Let's assume for a moment that the world is 1/5 of a degree warmer than it was a few decades ago, and that this is causing glacial melt. Here's my question to you all:
So what?
Climate is not a constant. Never has been, never will be, and the variation has been a whole lot more than 1/5 of a degree. CO2 levels and global average temperatures have been higher and lower at many points in history, and we didn't magically turn into Venus or Mars. There have been times when the icecaps disappeared, and life somehow went on. Sea levels have varied by hundreds of feet, without Americans to blame for, well, everything. There have also been ice ages, and somehow the world didn't end.
So what?
There will be winners as well as losers. Canadians and Russians should be happy, as this will result in much longer growing seasons and more arable lands for them. They will be the breadbaskets of the world. And if this doesn't happen, if we decide that the current climate is decreed to never be allowed to change again, will there be a demand for subsidies for what "might have been"? Lack-of-CO2 credits?
So here's a question. If civilization had arisen 10,000 years earlier, and someone observed how quickly the ice sheets were retreating, would there be a clamor to protect the glaciers that blanketed pretty much everything north of 50 degrees latitude? Would THAT climate change be seen as the Armageddon that the proposed climate change is being presented as? Would rising sea levels lead to a frothing panic about the loss of the Bering land bridge?
So once again, I ask: If the climate is changing, so what? Climate is not a constant, things aren't automatically evil just because it's a human doing it, and I fail to see how this is any different from any other climate change in the four billion year history of everything on Earth.
Mod this down because I don't agree with you. It's the Slashdot definition of "fair". I just hope none of you are ever on a jury with the opportunity to destroy someone's life if you don't like their politics or religion or hairstyle or something.
It seems to me there is a wonderful opportunity here to do some data poisoning. A nice plugin to send Google as much false data and noise as possible, to reduce the value of this technology as close to zero as can be arranged. Identification of advertisers who knowingly use this information would be good too, to do a little "targeted" activity as a return favor. Nothing drastic or illegal, just boycotts and public shaming and attempts to poison their data caches too.
If they do this, my default search engine will be changed to Bing. It's a sad day when Microsoft becomes less evil than Google.
Google: Mouse-hovering does NOT imply consent to collect personally identifiable data. Facebook's "privacy" model is to be demonized, not emulated. You're being evil. Stop it.
Multiplayer mode is one of those features that relatively few players use, but almost everyone surveyed say they will use. Go figure.
However, one conclusion is very clear (as seen at various discussions on Gamasutra and at GDC Austin): multiplayer is seen by developers as an excellent way to extend the lifespan of a game. Multiplayer is essentially free content. The idea is that a player will keep coming back for multiplayer, thus keeping the title fresh in their minds, and making it more likely they will buy expansions or sequels. Is this true? Case-by-case basis.
I suspect that until multiplayer gaming is cleaned up (something done to lock out griefers and cheaters, and deal with bad behavior generically), many people will quickly find that multiplayer play loses its sparkle. As the industry is starting to realize, if a game is associated with nothing but a bad experience due to a cretinous few, it won't matter that it's not the publisher's fault. A player will say "Crysis, yeah, that's where the aimbots are at, and that's where I get called a fag every five seconds", then go off to TF2 (which enjoys a better reputation for being more supportive towards n00bs like me). In a situation like that, someone will be more likely to buy TF3 than Crysis 2, because of the negativity surrounding the one and the positivity surrounding the other. Fair or otherwise, that's reality.
It's worse than that. If you split a country, some people won't want to move to "their side". You end up with ethnic cleansing, and legitimate causes for the two halves to go to war with each other (if the minority that didn't move are mistreated... as they always are... the majority in the other country will feel fully justified in rolling the tanks and brutalizing the minority). Even among those who do choose to move, the resentment will be deep and last for centuries.
Drawing lines and saying "you lot must leave and go form A to B, and you lot must leave and go from B to A, screw your property and relationships and history" is a sure formula for generations of the nastiest kinds of war.
As has been variously alluded to, a serious fly in the soup here is that the people playing a given MMO have self-selected for certain models of interaction. I suspect that if the same methodology were to be applied to data extracted from different MMOs the conclusions reached might well be different.
