No, I'm serious. Why the fuck do I have to show up at the airport an hour or so before? I'm the customer who pays for the whole charade, and I've not seen serious attempts to make things smooth and going well for the customer in many airports. What I do see are easily spotted attempts at operating as cheaply as possible.
"Put up with it" is an attitude that not many industries can afford, you know?
It is really simple: Advertisement will kill Wikipedia.
You simply can't take a bundle of grand from, say, the Coca-Cola Company and then ignore their request to revert that change on their wiki page that puts them in unfavourable light. Maybe you think you can, but they will explain to you in detail how you can't do both, so its either the wiki page or the end of their ads. Forever. And that includes all their subsidiaries and a lot of their business partners.
Oh, that and it breaks the #1 promise of an encyclopedia, that it contains reliable information. I know that's debatable about Wikipedia anyways, which is why making the subject any more difficult will be another nail in the coffin.
How about you start living in the 21st century? Most of the Germans you meet today weren't even born when that happened. No matter where you live, I'm quite sure that somewhere in your history, some of your ancestors killed a whole lot of other people, too.
He was really angry when he went back for a visit with his kids and a restaurant wouldn't let him eat there if he brought them in. One - there were certainly dozens of other restaurants that were happy to have him and his kids, so what, exactly, is the problem?
Two - can you get the address of that restaurant? If I'm ever in the vicinity, I might want to eat there. No kids is a great thing for those of us who're not subject to certain hormone drugs that cover the pain of high-pitched screams and constant attention begging.
1. The government is asking you what religion you are on your tax forms at all, and that they will be the instrument of collection for the "official" churches of Germany. Yes, I hate that part as well. However, on the other hand when a german politician says on national TV that he's an atheist, people shrug and ask why that's in the news. In the US, he would've pretty much destroyed his chances of going anywhere.
2. That if you are a Catholic, but don't want to pay the tax, you have to lie to the government and say you aren't. In which case you are "removed" from the church and can't have a church wedding. That's a policy of the catholic church, not the government.
3. That you have to tell the government when you move (police station, town hall, whatever) ? Instead of writing "whatever" you should verify what you write. It's the "Einwohnermeldeamt", a government office, only identical to the town hall in small villages. And yes, they want your address. After all, they have to send your voting and tax documents somewhere. Nowadays, you can change your address online in most places.
4. Assigned an official religion by the state, based on what you parent were/are ? This in itself might be the worst of all of it!
Yes, the government assumes you'll be of the same confession as your parents. In many cases, they're right. If they aren't, it's one signature on a paper and no questions asked. You can probably do that online as well nowadays, but it's been a long time since I did.
What exactly any of this has to do with freedom, that's beyond me.
The problem with a "copyright tax" is very simple: According to current international copyright laws, you don't have to register, anything you create is (C) you.
Which means this posting is (C) by me. How much tax do you want to leverage on it? And how much tax will you ask for the private love letters that I write, and that are also (C) by me but only two persons will probably ever see them?
You can make this work for patents and trademarks, because they are registered. But not copyrights.
No, seriously. It's profits that causes these troubles.
When you're a corporation, your primary goal is profits. If something bad happens, that's ok as long as the cost of it happening is less than the cost of measures to avoid it. So you accept a certain number of faults and failures, namely that percentage that's too expensive to avoid.
When you're not a for-profit company, your focus can be different. For example, an energy company owned and operated by the state would have as its first priority to supply energy to the people and the industries of the state. It would invest in more measures to prevent failures, since avoiding blackouts would be a higher priority than profits.
I see this weekly with the german train company. It was made a private company 10 years ago, and ever since, service has gone down the drain while costs have risen. When it was run by the government, trains were on the minute and going every hour between major cities. Now that it's a private company, most trains are crowded, many are late, and lots of connections have been discontinued, but you get coffee brought to your seat if you travel first class. Well, that's nice, but I'd rather have my reliable, punctual train service with no crowding an plenty of connections back.
