It's not incompetence; Royal Mail's postage methods have recently changed, and lots of people have been caught out. I've been caught out twice; once when sending a friend a birthday present (as you can probably guess, someone having to pay to receive their own present didn't go down well), and once when receiving a book from overseas. On the latter occasion, Royal Mail didn't even bother to leave a note to tell me my package had been impounded. I know it's an irritating legal threat, but as much as you dislike the lawyer, he is acting entirely inside the law.
It's not "incompetence at best" to screw up the newly changed postage pricing system, especially if they're when posting from overseas. It's just a mistake.
What would you suggest? - oh wise British/.er, who's country has ridings that openly support and elect fascists?
The BNP don't have a seat in either of our two houses of government. They have a few local councillors; these are the kinds of people who decide the colour of the bikeshed. If the most the anglo-fascists can do with a wildly unpopular prime minister and a recession is pick up a few local councillors, I'm not particularly worried.
Am I obviously British because I stated so twice in my post? I hope so.
I'm aware of this apparent contradiction, and this was exactly the intended meaning in my post. It is an insult; it is meant to be insulting, especially if to be insulting is to highlight the inconsistent views of the opponent.
Unadulterated fascist, racist propaganda of the lowest intent - with crypto-homoeroticism as the cincher. In other words: more American "culture".
You are hilariously overreacting. I saw the film yesterday evening (in the UK), and it's not exactly high art, but it's a slightly above average CGI Blockbuster; the CGI is good and there are reasonable spots of humour around the place. There are certainly some low points; Iron Man saving the defenceless Afghans from each other was pretty questionable (and I mean in a moral sense, not in some theatrical way).
I disliked V for Vendetta, because that truly was an film which took serious liberties with the source material (to the point where the original author declined to be credited). It misrepresented the plot to make it appeal to fools like you; the kind of fools that see homo-eroticism in a superhero story and aren't aware of the really sinister films; the ones that pander to the American anti-American (and I say this as a British person). I mean the kind of tiresome American who thinks that the two solutions to the current bad president are revolution or magical panacea of the democratic party. I'm sure some of the latter persuasion think they're both the same thing.
I've only briefly examined the report, but it's already clear that there is a strong selection bias in the results. They're pulling from a database of companies worth $1m+ founded between 1995-2005. There are probably at least four issues with this:
First, it doesn't properly account for businesses that take a long time to mature. it's very possible that a business started in 2003-2005 hasn't broken the $1m+ barrier yet, and these companies aren't examined at all by the survey.
Second, they aren't using the best data for tech companies; it's pretty plausible that many tech companies aren't in the database of companies for having simply failed to be submitted (it's a largeish, largely automated database), or have confusing accounts such that they either aren't directly eligible or aren't. This is a big deal particular to "young people" style tech companies; they're often not traditionally founded or managed, and so are less likely to reply to some external survey.
Third, they are reliant on businesses to respond to their requests for information. Around 40% did this. I suspect this creates a bias towards traditional CEO-style corporate hierarchies - exactly the kind of corporate hierarchy that a Silicon Valley business only 5 years old and started by University graduates is unlikely to have. A business started in a garage is probably unlikely to respond to some cold calling survey pollster.
Finally, and probably most importantly, they have failed to be specific enough about the kind of company that they are trying to measure. I haven't had time to look precisely yet, but other studies of tech business have suffered from the difficultly of including a lot of not-quite-really-if-we're-honest tech companies. I'm talking companies that don't do a lot of R&D, and companies that are generally pretty low tech. This is a pretty serious (and probable) bias considering all the data is drawn from a single, third-party database, because these companies are so unlikely to have the typical "California Startup" DNA that the study is testing for.
Additionally, it would be better if they'd done the survey in a way to examine the near-miss companies that did reasonably well but failed. It would add extra insight because there is an awful lot of luck in the startup business game, especially in tech. This survey would better examine this topic if it was more carefully followed tech startup-specific data.
Sadly, this study doesn't prove a whole lot. The data is too marginal and suffers from the typical issues related to drawing many times derived conclusions; to inherit all the biases of the study below you in the chain. This is a really big deal if the study below you is general in nature compared to your interests.
Wikiscanner is a program that analyses where anonymous edits came from. It's brought up here because it is (I assume) the way that WP was first alerted to the DOJ edits in question. (This is explained in the summary.)
I can't tell who you're referring to with the "they" in this sentence; "If something isn't true, they really have no reason or resposibility to correct it.". If you mean WP; they do have a reason and a responsibility to change it; it's libellous. If you mean the DOJ; they do have a reason to change it; it's not true.