What would EVE Online look like? (a hard-core, Ayn Rand gone wild take on open PVP in which material losses in combat can represent days to weeks of work)
What would a PVP server on World of Warcraft look like? (in which factions are preallocated, and in which there is no real "loss" to getting pwned)
What would a non-PVP game such as Lord of the Rings Online look like ?(in which there is significant pre-selection based upon appreciation of the source material, resulting in a significantly older demographic)
What would Runescape look like? (free to play microtransaction based, with a younger demographic)
What would Second Life look like? (no institutionalized combat systems, almost pure social interaction with self-image modification, less of a game more of a 3D chat room)
What would non-Western MMOs look like?
This doesn't mean the conclusion is wrong, but it does mean that many different games with many different rulesets and demographics would have to be examined, and the effects of preselection taken into account. Nice start, more work to be done before anybody can draw conclusions based upon this sort of study.
So how long will it be before people are thoroughly bricking their own iPhones with bad firmware updates and bad applications, getting their identities stolen, then blaming Apple? I can smell the lawyers and the puddles already.
If people want to jailbreak their cell phones, fine, but with that comes absolute responsibility. Not one word of blame on the provider or manufacturer, including when your credit card is suddenly maxed from Thailand, or when the FCC comes knocking on your door because you downloaded a cell-tower spammer that you thought was a jiggly-boobs app. You don't get to sue, you don't get to say it's Apple's fault, and you get to pay for the trouble you cause.
Scream "freedom" all you want, but recognize that with it comes the full burden of the consequences of your actions. If... and only if... you can handle that, enjoy your iPhone on T-mobile or wherever else. I'm all for being able to go to other carriers, but if the process involves downloading a firmware image from Russia, yeah, I'll pass.
The first is that highly-talented hacker-types tend to be very libertarian (note the small-L) in their outlook. They believe in doing everything possible to minimize governmental authority and governmental interference in private lives; recent administrations and Congresses/Senates have been dead opposites. The caliber of people that the NSA wants are tuned into what's really going on, and propaganda (meaning; lies) that the government is not spying on US citizens for the political gain of the Capitol Hill gang are not going to be believed. When a prospective employer lies to you, it speaks volumes about the contempt they hold for you and whether they can be trusted. While the NSA may indeed be concerned with protecting Americans without being intrusive, the NSA's masters in the White House and Capitol have no such concerns.
Secondly, THIS administration has shown a willingness to retroactively throw its intelligence officers under the bus in return for political gain. When someone in the intelligence community asks "Is it okay to do [redacted]?" and are told "It's legal and approved"... four years later, they find themselves on trial. When we change administrations, the NEXT administration is going to remember this and roast THIS administration's intelligence officers over open coals. The precedent has been set. Who would ever want to take risks for a nation that holds them in contempt, and be demonized to squeeze a couple more votes out of an ignorant public?
Then there's the pay issue. If someone is good, THAT good, they know they can strike it rich in private industry. While the NSA recruiters at Black Hat say "oh, we'll pay you very well, we want to make sure you're living well enough to be bribe-resistant", they have an east-coast idea of what "good pay" is. Founders of Silicon Valley companies, even in this day and age, are paid mighty well when the exit strategy comes to fruition. That's what the NSA has to compete with, and the bean-counters don't believe it.
Work for evil, burned at the stake for the privilege, for less pay than other options. WHERE DO I SIGN?
If it involves steganography it's useless now. Because now China, North Korea and Australia know to look for it.
I wonder if the Aussie people and the Aussie government realize just what a condemnation of what they have become this is... to be legitimately and accurately grouped with the likes of China, North Korea, Iran, and Myanmar over a basic human rights and civil liberties issue.
The government for what it does to its citizens.
The people for tolerating it.
So here's a question. Who else has gotten into PirateBay's servers and NOT told them about it?
I'd think that an organization like PirateBay would be the very last people on Earth whom you'd want to give any sort of personally-identifiable information. I guess we can put this one into the "Darwin Filter" category.
side question: how many accounts are from president@whitehouse,gov, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington DC 20050 USA?
Go to your local big airport. See how many of their moving-sidewalks are down at any given moment either because they are broken or because some smartass hit the big red "stop" button. Now do the same at your local escalator-equipped department store.
When an escalator or moving sidewalk is shut down, an inspector (usually fire department personnel, i.e. a fire marshal) has to give their blessing before the escalator can be started again. Law, at least in California.
And let's not even start on vandalism and the lawsuit burden that would follow.
Huge construction expense, huge ongoing expense (including energy, maintenance, inspections, legal issues, etc.), significant downtime, little benefit, noisy, disruptive during construction, disruptive during operation (how are we supposed to cross these things?)... yeah. Where do we sign up?
