Amazon better? Don't be so sure - I once got a pirate DVD from an Amazon seller. I think Caveat Emptor applies at pretty much every online (and to a lesser extent offline) market.
One thing they could do is that if a buyer pays by paypal, the buyer's feedback is automatically increased, as the buyer has perfromed thier part of the deal. If you read eBay's rules, the seller is supposed to leave feedback as soon as payment is recieved and cleared - this would just enforce it for some of the transactions.
I think it goes deeper - I think geologists are pissed off a bit because they're the ones who study what planets really are (it's why these days, geology is often called Earth & Planetary Science), but they haven't been invited to participate in defining what a planet is. It's not just the reuse of a geology term, it's the fact that astronomers are stepping on geologist's toes.
How about geologists that study other planets.. er.. plutons?
That what I don't get - you would have thought earth & planetary scientists (ie, the new name for geologists) would have been consulted on the definition of a planet.
Burger King, Wendy's and Subway - all make considerable money by offering food that *isn't* handled in a robotic way.
Nonsense. Subway is entirely robotic - even the customer moves along assembly line fashion. You have a limited range of choices and the human|robot pickes the options out of bins that are always in the same position - hell, they get so used to putting cheese on a sandwich that even after they ask the "do you want cheese with that" question they start to put cheese on the sandwich and have to stop themselves (so I'm betting the staff are mostly running on autopilot).
BK - yeah, it's have it your way, but again all that means is that they use a dynamic picklist (so it's still robotic), and then only for the rare order that is special. The rest will be handled as robotically as at McDonalds. It's really no different from McDonalds - if you want a Big Mac without the special sauce you can get one, they just don't make a song and dance about the fact like BK do. Nor have I found that BK are all that special at taking special orders, seeing as the amount of errors that I've come accross (as I'm one of the few who actually take them up on the have it your way offer).
I can't particularly comment on Wendy's - they pulled out of the UK several years ago (and then they only had a handfull of resteraunts), and I don't go to the US that often. However, I don't recall them being that different from any other fast food resteraunt.
More to the point, a lot of people don't want to know how to cook. A lot of people don't enjoy cooking, which always comes as a bit of a shock to people who do enjoy it. And thanks to resources like fast food resteraunts and easy cook meals, people who don't want to cook no longer have to.
I find this incredible. Just what are these London bobbies holding? Walkie-talkies?
No not walkie talkies - the police communications system is called TETRA.
Normally they carry batons, but that's about it - the normal bobbie on the beat isn't carrying a gun (except up in Nottingham, but thats far to the north of London, and an area with a long standing tradition of lawlessness). If they do need an armed response, then they call in the armed response people. Assuming you're not Brazilian, the system works well.
Same can be said for the conservatives. It's a bad idea, irrespective of if you're left or right wing.
seem a little more likely to preserve some independence for Britain,
Only if by independence you mean trading in Washington for Brussels. At least under Washington's hegemony, we retain some semblance of being a soverign state - under Europe that will disapppear.
They are also in favor of a saner voting system
Any voting system that doesn't take into account people not voting is insane - which includes every form of PR I've ever heard proposed, which is a bit of a shame as PR could be modified to take nonvotes into account. IE, if only 39% of the population could be bothered to vote and thier are 10 seats being contested in a region then only 4 seats would actually become available while the other 6 seats would go unfilled - this would stop extremist parties from gaining undue influence. But I don't know of anybody calling for this.
"UK Independence Party"
I doubt UKIP will survive much longer - it's main purpose for exitence was for conservatives who were sick of the conservative party and were smart enough to realize that voting LibDem was voting for the complete antithesis of the tories, while a vote for New Labour was still a vote for Labour. Now that the conservative party has lost some of it's unpopularity, I expect to see UKIP voters return to the fold.
But if people weren't being such complete pricks with thier cars then the government would have a far harder time getting these cameras installed. More and more people just stop in the middle of the road, either because they want to go to the newsagents or the chip shop or they want to chat to thier mates who are walking by and they can't be bothered to park. This has become a London wide problem in the last few years. It's like somebody stated beaming a bozoray accross London and people turned into jerks.
