Sorry to see so much hostility toward you on this topic.
As you may have determined, it's probably best that you find a different host by now. It could be that they're just trying to raise road blocks in front of you because they've decided this is a "thing" now. Hopefully you have your own off-site backups of the data (I rsync meaningful files to my home machine on a nightly basis with a cron job, and dump my database on a nightly basis as well), and you can get a new host set up pretty quickly.
Depending on your budget, it's best if you purchase hardware and colocate it yourself. If you can't afford that, a dedicated lease might be in order (lease it from a big shop like The Planet, etc. so you know they actually own their own hardware). I've leased dedicated hardware from The Planet for many years. Although they've been getting progressively worse since they merged with EV1, historically they've never required a root password, they nicely ask for it and honestly try their best if you're not willing to give it to them.
They also offer remote console services (a separate device which presents an SSH interface to direct console access, so even if your machine's NIC is toast, you can still log into that box yourself and provide them logs of the hardware failure, etc.)
It is punishment before there is a determination of guilt, and worse it's a public, permanent, and easily searchable brand on this person before they have even been placed in front of a judge.
You missed his point. Just because you passed a blood test doesn't mean the DA will drop the case, or even enter the blood test into evidence at all (in Texas, "you can be charged with a crime when exculpatory evidence proving that you did not commit the crime exists" to quote OP).
Plus, beyond corner cases such as this, there is a bigger issue at stake. The DA is taking it upon him/herself to enact a form of punishment. This is outside of the DA's purview, a judge and jury decides who gets punished and what that punishment will be.
If they were planning to tweet the names of all the people convicted of the crime, that would be different (though it has problems of its own as well).
The problems you describe are not unique to a mobile platform, they are problems free software everywhere and on every platform would face regardless of the success or not of the Android platform.
So what, if anything, should the community be doing about it?
Fix it. Write equivalent open source apps. There's nothing wrong (in my book) with running proprietary on top of open source (so long as this isn't a violation of the license). Value for the platform is value for the platform.
If the platform succeeds, the open source equivalents will be there eventually.
Whether or not it's justified, a email like this coming from someone in Operations would get that person a serious smackdown in my company, and likely just about any company whose core business isn't technology focused.
Sometimes the bad decision that leads to this sort of outcome is out of the hands of anyone technical. For example, we were told we needed to provide a certain kind of sales report to customers with real time data. We warned our business users that the only source of real time data we had for this was from a system that was already heavily over-loaded (and which had already reached the limits of its horizontal scalability). This report was a beast, incorporating conglomerate data from many, many, records from a variety of systems. The benefits to the customers was obvious, but we simply weren't set up to be able to provide this in an efficient manner. As developers we objected loudly and strongly that this was going to cause issues, perform poorly, and significantly hurt an already struggling system. We could do what they ask, but we needed time and money to build out the infrastructure to handle it. Management (C*O level) decided we were crying wolf and ordered us to proceed. The system went live, the sites ground to a halt, and suddenly the money that didn't exist the day before was found. We worked through the night, and by the next day the sites were running albeit somewhat roughly.
Also sometimes the negative outcome is simply not foreseeable. My company is not a technology company, but has a ~200 person IT staff. Three or four years ago our biggest product was scheduled to go on sale for the year (it is a seasonal product in high demand). The day before it was scheduled to go on sale, our single competitor in the market had a disaster and suddenly exited the market. We had load tested and prepared for ten times our normal traffic. As a result of essentially a market panic, we got at best estimates roughly 100 times our normal traffic (seriously, our analytics charts were basically the bottom and right sides of a rectangle). Also, the product went on sale at noon (and was heavily advertised as such), and by 11:45, every call center rep was on the phone talking about weather and the kids (people were just trying to tie the rep up so that they'd have someone as of noon).
So the long and short of it is, unless you understand all of the politics through the very top of the organization of decision making and market conditions which may affect your IT infrastructure, firing off a snarky email and CCing the world is a good way to make the short list of troublemakers. Chances are that the work/life balance of those in power are different from your own work/life balance, and chances are that they don't care what you think it should be. IT is increasingly a commodity. Troublemakers are easily replaced.