Wasn't part of the statement of problem that they are wall-mounted analog-only TVs, and therefore can't have boxes at the site of the TV? "Free boxes or my lawyers will eat you" doesn't help solve the problem, and city lawyers have better things to do than this. In any event, from the description of the situation Comcast is certainly not trying to "get around" anything; they are still providing basic cable for free. It's just not analog; the city has to go digital like everybody else. FCC mandate. The question is how to do so without converter boxes at the TV itself, not who to sue.
Teaching people on the job means they make their costly, disastrous mistakes on the job instead of making them in college, where nobody gets hurt.
Except for one thing: I have been interviewing a lot of people with recent degrees who obviously didn't get it in college either. A degree is no guarantee that someone knows how to write collaboratively, understands structures and best practices, or much of anything else. That's why I place far more faith in someone who has a project on Sourceforge or who has sample code. A university may be a great place to learn all those things, but I do not consider a degree to be proof that the learning has actually occurred. I've seen too many cases to the contrary.
But then... I'm a QA engineer. Costly, disastrous mistakes on the job are my bread and butter:)
When I am hiring, the only time I look at the "education" section of a resume is when it's someone who is fresh out of college and who has little-to-no experience (in which case I want to see projects, thesis topics, extracurriculars, etc.). I don't care about degrees one bit; I care about past job experience and performance.
Your degree gets you your first job. Your first job gets you your second job and all subsequent. Maybe it's different in non-tech fields, but for me and my hiring decisions in my field (networking infrastructure software and hardware), that's the way it is. Show me your projects, show me your code, show me your references.
This actually isn't new... it's a return to the classic "apprenticeship" model. I think it's a great idea.
Consider the benefits. It's all real-world experience, learning how things actually operate and how they are actually used. The modern academia "ivory tower" model, in which people with no industry experience are teaching students only a small portion of what they need to know, isn't serving the industry particularly well. There is also the issue that college/university these days seems to be at least as much about political indoctrination as job skills, but that's another discussion.
Additionally, the instruction in the apprenticeship model is much, much more effective. The mentor-to-apprentice ratio is far better than the teacher-top-student ratio, and the instruction is always what the apprentice needs (you're not going at the least-common-denominator pace, time isn't wasted on rehashing things you already know, you can ask questions as they arise, and you can't hide what you don't know behind standardized Scan-Tron style tests). As a result, the apprentice learns much more quickly, and will become a seasoned veteran in less time.
The one hazard I see is that there is the potential to lowball the apprentices on pay. At the very least, a conventionally-trained college grad has demonstrated they have what it takes to make a four-year plan and get it done in... um... let's call it five years. They aren't going to settle for minimum wage (except in the video game industry), and they aren't going to pull down the average wage for others (again, except in the video game industry). The potential does exist for these issues arising, but it's by no means certain that they WILL arise, and if an employer gets a rep for either turning out ill-trained apprentices or for being an exploitative sweatshop that leverages the naivete of an 18-year-old (sorry, if you're 18 you're a rookie no matter who you are or what grades you got), that employer is going to get blackballed by the rest of us real quick-like.
I do hope Zoho's approach succeeds and gains traction.
Putting it bluntly... if you intend to never pay for movies/music regardless, why should the RIAA and MPAA care about your opinion?
Seriously. What incentive is being offered for the goons to play nicely? They really have no reason not to, and lot$ of reasons to be jerks. Given intellectual property laws and the concept that "the artist should get paid", they hold all the high cards (at least as far as the courts are concerned, public opinion is another matter). Yes, the middlemen who don't add any value to the system are the ones benefiting the most from the sue-sue-sue mindset and the artists are the ones ultimately who are screwed. We all loathe the self-appointed middlemen. But the hard fact is that the RIAA/MPAA have no reason to not be dicks about it, because as long as the concept of "the artist deserves to be paid" exists and as long as middlemen exist, the law will be on their side.
I'd like to see a non-trollish response to "why shouldn't the RIAA/MPAA play hardball". You have to fill their wallets somewhere in the ecosystem, and if you don't, they will happily throw a downloading grandmother... and you... under the train to protect their revenues.
This isn't about being liked. It's about getting paid. What's (collective "you") your proposal for how they get paid? Conversely, if paying is entirely optional (i.e. the current ease-of-download state of affairs), why would anyone ever pay when they see all the people around them getting it for free? How do you propose to close the loop?
Or do movies and music have no monetary value at all, and should we stop pretending that art of any sort is anything other than a hobby? I'd be mighty unhappy if that's the case, but if you can get anything artistic you want for free, that's where it ends up.