I think you'll find that you will actually end up with a national ID card - one of the reasons for it is to tackle illegal immigrants, which seems to imply that legal immigrants (I assume you're a legal immigrant) will be getting biometric ID cards with the rest of us. If anything, you'll be getting them first precisely because you don't have a UK passport.
And your evidence for you guess that big business and rich people will benefit is?
Who really benefits for an orwellian nightmare? Only the state. The state serves itself. If big business or rich people benefit at all from an orwellian fascist state, it's because they had the foresight to realize this and they aligned thier goals accordingly. How do you profit from an orwellian state? - by doing your best to make sure that what is good for the state is good for you.
The Brits are getting better and better at these kind of projects
Any IT success with the congestion charge is more an exception than the rule.For example, IT in the NHS has been, in general, a disaster.
With UK government IT, if it doesn't generate income for the government it's pretty much garunteed to be a costly failure - and when it is revenue generating, they still have a habit of failure.
Let people know your country's moving into fascism.
And then be shocked to discover that most of your countrymen think moving into fascism is a good idea. At best, they will say that they do not support fascism - unfortuantly what they do support will look and act like fascism - just without the historical baggage associated with the term.
Instead of jumping right in organizing a rebellion (which, let's face it, is a lot of hard work and unlikely to succeed, at least in the the short to medium term), it's a lot easier to see if leaving the country is an option (assuming you can find somwhere on the planet to go) and if it is an option, take it.
And people will accept it all - because it will all happen slowly, over time, and add seeming convenience to everything. Why carry an ID or a credit card?
We could have that now under certain circumstances, but we don't. When I go to the petrol station to fill up, my car's registration is read and OCR'd, so why do I have to go in and give my loyalty card and credit card? It should just be able to recognize that it's my car, authorize the pump to dispense a ceratin amount of petrol and let me drive off. It could go one step furthur, they could link it up to the security cameras and only authorize it if it recognizes me - if it doesn't, then they can phone me up on my mobile (which they have from when I signed up to the loyality card) and ask if I know that my car is being driven by somebody else. The reason why this doesn't happen is that while it would be of great convience to me (it would be even more convienient than the pay at pump pumps - which are now slowly being phased out), it ruins the petrol station's business model, which has me going in to the kiosk and impulse buying items.
think about when you sign up for health insurance, they'll be like `dear sir, we know you lied on your application, we have seen you have purchased excessive tobacoo and alcholic substances in the last year`.
Most people don't have private health insurance here, we have the NHS, and if you do choose to get private health insurance, you have to tell them how much you smoke/drink anyway.
If anything, this would be one of the few possible benefits of such a system - the amount of tax you pay could be directly linked to your lifestyle, so people who smoke would pay more because they're probably going to make more use of the NHS than those who don't. True, they already pay more due to the high level of duty on cigarettes, but smokers are an easy target and what government can resist easy tax targets. They could sell it the same way that they're selling the road usage charge idea (the one one where they stick a gps in your car and monitor where it goes) - just use a dubious moral argument to get it through (smokers|car drivers are evil and must be punished through punative taxation).
You could even go one stage further and make VAT progressive as well - instead of everyone paying the same 17.5%, your VAT rate would be directly related to income. Of course, that would mean moving to the US model where the displayed price doesn't include tax, which would mean people would actually become aware of how much money they're handing over to the government, and some resentment might result.
Much the same could be said for prorietary software (ie, Windows) - it's just that adminless users come accross the "complex" bits at different points in time. I have yet to meet a windows user who has not had thier computer become unusuable at least once - so they end up with the complexity of getting it back up and running. With Linux, you mostly hit complexity when you want to initially install Linux or new hardware, after that it pretty much just runs (and with Ubunutu, a lot of people aren't even running in to anything particularly complex, at least not for a while).
It's the Java write-once-run-everywhere myth: all the JVMs are written to the same standard, right, so why doesn't all Java code just work everywhere as intended? Because every JVM and environment has its own set of bugs and quirks. It's a great idea, it just falls down in practice.
