I think it's not so much that the consumer has changed, just that companies such as Apple have understood what the consumer wants and are leveraging it.
The vast majority of people never needed a PC. They needed a device with a browser, email, a basic word processor, some games, and some photo and video apps. Now, they've got it. And for the most part they are happy with it.
The market for customizable PCs for business and science users will continue. I really see no issue here: it's just the right tool for the right job -- rather than a universal tool that didn't meet a large number of people's needs.
"the website that links more than 800 million users worldwide"
No. It does not. The number of user accounts registered in no way maps to the number of users of the service, and definitely not to regular users of the service. It's probably more like 1/10th of that. (and diminishing too)
You'd think/. editors would be wise to the fact that numbers spouted by a marketing droid (especially a sleazy marketing droid from Facebook) are bullshit. Registered accounts is a fucking useless number -- other than for marketing droids to use to influence the weak-minded.
You're confusing socialism for The People's Republic of China and the scare stories about Russia in the 1980s as told by Americans to other Americans.
Places like Denmark, Finland, Sweden, France, and Germany are phenomenal when it comes to variety and choice in job.
Perhaps a bit of world travel and turning off Fox News would do you good.
You'd be well advised to take your own last bit of advice... of the countries you mention, only Denmark has a socialist government. France, Germany, Sweden and Finland have conservative right wing governments, although in the past they have had some (pretty bad) socialist ones.
As someone who has lived under socialist governments many times in several countries, my experience tells me that the only reason they are not totalitarian, is because they do not have enough of a parliamentary majority to railroad through totalitarian policies. Yes, most are not as bad as communist china nor the soviet states, however that's only because the people have, luckily, retained some degree of leverage.
In European countries where socialist parties have had large majorities, human rights and freedoms have been seriously curtailed -- e.g. in the UK between 1997 and 2009. The most surveiled country in the world, with no right to free speech, which has the most severe "equality" laws in the world.
Behind every socialist veneer, there beats a totalitarian heart. They are all about forcing people to do the "right" thing for the greater "good".
I'm all for redefining what a library is. I've always felt that libraries are potentially much more useful spaces than they are currently used for. The problem being that they are ultimately run by civil servants who are far from the most creative people on the planet. (They may even be the most uncreative people on the planet).
However, let us not -- ever -- call these wonderful institutions, "makers spaces", or "fab labs", or any similar kind of retarded buzzword bullshit.
There's a current global trend to turn museums into dumb infotainment centers for kids. Can we please not also make libraries the information centers for the new Idiocracy.
By all means expand the boundaries of what a library is, but call it a library. If you are too fucking dumb to know what a library is, you should not even be in one.
8.0 is release. 9.0 is beta. 10.0 is alpha. When a new version goes gold, as happened with 8.0 a short time ago, the beta and alpha versions bump up. It's standard practice for software but for some reason pisses everyone on Slashdot off with Firefox.
The "some reason" is that 1. it's preposterously rapid.
8 was out on Tuesday, now 9 beta is available, by next Tuesday 9 will be out and 10beta will be ready by next Friday.
And 2. that the whole number releases are NOT really new versions. Well, some of them are, but how do you know which ones?
I know the idiot developers at Mozilla think this is no big deal. One of them even said so on this site earlier this week. But it is a BIG FUCKING DEAL. It's breaks add-ons. People have better things to do that try to fix that every week. It also screws up sites that NEED older versions to work -- like banking sites. But if you stick with the old version it screws up sites like Gmail because they need the latest "version" or 3. It's a catch 22. There is now ABSOLUTELY NO POSSIBLE WAY, NONE, of using Firefox throughout the majority of web that most regular people need to do. You absolutely HAVE to use more than one browser for your daily needs. This is worse utility than they had with 0.86. And the reason is simply VANITY and EGO.
It's fucked up. Totally fucked up. And the only reason Mozilla are doing this is because it makes them feel like their dicks are bigger than everyone else's.
Just like with Netscape, Mozilla is determined to bloat their browser into the ground. They are already bleeding users, just because of this numbering system. And they are too dumb, and too vain, to reverse the retarded decision.