The bottom line is this: as long as an EMPLOYER can be sued for the conduct of an EMPLOYEE in relation to a job (and use of employer-provided equipment counts), the employer for its own protection must have the right to take steps to mitigate that risk.
There is also a strange idea that an employee has a right to use employer-provided equipment and services for personal use. That's a myth. If the employer is kind enough to allow you to use company equipment and services for personal use (such as me posting this from work), that's a courtesy and a kindness, not a right, and if there are self-defense strings attached like monitoring, that's the employer's prerogative. Don't like it? Don't use it. I could be doing this from my smartphone or from home.
Employers wouldn't do this if they didn't have to. Monitoring costs time and money. Monitoring happens in response to abuses by employees which have proven to be very costly to the employer. You can lay the blame for this at the feet of employees who have gotten their employers dragged into court and fined millions, resulting in the employer having to fire the innocent as well as the guilty to make up for the cost of the lawsuit. Or, in extreme cases, go out of business altogether... all because Charlie Assgrab surfed porn and Suzy StickUpHerAss saw it and told the law firm of Wi, Fukkem & Howe.
The solution? Get rid of these terrible tort laws that allow employers to be sued for actions of an employee that were clearly not ordered by the employer. Someone grabbed your ass? Get your million from the grabber, not the nearest target that actually happens to have a million.
Until the greed goes away, until individuals are held responsible for individual actions, employers will take draconian measures to protect themselves from a draconian threat. Put down the lawyer and we'll turn off the packet logger.
1. It's 2008. Oracle charges everyone else 600 per seat per year but Uncle Sam gets it at 500 per year; it's a 3-year contract. Oracle delivers, and receives 500 per seat.
2. In 2010, Oracle in response to competition cuts its global rate to 400 per seat. But Uncle Sam, under that 3-year contract, is paying 500 per seat until 2011.
Is Oracle therefore forbidden to reduce its prices? Is the contract with the government null and void, allowing the government to terminate the contract earlier than they otherwise would?
This whole bit about "you have to treat others worse than me; you have to charge others more than you charge me" is repugnant. Negotiate a price, and if it's acceptable, pay it and keep your nose out of other people's contracts. As long as Oracle is delivering what it said it would, what's the constitutional authority for the government interfering in private contracts? Why should what a company charges others be anybody else's legal balliwick in an industry that is not a regulated public utility?
Oh, wait, I forgot. ALL business is a public utility now, subject to nationalization and seizure. And Larry Ellison is a poopyhead, so his business doesn't get the same protections as others. Never mind.
Why in the world would someone want to go into basic research fields in the U.S. today? What can you look forward to?
Not seeing the fruits of your labor, i.e. your employer takes it all
Some filthy pig of a lawyer suing you 25 years from now because some chain-smoker got lung cancer and blamed your networking protocol instead of his smoking habit
Having your house firebombed by clueless corp-hating college students because you work for a recognizable company name
Having your invention stolen and copied and produced by a Chinese company
Let's be honest here. If the quote were "We have one platform, and that's going to be Windows on a ThinkPad" or "...Linux on an Vaio", would we be seeing the same level of vitriol here? I rather doubt it.
The problem is not that kids are required to have Macs, but that they are required to have computers at all. Whatever brand is chosen is utterly irrelevant. If it's a public school, and if it's a requirement, then the school is obligated to provide that requirement. If it's a private school, nobody else has anything to say on the matter. And if Apple gave them a discount or provided the computers free of charge (which I don't know and neither does anyone else here), that makes Apple good, not evil.
Why use a single platform? Easy. So they only have one set of spares to stock, one "golden image" to maintain, one library of software to maintain, and only one platform to have to provide tech support for. That one's a no-brainer. Homogeneity is cheaper.
I can think of half a dozen reasons to use Macbooks without breaking a sweat. I can also think of an equal number of reasons to use other platforms. With schools as cash-strapped as they are, it probably came down to a total cost of ownership over the lifetime of the product decision, including maintenance, support, software, and loss. The price of the computer itself is almost certainly not the largest part of the cost-per-student of this program, even if the school provided them out of the school's pocket. Their numbers pointed to a Mac. Until we see their numbers and assumptions, I don't think anyone here is in a position to gainsay them; the only arguments I see can be reduced to either "Hate Apple like I do!" or "Make kids learn to compute like I do!". Neither of those is a fit basis for making educational choices (or choices of any other stripe, for that matter).