Would you like to give some modern day examples, or is this just the "Java - write once, test everywhere"
That's true. They've spent a bit of time getting base libraries for Python that would have been a non-issue in other languages.
What libraries are those? wxPython existed before Chandler and twisted was independant (I'm not certain which was first - twisted or chandler). I know they've created a library for http and [web|cal]DAV - but such code has existed for python for a while so I'm guessing they just wanted something easy to use and all in one place.
Saying that, I've never been able to figure out how to use twisted - the docs are attrocious and the O'Reilly book isn't as much help as I had hoped - so maybe they spent a long time trying to figure out how to use twisted.
Python would have been a good choice if they were going to rapidly develop Chandler - once they had a working app, they could go through and move parts to C/C++. So they could get Chandler out the door and conquoring the world quick, and then optimize later. But if they had rapidly developed Chandler, you would think they'd be working on version 2 by now. Seeing as the project is moving at glacial speeds with python, it makes one wonder if they would even have released version 0.1 by now if they were writing in C++.
Compare that to the fun sounding prospect of install vmware server in disaster prone windows and running ubuntu inside it.
It works fine. I haven't had any problems running Ubuntu (both Breezy and Dapper) under VMWare Player on Windows 2000. True, once the corporate purchasing people finally get around to ordering P2V Assitant then it will switch to the other way around, but for now I'm still getting the best of both worlds.
"Evolution is a very clumsy feeling program with a lack of fluidity.
What gets me is, is that much the same can be said of Outlook. I hate Outlook, and (like a lot of other MS apps in the last few years), it gets worse with each new release. My bigest gripe with Evolution is that it's trying too hard to be just like Outlook.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazon better? Don't be so sure - I once got a pirate DVD from an Amazon seller. I think Caveat Emptor applies at pretty much every online (and to a lesser extent offline) market.
One thing they could do is that if a buyer pays by paypal, the buyer's feedback is automatically increased, as the buyer has perfromed thier part of the deal. If you read eBay's rules, the seller is supposed to leave feedback as soon as payment is recieved and cleared - this would just enforce it for some of the transactions.
I think it goes deeper - I think geologists are pissed off a bit because they're the ones who study what planets really are (it's why these days, geology is often called Earth & Planetary Science), but they haven't been invited to participate in defining what a planet is. It's not just the reuse of a geology term, it's the fact that astronomers are stepping on geologist's toes.
How about geologists that study other planets.. er.. plutons?
That what I don't get - you would have thought earth & planetary scientists (ie, the new name for geologists) would have been consulted on the definition of a planet.
Nope
.Net.
If you read the article you would have know it runs on Windows and
But if you had read the article then this wouldn't be slashdot.
Burger King, Wendy's and Subway - all make considerable money by offering food that *isn't* handled in a robotic way.
Nonsense. Subway is entirely robotic - even the customer moves along assembly line fashion. You have a limited range of choices and the human|robot pickes the options out of bins that are always in the same position - hell, they get so used to putting cheese on a sandwich that even after they ask the "do you want cheese with that" question they start to put cheese on the sandwich and have to stop themselves (so I'm betting the staff are mostly running on autopilot).
BK - yeah, it's have it your way, but again all that means is that they use a dynamic picklist (so it's still robotic), and then only for the rare order that is special. The rest will be handled as robotically as at McDonalds. It's really no different from McDonalds - if you want a Big Mac without the special sauce you can get one, they just don't make a song and dance about the fact like BK do. Nor have I found that BK are all that special at taking special orders, seeing as the amount of errors that I've come accross (as I'm one of the few who actually take them up on the have it your way offer).
I can't particularly comment on Wendy's - they pulled out of the UK several years ago (and then they only had a handfull of resteraunts), and I don't go to the US that often. However, I don't recall them being that different from any other fast food resteraunt.
No, people don't know how to cook.
More to the point, a lot of people don't want to know how to cook. A lot of people don't enjoy cooking, which always comes as a bit of a shock to people who do enjoy it. And thanks to resources like fast food resteraunts and easy cook meals, people who don't want to cook no longer have to.
