Most modern pilot lights use a heated spring to hold the gas flow open. If gas is lost, it will cool and close itself. This is why when starting it from cold, you have to hold a manual release for 8-10 seconds while the pilot warms up.
Further, the Microsoft/IE analogy breaks down in that Google lets others advertise in these spaces, while Microsoft does not allow others to ship browsers in its default install.
The existing analogy would only be equivalent if Google prevented others from advertising in this space. Alternatively you could construct a better analogy with a hypothetical Microsoft that shipped IE, Opera, and Firefox all with Windows, but just always put the IE icon first. I think most people would see that as acceptable.
The relevant figure to whether a boycott of Apple's iTunes music store is a viable strategy or not is really the market share of the music store associated with the player. And this figure doesn't care about past performance or existing players on the market, it only really cares about how much music is purchased today and in the future.
Even if Zune only has 2% of the market share but the Zune Marketplace sells 98% of the music, then Universal has the power to use a boycott of other online music retailers to influence their contract with them.
I don't know any figures on who has what percent of the music sales market (though I do suspect that there's a correlation with music players). Also, I do doubt that Zune Marketplace has a big enough market share for Universal to use this as a bargaining chip. I'm not disagreeing with the original premise, just attempting to realign the underlying assumptions =)
But whether or not such people create a museum, they still exist, and they still have just as much impact on national policy. And this is their right as Americans, within constitutional bounds, each citizen is given the same innate influence as each other citizen. Their willingness to create a museum dedicated to their beliefs does not deserve the anger this story and subsequent discussion demonstrates.
I'm not sure what that passage you quoted has to do with science and the environment. http://www.nccbuscc.org/nab/bible/deuteronomy/deut eronomy30.htm In essence the author is simply saying, "Obey the God and you will prosper. Do not, and you will not." It is a common theme in Christianity, as well as most major religions. Specifically this is Moses speaking to the Israelites before they enter their promised land. Moses is telling these individuals that they are at a crossroads in their relationship with God, where he is offering them longevity and prosperity for their obedience; the alternative being that he smites them.
There's a large but quiet (since we do not have an agenda) following of Biblical hermeneutics. Roughly (since the Wikipedia article uses a lot of terminology which would be unfamiliar to those not in serious religious study - even I don't understand some of what it says, but after explaining my beliefs to someone who does, they informed me that I belong in this category) interpretation of religious texts within the framework of modern knowledge. As an example, from the wikipedia article:
The early Jewish Rabbis and the early Church Fathers deployed similar philological tools; their Biblical interpretations stressed allegorical readings, frequently at the expense of the texts' literal meaning. They sought deeper meanings below the outward appearance of the text. Examples of such interpretations include the writings of Philo of Alexandria, Origen, and the Talmud.
It's unfortunate, because I as a modern Christian, who believes both the Bible and also science (I do not see them as excluding each other in any sense; things like the creation myth are not literal truth but rather essential truth) get grouped together with and labeled with the group commonly called Christian Fundamentalists. And hatred is exacted on me because others do not understand me. And even those Fundamentalist Christians do not deserve the hatred that is leveled against them each day. It is contrary to the spirit of tolerance preached by some of the same individuals who spew this hatred. Don't hate people based on their sexual orientation, their race, or even their religion. Unless they're Christian.
The big question on my mind is: If you don't believe in this, why do you care? They're not funding it with taxpayer dollars, they're funding it on donations. If people want to spend their money on something, why is it anyone's business but their own?
I think people are idiots for paying thousands of dollars for a console on Ebay that they could buy in a store in another month for a couple hundred dollars. However I'm not writing an opinion piece on Slashdot, presenting it as news, and inciting a lot of community anger at a group of people just because I don't agree with their priorities.
When a public school has a school trip to it, then it's cause for news. Until then this is no bigger news than the construction of a really big church. And anyone who finds themselves being angry at these people (which is the general tone of this entire discussion) for spending their money in this way needs to take a step back and examine where their hate comes from, because such attitudes are bigotry, even if (especially if) you don't agree with it.
Last I checked, freedom of religion was still a constitutional right, and this is no more than exercise of that right. And as a personal disclaimer, I'm a non-creationist Christian (yes, we exist). I think this is exactly as much of a shame as the hype and zealotry over console releases, but it's their money to do with as they will.
The kind of stats you can get from awk & sed with a couple of hours of free time could be useful when you want to know some very specific things (such as "How many times was this file downloaded in the last two weeks") and already know the general shape of your data (eg, what pages are in your site).