Slashdot Mirror
Let's assume for a moment that the world is 1/5 of a degree warmer than it was a few decades ago, and that this is causing glacial melt. Here's my question to you all:
So what?
Climate is not a constant. Never has been, never will be, and the variation has been a whole lot more than 1/5 of a degree. CO2 levels and global average temperatures have been higher and lower at many points in history, and we didn't magically turn into Venus or Mars. There have been times when the icecaps disappeared, and life somehow went on. Sea levels have varied by hundreds of feet, without Americans to blame for, well, everything. There have also been ice ages, and somehow the world didn't end.
So what?
There will be winners as well as losers. Canadians and Russians should be happy, as this will result in much longer growing seasons and more arable lands for them. They will be the breadbaskets of the world. And if this doesn't happen, if we decide that the current climate is decreed to never be allowed to change again, will there be a demand for subsidies for what "might have been"? Lack-of-CO2 credits?
So here's a question. If civilization had arisen 10,000 years earlier, and someone observed how quickly the ice sheets were retreating, would there be a clamor to protect the glaciers that blanketed pretty much everything north of 50 degrees latitude? Would THAT climate change be seen as the Armageddon that the proposed climate change is being presented as? Would rising sea levels lead to a frothing panic about the loss of the Bering land bridge?
So once again, I ask: If the climate is changing, so what? Climate is not a constant, things aren't automatically evil just because it's a human doing it, and I fail to see how this is any different from any other climate change in the four billion year history of everything on Earth.
Mod this down because I don't agree with you. It's the Slashdot definition of "fair". I just hope none of you are ever on a jury with the opportunity to destroy someone's life if you don't like their politics or religion or hairstyle or something.
It seems to me there is a wonderful opportunity here to do some data poisoning. A nice plugin to send Google as much false data and noise as possible, to reduce the value of this technology as close to zero as can be arranged. Identification of advertisers who knowingly use this information would be good too, to do a little "targeted" activity as a return favor. Nothing drastic or illegal, just boycotts and public shaming and attempts to poison their data caches too.
If they do this, my default search engine will be changed to Bing. It's a sad day when Microsoft becomes less evil than Google.
Google: Mouse-hovering does NOT imply consent to collect personally identifiable data. Facebook's "privacy" model is to be demonized, not emulated. You're being evil. Stop it.
Multiplayer mode is one of those features that relatively few players use, but almost everyone surveyed say they will use. Go figure.
However, one conclusion is very clear (as seen at various discussions on Gamasutra and at GDC Austin): multiplayer is seen by developers as an excellent way to extend the lifespan of a game. Multiplayer is essentially free content. The idea is that a player will keep coming back for multiplayer, thus keeping the title fresh in their minds, and making it more likely they will buy expansions or sequels. Is this true? Case-by-case basis.
I suspect that until multiplayer gaming is cleaned up (something done to lock out griefers and cheaters, and deal with bad behavior generically), many people will quickly find that multiplayer play loses its sparkle. As the industry is starting to realize, if a game is associated with nothing but a bad experience due to a cretinous few, it won't matter that it's not the publisher's fault. A player will say "Crysis, yeah, that's where the aimbots are at, and that's where I get called a fag every five seconds", then go off to TF2 (which enjoys a better reputation for being more supportive towards n00bs like me). In a situation like that, someone will be more likely to buy TF3 than Crysis 2, because of the negativity surrounding the one and the positivity surrounding the other. Fair or otherwise, that's reality.
It's worse than that. If you split a country, some people won't want to move to "their side". You end up with ethnic cleansing, and legitimate causes for the two halves to go to war with each other (if the minority that didn't move are mistreated... as they always are... the majority in the other country will feel fully justified in rolling the tanks and brutalizing the minority). Even among those who do choose to move, the resentment will be deep and last for centuries.
Drawing lines and saying "you lot must leave and go form A to B, and you lot must leave and go from B to A, screw your property and relationships and history" is a sure formula for generations of the nastiest kinds of war.
As has been variously alluded to, a serious fly in the soup here is that the people playing a given MMO have self-selected for certain models of interaction. I suspect that if the same methodology were to be applied to data extracted from different MMOs the conclusions reached might well be different.
What would EVE Online look like? (a hard-core, Ayn Rand gone wild take on open PVP in which material losses in combat can represent days to weeks of work)
What would a PVP server on World of Warcraft look like? (in which factions are preallocated, and in which there is no real "loss" to getting pwned)
What would a non-PVP game such as Lord of the Rings Online look like ?(in which there is significant pre-selection based upon appreciation of the source material, resulting in a significantly older demographic)
What would Runescape look like? (free to play microtransaction based, with a younger demographic)
What would Second Life look like? (no institutionalized combat systems, almost pure social interaction with self-image modification, less of a game more of a 3D chat room)
What would non-Western MMOs look like?