But hey, let them learn the hard way, very soon they will be too unemployed to make such retarded decisions again.
There's just no advantage to being able to instantly print in this form factor.
I've no idea why you've been modded up, because what you are saying is FAR from true. The lack of polaroid instant prints was a real hassle for a lot of people. Not the least in the movie industry, where it's often necessary for art, costume and make-up depts to have prints to refer to. Yes they can use small printers back in their trailers, but that's a real hassle on set.
I'm sure there's plenty of other people who find having instant prints extremely useful too.
Yeah, maybe in your narrow experience there's no use for instant prints, maybe for more people out there too, but there's many people who REALLY needed them. And this is long overdue. It's been a total pain for some people not having access to this tech.
Re:At what point did Corporate Ethics Die?
on
Ask The Yes Men
·
· Score: 1
On a related note, do you get as annoyed as I do when people blatantly romanticize the past to make it seem like basic human nature is some new, evil development?
Well, that's true for sure. You only have to look at people like Henry Ford, or Andrew Carnegie, to realize that corporations have always had dubious ethics. Perhaps the best example is the World's first megacorporation, the East India Company, which did all sorts of seriously evil things. Things that the Enron guys could only ever dream about.
Corporations seem more evil today, because they've now surrounded themselves with layered walls of lawyers, spin, PR and marketing. Buzzwords being part of that smokescreen.
A crappy scraper site that republishes Wikipedia's content
Not quite "scraper". Honest Jimbo Wales sells them wikipedia content: i.e. flogs them other people's work for profit. Just one of the many dubious ways Jimbo cashes in on wikipedia.
Consumers have been quicker to ditch XP for Windows 7 while businesses hem and haw
That's not exactly true. Or rather, it's spun in this sentence in such a way that suggests consumers are choosing 7 over XP -- they are not. They buy a new computer, it comes with whatever it comes with. There's no informed, nor conscious, choice for the most part. Most consumers don't have the skills to find an old copy of XP, wipe off 7 and re-install XP.
Businesses are making a conscious, informed decision. For the most part, there is no compelling business reason to upgrade to Windows 7. It adds very little utility, it's mostly an eye-candy shell for XP.
With 147 corporations, you have a chance to watch them all.
With 14,700 corporations you'd have no chance.
While that is true... it is a lot harder to do that when those corporations either directly, or indirectly, control all mainstream media (which they do). And that includes most social networking too.
So they can get paid at least twice for the TV show. Once from the Licence Fee (legally required of all UK citizens with a TV set), and then once more when they show it on BBC America, and then again when they sell it internationally.
It's a nice racket, a nice way of earning money. No risk, no pressure to return on it.
This also being the reason why they just got their budget cut by government, and had to fire 2000 staff (a very small percentage).
How about everyone get over the version numbering already and enjoy the new features in this free browser? That'd be great.
Oh sure, that would be great... except for two things:
Websites like Google expect you to update to the latest version, and will often lock you out if you don't.
Websites, like Banks for example, won't run if you use a browser version they haven't tested -- in Firefox's case that's 3 versions ago.
So basically there no fucking way to win. Or, more precisely, there's no fucking way to use Firefox across all the web any more -- so what is the point?
And that's completely ignoring the broken add-ons, and the fact that many people choose not to upgrade Firefox because they don't like the GUI changes on recent versions.
There's a reason I didn't use Netscape. There was a reason I actually bought the Firefox t-shirt 5 years ago too. But now, Firefox is just Netscape that updates its versions at an absurd and dysfunctional rate. It's now completely worthless as a browser because you can use it on less websites than you could when it was version 0.86.
Goodbye Mozilla, you clearly never learned one fucking thing from the Netscape disaster. You just never fucking listened to anyone who actually used your software.
The amount of time spent doing work is irrelevant. The important thing, is what amount of work is done within any deadline set.
Measuring employees clocking in and out is an archaic way of managing. It was something developed in the Industrial Revolution where employees were near slaves. Measure work done, and its quality, set tasks accordingly, set deadlines accordingly, require set times for meetings etc, but that's all you need to do.