Just remove the battery. If if it had a super-secret micro-battery hidden somewhere, that wouldn't last for more than maybe half an hour. A guy I remotely know who works for a german intelligence agency did that with his private cell phone - almost ten years ago.
You can also put it into a Faraday Cage, you know?
All of these strike me as more useful, because: a) they mean that you are in control about when or when not you can be tracked. b) a cellphone searching for, but not finding, a tower, will increase its output and continue searching. That means that at short range, you are easier to find if the cell network is down.
But hey, we don't expect the Taliban to know (or care) about technical details, do we?
My big problem with this is that EVERY program for the iPhone has to come from iTunes, which means it will most likely be sold. I doubt Apple is going to host any freeware programs that people write out of the goodness of their hearts. There's a lot of free podcasts on iTunes. Why do you assume it would be different for iPhone apps?
As someone who has bought a ton of 3rd party apps for OS X, for all I care you and your kind can rot. Let me explain before you hit me in the face:
Writing code for a pre-release, beta or pushed-out-too-early API is just one of the things that shows immature coding practices. When the API changes, you'll do what? Refactor? No, you won't, you will patch it up, put in a hack here and a workaround there.
I much prefer the mature code written by mature people that I've come to experience on OS X. Yes, Apple is less kind to developers than MS is. The result is that MS has more developers. The result also is that every immature fuckup who can't write 10 lines without a bug and can't stand being told that he sucks, writes software for windos, not OS X.
The software quality of most of the shareware released for OS X tops a good part of the "enterprise software" that I know for windos. I don't think that's a coincidence.
So please, if you want to write software for an API that was released too early, instead of one that has been refined, worked over, and matured, by all means by my guest and please do it to something different, not my iPhone.
We need the news media to take the lead in helping people understand Sorry, kid, the 80s are over.
Educational television used to be very popular. Some of the most popular shows of my teenage days were scientific shows. But those days are over. Kids these days get daily soaps, look-I-can't-sing-too shows and ringtone advertisements.
There's a presupposition on NLP that says "every action has a positive intention". And that's exactly the problem here: These dumbfucks^H^H^H^H^Hpeople really think that they are doing you a favour, by saving your soul and bringing you the "good message". Their perception of "right" and "wrong" is entirely screwed up and taken over by the religion meme.
Something incriminating ends up online, and you have two options. You have three.
3. Wash it away in a flood of misleading other information.
That's what politicians and other people experienced at fooling the general public do. For example, look at when controversial laws are passed, it is often during times where the media's minds are elsewhere.
I think the CIA and the NSA have the best grip on this. AFAIK there is no word "Uninformation" in their vocabulary, but the words "Disinformation" ranks highly.
There is no negative to "information", so you can't remove it, mathematically speaking. But you can bury it under more information.
Looks like there is hope left in the United States of "look ma', no brains!".
the new curriculum emphasizes teaching the meaning of scientific terms and the scientific method in earlier grades. If done right, this could blow a huge hole in the fundamentalist brainwashing. If you teach scientific terms first, and then call evolution a "theory", kids will know what you mean. Heck, they'll know that a scientific "theory" generally holds about a hundred times more water than religious "facts".
I don't think it's coincidence that it sounds a lot like SourceForge.
I don't know why, but if I wanted to muddle a name, that's something I'd do: Create something that sounds much like it, is a bit childish and ridiculous, and try to make it popular.
whereas in, say, Germany, displaying any sort of Nazi symbolism is a good way to get hauled off to jail. Actually, it's a good way to get a lawsuit against you, with all the proper proceedings of a fair trial but that's beside the point. The point is that those laws were set up by the allied occupation forces after WW2. They're not really a german idea, though we've found them useful and decided to keep them. But saying the US is the champion of free speech and then using a contrast where it was them who caused that contrast to exist in the first place is a little cheap.
...is over in the US. One basic principle of it is that the law applies to everyone equally, that nobody is "above the law". There can be exceptions and special priviledges as long as they are written into the laws. So in most countries MPs are exempt from prosecution, for good reasons, and that's ok because it's part of the process.