Yeah, but the 1-0 layout (or "ten" as some like to call it) is the established standard even if it's not the most efficient. In fact, rumor has it that the ten layout was specifically designed in order to reduce overall typing speed so that the bits wouldn't collide and get stuck.
I've thought about switching to a more modern layout such as oh-one, but I'm a pretty fast typist on the ten layout (60 nibbles per minute), and I'm not sure how long it would take me to get back up to this speed, or whether I'd be able to switch back easily if I changed my mind later (or if I had to use someone else's keyboard to troubleshoot, etc).
I've only recently gotten to the point I can wholly touch type without cheating (by blacking out both keys on my keyboard). I'd hate to lose that progress.
The plaintiff does have to be able to make a reasonable case, they can't just declare that they find the word "it" to be sexually suggestive and therefore constitute harassment.
Intent of the defendant is the biggest consideration. If they know or should have reasonably known that the words were offensive to the plaintiff, that is going to go poorly for them. If they could not have reasonably known that it was offensive, it's very likely to go in their favor.
Unless the editor is reviewing a photo which contains a DC-providing high air flow cable managing server cabinet.
Or the editor works for a tabloid and you're suggesting the words they should use for the headline they're working on.
It's always about context. =)
In the real world though, there are many seemingly innocent things which can be considered harassment if there is a historical reason it might be. For example, if there was an office rumor about someone having had intercourse on a pool table, asking them if they'd like to play a round of billiards with you can still be harassment. Intent is a very big part of the consideration.
Which basically reads as: Any charity Chase corporate management do not like is not seeing a dime.
Which is their prerogative as the organization which is giving away $5,000,000. Honestly we should be happy that this much money is going to meaningful causes, even if we think there are a few more meaningful.
Maybe it was poorly thought out or communicated regarding who they would be willing to give this money away to. But can you honestly think that a bank would be able to so openly support an extremely liberal organization when the median age of its principal stake holders and account holders are going to be much higher than the median age of the sorts of person who normally supports such an organization?
No, they stand to lose far more by disenfranchising their middle and late aged stock and account holders than they do by disenfranchising a bunch of broke college age kids.
I used to use Mantis and create tickets for different tasks.
I have switched to OpenGoo, this is a slick easy to use web based lightweight project management software. It can be used to give visibility to others in the organization regarding what you're working on if you so choose.
Also, if office noise is a problem for you, get a box of foam rubber ear plugs (you can get them at the hardware store, they're used as hearing protection when working with loud equipment). This can really cut down on the distracting noise. And if (as I suspect) your boss' real problem is that people with ear phones don't respond when you walk up behind them and say their name, you may find that you're soon allowed to listen to music again (foam ear plugs block more noise than ear phones do, you are less likely to hear your name when it is called).
If you're feeling subversive, make sure you get the brightest florescent ones you can, with a nice bright cord tying them together. Wear them around your neck whenever you're not using them. Remember, in addition to being functional, you're also making a statement. If your boss doesn't like the color, he's free to supply ear plugs at his expense (at which point, remember that sanitary reasons require that you not repeatedly remove and re-insert the same ear plugs, so you're going to want to throw them out every time someone breaks your concentration by asking you a question).
Our developers got temporarily ousted from their normal space (an off-campus building with a room full of nothing but developers), and have been seated in empty seats in the call center (pretty much the worst possible location - the environment is highly noisy and disruptive, while at the same time the developers have to keep their voices down because people are on the phone). There is a visible increase in bug reports as a result. Fortunately we should be back in our normal space by the end of the year.
For people whose primary job output is intellectual capital, noisy and distracting environments detract directly from their ability to do their job in the same way as having noisy phone lines would detract directly from the ability of your call center to handle calls. With this in mind, the company could see a dramatic improvement in quality by recognizing this and segregating this class of workers from the rest.
For your boss to try to dictate how you work like this is a form of micromanagement which demonstrates distrust.