Secondly, fire all HR staff. Yes, ALL of them. They are a worthless cost center that kills productivity and quality. Small businesses do not have HR staff, they tend to hire better quality employees. They tend to manage employees better. With the technology currently available there is absolutely no reason whatsoever that supervisors and managers can't actually do real managing, and take care of anything and everything that HR does -- and do a much better job of it too. The only purpose of HR now, is for weak managers to use them as a CYA excuse. But HR does nothing else but cost money and kill quality, productivity and innovation. HR is probably the single biggest fail, and brake, on the world's economy.
Nobody EVER grows up wanting to work in HR. They have all failed at something else, most of them also have an huge chip on their shoulder. They are failed people. Fire ALL of them everywhere, and watch the economy grow, if not surge.
There's no reason why most people need to work in offices most of the time. Anything desk or phone based could be done at home. Considering the massive cost to the environment of all those cars going to business parks, city centers and the like, and the increasing personal cost to employees of fuel etc, It's also often quieter and easier to work at home, with less distractions. Open plan offices are hellish places in which to concentrate. Telecommuting is an excellent solution to a lot of business problems. Not to mention that your business may well get access to much better quality employees who live too far away to work for you in person.
Other than bad management, and bad economics, there's no reason why telecommuting isn't massively more prevalent in modern businesses and organizations. It's the future... if only HR would allow organizations to hire good enough managers to make it happen.
There is so much that Lucas could fix in his own childhood by reworking American Graffiti, why does he keep tinkering with Star Wars?
That's because people don't have American Graffiti conventions, and don't make as much fuss about it, thus generating him even more money. If people just stopped buying his new versions of Star Wars he'd have to stop reworking them, and likely eventually have to release the originals.
Thus, it's pretty easy to get him to stop doing this. Just stop buying anything but the original versions. He'll get the message eventually -- or Fox execs will, at least.
God only knows why anyone ever bought the prequels in any form.
Stunning video! It just shows you how crappy most scfi movie and TV show VFX have been. The real thing is waaaayyyy better. I could watch it for hours.
Ok, I'm not really understanding the article, nor the comments. This being in light of the fact that -- as was already submitted here a week or so ago -- Google+ is NOT a social Network according to Google. It's an identity service.
Admittedly, I'm not sure I entirely believe that, as there's clearly some social network aspects to Google+. But it certainly is clear that, at the moment, that is not what they are promoting it as.
Thus, more games etc, seems kind of redundant. Other than for purely speculative reasons, should Google decide they want it as a social network.
Regardless, personally I have no need of an identity service. I will not ever sign up to any social network that requires me to use my real name. So Google+ is an useless product for me, regardless of what games or features it may ever have.
Which is kind of a shame, I actually was excited about Google+ being a much better tool than Facebook when I first heard about it. However, the ID thing is a deal-breaker.
Though, at least it scared Facebook into making a very small step towards fixing its many, and massive, privacy issues.
Basically, there are two ways to be a sovereign nation:
While that sounds true, it really doesn't explain Myanmar. Or Burma, as the country is really called, since hardly anyone recognizes Myanmar, and they don't really have an overpowering military.
The truth is, no other government is going to care what you do, as long as it doesn't infringe on them particularly. Sure they might talk a lot about freedom and human rights abuses in your country, but as long as you've no oil, or something similar, they really don't much care. And probably won't do anything more than posture.
The scope is woefully incomplete. So yes, it is flawed. Considerably flawed.
In addition to the cost of the bicycle, there is also:
Clothing and helmets for cycling, much of which is plastics based.
Perhaps (and hopefully) more frequent showers.
Lighting for cycling at night, and possibly disposable batteries too.
Road damage, and especially damage to off road paths. Which is significant environmental impact.
In countries such as Holland -- there's considerable infrastructure for cycling, all with a cost. The more people that cycle the more (additional) infrastructure is needed.
That's just of the top of my head, there's probably dozens of other costs and benefits. This is the trouble with most analysis of this type. The true costs and benefits are rarely scoped properly. This one's most certainly are not.