This would not give you statistics that are probably a lot more important, such as: o Conversion rates for your advertising (are we getting more out of advertising with company X than we pay for it?) o What your site's abandonment points are (are users getting too confused by a certain page and switching to someone else?) o What part of the world your users are coming from (maybe a German translation of your site would double your income) o What times of day are most active (schedule your downtime for the slowest point) o What is the trend of visits, vs the trend of hits, vs the trend of users (visits increasing faster than users means your users are finding your site to be of progressively more value, etc) o How did this week compare to last week? How about this week to two weeks ago? How about this week to last year's Christmas season, whose logs you no longer have?
All of this can be done without needing to know sed, awk, or even have a staff member who can do this. That's great because when your marketing guys want random stats such as this 6-10 times a day, your "one good staff member" can focus instead on creating new content.
Especially when you get into multidimensional traffic forecasting, your ability to discover some of this stuff with even a few weeks of development time can get pretty limited. Forecasting is important because it can point out areas where you're slowing down so that you can reinvigorate them before they become a liability.
Finally when you have 200 clients (like the author of this article), stats packages mean you can give your users their stats any time of a day or night for a lot less overall expense (200 people asking for some statistic once a week means you give up one or more full time developers, when the stats package could have satisfied this with a better response time for a lot less money).
In a manner of speaking, yes. I'm guessing they're using the hosted version of Livestats, so if they stop support, they are probably also taking down the hosted servers. The full non-hosted version is substantially more expensive (but cheaper if you do millions of hits a day like we do here).
IANARS, but Newton tells us that giving the debris a small boost toward Earth would add the same momentum to them in the opposite direction. Meaning that this would interfere with their orbit a bit, which would have to be corrected with thrusters (though they could probably also time their debris ejection with a time that they need outward thrust to maintain their orbit anyway).
Even still, terminal velocity would be reached on this trash before it had entered very far into the atmosphere. By Nasa's space debris FAQ page, this debris could then remain in orbit anywhere from a year to decades (depending on how much thrust they applied to it). They want to minimize the amount of debris they eject in general just because all of it is a liability until it actually descends far enough into the atmosphere to pick up enough speed and friction to burn up. Even then they record an average of one piece of debris striking terra firma every day. Most strikes the oceans or some of the wide open spaces (such as Canadian tundra), but it would not be good for someone's home to be crushed by descended orbital debris.
Most of this info is gleaned from Nasa's space debris pages. They're a bit smarter than me =).
Believe it or not, language is not that big of a factor in whether you like your job. As proof, I offer that I've been working 2.5 years in a ColdFusion job, and while the language feels like I'm trying to perform surgery with rusty tools, the work is interesting and challenging.
Here's a few questions, and my advice based on their answers:
1) Are you young? Take the higher paying job and work like mad for 5 years while living like a pauper (small apartment, used car which you paid cash for, but wide broadband and good computer). Your time in the cubicle farm will be rewarded with getting home and being able to go frag someone. You'll either pay off all your debt, develop a huge savings, or some combination thereof. This will establish the financial stability today which can permit you a lot more freedom in your job choice in a few years. This is the path I'm going, and I'll have my mortgage paid off 3 years from now (5 years after I opened it).
2) Are you willing to relocate? If not, you do NOT want that Perl job no matter how good it looks. 2.5-3 hours of driving a day will sap way more of your life than working in a corporate environment. Every single day you will arrive at work tired, and every single night you will get home exhausted. I drive 1.5 hours now, and this is absolutely my upper limit. Something most folks don't really think about is that they get errands done during the week, which I don't have time for even with my (short compared to yours) drive. That means my weekends get sapped up getting stuff done which most people get done during the week. Opportunities for relaxation become few and far between. During the week you'll get home from work and just crash on the couch until you fall asleep, exhausted. My drive takes more out of me than my work day does, by a long shot.
3) Do you have a wife and/or kids? You're going to want to take the job which provides sufficient financial stability, while giving you the most time with them. If not, refer again to question 1.
4) How many hours are generally worked by the employees of each location? I've seen small companies which generally work 40 hours and no more, and I've seen big companies which are this way. Also I've seen small companies which expect each person to put in 70-80 hours, and I've seen big companies which expect each project to meet its deadline no matter how unreasonable. Total amount of free personal time is way more important than how much you like the work you're doing.
5) How busy are the people at each place? Too busy as in #4 is bad, but too slow is just as bad. Nothing is worse than trying to muddle through another work day with nothing to do, and nothing interesting to keep your mind occupied, while you surf work-friendly sites such as Slashdot, and hope your web usage doesn't get high enough to raise eyebrows. This will actually lead to a state of mental apathy which is very hard to shake, and which can seriously cripple your career for years. We've had people like this, and have had to get rid of them because we could never depend on them to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time even though once upon a time they were firecracker developers. 3 or 4 years in a job like this can ruin a developer, sometimes forever.