This doesn't mean the conclusion is wrong, but it does mean that many different games with many different rulesets and demographics would have to be examined, and the effects of preselection taken into account. Nice start, more work to be done before anybody can draw conclusions based upon this sort of study.
So how long will it be before people are thoroughly bricking their own iPhones with bad firmware updates and bad applications, getting their identities stolen, then blaming Apple? I can smell the lawyers and the puddles already.
If people want to jailbreak their cell phones, fine, but with that comes absolute responsibility. Not one word of blame on the provider or manufacturer, including when your credit card is suddenly maxed from Thailand, or when the FCC comes knocking on your door because you downloaded a cell-tower spammer that you thought was a jiggly-boobs app. You don't get to sue, you don't get to say it's Apple's fault, and you get to pay for the trouble you cause.
Scream "freedom" all you want, but recognize that with it comes the full burden of the consequences of your actions. If... and only if... you can handle that, enjoy your iPhone on T-mobile or wherever else. I'm all for being able to go to other carriers, but if the process involves downloading a firmware image from Russia, yeah, I'll pass.
"Customer satisfaction is a thing of the past. They should get over it."
There are several serious problems at work here.
The first is that highly-talented hacker-types tend to be very libertarian (note the small-L) in their outlook. They believe in doing everything possible to minimize governmental authority and governmental interference in private lives; recent administrations and Congresses/Senates have been dead opposites. The caliber of people that the NSA wants are tuned into what's really going on, and propaganda (meaning; lies) that the government is not spying on US citizens for the political gain of the Capitol Hill gang are not going to be believed. When a prospective employer lies to you, it speaks volumes about the contempt they hold for you and whether they can be trusted. While the NSA may indeed be concerned with protecting Americans without being intrusive, the NSA's masters in the White House and Capitol have no such concerns.
Secondly, THIS administration has shown a willingness to retroactively throw its intelligence officers under the bus in return for political gain. When someone in the intelligence community asks "Is it okay to do [redacted]?" and are told "It's legal and approved"... four years later, they find themselves on trial. When we change administrations, the NEXT administration is going to remember this and roast THIS administration's intelligence officers over open coals. The precedent has been set. Who would ever want to take risks for a nation that holds them in contempt, and be demonized to squeeze a couple more votes out of an ignorant public?
Then there's the pay issue. If someone is good, THAT good, they know they can strike it rich in private industry. While the NSA recruiters at Black Hat say "oh, we'll pay you very well, we want to make sure you're living well enough to be bribe-resistant", they have an east-coast idea of what "good pay" is. Founders of Silicon Valley companies, even in this day and age, are paid mighty well when the exit strategy comes to fruition. That's what the NSA has to compete with, and the bean-counters don't believe it.
Work for evil, burned at the stake for the privilege, for less pay than other options. WHERE DO I SIGN?
Which is why terrorist organizations and freedom fighters are organized in loose, small, decentralized cells.
Apply your own definition of "terrorist" and "freedom fighter", of course, depending upon which side you back.
And when the gov knows and knocks on your door asking you about it?
"Rubber hose cryptography".
If it involves steganography it's useless now. Because now China, North Korea and Australia know to look for it.
I wonder if the Aussie people and the Aussie government realize just what a condemnation of what they have become this is... to be legitimately and accurately grouped with the likes of China, North Korea, Iran, and Myanmar over a basic human rights and civil liberties issue.
The government for what it does to its citizens.
The people for tolerating it.
So here's a question. Who else has gotten into PirateBay's servers and NOT told them about it?
I'd think that an organization like PirateBay would be the very last people on Earth whom you'd want to give any sort of personally-identifiable information. I guess we can put this one into the "Darwin Filter" category.
side question: how many accounts are from president@whitehouse,gov, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington DC 20050 USA?
There is a graveyard in Haven. Read the tombstones; Bioware thought the same way you do. It's a feature that they started on but had to cut.
(side note, I don't recall if the tombstones are "active: until after you complete the Haven quests)
Go to your local big airport. See how many of their moving-sidewalks are down at any given moment either because they are broken or because some smartass hit the big red "stop" button. Now do the same at your local escalator-equipped department store.
