pay, because there are more and more ways to dodge it.
Ok, is there anything that we as the Internet community can do? Blacklisting these crap new domains on our own DNS servers sounds like a good step forward, but it won't have any kind of wider impact. Any way to make them not work for a good part of the world? Without impacting the legitimate TLDs?
First thing I can come up with is finding a meme - they are obviously not gTLDs and vTLDs (for vanity-TLDs) doesn't quite capture it. How about sTLD, for stupid-TLD and with an intentional close similarity to STD?