I find this incredible. Just what are these London bobbies holding? Walkie-talkies?
No not walkie talkies - the police communications system is called TETRA.
Normally they carry batons, but that's about it - the normal bobbie on the beat isn't carrying a gun (except up in Nottingham, but thats far to the north of London, and an area with a long standing tradition of lawlessness). If they do need an armed response, then they call in the armed response people. Assuming you're not Brazilian, the system works well.
The Liberal Democrats oppose ID cards
Same can be said for the conservatives. It's a bad idea, irrespective of if you're left or right wing.
seem a little more likely to preserve some independence for Britain,
Only if by independence you mean trading in Washington for Brussels. At least under Washington's hegemony, we retain some semblance of being a soverign state - under Europe that will disapppear.
They are also in favor of a saner voting system
Any voting system that doesn't take into account people not voting is insane - which includes every form of PR I've ever heard proposed, which is a bit of a shame as PR could be modified to take nonvotes into account. IE, if only 39% of the population could be bothered to vote and thier are 10 seats being contested in a region then only 4 seats would actually become available while the other 6 seats would go unfilled - this would stop extremist parties from gaining undue influence. But I don't know of anybody calling for this.
"UK Independence Party"
I doubt UKIP will survive much longer - it's main purpose for exitence was for conservatives who were sick of the conservative party and were smart enough to realize that voting LibDem was voting for the complete antithesis of the tories, while a vote for New Labour was still a vote for Labour. Now that the conservative party has lost some of it's unpopularity, I expect to see UKIP voters return to the fold.
But if people weren't being such complete pricks with thier cars then the government would have a far harder time getting these cameras installed. More and more people just stop in the middle of the road, either because they want to go to the newsagents or the chip shop or they want to chat to thier mates who are walking by and they can't be bothered to park. This has become a London wide problem in the last few years. It's like somebody stated beaming a bozoray accross London and people turned into jerks.
I think you'll find that you will actually end up with a national ID card - one of the reasons for it is to tackle illegal immigrants, which seems to imply that legal immigrants (I assume you're a legal immigrant) will be getting biometric ID cards with the rest of us. If anything, you'll be getting them first precisely because you don't have a UK passport.
And your evidence for you guess that big business and rich people will benefit is?
Who really benefits for an orwellian nightmare? Only the state. The state serves itself. If big business or rich people benefit at all from an orwellian fascist state, it's because they had the foresight to realize this and they aligned thier goals accordingly. How do you profit from an orwellian state? - by doing your best to make sure that what is good for the state is good for you.
The Brits are getting better and better at these kind of projects
Any IT success with the congestion charge is more an exception than the rule.For example, IT in the NHS has been, in general, a disaster.
With UK government IT, if it doesn't generate income for the government it's pretty much garunteed to be a costly failure - and when it is revenue generating, they still have a habit of failure.
Statistically, that's not true.
:-)
Since when has the truth had anything to do with tax raising opportunities? All it has to do is feel right in a soundbite.
Let people know your country's moving into fascism.
And then be shocked to discover that most of your countrymen think moving into fascism is a good idea. At best, they will say that they do not support fascism - unfortuantly what they do support will look and act like fascism - just without the historical baggage associated with the term.
Instead of jumping right in organizing a rebellion (which, let's face it, is a lot of hard work and unlikely to succeed, at least in the the short to medium term), it's a lot easier to see if leaving the country is an option (assuming you can find somwhere on the planet to go) and if it is an option, take it.
And people will accept it all - because it will all happen slowly, over time, and add seeming convenience to everything. Why carry an ID or a credit card?