"I suppose it's no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention to Firefox development for the past several years, but for fuck's sake, listen to your users"
Indeed, if you've been paying attention to Firefox for years you'd know that its developers stopped listening sometime about 2005ish. Although there are some that have never listened. They have always denied that some bugs and memory leaks even existed.
Mozilla, seemingly doomed to repeat every single failure of Netscape.
Maybe once Firefox does finally fade the way Netscape did, they can call their next browser "Sisyphus". They might as well admit the truth right from the very beginning.
So fuck 'em. They don't listen. They took a very good idea (a fast core browser that was extensible as per the user's choice) and needlessly destroyed it with bloat, candy and assorted crap. They've not had an original idea in at least 5 years. And it's still not multi-threaded.
I used to love Firefox, but that was about v.1.5. I still use it, but now it really is a total piece of crap. Just a piece of crap I can use addons I like with.
"Well, no, it's compulsory for everybody... on the other hand, and I know this sounds unbelievable, the government generally respects the people's privacy..."
Wait? Belgium has a Government? I thought the country has been without any real form of Government for over a year. It seems to be a country in the process of completely ripping itself apart.
Regardless... your "government" may be respecting your privacy now, this does not mean that will always be the status quo. Anyone with the tiniest knowledge of European history (and especially that of Belgium) would be extremely foolish to trust their government.
Plus, compulsory ID cards are very expensive, and just do not work. They are simply a way of controlling the passive. Criminals, illegal immigrants etc do better as a result of ID cards, not worse.
For example, Paris Hilton, and the aristocracy of Europe. There's a million gold-digging women who can barely tie their own shoelaces, but are seriously wealthy. There's also a great many artists who are impoverished geniuses. There's plenty of high IQ underachievers stuck in call centers and driving taxis. Perhaps if you are really, really smart you realize that working for the man for lots of money isn't the best way of making you happy. A lot of senior managers and VP in corporations are as dumb as a rock, but pushy, greedy and ruthless. Genetics, ethnicity, religious background, attractiveness, social circumstances, parentage, geography are also all major factors in wealth creation.
So basically, I seriously doubt there's any real correlation between poverty and intelligence. In a meritocracy there could be -- but I know of no such utopia.
"The creative genius was the creator's decision to allow anyone to contribute, when everyone said it wouldn't work. "
Anyone can contribute? But, in reality, they can't. That's simply just the first, and biggest, lie of Wikipedia. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Well, anyone can try to contribute (assuming your are not behind one of their many lists of banned IP addresses, including those of entire countries), but there's an even chance anything you do contribute will get kicked out by some ignorant, narcissist, jack-booted, book-burning thug of an admin, no matter how factually accurate and well-sourced your contribution is.
And for that reason alone, it should never get this status. Any project that is so fundamentally against free speech as Wikipedia is, should be shunned, not given awards.
The whole thing just stinks of yet another Jimmy Wales ego-trip, and money-making scam.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's not so much that the consumer has changed, just that companies such as Apple have understood what the consumer wants and are leveraging it.
The vast majority of people never needed a PC. They needed a device with a browser, email, a basic word processor, some games, and some photo and video apps. Now, they've got it. And for the most part they are happy with it.
The market for customizable PCs for business and science users will continue. I really see no issue here: it's just the right tool for the right job -- rather than a universal tool that didn't meet a large number of people's needs.
No. It does not. The number of user accounts registered in no way maps to the number of users of the service, and definitely not to regular users of the service. It's probably more like 1/10th of that. (and diminishing too)
/. editors would be wise to the fact that numbers spouted by a marketing droid (especially a sleazy marketing droid from Facebook) are bullshit. Registered accounts is a fucking useless number -- other than for marketing droids to use to influence the weak-minded.
You'd think
You'd be well advised to take your own last bit of advice... of the countries you mention, only Denmark has a socialist government. France, Germany, Sweden and Finland have conservative right wing governments, although in the past they have had some (pretty bad) socialist ones.
As someone who has lived under socialist governments many times in several countries, my experience tells me that the only reason they are not totalitarian, is because they do not have enough of a parliamentary majority to railroad through totalitarian policies. Yes, most are not as bad as communist china nor the soviet states, however that's only because the people have, luckily, retained some degree of leverage.