I hope these thoughts help. Largely they're based on my own personal experience, but to some extent they're also based on having been a developer manager for a firm which contracts most of our people out to other companies (hence my experience with point 5).
If this is true, then they should just keep cutting taxes and making more and more money!
Hyperbole aside, cutting taxes does stimulate economic development for a net gain only in a downward facing economy. It does increase government revenue in the mid term, but not as much as higher taxes in an upward facing economy. The principle is exactly the same as the one the Fed uses to decide on interest rates.
Substantial economic change, whether positive or negative, is unhealthy for the economy. Even healthy economies need brief periods of recession as check points. The longer you have unmitigated growth, the longer the necessary eventual recession. Short growth, shorter recession, repeat - this is the path to the healthiest long term economy.
Whenever you cut taxes, you eventually have to raise them again. The income that lower taxes ultimately generates for the government diminishes over time. A smart government raises taxes during economic growth to slow it down (and thus shorten the eventual recession), and lowers taxes during recession (to speed recovery).
What we see in the US is the republicans repeatedly expending this economic governance tool, and the democrats having to reset it again since the economy requires it.
It's ultimately the company's decision whether they report it to their customers or not. Especially as a contractor to the compromised company, you have no authority or right to disclose anything that the company doesn't want you to.
Unless of course you suspect something illegal is being done by the company (eg criminal withholding of proper disclosure), in which case you should: 1) Hire a lawyer today (maybe yesterday) 2) As mentioned repeatedly, document everything, and make sure you notified the correct channels in the company (corporate compliance, or if they're not large enough to have such a department, at least the head of the division, and failing the existence of one of them, the owner/ceo/president) 3) Contact law enforcement to describe the nature of the situation, why you think something illegal might be going on, and ask them what to do next.
But if the person who owns the patents distributes or sanctions the distribution under the GPL of code which is covered by the patents, they are therefore agreeing to be bound by the terms of the GPL, and their patent offers that company no protection (as defined by patent law) for that patent as it applies to any derivative works thereof.
There's also a difference between being addicted and having a problem. Technically true alcoholics are addicted even when they're on the wagon. But they don't let it be a problem, and that's a key distinction, and I think it's one most people here on Slashdot are missing. You can be addicted to something without having a problem; and if it's not a problem, it does not necessarily even merit treatment.
Alcohol, unlike the Internet, can be damaging even if you only drink by yourself, don't physically injure yourself, don't drive, don't let it affect your life, and are completely sober before you leave the house again. Excessive use of it has physical ramifications such as liver damage. Thus, closet alcoholics can have a problem even when they're able to keep it from affecting anyone else.
The same thing is not true of the Internet; if you go home and spend 8 hours surfing the web every night, but still show up to work on time, and manage to not let your health go to pot, then you might be addicted, but without a problem. [[Tangent: is it worse to spend 8 hours surfing the web a night than 8 hours watching TV? I think surfing is a better habit than watching TV, because surfing is more mentally active, and with TV you just let the TV do your thinking for you.]] Basically what I'm saying is that the level of addiction and involvement for a web addiction to become a problem is substantially higher than for alcoholism. I think this is what most people here are intuiting, but are mistakenly expressing as if there's no such thing as Internet addiction, or that it's not as prevalent as might be suggested in the article.
That said, there is such a thing as Internet addicts with a problem, I've witnessed it first hand (follow the link for a description of this). It becomes a problem when it starts to negatively affect your relationships with other people; including and especially your spouse, kids, or job. I'd wager that Internet addiction rates are higher when it involves a fantasy world in some way (typically online gaming, though probably things like porn addiction fall into this category as well).
So because alcohol addiction can come from several sources (some people have a chemical addiction, some have a psychological addiction, some have both) while Internet addiction would only come from a psychological one, your chances of getting addicted to alcohol should be higher and potentially more severe. And because of their nature, the threshold of this addiction becoming a problem would be way lower for alcoholism (whose effects cannot be turned off with a switch, and lead to things like drunk driving, hangovers for work, and drunken rages) than it is for Internet addiction.
My project (a web based game; see my user profile) sees about 40,000 users every day across the globe. Right now our operational costs (two dedicated servers w/ substantial bandwidth) are 100% funded (and well in the black) by user donations.
To me, this makes the project a success, and demonstrates clearly that there's a real market for such a project, as users are of their own free will willing to support it wholly.