Brush up your resume, in my experience managers who act in this fashion tend to get worse, not better. Working there is going to be an exercise in frustration. That said, a company is wholly within its rights to expect something like this of you. But by doing so they make themselves less competitive and attractive. Maybe they can get away with that for now, but in doing so they're destroying loyalty and directly contributing to a Dead Sea Effect - when the economy picks up the decent developers are going to evaporate, and the company will be left with a brackish collection of sub-par developers.
As to the original question, I find that the right music selection can really help with my code quality and speed. If I'm really ramped up on what I'm working on, a good fast paced techno, industrial, or otherwise highly rhythmic repetitious and fast paced music can contribute to a mental wave to surf. If I feel like my project pace is overly frenetic, there are too many expectations, and there's just really no way I'll meet all the obligations in the time allowed, something slow and soothing can bring down the blood pressure levels and let me concentrate on my work better.
With EC2, you'd bring up a new node based on the clean AMI, but with a security policy which allows only your IP to talk to it (this is the default). You'd fix the vulnerability and save that instance as a new AMI.
You'd launch new instances of the clean, fixed AMI. You'd shut down the old infected instances. Done. No downtime and a complete purge.
Most of your time would be spent fixing the vulnerability, the rest of it are just standard EC2 maintenance tasks that if you're moderately savvy in the cloud would take you at most a few minutes.
A big part of why it's so alluring is that when you steal from a thief, not only is the grunt work already done, the chain of evidence gets disrupted. Leads past that point are likely to be interpreted as an attempt at misdirection (particularly in the case where information theft does not destroy the original information - the original phisher looks like the end of the line). Plus nobody is going to call the police that illegal information was stolen, doing so requires them to first admit their own crime, or at least put themselves at very high jeopardy of discovery.
So if you can crack a phisher, you're far less likely to face real world retribution (though maybe they'll work on cracking you back).
This makes phishers a much juicier, safer target, though presumably they're quite a lot more savvy than the average user, so pulling it off is likely harder.
I'll admit that I'm not an expert in the details of these events, but it's my understanding that these scientists were the primary source for some or much of data in question. Third parties do not have access to acquire the same data any way but through these scientists, who refused to disclose it, and in some cases actually destroyed the original data while maintaining the conclusions based on it.
This case is often brought up as an example of frivolous lawsuits, but in reality it's actually a really good example of consumer protection.
The primary reason McDonalds lost that case is because when the product manager for McDonalds' coffee was on the stand, (s)he was asked, "What temperature do you serve your coffee at?" they didn't have an answer. McDonalds was not controlling the temperature of their coffee, they were serving it at whatever the hottest setting was for the line of industrial coffee makers they used.
Just because a coffee maker can produce coffee at a few degrees short of boiling doesn't mean that this is the temperature at which coffee is served. The simple fact is that spills are inevitable. Certainly it was unwise of her to have put the coffee cup in her lap to prepare it, but this is only the cause of her specific injury, the potential for injury existed whether or not she had the coffee in her lap.
For example, I have been served coffee in which the lid of the cup was not properly secured. If you hold such a cup near its rim, the lid can pop off and the lateral compression the lid was offering is suddenly removed causing the cup to fall out of your hands. Imagine that this happened while the cup is handed to a person in a car, just as the cup is over the person's body. Exactly the same injury occurs.
McDonalds lost this case because they were producing a product which possesses a measure of danger, and they failed to even try to control the amount of danger it presented. At issue was not how the coffee was spilled (spills are inevitable), but rather whether McDonalds took steps to protect their customers when a spill happens by mitigating the amount of damage it can produce.
FWIW, I agree with you. However a lot of the data that is unreleased is historical climatological data. There is no opportunity to duplicate the results without the data since we can't make another go at the 1980's.
Agreed, I think GP has the relationship backwards. If I'm specifically looking for information from FoxNews, I'm very likely to start with FoxNews. I'm using Google News because I care less where my news comes from than I care about getting offered a reasonable article.
Often on Google News I'll try several different news sites for a given article either to try to pick up different angles, or because some of them are clearly just re-running a story originally identified and written by someone like the AP.