In European countries where socialist parties have had large majorities, human rights and freedoms have been seriously curtailed -- e.g. in the UK between 1997 and 2009. The most surveiled country in the world, with no right to free speech, which has the most severe "equality" laws in the world.
Behind every socialist veneer, there beats a totalitarian heart. They are all about forcing people to do the "right" thing for the greater "good".
I'm all for redefining what a library is. I've always felt that libraries are potentially much more useful spaces than they are currently used for. The problem being that they are ultimately run by civil servants who are far from the most creative people on the planet. (They may even be the most uncreative people on the planet).
However, let us not -- ever -- call these wonderful institutions, "makers spaces", or "fab labs", or any similar kind of retarded buzzword bullshit.
There's a current global trend to turn museums into dumb infotainment centers for kids. Can we please not also make libraries the information centers for the new Idiocracy.
By all means expand the boundaries of what a library is, but call it a library. If you are too fucking dumb to know what a library is, you should not even be in one.
The "some reason" is that 1. it's preposterously rapid.
8 was out on Tuesday, now 9 beta is available, by next Tuesday 9 will be out and 10beta will be ready by next Friday.
And 2. that the whole number releases are NOT really new versions. Well, some of them are, but how do you know which ones?
I know the idiot developers at Mozilla think this is no big deal. One of them even said so on this site earlier this week. But it is a BIG FUCKING DEAL. It's breaks add-ons. People have better things to do that try to fix that every week. It also screws up sites that NEED older versions to work -- like banking sites. But if you stick with the old version it screws up sites like Gmail because they need the latest "version" or 3. It's a catch 22. There is now ABSOLUTELY NO POSSIBLE WAY, NONE, of using Firefox throughout the majority of web that most regular people need to do. You absolutely HAVE to use more than one browser for your daily needs. This is worse utility than they had with 0.86. And the reason is simply VANITY and EGO.
It's fucked up. Totally fucked up. And the only reason Mozilla are doing this is because it makes them feel like their dicks are bigger than everyone else's.
Just like with Netscape, Mozilla is determined to bloat their browser into the ground. They are already bleeding users, just because of this numbering system. And they are too dumb, and too vain, to reverse the retarded decision.
But hey, let them learn the hard way, very soon they will be too unemployed to make such retarded decisions again.
I've no idea why you've been modded up, because what you are saying is FAR from true. The lack of polaroid instant prints was a real hassle for a lot of people. Not the least in the movie industry, where it's often necessary for art, costume and make-up depts to have prints to refer to. Yes they can use small printers back in their trailers, but that's a real hassle on set.
I'm sure there's plenty of other people who find having instant prints extremely useful too.
Yeah, maybe in your narrow experience there's no use for instant prints, maybe for more people out there too, but there's many people who REALLY needed them. And this is long overdue. It's been a total pain for some people not having access to this tech.
Well, that's true for sure. You only have to look at people like Henry Ford, or Andrew Carnegie, to realize that corporations have always had dubious ethics. Perhaps the best example is the World's first megacorporation, the East India Company, which did all sorts of seriously evil things. Things that the Enron guys could only ever dream about.
Corporations seem more evil today, because they've now surrounded themselves with layered walls of lawyers, spin, PR and marketing. Buzzwords being part of that smokescreen.
Not quite "scraper". Honest Jimbo Wales sells them wikipedia content: i.e. flogs them other people's work for profit. Just one of the many dubious ways Jimbo cashes in on wikipedia.
That's not exactly true. Or rather, it's spun in this sentence in such a way that suggests consumers are choosing 7 over XP -- they are not. They buy a new computer, it comes with whatever it comes with. There's no informed, nor conscious, choice for the most part. Most consumers don't have the skills to find an old copy of XP, wipe off 7 and re-install XP.
Businesses are making a conscious, informed decision. For the most part, there is no compelling business reason to upgrade to Windows 7. It adds very little utility, it's mostly an eye-candy shell for XP.
While that is true... it is a lot harder to do that when those corporations either directly, or indirectly, control all mainstream media (which they do). And that includes most social networking too.