Real life gets in the way of me being able to dedicate the same level of devotion that I used to be able to give the project, but I personally am confident that if we had funding that enabled us to hire just one or two developers and purchase some additional equipment, the project could take off like a rocket. We have a huge list of ideas for improvement -- things that we simply don't have the time to successfully realize today, but which we could if it was our job.
So my question is, what would you recommend we do to seriously pursue getting real funding. How do we first find someone that is not turned off by the idea of an open source model, and second will actually listen to our proposed business plan? When talking to them, what sort of things are they looking for that demonstrates that we're serious, willing to work hard, and aren't just looking for a free ride to tinker around on code?
In college I ran a CounterStrike server for the campus LAN. Turned out to be popular as it was the only one on campus that was up 24x7. Everyone had fixed IP's, and so I wrote a log parser that tracked individual accomplishments and put them up on a web page. Because my player base was limited to a total of 20-30 regular players, and probably 60 overall, I even went so far as to track how you fared against each other player (times killed by vs times killed), what weapons you preferred, what weapons you had success with against what other player, etc. Because of the fixed IP's, I even was able to track accomplishments by individual, not just your screen name.
Anyhow, this turned out to be a huge hit, solidified my server as the on-campus server, and completely and utterly ruined gameplay.
Everyone turned into campers, everyone wanted all the kills, noone worked as a team. After a month, and this trend getting worse and worse (as people put more and more value in the scores page), my "competetor servers" were putting up their own log parsers, and I took mine down, citing the loss of fun gameplay. This actually further cemented my place as the campus server. By this point, my dedicated players all recognized that this ruined the gameplay, but they were not willing to ignore the statistics as long as they were available. By now they became more willing to play on a server without persistant statistics than they were on a server w/ them.
All in all it turned into a fairly interesting study on human behavior.
circumvent/srkmvnt, srkmvnt/ -verb (used with object) 1. to go around or bypass: to circumvent the lake; to circumvent the real issues. 2. to avoid (defeat, failure, unpleasantness, etc.) by artfulness or deception; avoid by anticipating or outwitting: He circumvented capture by anticipating their movements. http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=circumven t&x=0&y=0
This does bypass the DRM. This does get around the DRM. This does avoid the DRM. This does defeat the DRM.
How exactly is this not circumvention? The fact that it captures the unencrypted stream out of memory, or that it uses iTunes' own decryption in the process doesn't affect its status as a circumvention tool. It explicitly and by purpose is a tool you stick DRM in one side, and get non-DRM out the other side; that qualifies. iTunes qualifies as circumvention too, except the statute exempts DRM circumvention w/ permission of the copyright owner (which iTunes has).
Don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of the tool, but any first year lawyer would be able to make this statute stick against this tool. I'm glad that someone's pulling it from the memory stream, because this proves that no matter how complex and "fool proof" you make DRM, at some point you need to decrypt it, and at that point (and ideally as close to the end of the decryption as possible), it exists someplace that it can be captured.
If it means not taking any baths, well, you do have that choice. You might not like the sacrifice it'd entail, but don't complain about having no choice.
There is no legitimate reason to strip the DRM from iTunes Store purchases.
What about playing it on my non-Apple MP3 player? What about having a shared music source for my Windows & Linux dual boot?
What about something as simple as wanting to play it in the audio software of my choice? Personally I like MixMeister Pro, it's DJ software, and gives me the kind of control I want in a music player (which iTunes is lacking).
iTunes DRM is purposeful incompatibility designed into the codec. Frankly, unless Apple opens this format for others to implement on non-Apple hardware/software, shortly they're going to start risking wandering into antitrust territory, as they become the vast majority player in the market. Other companies have been burned for purposely taking great lengths to make their dominant product incompatible with competetor's products in order to lock their customers in. This is no different other than that Apple is a broker and not a producer.
Moderation should wholly be determined by how good a comment is, not whether the moderator agrees with the comment. If it's a discussion about religion, then a comment that defends religion in a fashion that the moderator hadn't heard before is insightful or informative, and should be moderated as such.
Moderation isn't selective idea voting, its comment quality voting. Moderation should bring forth and hilight the opposing viewpoints rather than crushing the less popular viewpoint. This is why the categories are things like "Interesting, Insightful, Informative" rather than "Agree, Disagree."
My camera doesn't charge off the cable, this is not an average consumer grade camera, it's a Nikon D70s. And I went home and checked: my camera's manual specifically states that it does not require a powered USB port to connect. OSX reports that it does, all other OS's do not. You tell me where the bug is: either my camera manufacturer, Linux, and Microsoft are all wrong, or OSX is. Occam's Razor.