When an escalator or moving sidewalk is shut down, an inspector (usually fire department personnel, i.e. a fire marshal) has to give their blessing before the escalator can be started again. Law, at least in California.
And let's not even start on vandalism and the lawsuit burden that would follow.
Huge construction expense, huge ongoing expense (including energy, maintenance, inspections, legal issues, etc.), significant downtime, little benefit, noisy, disruptive during construction, disruptive during operation (how are we supposed to cross these things?)... yeah. Where do we sign up?
Wasn't part of the statement of problem that they are wall-mounted analog-only TVs, and therefore can't have boxes at the site of the TV? "Free boxes or my lawyers will eat you" doesn't help solve the problem, and city lawyers have better things to do than this. In any event, from the description of the situation Comcast is certainly not trying to "get around" anything; they are still providing basic cable for free. It's just not analog; the city has to go digital like everybody else. FCC mandate. The question is how to do so without converter boxes at the TV itself, not who to sue.
Teaching people on the job means they make their costly, disastrous mistakes on the job instead of making them in college, where nobody gets hurt.
Except for one thing: I have been interviewing a lot of people with recent degrees who obviously didn't get it in college either. A degree is no guarantee that someone knows how to write collaboratively, understands structures and best practices, or much of anything else. That's why I place far more faith in someone who has a project on Sourceforge or who has sample code. A university may be a great place to learn all those things, but I do not consider a degree to be proof that the learning has actually occurred. I've seen too many cases to the contrary.
But then... I'm a QA engineer. Costly, disastrous mistakes on the job are my bread and butter :)
When I am hiring, the only time I look at the "education" section of a resume is when it's someone who is fresh out of college and who has little-to-no experience (in which case I want to see projects, thesis topics, extracurriculars, etc.). I don't care about degrees one bit; I care about past job experience and performance.
Your degree gets you your first job. Your first job gets you your second job and all subsequent. Maybe it's different in non-tech fields, but for me and my hiring decisions in my field (networking infrastructure software and hardware), that's the way it is. Show me your projects, show me your code, show me your references.
This actually isn't new... it's a return to the classic "apprenticeship" model. I think it's a great idea.
Consider the benefits. It's all real-world experience, learning how things actually operate and how they are actually used. The modern academia "ivory tower" model, in which people with no industry experience are teaching students only a small portion of what they need to know, isn't serving the industry particularly well. There is also the issue that college/university these days seems to be at least as much about political indoctrination as job skills, but that's another discussion.
Additionally, the instruction in the apprenticeship model is much, much more effective. The mentor-to-apprentice ratio is far better than the teacher-top-student ratio, and the instruction is always what the apprentice needs (you're not going at the least-common-denominator pace, time isn't wasted on rehashing things you already know, you can ask questions as they arise, and you can't hide what you don't know behind standardized Scan-Tron style tests). As a result, the apprentice learns much more quickly, and will become a seasoned veteran in less time.
The one hazard I see is that there is the potential to lowball the apprentices on pay. At the very least, a conventionally-trained college grad has demonstrated they have what it takes to make a four-year plan and get it done in... um... let's call it five years. They aren't going to settle for minimum wage (except in the video game industry), and they aren't going to pull down the average wage for others (again, except in the video game industry). The potential does exist for these issues arising, but it's by no means certain that they WILL arise, and if an employer gets a rep for either turning out ill-trained apprentices or for being an exploitative sweatshop that leverages the naivete of an 18-year-old (sorry, if you're 18 you're a rookie no matter who you are or what grades you got), that employer is going to get blackballed by the rest of us real quick-like.
I do hope Zoho's approach succeeds and gains traction.
Seriously. What incentive is being offered for the goons to play nicely? They really have no reason not to, and lot$ of reasons to be jerks. Given intellectual property laws and the concept that "the artist should get paid", they hold all the high cards (at least as far as the courts are concerned, public opinion is another matter). Yes, the middlemen who don't add any value to the system are the ones benefiting the most from the sue-sue-sue mindset and the artists are the ones ultimately who are screwed. We all loathe the self-appointed middlemen. But the hard fact is that the RIAA/MPAA have no reason to not be dicks about it, because as long as the concept of "the artist deserves to be paid" exists and as long as middlemen exist, the law will be on their side.
I'd like to see a non-trollish response to "why shouldn't the RIAA/MPAA play hardball". You have to fill their wallets somewhere in the ecosystem, and if you don't, they will happily throw a downloading grandmother... and you... under the train to protect their revenues.