... the "enhance!" command. Yay!
So they can get paid at least twice for the TV show. Once from the Licence Fee (legally required of all UK citizens with a TV set), and then once more when they show it on BBC America, and then again when they sell it internationally.
It's a nice racket, a nice way of earning money. No risk, no pressure to return on it.
This also being the reason why they just got their budget cut by government, and had to fire 2000 staff (a very small percentage).
Oh sure, that would be great... except for two things:
Websites like Google expect you to update to the latest version, and will often lock you out if you don't.
Websites, like Banks for example, won't run if you use a browser version they haven't tested -- in Firefox's case that's 3 versions ago.
So basically there no fucking way to win. Or, more precisely, there's no fucking way to use Firefox across all the web any more -- so what is the point?
And that's completely ignoring the broken add-ons, and the fact that many people choose not to upgrade Firefox because they don't like the GUI changes on recent versions.
There's a reason I didn't use Netscape. There was a reason I actually bought the Firefox t-shirt 5 years ago too. But now, Firefox is just Netscape that updates its versions at an absurd and dysfunctional rate. It's now completely worthless as a browser because you can use it on less websites than you could when it was version 0.86.
Goodbye Mozilla, you clearly never learned one fucking thing from the Netscape disaster. You just never fucking listened to anyone who actually used your software.
The amount of time spent doing work is irrelevant. The important thing, is what amount of work is done within any deadline set.
Measuring employees clocking in and out is an archaic way of managing. It was something developed in the Industrial Revolution where employees were near slaves. Measure work done, and its quality, set tasks accordingly, set deadlines accordingly, require set times for meetings etc, but that's all you need to do.
Secondly, fire all HR staff. Yes, ALL of them. They are a worthless cost center that kills productivity and quality. Small businesses do not have HR staff, they tend to hire better quality employees. They tend to manage employees better. With the technology currently available there is absolutely no reason whatsoever that supervisors and managers can't actually do real managing, and take care of anything and everything that HR does -- and do a much better job of it too. The only purpose of HR now, is for weak managers to use them as a CYA excuse. But HR does nothing else but cost money and kill quality, productivity and innovation. HR is probably the single biggest fail, and brake, on the world's economy.
Nobody EVER grows up wanting to work in HR. They have all failed at something else, most of them also have an huge chip on their shoulder. They are failed people. Fire ALL of them everywhere, and watch the economy grow, if not surge.
There's no reason why most people need to work in offices most of the time. Anything desk or phone based could be done at home. Considering the massive cost to the environment of all those cars going to business parks, city centers and the like, and the increasing personal cost to employees of fuel etc, It's also often quieter and easier to work at home, with less distractions. Open plan offices are hellish places in which to concentrate. Telecommuting is an excellent solution to a lot of business problems. Not to mention that your business may well get access to much better quality employees who live too far away to work for you in person.
Other than bad management, and bad economics, there's no reason why telecommuting isn't massively more prevalent in modern businesses and organizations. It's the future... if only HR would allow organizations to hire good enough managers to make it happen.
That's because people don't have American Graffiti conventions, and don't make as much fuss about it, thus generating him even more money. If people just stopped buying his new versions of Star Wars he'd have to stop reworking them, and likely eventually have to release the originals.
Thus, it's pretty easy to get him to stop doing this. Just stop buying anything but the original versions. He'll get the message eventually -- or Fox execs will, at least.
God only knows why anyone ever bought the prequels in any form.
Stunning video! It just shows you how crappy most scfi movie and TV show VFX have been. The real thing is waaaayyyy better. I could watch it for hours.
Ok, I'm not really understanding the article, nor the comments. This being in light of the fact that -- as was already submitted here a week or so ago -- Google+ is NOT a social Network according to Google. It's an identity service.
Admittedly, I'm not sure I entirely believe that, as there's clearly some social network aspects to Google+. But it certainly is clear that, at the moment, that is not what they are promoting it as.
Thus, more games etc, seems kind of redundant. Other than for purely speculative reasons, should Google decide they want it as a social network.