We could have that now under certain circumstances, but we don't. When I go to the petrol station to fill up, my car's registration is read and OCR'd, so why do I have to go in and give my loyalty card and credit card? It should just be able to recognize that it's my car, authorize the pump to dispense a ceratin amount of petrol and let me drive off. It could go one step furthur, they could link it up to the security cameras and only authorize it if it recognizes me - if it doesn't, then they can phone me up on my mobile (which they have from when I signed up to the loyality card) and ask if I know that my car is being driven by somebody else. The reason why this doesn't happen is that while it would be of great convience to me (it would be even more convienient than the pay at pump pumps - which are now slowly being phased out), it ruins the petrol station's business model, which has me going in to the kiosk and impulse buying items.
think about when you sign up for health insurance, they'll be like `dear sir, we know you lied on your application, we have seen you have purchased excessive tobacoo and alcholic substances in the last year`.
Most people don't have private health insurance here, we have the NHS, and if you do choose to get private health insurance, you have to tell them how much you smoke/drink anyway.
If anything, this would be one of the few possible benefits of such a system - the amount of tax you pay could be directly linked to your lifestyle, so people who smoke would pay more because they're probably going to make more use of the NHS than those who don't. True, they already pay more due to the high level of duty on cigarettes, but smokers are an easy target and what government can resist easy tax targets. They could sell it the same way that they're selling the road usage charge idea (the one one where they stick a gps in your car and monitor where it goes) - just use a dubious moral argument to get it through (smokers|car drivers are evil and must be punished through punative taxation).
You could even go one stage further and make VAT progressive as well - instead of everyone paying the same 17.5%, your VAT rate would be directly related to income. Of course, that would mean moving to the US model where the displayed price doesn't include tax, which would mean people would actually become aware of how much money they're handing over to the government, and some resentment might result.
Much the same could be said for prorietary software (ie, Windows) - it's just that adminless users come accross the "complex" bits at different points in time. I have yet to meet a windows user who has not had thier computer become unusuable at least once - so they end up with the complexity of getting it back up and running. With Linux, you mostly hit complexity when you want to initially install Linux or new hardware, after that it pretty much just runs (and with Ubunutu, a lot of people aren't even running in to anything particularly complex, at least not for a while).
It's the Java write-once-run-everywhere myth: all the JVMs are written to the same standard, right, so why doesn't all Java code just work everywhere as intended? Because every JVM and environment has its own set of bugs and quirks. It's a great idea, it just falls down in practice.
Would you like to give some modern day examples, or is this just the "Java - write once, test everywhere"
That's true. They've spent a bit of time getting base libraries for Python that would have been a non-issue in other languages.
What libraries are those? wxPython existed before Chandler and twisted was independant (I'm not certain which was first - twisted or chandler). I know they've created a library for http and [web|cal]DAV - but such code has existed for python for a while so I'm guessing they just wanted something easy to use and all in one place.
Saying that, I've never been able to figure out how to use twisted - the docs are attrocious and the O'Reilly book isn't as much help as I had hoped - so maybe they spent a long time trying to figure out how to use twisted.
Python would have been a good choice if they were going to rapidly develop Chandler - once they had a working app, they could go through and move parts to C/C++. So they could get Chandler out the door and conquoring the world quick, and then optimize later. But if they had rapidly developed Chandler, you would think they'd be working on version 2 by now. Seeing as the project is moving at glacial speeds with python, it makes one wonder if they would even have released version 0.1 by now if they were writing in C++.
vmware server
And we've got vmware server running on a Server 2003 box as well. 8 VMs ( amix of Linux and Windows), all running fine.
Compare that to the fun sounding prospect of install vmware server in disaster prone windows and running ubuntu inside it.
It works fine. I haven't had any problems running Ubuntu (both Breezy and Dapper) under VMWare Player on Windows 2000. True, once the corporate purchasing people finally get around to ordering P2V Assitant then it will switch to the other way around, but for now I'm still getting the best of both worlds.
"Evolution is a very clumsy feeling program with a lack of fluidity.
What gets me is, is that much the same can be said of Outlook. I hate Outlook, and (like a lot of other MS apps in the last few years), it gets worse with each new release. My bigest gripe with Evolution is that it's trying too hard to be just like Outlook.
"today, tomorrow and the next day are the only days we'll get dates like this: 2/8/6 3/8/6 4/8/6 like the x86 computers :-)"
That all depends on your locale settings - other people had thier x86 days several months back