Fair enough. I forgot about standard audio cables. I use optical out at home (only fits in one port, like the rest of the cables), and don't have any speakers connected to my mini.
Yep, they're there, but almost anything other than the mouse that I plug into it, it won't interface with, citing a need for this device to be plugged into a powered USB port (the ones on the keyboard aren't powered). This includes devices which provide their own power, like my digital camera, and which don't need to be plugged into a powered port when I'm running Ubuntu on the same machine.
Specifically because, and I'll quote my original post which you also graciously quoted, "I didn't want to drop $120 on a keyboard & mouse for a $450 computer."
Slashdot Mirror
Most modern pilot lights use a heated spring to hold the gas flow open. If gas is lost, it will cool and close itself. This is why when starting it from cold, you have to hold a manual release for 8-10 seconds while the pilot warms up.
Further, the Microsoft/IE analogy breaks down in that Google lets others advertise in these spaces, while Microsoft does not allow others to ship browsers in its default install.
The existing analogy would only be equivalent if Google prevented others from advertising in this space. Alternatively you could construct a better analogy with a hypothetical Microsoft that shipped IE, Opera, and Firefox all with Windows, but just always put the IE icon first. I think most people would see that as acceptable.
The relevant figure to whether a boycott of Apple's iTunes music store is a viable strategy or not is really the market share of the music store associated with the player. And this figure doesn't care about past performance or existing players on the market, it only really cares about how much music is purchased today and in the future.
Even if Zune only has 2% of the market share but the Zune Marketplace sells 98% of the music, then Universal has the power to use a boycott of other online music retailers to influence their contract with them.
I don't know any figures on who has what percent of the music sales market (though I do suspect that there's a correlation with music players). Also, I do doubt that Zune Marketplace has a big enough market share for Universal to use this as a bargaining chip. I'm not disagreeing with the original premise, just attempting to realign the underlying assumptions =)
Otherwise known as freedom of speech. So what I'm hearing from you is, "You should be allowed to say whatever you want, as long as I agree with it."
I'm not sure what that passage you quoted has to do with science and the environment. http://www.nccbuscc.org/nab/bible/deuteronomy/deu
There's a large but quiet (since we do not have an agenda) following of Biblical hermeneutics. Roughly (since the Wikipedia article uses a lot of terminology which would be unfamiliar to those not in serious religious study - even I don't understand some of what it says, but after explaining my beliefs to someone who does, they informed me that I belong in this category) interpretation of religious texts within the framework of modern knowledge. As an example, from the wikipedia article:
It's unfortunate, because I as a modern Christian, who believes both the Bible and also science (I do not see them as excluding each other in any sense; things like the creation myth are not literal truth but rather essential truth) get grouped together with and labeled with the group commonly called Christian Fundamentalists. And hatred is exacted on me because others do not understand me. And even those Fundamentalist Christians do not deserve the hatred that is leveled against them each day. It is contrary to the spirit of tolerance preached by some of the same individuals who spew this hatred. Don't hate people based on their sexual orientation, their race, or even their religion. Unless they're Christian.
The big question on my mind is: If you don't believe in this, why do you care? They're not funding it with taxpayer dollars, they're funding it on donations. If people want to spend their money on something, why is it anyone's business but their own?
I think people are idiots for paying thousands of dollars for a console on Ebay that they could buy in a store in another month for a couple hundred dollars. However I'm not writing an opinion piece on Slashdot, presenting it as news, and inciting a lot of community anger at a group of people just because I don't agree with their priorities.
When a public school has a school trip to it, then it's cause for news. Until then this is no bigger news than the construction of a really big church. And anyone who finds themselves being angry at these people (which is the general tone of this entire discussion) for spending their money in this way needs to take a step back and examine where their hate comes from, because such attitudes are bigotry, even if (especially if) you don't agree with it.
Last I checked, freedom of religion was still a constitutional right, and this is no more than exercise of that right. And as a personal disclaimer, I'm a non-creationist Christian (yes, we exist). I think this is exactly as much of a shame as the hype and zealotry over console releases, but it's their money to do with as they will.
The kind of stats you can get from awk & sed with a couple of hours of free time could be useful when you want to know some very specific things (such as "How many times was this file downloaded in the last two weeks") and already know the general shape of your data (eg, what pages are in your site).
This would not give you statistics that are probably a lot more important, such as:
o Conversion rates for your advertising (are we getting more out of advertising with company X than we pay for it?)
o What your site's abandonment points are (are users getting too confused by a certain page and switching to someone else?)
o What part of the world your users are coming from (maybe a German translation of your site would double your income)
o What times of day are most active (schedule your downtime for the slowest point)
o What is the trend of visits, vs the trend of hits, vs the trend of users (visits increasing faster than users means your users are finding your site to be of progressively more value, etc)
o How did this week compare to last week? How about this week to two weeks ago? How about this week to last year's Christmas season, whose logs you no longer have?