I think Rupert Murdoch has identified that there's no way he'll get cash out of news seeking citizens, and instead he's looking to get cash out of the only people around who might be willing to pay for news (those for whom news is a profit source).
My guess is that if he delists from Google, he'll see a massive hit to page rankings for his properties across the Internet, even without Google lifting a finger to reduce their profile. He'll have delisted his news sites and his non-news sites will lose out on the page rank his news sites would have contributed to them.
Not that I disagree with your point (in fact I agree with it), but I'll point out the difference being that professional athletes are paid to adhere to the rules, while console owners have paid, and in addition the banning process subtracts substantial value from the hardware owned by the user.
The advantage of using a headless AppleTV is that you can synchronize your music to it and your main computer doesn't have to be online to interact with it (in fact the AppleTV can be the only thing powered on in the whole house, other than the network which you use to control it). It would still be less expensive than the Sonos which wouldn't do this. AirPort Express would require iTunes to be running on your main computer, though this is a more than adequate solution for most folks.
You could probably ebay an older Mac Mini for this purpose too.
Unfortunately iTunes doesn't automatically pick up added/removed/moved files in its music directory, so this means that if you're constantly adding to your collection, you have to babysit it a lot; so it doesn't do well as a headless option.
You can get clever with an Automator script to add new files automatically for you on some interval (not too hard to set up or figure out), but it's a bit error prone (tends to beach ball indefinitely sometimes; particularly when reading from a network share such as a NAS) and certainly a bit annoying to have such a delay. Not sure there's a way to have it pick up on deleted / moved files though (it'd show up as new
Wow, this is pretty pricy. You could put an AppleTV in every room for much less money; they don't need a TV attached to them, you can control it from iTunes or an iPhone with the Remote application. Or you can use an Apple AirPort for each room, and control it in a similar fashion.
Personally I prefer to use Handbrake to rip my movie library, and store it on a NAS. Then I use AppleTV as a library front end. My entire collection is available simply by finding the correct entry in a menu.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to see so much hostility toward you on this topic.
As you may have determined, it's probably best that you find a different host by now. It could be that they're just trying to raise road blocks in front of you because they've decided this is a "thing" now. Hopefully you have your own off-site backups of the data (I rsync meaningful files to my home machine on a nightly basis with a cron job, and dump my database on a nightly basis as well), and you can get a new host set up pretty quickly.
Depending on your budget, it's best if you purchase hardware and colocate it yourself. If you can't afford that, a dedicated lease might be in order (lease it from a big shop like The Planet, etc. so you know they actually own their own hardware). I've leased dedicated hardware from The Planet for many years. Although they've been getting progressively worse since they merged with EV1, historically they've never required a root password, they nicely ask for it and honestly try their best if you're not willing to give it to them.
They also offer remote console services (a separate device which presents an SSH interface to direct console access, so even if your machine's NIC is toast, you can still log into that box yourself and provide them logs of the hardware failure, etc.)
If being done to retain root access after it was intended to be revoked, it's exactly as illegal as installing a rootkit.
It is punishment before there is a determination of guilt, and worse it's a public, permanent, and easily searchable brand on this person before they have even been placed in front of a judge.
You missed his point. Just because you passed a blood test doesn't mean the DA will drop the case, or even enter the blood test into evidence at all (in Texas, "you can be charged with a crime when exculpatory evidence proving that you did not commit the crime exists" to quote OP).
Plus, beyond corner cases such as this, there is a bigger issue at stake. The DA is taking it upon him/herself to enact a form of punishment. This is outside of the DA's purview, a judge and jury decides who gets punished and what that punishment will be.
If they were planning to tweet the names of all the people convicted of the crime, that would be different (though it has problems of its own as well).
The problems you describe are not unique to a mobile platform, they are problems free software everywhere and on every platform would face regardless of the success or not of the Android platform.
Fix it. Write equivalent open source apps. There's nothing wrong (in my book) with running proprietary on top of open source (so long as this isn't a violation of the license). Value for the platform is value for the platform.