This is what I mean about inductive reasoning; it doesn't prove anything. Hillary Clinton would probably delete a WP section declaring her to be an Silverback Ape in disguise. The fact that she takes this action has _no_ bearing on the truth of the statement in the article! When people decide things "on the balance of probabilities"; that is how urban legends about government conspiracies start (and many other stupid things besides). If the DOJ deleted a section accusing them of being a musical band of Silverback Apes in disguise: I would not investigate it further.
Wikipedia does not, and should not, respect your freedom of speech. It is not a government entity, so I don't know what has mislead you into thinking it should. They don't have any more obligation to allow you access to their services than the local car wash does. "Freedom" means no one interferes with you, it doesn't mean you force other people to accommodate you.
Did you even read the summary? WP is concerned that edits from DOJ IP addresses are being used for malicious edits. On your second point: inductive logic is not a useful way of determining accuracy.
Does it have to be viable evidence in a court of law?
Does that matter anymore? Lawyers and clients are probably worried about the US waterboarding; because there seems to be no requirement for a court case before you're waterboarded.
I'm aware this is pretty tangential, but I found it interesting that the Corvair was eventually rated to be a pretty reasonable car by the government body that Nader's book created.
Knuth said many of these supposedly outrageous things in passing, and does it while noting that he is an academic. Most of these claims in the summary vastly exaggerates the strength of the claims in the interview. Knuth specifically states;
there's no reason anybody should care about the opinions of a computer scientist/mathematician like me regarding software development.
Knuth doesn't claim that unit testing is a waste of time for everyone, just that it is a waste of time for him, in his circumstances. This makes sense, considering he follows his own (diametrically opposed) doctrine of "literate programming", which, if the summary author has never heard of, should cause him to be cautious about interpreting Knuth.
As I said, most of the OLPC is Python. There is close to zero effort involved in switching architecture in Python; so it's more than doable - it requires special, extraordinary effort not to port correctly.
You should read usernames more closely: I'm not the OP, and am not trying to prove that OLPC should've picked ARM. I'm just objecting to your incorrect statement that development methods tied them to x86: ARM would have been easy from a software point of view. Accusing me of "religion or gutfeel" was poorly thought out.
Fundamentally, bible-thumpers and GPL-thumpers both exhibit a similar kind of narrow thinking: my beliefs are correct, they think, and you need to be convinced of my righteousness.
Well, in that sense, me and my friend are both fundamentalists. I think Manchester United will win the league, he thinks Chelsea. This must be a clear cut case of fundamentalism!
What you describe is called "disagreement". You simply think that people who disagree with you are "fundamentalists". This is the reason why important words like "fundamentalist" must correlate to dictionary definitions; because they get exploited by fools.
Considering most of it is written in Python, I don't see how using ARM would make that much different. Added to that, this is FOSS; everything is portable and moving architecture isn't that hard.
I'm sure you think you're being witty, but it doesn't describe the FOSS movement at all. Strong advocacy is not the same as religious fundamentalism, and, furthermore, you know this.
I agree entirely with everything you said. You're right about subsidies. You're also right that I was mistaken in saying that all 3rd World settlements should be abandoned. I really meant to say that there are some settlements which cannot realistically be continued.
Donating money is normally just a waste of your own money; little of it gets to other countries, and even less of it does any good. Giving money is a largely irrational response to poverty, and makes little difference. The correct answer is to make it easier for them to sell their products to us, or make it easier for them to immigrate over to the West. There aren't a lot of resources in many places in the Third World, and it seems pretty pointless to try and continue the settlements.
Furthermore, the value of "a dollar a day" depends entirely on how inflated their economy is compared to ours and thus their cost-of-living. This "dollar a day" statistic is just a comparison of costs of living and inflation. It's no measure of poverty.
There are very few goods we "need". Shelter, clothing and food is an almost complete list of needed goods. Disruptions in the economy always cause downturns; you are mistakenly linking this to the fact we buy "consumerist" items. This is completely false: every economy experiences downturns - there is no connection between you supposed "bad consuming" and economic downturns.
Also, you haven't made the case for the "Consumerist" term any more because you still have to deal with the fact that every society consumes.
It's the socialeconomic structure that's broken, mostly because it *requires* penniless and poor and impoverished people in order to work.
No it does not. Your mistake is called the Zero Sum Fallacy. There is a Wikipedia article but it isn't good enough to precisely dispel your mistake. This fallacy was basically debunked ~230 years ago by Adam Smith in the book that founded the subject of economics; The Wealth of Nations. In one of the first chapters Smith uses his own method of manufacturing; "The Division of Labour" to explain the economic theory of "Economies of Scale".