All of this can be done without needing to know sed, awk, or even have a staff member who can do this. That's great because when your marketing guys want random stats such as this 6-10 times a day, your "one good staff member" can focus instead on creating new content.
Especially when you get into multidimensional traffic forecasting, your ability to discover some of this stuff with even a few weeks of development time can get pretty limited. Forecasting is important because it can point out areas where you're slowing down so that you can reinvigorate them before they become a liability.
Finally when you have 200 clients (like the author of this article), stats packages mean you can give your users their stats any time of a day or night for a lot less overall expense (200 people asking for some statistic once a week means you give up one or more full time developers, when the stats package could have satisfied this with a better response time for a lot less money).
In a manner of speaking, yes. I'm guessing they're using the hosted version of Livestats, so if they stop support, they are probably also taking down the hosted servers. The full non-hosted version is substantially more expensive (but cheaper if you do millions of hits a day like we do here).
IANARS, but Newton tells us that giving the debris a small boost toward Earth would add the same momentum to them in the opposite direction. Meaning that this would interfere with their orbit a bit, which would have to be corrected with thrusters (though they could probably also time their debris ejection with a time that they need outward thrust to maintain their orbit anyway).
Even still, terminal velocity would be reached on this trash before it had entered very far into the atmosphere. By Nasa's space debris FAQ page, this debris could then remain in orbit anywhere from a year to decades (depending on how much thrust they applied to it). They want to minimize the amount of debris they eject in general just because all of it is a liability until it actually descends far enough into the atmosphere to pick up enough speed and friction to burn up. Even then they record an average of one piece of debris striking terra firma every day. Most strikes the oceans or some of the wide open spaces (such as Canadian tundra), but it would not be good for someone's home to be crushed by descended orbital debris.
Most of this info is gleaned from Nasa's space debris pages. They're a bit smarter than me =).
Believe it or not, language is not that big of a factor in whether you like your job. As proof, I offer that I've been working 2.5 years in a ColdFusion job, and while the language feels like I'm trying to perform surgery with rusty tools, the work is interesting and challenging.
Here's a few questions, and my advice based on their answers:
1) Are you young? Take the higher paying job and work like mad for 5 years while living like a pauper (small apartment, used car which you paid cash for, but wide broadband and good computer). Your time in the cubicle farm will be rewarded with getting home and being able to go frag someone. You'll either pay off all your debt, develop a huge savings, or some combination thereof. This will establish the financial stability today which can permit you a lot more freedom in your job choice in a few years. This is the path I'm going, and I'll have my mortgage paid off 3 years from now (5 years after I opened it).
2) Are you willing to relocate? If not, you do NOT want that Perl job no matter how good it looks. 2.5-3 hours of driving a day will sap way more of your life than working in a corporate environment. Every single day you will arrive at work tired, and every single night you will get home exhausted. I drive 1.5 hours now, and this is absolutely my upper limit. Something most folks don't really think about is that they get errands done during the week, which I don't have time for even with my (short compared to yours) drive. That means my weekends get sapped up getting stuff done which most people get done during the week. Opportunities for relaxation become few and far between. During the week you'll get home from work and just crash on the couch until you fall asleep, exhausted. My drive takes more out of me than my work day does, by a long shot.
3) Do you have a wife and/or kids? You're going to want to take the job which provides sufficient financial stability, while giving you the most time with them. If not, refer again to question 1.
4) How many hours are generally worked by the employees of each location? I've seen small companies which generally work 40 hours and no more, and I've seen big companies which are this way. Also I've seen small companies which expect each person to put in 70-80 hours, and I've seen big companies which expect each project to meet its deadline no matter how unreasonable. Total amount of free personal time is way more important than how much you like the work you're doing.
5) How busy are the people at each place? Too busy as in #4 is bad, but too slow is just as bad. Nothing is worse than trying to muddle through another work day with nothing to do, and nothing interesting to keep your mind occupied, while you surf work-friendly sites such as Slashdot, and hope your web usage doesn't get high enough to raise eyebrows. This will actually lead to a state of mental apathy which is very hard to shake, and which can seriously cripple your career for years. We've had people like this, and have had to get rid of them because we could never depend on them to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time even though once upon a time they were firecracker developers. 3 or 4 years in a job like this can ruin a developer, sometimes forever.