If the platform succeeds, the open source equivalents will be there eventually.
Whether or not it's justified, a email like this coming from someone in Operations would get that person a serious smackdown in my company, and likely just about any company whose core business isn't technology focused.
Sometimes the bad decision that leads to this sort of outcome is out of the hands of anyone technical. For example, we were told we needed to provide a certain kind of sales report to customers with real time data. We warned our business users that the only source of real time data we had for this was from a system that was already heavily over-loaded (and which had already reached the limits of its horizontal scalability). This report was a beast, incorporating conglomerate data from many, many, records from a variety of systems. The benefits to the customers was obvious, but we simply weren't set up to be able to provide this in an efficient manner. As developers we objected loudly and strongly that this was going to cause issues, perform poorly, and significantly hurt an already struggling system. We could do what they ask, but we needed time and money to build out the infrastructure to handle it. Management (C*O level) decided we were crying wolf and ordered us to proceed. The system went live, the sites ground to a halt, and suddenly the money that didn't exist the day before was found. We worked through the night, and by the next day the sites were running albeit somewhat roughly.
Also sometimes the negative outcome is simply not foreseeable. My company is not a technology company, but has a ~200 person IT staff. Three or four years ago our biggest product was scheduled to go on sale for the year (it is a seasonal product in high demand). The day before it was scheduled to go on sale, our single competitor in the market had a disaster and suddenly exited the market. We had load tested and prepared for ten times our normal traffic. As a result of essentially a market panic, we got at best estimates roughly 100 times our normal traffic (seriously, our analytics charts were basically the bottom and right sides of a rectangle). Also, the product went on sale at noon (and was heavily advertised as such), and by 11:45, every call center rep was on the phone talking about weather and the kids (people were just trying to tie the rep up so that they'd have someone as of noon).
So the long and short of it is, unless you understand all of the politics through the very top of the organization of decision making and market conditions which may affect your IT infrastructure, firing off a snarky email and CCing the world is a good way to make the short list of troublemakers. Chances are that the work/life balance of those in power are different from your own work/life balance, and chances are that they don't care what you think it should be. IT is increasingly a commodity. Troublemakers are easily replaced.
Yeah, but the 1-0 layout (or "ten" as some like to call it) is the established standard even if it's not the most efficient. In fact, rumor has it that the ten layout was specifically designed in order to reduce overall typing speed so that the bits wouldn't collide and get stuck.
I've thought about switching to a more modern layout such as oh-one, but I'm a pretty fast typist on the ten layout (60 nibbles per minute), and I'm not sure how long it would take me to get back up to this speed, or whether I'd be able to switch back easily if I changed my mind later (or if I had to use someone else's keyboard to troubleshoot, etc).
I've only recently gotten to the point I can wholly touch type without cheating (by blacking out both keys on my keyboard). I'd hate to lose that progress.
The plaintiff does have to be able to make a reasonable case, they can't just declare that they find the word "it" to be sexually suggestive and therefore constitute harassment.
Intent of the defendant is the biggest consideration. If they know or should have reasonably known that the words were offensive to the plaintiff, that is going to go poorly for them. If they could not have reasonably known that it was offensive, it's very likely to go in their favor.
Unless the editor is reviewing a photo which contains a DC-providing high air flow cable managing server cabinet.
Or the editor works for a tabloid and you're suggesting the words they should use for the headline they're working on.
It's always about context. =)
In the real world though, there are many seemingly innocent things which can be considered harassment if there is a historical reason it might be. For example, if there was an office rumor about someone having had intercourse on a pool table, asking them if they'd like to play a round of billiards with you can still be harassment. Intent is a very big part of the consideration.
Which is their prerogative as the organization which is giving away $5,000,000. Honestly we should be happy that this much money is going to meaningful causes, even if we think there are a few more meaningful.
Maybe it was poorly thought out or communicated regarding who they would be willing to give this money away to. But can you honestly think that a bank would be able to so openly support an extremely liberal organization when the median age of its principal stake holders and account holders are going to be much higher than the median age of the sorts of person who normally supports such an organization?