You could say that the first discovery of Economics was that Economics was not Zero-Sum, and that centuries later, most people (you included) are no better informed.
I'm not sure what the letter of the law is in the UK, but the state-of-play is that warranties on laptops last for a single year, and the retailer normally offers a 30 day return policy. Only hardware faults are covered: software fault, accidental damage, theft, acts of war and god are all excluded. The only exception to this is if you are able to prove that you are mis-sold. If you don't produce a receipt (other other proof of sale) then there is no obligation for anyone to do anything.
In short, if the keyboard issue is a software error (and, seeing as there are apparently many manufacturers of this single keyboard, and they are all failing, this seems likely), the buyer would be on their own in the UK also, assuming their minimum rights (ie; they did not buy any extra insurance).
Slashdot Mirror
It's not incompetence; Royal Mail's postage methods have recently changed, and lots of people have been caught out. I've been caught out twice; once when sending a friend a birthday present (as you can probably guess, someone having to pay to receive their own present didn't go down well), and once when receiving a book from overseas. On the latter occasion, Royal Mail didn't even bother to leave a note to tell me my package had been impounded. I know it's an irritating legal threat, but as much as you dislike the lawyer, he is acting entirely inside the law.
It's not "incompetence at best" to screw up the newly changed postage pricing system, especially if they're when posting from overseas. It's just a mistake.
Am I obviously British because I stated so twice in my post? I hope so.
I'm aware of this apparent contradiction, and this was exactly the intended meaning in my post. It is an insult; it is meant to be insulting, especially if to be insulting is to highlight the inconsistent views of the opponent.
I disliked V for Vendetta, because that truly was an film which took serious liberties with the source material (to the point where the original author declined to be credited). It misrepresented the plot to make it appeal to fools like you; the kind of fools that see homo-eroticism in a superhero story and aren't aware of the really sinister films; the ones that pander to the American anti-American (and I say this as a British person). I mean the kind of tiresome American who thinks that the two solutions to the current bad president are revolution or magical panacea of the democratic party. I'm sure some of the latter persuasion think they're both the same thing.
Keep on fighting the man, man!
I've only briefly examined the report, but it's already clear that there is a strong selection bias in the results. They're pulling from a database of companies worth $1m+ founded between 1995-2005. There are probably at least four issues with this:
First, it doesn't properly account for businesses that take a long time to mature. it's very possible that a business started in 2003-2005 hasn't broken the $1m+ barrier yet, and these companies aren't examined at all by the survey.
Second, they aren't using the best data for tech companies; it's pretty plausible that many tech companies aren't in the database of companies for having simply failed to be submitted (it's a largeish, largely automated database), or have confusing accounts such that they either aren't directly eligible or aren't. This is a big deal particular to "young people" style tech companies; they're often not traditionally founded or managed, and so are less likely to reply to some external survey.
Third, they are reliant on businesses to respond to their requests for information. Around 40% did this. I suspect this creates a bias towards traditional CEO-style corporate hierarchies - exactly the kind of corporate hierarchy that a Silicon Valley business only 5 years old and started by University graduates is unlikely to have. A business started in a garage is probably unlikely to respond to some cold calling survey pollster.
Finally, and probably most importantly, they have failed to be specific enough about the kind of company that they are trying to measure. I haven't had time to look precisely yet, but other studies of tech business have suffered from the difficultly of including a lot of not-quite-really-if-we're-honest tech companies. I'm talking companies that don't do a lot of R&D, and companies that are generally pretty low tech. This is a pretty serious (and probable) bias considering all the data is drawn from a single, third-party database, because these companies are so unlikely to have the typical "California Startup" DNA that the study is testing for.
Additionally, it would be better if they'd done the survey in a way to examine the near-miss companies that did reasonably well but failed. It would add extra insight because there is an awful lot of luck in the startup business game, especially in tech. This survey would better examine this topic if it was more carefully followed tech startup-specific data.
Sadly, this study doesn't prove a whole lot. The data is too marginal and suffers from the typical issues related to drawing many times derived conclusions; to inherit all the biases of the study below you in the chain. This is a really big deal if the study below you is general in nature compared to your interests.
Having keybindings and a program launcher certainly does not make fluxbox a desktop environment.
Wikiscanner is a program that analyses where anonymous edits came from. It's brought up here because it is (I assume) the way that WP was first alerted to the DOJ edits in question. (This is explained in the summary.)