I hope these thoughts help. Largely they're based on my own personal experience, but to some extent they're also based on having been a developer manager for a firm which contracts most of our people out to other companies (hence my experience with point 5).
If this is true, then they should just keep cutting taxes and making more and more money!
Hyperbole aside, cutting taxes does stimulate economic development for a net gain only in a downward facing economy. It does increase government revenue in the mid term, but not as much as higher taxes in an upward facing economy. The principle is exactly the same as the one the Fed uses to decide on interest rates.
Substantial economic change, whether positive or negative, is unhealthy for the economy. Even healthy economies need brief periods of recession as check points. The longer you have unmitigated growth, the longer the necessary eventual recession. Short growth, shorter recession, repeat - this is the path to the healthiest long term economy.
Whenever you cut taxes, you eventually have to raise them again. The income that lower taxes ultimately generates for the government diminishes over time. A smart government raises taxes during economic growth to slow it down (and thus shorten the eventual recession), and lowers taxes during recession (to speed recovery).
What we see in the US is the republicans repeatedly expending this economic governance tool, and the democrats having to reset it again since the economy requires it.
It's ultimately the company's decision whether they report it to their customers or not. Especially as a contractor to the compromised company, you have no authority or right to disclose anything that the company doesn't want you to.
Unless of course you suspect something illegal is being done by the company (eg criminal withholding of proper disclosure), in which case you should:
1) Hire a lawyer today (maybe yesterday)
2) As mentioned repeatedly, document everything, and make sure you notified the correct channels in the company (corporate compliance, or if they're not large enough to have such a department, at least the head of the division, and failing the existence of one of them, the owner/ceo/president)
3) Contact law enforcement to describe the nature of the situation, why you think something illegal might be going on, and ask them what to do next.
But if the person who owns the patents distributes or sanctions the distribution under the GPL of code which is covered by the patents, they are therefore agreeing to be bound by the terms of the GPL, and their patent offers that company no protection (as defined by patent law) for that patent as it applies to any derivative works thereof.
There's also a difference between being addicted and having a problem. Technically true alcoholics are addicted even when they're on the wagon. But they don't let it be a problem, and that's a key distinction, and I think it's one most people here on Slashdot are missing. You can be addicted to something without having a problem; and if it's not a problem, it does not necessarily even merit treatment.
Alcohol, unlike the Internet, can be damaging even if you only drink by yourself, don't physically injure yourself, don't drive, don't let it affect your life, and are completely sober before you leave the house again. Excessive use of it has physical ramifications such as liver damage. Thus, closet alcoholics can have a problem even when they're able to keep it from affecting anyone else.
The same thing is not true of the Internet; if you go home and spend 8 hours surfing the web every night, but still show up to work on time, and manage to not let your health go to pot, then you might be addicted, but without a problem. [[Tangent: is it worse to spend 8 hours surfing the web a night than 8 hours watching TV? I think surfing is a better habit than watching TV, because surfing is more mentally active, and with TV you just let the TV do your thinking for you.]] Basically what I'm saying is that the level of addiction and involvement for a web addiction to become a problem is substantially higher than for alcoholism. I think this is what most people here are intuiting, but are mistakenly expressing as if there's no such thing as Internet addiction, or that it's not as prevalent as might be suggested in the article.
That said, there is such a thing as Internet addicts with a problem, I've witnessed it first hand (follow the link for a description of this). It becomes a problem when it starts to negatively affect your relationships with other people; including and especially your spouse, kids, or job. I'd wager that Internet addiction rates are higher when it involves a fantasy world in some way (typically online gaming, though probably things like porn addiction fall into this category as well).
So because alcohol addiction can come from several sources (some people have a chemical addiction, some have a psychological addiction, some have both) while Internet addiction would only come from a psychological one, your chances of getting addicted to alcohol should be higher and potentially more severe. And because of their nature, the threshold of this addiction becoming a problem would be way lower for alcoholism (whose effects cannot be turned off with a switch, and lead to things like drunk driving, hangovers for work, and drunken rages) than it is for Internet addiction.
My project (a web based game; see my user profile) sees about 40,000 users every day across the globe. Right now our operational costs (two dedicated servers w/ substantial bandwidth) are 100% funded (and well in the black) by user donations.
To me, this makes the project a success, and demonstrates clearly that there's a real market for such a project, as users are of their own free will willing to support it wholly.
Real life gets in the way of me being able to dedicate the same level of devotion that I used to be able to give the project, but I personally am confident that if we had funding that enabled us to hire just one or two developers and purchase some additional equipment, the project could take off like a rocket. We have a huge list of ideas for improvement -- things that we simply don't have the time to successfully realize today, but which we could if it was our job.