No, they stand to lose far more by disenfranchising their middle and late aged stock and account holders than they do by disenfranchising a bunch of broke college age kids.
I used to use Mantis and create tickets for different tasks.
I have switched to OpenGoo, this is a slick easy to use web based lightweight project management software. It can be used to give visibility to others in the organization regarding what you're working on if you so choose.
Also, if office noise is a problem for you, get a box of foam rubber ear plugs (you can get them at the hardware store, they're used as hearing protection when working with loud equipment). This can really cut down on the distracting noise. And if (as I suspect) your boss' real problem is that people with ear phones don't respond when you walk up behind them and say their name, you may find that you're soon allowed to listen to music again (foam ear plugs block more noise than ear phones do, you are less likely to hear your name when it is called).
If you're feeling subversive, make sure you get the brightest florescent ones you can, with a nice bright cord tying them together. Wear them around your neck whenever you're not using them. Remember, in addition to being functional, you're also making a statement. If your boss doesn't like the color, he's free to supply ear plugs at his expense (at which point, remember that sanitary reasons require that you not repeatedly remove and re-insert the same ear plugs, so you're going to want to throw them out every time someone breaks your concentration by asking you a question).
Our developers got temporarily ousted from their normal space (an off-campus building with a room full of nothing but developers), and have been seated in empty seats in the call center (pretty much the worst possible location - the environment is highly noisy and disruptive, while at the same time the developers have to keep their voices down because people are on the phone). There is a visible increase in bug reports as a result. Fortunately we should be back in our normal space by the end of the year.
For people whose primary job output is intellectual capital, noisy and distracting environments detract directly from their ability to do their job in the same way as having noisy phone lines would detract directly from the ability of your call center to handle calls. With this in mind, the company could see a dramatic improvement in quality by recognizing this and segregating this class of workers from the rest.
For your boss to try to dictate how you work like this is a form of micromanagement which demonstrates distrust.
Brush up your resume, in my experience managers who act in this fashion tend to get worse, not better. Working there is going to be an exercise in frustration. That said, a company is wholly within its rights to expect something like this of you. But by doing so they make themselves less competitive and attractive. Maybe they can get away with that for now, but in doing so they're destroying loyalty and directly contributing to a Dead Sea Effect - when the economy picks up the decent developers are going to evaporate, and the company will be left with a brackish collection of sub-par developers.
As to the original question, I find that the right music selection can really help with my code quality and speed. If I'm really ramped up on what I'm working on, a good fast paced techno, industrial, or otherwise highly rhythmic repetitious and fast paced music can contribute to a mental wave to surf. If I feel like my project pace is overly frenetic, there are too many expectations, and there's just really no way I'll meet all the obligations in the time allowed, something slow and soothing can bring down the blood pressure levels and let me concentrate on my work better.
With EC2, you'd bring up a new node based on the clean AMI, but with a security policy which allows only your IP to talk to it (this is the default). You'd fix the vulnerability and save that instance as a new AMI.
You'd launch new instances of the clean, fixed AMI. You'd shut down the old infected instances. Done. No downtime and a complete purge.
Most of your time would be spent fixing the vulnerability, the rest of it are just standard EC2 maintenance tasks that if you're moderately savvy in the cloud would take you at most a few minutes.
A big part of why it's so alluring is that when you steal from a thief, not only is the grunt work already done, the chain of evidence gets disrupted. Leads past that point are likely to be interpreted as an attempt at misdirection (particularly in the case where information theft does not destroy the original information - the original phisher looks like the end of the line). Plus nobody is going to call the police that illegal information was stolen, doing so requires them to first admit their own crime, or at least put themselves at very high jeopardy of discovery.
So if you can crack a phisher, you're far less likely to face real world retribution (though maybe they'll work on cracking you back).
This makes phishers a much juicier, safer target, though presumably they're quite a lot more savvy than the average user, so pulling it off is likely harder.