Regardless, personally I have no need of an identity service. I will not ever sign up to any social network that requires me to use my real name. So Google+ is an useless product for me, regardless of what games or features it may ever have.
Which is kind of a shame, I actually was excited about Google+ being a much better tool than Facebook when I first heard about it. However, the ID thing is a deal-breaker.
Though, at least it scared Facebook into making a very small step towards fixing its many, and massive, privacy issues.
Deckard shoots first in this one.
While that sounds true, it really doesn't explain Myanmar. Or Burma, as the country is really called, since hardly anyone recognizes Myanmar, and they don't really have an overpowering military.
The truth is, no other government is going to care what you do, as long as it doesn't infringe on them particularly. Sure they might talk a lot about freedom and human rights abuses in your country, but as long as you've no oil, or something similar, they really don't much care. And probably won't do anything more than posture.
In addition to the cost of the bicycle, there is also: Clothing and helmets for cycling, much of which is plastics based. Perhaps (and hopefully) more frequent showers. Lighting for cycling at night, and possibly disposable batteries too. Road damage, and especially damage to off road paths. Which is significant environmental impact. In countries such as Holland -- there's considerable infrastructure for cycling, all with a cost. The more people that cycle the more (additional) infrastructure is needed.
That's just of the top of my head, there's probably dozens of other costs and benefits. This is the trouble with most analysis of this type. The true costs and benefits are rarely scoped properly. This one's most certainly are not.
Indeed, if you've been paying attention to Firefox for years you'd know that its developers stopped listening sometime about 2005ish. Although there are some that have never listened. They have always denied that some bugs and memory leaks even existed.
Mozilla, seemingly doomed to repeat every single failure of Netscape.
Maybe once Firefox does finally fade the way Netscape did, they can call their next browser "Sisyphus". They might as well admit the truth right from the very beginning.
So fuck 'em. They don't listen. They took a very good idea (a fast core browser that was extensible as per the user's choice) and needlessly destroyed it with bloat, candy and assorted crap. They've not had an original idea in at least 5 years. And it's still not multi-threaded.
I used to love Firefox, but that was about v.1.5. I still use it, but now it really is a total piece of crap. Just a piece of crap I can use addons I like with.
Wait? Belgium has a Government? I thought the country has been without any real form of Government for over a year. It seems to be a country in the process of completely ripping itself apart.
Regardless... your "government" may be respecting your privacy now, this does not mean that will always be the status quo. Anyone with the tiniest knowledge of European history (and especially that of Belgium) would be extremely foolish to trust their government.
Plus, compulsory ID cards are very expensive, and just do not work. They are simply a way of controlling the passive. Criminals, illegal immigrants etc do better as a result of ID cards, not worse.
That sounds true, but I'm not sure it is.
For example, Paris Hilton, and the aristocracy of Europe. There's a million gold-digging women who can barely tie their own shoelaces, but are seriously wealthy. There's also a great many artists who are impoverished geniuses. There's plenty of high IQ underachievers stuck in call centers and driving taxis. Perhaps if you are really, really smart you realize that working for the man for lots of money isn't the best way of making you happy. A lot of senior managers and VP in corporations are as dumb as a rock, but pushy, greedy and ruthless. Genetics, ethnicity, religious background, attractiveness, social circumstances, parentage, geography are also all major factors in wealth creation.
So basically, I seriously doubt there's any real correlation between poverty and intelligence. In a meritocracy there could be -- but I know of no such utopia.
No, the venue is just up from Oranienburger Strasse. Plenty of open legs there -- although, for a fee.
Anyone can contribute? But, in reality, they can't. That's simply just the first, and biggest, lie of Wikipedia. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Well, anyone can try to contribute (assuming your are not behind one of their many lists of banned IP addresses, including those of entire countries), but there's an even chance anything you do contribute will get kicked out by some ignorant, narcissist, jack-booted, book-burning thug of an admin, no matter how factually accurate and well-sourced your contribution is.
And for that reason alone, it should never get this status. Any project that is so fundamentally against free speech as Wikipedia is, should be shunned, not given awards.
The whole thing just stinks of yet another Jimmy Wales ego-trip, and money-making scam.