In the US, the rule of law has been abandoned. You are back to the rule of power: Everyone does whatever he can get away with. Your so-called president leading the way.
Patents are meant to cover a particular implementation in physical terms of a theoretical idea, and right now, they are often being used to try and cover the theory as well. Exactly!
A long time ago, the USPTO required a working model(*) of the invention alongside the patent application. If you couldn't make a model of it, you couldn't patent it.
I still think the patent system went down the drain when they stopped having that requirement.
(*) in a loose sense. Some effects, of course, simply don't work that way in scale models. A model of a nuclear reactor is more tricky to build than the full-size thing. "working" here didn't always mean it had to "work" in the strict sense, but work enough to show the invention that was about to be patented.
What a coincidence that just a few days ago, a study was published showing that religion is the main source of trouble here (as elsewhere), and the main reason the US is slipping behind is the outdated power that religious belief has on the public opinion.
Google for "Zero Defect Software Development" or "They write the right stuff" for a couple pointers into real-life examples. When you study CS you learn a couple more formal methods of coding, but I don't know if they are actually employed for any actual software.
Slashdot Mirror
Why?
No, I'm serious. Why the fuck do I have to show up at the airport an hour or so before? I'm the customer who pays for the whole charade, and I've not seen serious attempts to make things smooth and going well for the customer in many airports. What I do see are easily spotted attempts at operating as cheaply as possible.
"Put up with it" is an attitude that not many industries can afford, you know?
It is really simple: Advertisement will kill Wikipedia.
You simply can't take a bundle of grand from, say, the Coca-Cola Company and then ignore their request to revert that change on their wiki page that puts them in unfavourable light. Maybe you think you can, but they will explain to you in detail how you can't do both, so its either the wiki page or the end of their ads. Forever. And that includes all their subsidiaries and a lot of their business partners.
Oh, that and it breaks the #1 promise of an encyclopedia, that it contains reliable information. I know that's debatable about Wikipedia anyways, which is why making the subject any more difficult will be another nail in the coffin.
There's a difference between a fault and a large-area blackout, wouldn't you say?
How about you start living in the 21st century? Most of the Germans you meet today weren't even born when that happened. No matter where you live, I'm quite sure that somewhere in your history, some of your ancestors killed a whole lot of other people, too.
Oh, wait. He means the other meaning of "secure". Darn.
Two - can you get the address of that restaurant? If I'm ever in the vicinity, I might want to eat there. No kids is a great thing for those of us who're not subject to certain hormone drugs that cover the pain of high-pitched screams and constant attention begging.
Yes, the government assumes you'll be of the same confession as your parents. In many cases, they're right. If they aren't, it's one signature on a paper and no questions asked. You can probably do that online as well nowadays, but it's been a long time since I did.
What exactly any of this has to do with freedom, that's beyond me.
The problem with a "copyright tax" is very simple: According to current international copyright laws, you don't have to register, anything you create is (C) you.
Which means this posting is (C) by me. How much tax do you want to leverage on it? And how much tax will you ask for the private love letters that I write, and that are also (C) by me but only two persons will probably ever see them?
You can make this work for patents and trademarks, because they are registered. But not copyrights.
No, seriously. It's profits that causes these troubles.
When you're a corporation, your primary goal is profits. If something bad happens, that's ok as long as the cost of it happening is less than the cost of measures to avoid it. So you accept a certain number of faults and failures, namely that percentage that's too expensive to avoid.
When you're not a for-profit company, your focus can be different. For example, an energy company owned and operated by the state would have as its first priority to supply energy to the people and the industries of the state. It would invest in more measures to prevent failures, since avoiding blackouts would be a higher priority than profits.
I see this weekly with the german train company. It was made a private company 10 years ago, and ever since, service has gone down the drain while costs have risen. When it was run by the government, trains were on the minute and going every hour between major cities. Now that it's a private company, most trains are crowded, many are late, and lots of connections have been discontinued, but you get coffee brought to your seat if you travel first class. Well, that's nice, but I'd rather have my reliable, punctual train service with no crowding an plenty of connections back.