I'll admit that I'm not an expert in the details of these events, but it's my understanding that these scientists were the primary source for some or much of data in question. Third parties do not have access to acquire the same data any way but through these scientists, who refused to disclose it, and in some cases actually destroyed the original data while maintaining the conclusions based on it.
This case is often brought up as an example of frivolous lawsuits, but in reality it's actually a really good example of consumer protection.
The primary reason McDonalds lost that case is because when the product manager for McDonalds' coffee was on the stand, (s)he was asked, "What temperature do you serve your coffee at?" they didn't have an answer. McDonalds was not controlling the temperature of their coffee, they were serving it at whatever the hottest setting was for the line of industrial coffee makers they used.
Just because a coffee maker can produce coffee at a few degrees short of boiling doesn't mean that this is the temperature at which coffee is served. The simple fact is that spills are inevitable. Certainly it was unwise of her to have put the coffee cup in her lap to prepare it, but this is only the cause of her specific injury, the potential for injury existed whether or not she had the coffee in her lap.
For example, I have been served coffee in which the lid of the cup was not properly secured. If you hold such a cup near its rim, the lid can pop off and the lateral compression the lid was offering is suddenly removed causing the cup to fall out of your hands. Imagine that this happened while the cup is handed to a person in a car, just as the cup is over the person's body. Exactly the same injury occurs.
McDonalds lost this case because they were producing a product which possesses a measure of danger, and they failed to even try to control the amount of danger it presented. At issue was not how the coffee was spilled (spills are inevitable), but rather whether McDonalds took steps to protect their customers when a spill happens by mitigating the amount of damage it can produce.
FWIW, I agree with you. However a lot of the data that is unreleased is historical climatological data. There is no opportunity to duplicate the results without the data since we can't make another go at the 1980's.
Agreed, I think GP has the relationship backwards. If I'm specifically looking for information from FoxNews, I'm very likely to start with FoxNews. I'm using Google News because I care less where my news comes from than I care about getting offered a reasonable article.
Often on Google News I'll try several different news sites for a given article either to try to pick up different angles, or because some of them are clearly just re-running a story originally identified and written by someone like the AP.
I think Rupert Murdoch has identified that there's no way he'll get cash out of news seeking citizens, and instead he's looking to get cash out of the only people around who might be willing to pay for news (those for whom news is a profit source).
My guess is that if he delists from Google, he'll see a massive hit to page rankings for his properties across the Internet, even without Google lifting a finger to reduce their profile. He'll have delisted his news sites and his non-news sites will lose out on the page rank his news sites would have contributed to them.
Not that I disagree with your point (in fact I agree with it), but I'll point out the difference being that professional athletes are paid to adhere to the rules, while console owners have paid, and in addition the banning process subtracts substantial value from the hardware owned by the user.
The advantage of using a headless AppleTV is that you can synchronize your music to it and your main computer doesn't have to be online to interact with it (in fact the AppleTV can be the only thing powered on in the whole house, other than the network which you use to control it). It would still be less expensive than the Sonos which wouldn't do this. AirPort Express would require iTunes to be running on your main computer, though this is a more than adequate solution for most folks.
You could probably ebay an older Mac Mini for this purpose too.
Unfortunately iTunes doesn't automatically pick up added/removed/moved files in its music directory, so this means that if you're constantly adding to your collection, you have to babysit it a lot; so it doesn't do well as a headless option.
You can get clever with an Automator script to add new files automatically for you on some interval (not too hard to set up or figure out), but it's a bit error prone (tends to beach ball indefinitely sometimes; particularly when reading from a network share such as a NAS) and certainly a bit annoying to have such a delay. Not sure there's a way to have it pick up on deleted / moved files though (it'd show up as new
Wow, this is pretty pricy. You could put an AppleTV in every room for much less money; they don't need a TV attached to them, you can control it from iTunes or an iPhone with the Remote application. Or you can use an Apple AirPort for each room, and control it in a similar fashion.
Personally I prefer to use Handbrake to rip my movie library, and store it on a NAS. Then I use AppleTV as a library front end. My entire collection is available simply by finding the correct entry in a menu.