This isn't about being liked. It's about getting paid. What's (collective "you") your proposal for how they get paid? Conversely, if paying is entirely optional (i.e. the current ease-of-download state of affairs), why would anyone ever pay when they see all the people around them getting it for free? How do you propose to close the loop?
Or do movies and music have no monetary value at all, and should we stop pretending that art of any sort is anything other than a hobby? I'd be mighty unhappy if that's the case, but if you can get anything artistic you want for free, that's where it ends up.
The bottom line is this: as long as an EMPLOYER can be sued for the conduct of an EMPLOYEE in relation to a job (and use of employer-provided equipment counts), the employer for its own protection must have the right to take steps to mitigate that risk.
There is also a strange idea that an employee has a right to use employer-provided equipment and services for personal use. That's a myth. If the employer is kind enough to allow you to use company equipment and services for personal use (such as me posting this from work), that's a courtesy and a kindness, not a right, and if there are self-defense strings attached like monitoring, that's the employer's prerogative. Don't like it? Don't use it. I could be doing this from my smartphone or from home.
Employers wouldn't do this if they didn't have to. Monitoring costs time and money. Monitoring happens in response to abuses by employees which have proven to be very costly to the employer. You can lay the blame for this at the feet of employees who have gotten their employers dragged into court and fined millions, resulting in the employer having to fire the innocent as well as the guilty to make up for the cost of the lawsuit. Or, in extreme cases, go out of business altogether... all because Charlie Assgrab surfed porn and Suzy StickUpHerAss saw it and told the law firm of Wi, Fukkem & Howe.
The solution? Get rid of these terrible tort laws that allow employers to be sued for actions of an employee that were clearly not ordered by the employer. Someone grabbed your ass? Get your million from the grabber, not the nearest target that actually happens to have a million.
Until the greed goes away, until individuals are held responsible for individual actions, employers will take draconian measures to protect themselves from a draconian threat. Put down the lawyer and we'll turn off the packet logger.
Someone forgot to leave the briefcase behind the billboard, and Guido the Prosecutor, he don't like being dissed, capice, Paisan?
On its face?
Just kidding guys, hey, don't pull that caHOST UNREACHABLE
1. It's 2008. Oracle charges everyone else 600 per seat per year but Uncle Sam gets it at 500 per year; it's a 3-year contract. Oracle delivers, and receives 500 per seat.
2. In 2010, Oracle in response to competition cuts its global rate to 400 per seat. But Uncle Sam, under that 3-year contract, is paying 500 per seat until 2011.
Is Oracle therefore forbidden to reduce its prices? Is the contract with the government null and void, allowing the government to terminate the contract earlier than they otherwise would?
This whole bit about "you have to treat others worse than me; you have to charge others more than you charge me" is repugnant. Negotiate a price, and if it's acceptable, pay it and keep your nose out of other people's contracts. As long as Oracle is delivering what it said it would, what's the constitutional authority for the government interfering in private contracts? Why should what a company charges others be anybody else's legal balliwick in an industry that is not a regulated public utility?
Oh, wait, I forgot. ALL business is a public utility now, subject to nationalization and seizure. And Larry Ellison is a poopyhead, so his business doesn't get the same protections as others. Never mind.
Yeah, that's a real nice deal.
The problem is not that kids are required to have Macs, but that they are required to have computers at all. Whatever brand is chosen is utterly irrelevant. If it's a public school, and if it's a requirement, then the school is obligated to provide that requirement. If it's a private school, nobody else has anything to say on the matter. And if Apple gave them a discount or provided the computers free of charge (which I don't know and neither does anyone else here), that makes Apple good, not evil.
Why use a single platform? Easy. So they only have one set of spares to stock, one "golden image" to maintain, one library of software to maintain, and only one platform to have to provide tech support for. That one's a no-brainer. Homogeneity is cheaper. I can think of half a dozen reasons to use Macbooks without breaking a sweat. I can also think of an equal number of reasons to use other platforms. With schools as cash-strapped as they are, it probably came down to a total cost of ownership over the lifetime of the product decision, including maintenance, support, software, and loss. The price of the computer itself is almost certainly not the largest part of the cost-per-student of this program, even if the school provided them out of the school's pocket. Their numbers pointed to a Mac. Until we see their numbers and assumptions, I don't think anyone here is in a position to gainsay them; the only arguments I see can be reduced to either "Hate Apple like I do!" or "Make kids learn to compute like I do!". Neither of those is a fit basis for making educational choices (or choices of any other stripe, for that matter).