You're right, the article summary is misleading, and I should've expected as much on /.
Unfortunately.
You can carry it.
Just remove the battery. If if it had a super-secret micro-battery hidden somewhere, that wouldn't last for more than maybe half an hour. A guy I remotely know who works for a german intelligence agency did that with his private cell phone - almost ten years ago.
You can also put it into a Faraday Cage, you know?
All of these strike me as more useful, because:
a) they mean that you are in control about when or when not you can be tracked.
b) a cellphone searching for, but not finding, a tower, will increase its output and continue searching. That means that at short range, you are easier to find if the cell network is down.
But hey, we don't expect the Taliban to know (or care) about technical details, do we?
As someone who has bought a ton of 3rd party apps for OS X, for all I care you and your kind can rot. Let me explain before you hit me in the face:
Writing code for a pre-release, beta or pushed-out-too-early API is just one of the things that shows immature coding practices. When the API changes, you'll do what? Refactor? No, you won't, you will patch it up, put in a hack here and a workaround there.
I much prefer the mature code written by mature people that I've come to experience on OS X. Yes, Apple is less kind to developers than MS is. The result is that MS has more developers. The result also is that every immature fuckup who can't write 10 lines without a bug and can't stand being told that he sucks, writes software for windos, not OS X.
The software quality of most of the shareware released for OS X tops a good part of the "enterprise software" that I know for windos. I don't think that's a coincidence.
So please, if you want to write software for an API that was released too early, instead of one that has been refined, worked over, and matured, by all means by my guest and please do it to something different, not my iPhone.
Educational television used to be very popular. Some of the most popular shows of my teenage days were scientific shows. But those days are over. Kids these days get daily soaps, look-I-can't-sing-too shows and ringtone advertisements.
There's a presupposition on NLP that says "every action has a positive intention". And that's exactly the problem here: These dumbfucks^H^H^H^H^Hpeople really think that they are doing you a favour, by saving your soul and bringing you the "good message". Their perception of "right" and "wrong" is entirely screwed up and taken over by the religion meme.
3. Wash it away in a flood of misleading other information.
That's what politicians and other people experienced at fooling the general public do. For example, look at when controversial laws are passed, it is often during times where the media's minds are elsewhere.
I think the CIA and the NSA have the best grip on this. AFAIK there is no word "Uninformation" in their vocabulary, but the words "Disinformation" ranks highly.
There is no negative to "information", so you can't remove it, mathematically speaking. But you can bury it under more information.
Look back further, to the events leading to the allied occupation of Germany, to see who caused what.
:-)
As far as I know, Nazi symbols were not illegal during the Third Reich.
I don't think it's coincidence that it sounds a lot like SourceForge.
I don't know why, but if I wanted to muddle a name, that's something I'd do: Create something that sounds much like it, is a bit childish and ridiculous, and try to make it popular.
...is over in the US. One basic principle of it is that the law applies to everyone equally, that nobody is "above the law". There can be exceptions and special priviledges as long as they are written into the laws. So in most countries MPs are exempt from prosecution, for good reasons, and that's ok because it's part of the process.
In the US, the rule of law has been abandoned. You are back to the rule of power: Everyone does whatever he can get away with. Your so-called president leading the way.
A long time ago, the USPTO required a working model(*) of the invention alongside the patent application. If you couldn't make a model of it, you couldn't patent it.
I still think the patent system went down the drain when they stopped having that requirement.
(*) in a loose sense. Some effects, of course, simply don't work that way in scale models. A model of a nuclear reactor is more tricky to build than the full-size thing. "working" here didn't always mean it had to "work" in the strict sense, but work enough to show the invention that was about to be patented.
What a coincidence that just a few days ago, a study was published showing that religion is the main source of trouble here (as elsewhere), and the main reason the US is slipping behind is the outdated power that religious belief has on the public opinion.
Google for "Zero Defect Software Development" or "They write the right stuff" for a couple pointers into real-life examples. When you study CS you learn a couple more formal methods of coding, but I don't know if they are actually employed for any actual software.