So my question is, what would you recommend we do to seriously pursue getting real funding. How do we first find someone that is not turned off by the idea of an open source model, and second will actually listen to our proposed business plan? When talking to them, what sort of things are they looking for that demonstrates that we're serious, willing to work hard, and aren't just looking for a free ride to tinker around on code?
In college I ran a CounterStrike server for the campus LAN. Turned out to be popular as it was the only one on campus that was up 24x7. Everyone had fixed IP's, and so I wrote a log parser that tracked individual accomplishments and put them up on a web page. Because my player base was limited to a total of 20-30 regular players, and probably 60 overall, I even went so far as to track how you fared against each other player (times killed by vs times killed), what weapons you preferred, what weapons you had success with against what other player, etc. Because of the fixed IP's, I even was able to track accomplishments by individual, not just your screen name.
Anyhow, this turned out to be a huge hit, solidified my server as the on-campus server, and completely and utterly ruined gameplay.
Everyone turned into campers, everyone wanted all the kills, noone worked as a team. After a month, and this trend getting worse and worse (as people put more and more value in the scores page), my "competetor servers" were putting up their own log parsers, and I took mine down, citing the loss of fun gameplay. This actually further cemented my place as the campus server. By this point, my dedicated players all recognized that this ruined the gameplay, but they were not willing to ignore the statistics as long as they were available. By now they became more willing to play on a server without persistant statistics than they were on a server w/ them.
All in all it turned into a fairly interesting study on human behavior.
This does bypass the DRM. This does get around the DRM. This does avoid the DRM. This does defeat the DRM.
How exactly is this not circumvention? The fact that it captures the unencrypted stream out of memory, or that it uses iTunes' own decryption in the process doesn't affect its status as a circumvention tool. It explicitly and by purpose is a tool you stick DRM in one side, and get non-DRM out the other side; that qualifies. iTunes qualifies as circumvention too, except the statute exempts DRM circumvention w/ permission of the copyright owner (which iTunes has).
Don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of the tool, but any first year lawyer would be able to make this statute stick against this tool. I'm glad that someone's pulling it from the memory stream, because this proves that no matter how complex and "fool proof" you make DRM, at some point you need to decrypt it, and at that point (and ideally as close to the end of the decryption as possible), it exists someplace that it can be captured.
We piss in all your bath water.
If it means not taking any baths, well, you do have that choice. You might not like the sacrifice it'd entail, but don't complain about having no choice.
What about something as simple as wanting to play it in the audio software of my choice? Personally I like MixMeister Pro, it's DJ software, and gives me the kind of control I want in a music player (which iTunes is lacking).
iTunes DRM is purposeful incompatibility designed into the codec. Frankly, unless Apple opens this format for others to implement on non-Apple hardware/software, shortly they're going to start risking wandering into antitrust territory, as they become the vast majority player in the market. Other companies have been burned for purposely taking great lengths to make their dominant product incompatible with competetor's products in order to lock their customers in. This is no different other than that Apple is a broker and not a producer.
It is still a DRM circumvention tool, and so still illegal in the US (not that I agree it should be, just pointing out the legal facts).
Moderation should wholly be determined by how good a comment is, not whether the moderator agrees with the comment. If it's a discussion about religion, then a comment that defends religion in a fashion that the moderator hadn't heard before is insightful or informative, and should be moderated as such.
Moderation isn't selective idea voting, its comment quality voting. Moderation should bring forth and hilight the opposing viewpoints rather than crushing the less popular viewpoint. This is why the categories are things like "Interesting, Insightful, Informative" rather than "Agree, Disagree."
My camera doesn't charge off the cable, this is not an average consumer grade camera, it's a Nikon D70s. And I went home and checked: my camera's manual specifically states that it does not require a powered USB port to connect. OSX reports that it does, all other OS's do not. You tell me where the bug is: either my camera manufacturer, Linux, and Microsoft are all wrong, or OSX is. Occam's Razor.
Fair enough. I forgot about standard audio cables. I use optical out at home (only fits in one port, like the rest of the cables), and don't have any speakers connected to my mini.
Yep, they're there, but almost anything other than the mouse that I plug into it, it won't interface with, citing a need for this device to be plugged into a powered USB port (the ones on the keyboard aren't powered). This includes devices which provide their own power, like my digital camera, and which don't need to be plugged into a powered port when I'm running Ubuntu on the same machine.
Specifically because, and I'll quote my original post which you also graciously quoted, "I didn't want to drop $120 on a keyboard & mouse for a $450 computer."