I can't tell who you're referring to with the "they" in this sentence; "If something isn't true, they really have no reason or resposibility to correct it.". If you mean WP; they do have a reason and a responsibility to change it; it's libellous. If you mean the DOJ; they do have a reason to change it; it's not true.
This is what I mean about inductive reasoning; it doesn't prove anything. Hillary Clinton would probably delete a WP section declaring her to be an Silverback Ape in disguise. The fact that she takes this action has _no_ bearing on the truth of the statement in the article! When people decide things "on the balance of probabilities"; that is how urban legends about government conspiracies start (and many other stupid things besides). If the DOJ deleted a section accusing them of being a musical band of Silverback Apes in disguise: I would not investigate it further.
Wikipedia does not, and should not, respect your freedom of speech. It is not a government entity, so I don't know what has mislead you into thinking it should. They don't have any more obligation to allow you access to their services than the local car wash does. "Freedom" means no one interferes with you, it doesn't mean you force other people to accommodate you.
Did you even read the summary? WP is concerned that edits from DOJ IP addresses are being used for malicious edits. On your second point: inductive logic is not a useful way of determining accuracy.
It's not pedantry, it's clarity. Examine the difference before you respond childishly to polite posts explaining the problem.
Ref. "National Highway Traffic Safety Administration".
I'm aware this is pretty tangential, but I found it interesting that the Corvair was eventually rated to be a pretty reasonable car by the government body that Nader's book created.
Clearly the money saved by only having to purchase 4 machines instead of 5 is not worth the time spent on the rewrite.
As I said, most of the OLPC is Python. There is close to zero effort involved in switching architecture in Python; so it's more than doable - it requires special, extraordinary effort not to port correctly.
You should read usernames more closely: I'm not the OP, and am not trying to prove that OLPC should've picked ARM. I'm just objecting to your incorrect statement that development methods tied them to x86: ARM would have been easy from a software point of view. Accusing me of "religion or gutfeel" was poorly thought out.
What you describe is called "disagreement". You simply think that people who disagree with you are "fundamentalists". This is the reason why important words like "fundamentalist" must correlate to dictionary definitions; because they get exploited by fools.
Considering most of it is written in Python, I don't see how using ARM would make that much different. Added to that, this is FOSS; everything is portable and moving architecture isn't that hard.
I'm sure you think you're being witty, but it doesn't describe the FOSS movement at all. Strong advocacy is not the same as religious fundamentalism, and, furthermore, you know this.
I watched the whole thing. All 20 minutes. I've learned an important lesson: don't waste time on anything an AC says or does.
The documentary is terrible, and spews logical fallacies and fundamental errors every few seconds (and I honestly and seriously mean that).
I agree entirely with everything you said. You're right about subsidies. You're also right that I was mistaken in saying that all 3rd World settlements should be abandoned. I really meant to say that there are some settlements which cannot realistically be continued.
Donating money is normally just a waste of your own money; little of it gets to other countries, and even less of it does any good. Giving money is a largely irrational response to poverty, and makes little difference. The correct answer is to make it easier for them to sell their products to us, or make it easier for them to immigrate over to the West. There aren't a lot of resources in many places in the Third World, and it seems pretty pointless to try and continue the settlements.
Furthermore, the value of "a dollar a day" depends entirely on how inflated their economy is compared to ours and thus their cost-of-living. This "dollar a day" statistic is just a comparison of costs of living and inflation. It's no measure of poverty.
There are very few goods we "need". Shelter, clothing and food is an almost complete list of needed goods. Disruptions in the economy always cause downturns; you are mistakenly linking this to the fact we buy "consumerist" items. This is completely false: every economy experiences downturns - there is no connection between you supposed "bad consuming" and economic downturns.
Also, you haven't made the case for the "Consumerist" term any more because you still have to deal with the fact that every society consumes.
You could say that the first discovery of Economics was that Economics was not Zero-Sum, and that centuries later, most people (you included) are no better informed.
I'm not sure what the letter of the law is in the UK, but the state-of-play is that warranties on laptops last for a single year, and the retailer normally offers a 30 day return policy. Only hardware faults are covered: software fault, accidental damage, theft, acts of war and god are all excluded. The only exception to this is if you are able to prove that you are mis-sold. If you don't produce a receipt (other other proof of sale) then there is no obligation for anyone to do anything.
In short, if the keyboard issue is a software error (and, seeing as there are apparently many manufacturers of this single keyboard, and they are all failing, this seems likely), the buyer would be on their own in the UK also, assuming their minimum rights (ie; they did not buy any extra insurance).