It's too late for them to even try to monetize Android as attempting to charge for it will just drive their hardware partners down the same path as Amazon or towards other platforms like Ubuntu, Firefox OS, Windows Phone, Tizen, etc. That would be bad for Google as it might mean that fewer people use their services, which means fewer ad views, which means less revenue. I can't imagine that some of their hardware partners are overly thrilled that they've started selling Nexus devices at close to cost and have further eroded their profit margins, so some might be fine with testing other waters if Google wanted to start charging for the OS.
If you don't want your brand tarnished, you would deny the accusations. You might not care about dogs at all, but if you were accused to kicking them out of meanness on a regular basis, you'd likely deny doing it. How much you care about something is largely irrelevant when it comes to dealing with accusations of misconduct, whether they're true or false.
That would make it far too obvious. What they were likely hoping to do is get the trades in as close to the borderline as possible, at which point in time there's no way to prove that they're not legitimate.
The said thing is that this study ever had to be conducted in the first place.
I wouldn't call it sad. There's a lot of "common knowledge" that has turned out to be bullshit.
I think it's a good thing that this study was conducted. It shows that someone was willing to approach the problem from a scientific perspective rather than to either blame or sanctify video games based on an emotional response. This isn't the first study to suggest that video games do not result in violent behavior, but part of science is also replicating results.
You can use 1,000 people if you're sure that they're representative of the population as a whole. For example, no one would accept a presidential poll as reliable if the 1,000 people polled all happened to be people exiting out of the building where they just held party X's national convention.
You can also throw off the results with a leading question or other shenanigans. If you phrase the question as preventing dangerous weapons from being made or talk about infringing someone's freedom, you're going to see vastly different results. Hell, if you put enough space between the two questions, you could probably get the same people to answer differently each time without realizing it.
So how good is this poll? Are the methodologies available so that I might repeat it?
What reason do you possibly have to look at another person's medical history unless you are a physician or are put into a situation where you have to make medical decisions for another person? It's one thing to decide to share something if you feel it might be beneficial to help raise awareness (see Angelina Jolie) or if you're in an important position where people might have money riding on your health (see Steve Jobs or Larry Page) and a case could be made for ascertaining that you are healthy, but otherwise, there's no good reason.
I don't want to come off as some tin-foil hat wearing nut-job, but one can't help making a connection between Google wanting to know as much information as possible about a person to influence search results and Page's comments.
I just think there's no good reason to open up if people don't want to. There are a lot of things that could be stigmatizing in a person's medical history and open them all to all kinds of forms of discrimination outside of being able to get health insurance. Things as simple as "Oh, you had an abortion once. You're not welcome here."
And for what it's worth, I'd like to see better privacy laws in place. The kind of data that companies are so easily able to gather these days is getting out of hand is probably going to lead to an entirely new set of problems in the future. For example, it's already been proven possible to out a gay person by analyzing their friends on social networks. If the world were a better place that wouldn't be a big deal, but it isn't. I'm reminded a short story where information gathering becomes so sophisticated that computers are able to generate targeted ads to influence a person in a single regard:
“Push combs the online footprint of our targets to determine everything we can about them,” said Yaroslava. “We use social networks, we use search histories, we use cell phone data, we use gaming protocols. All data is useful to us. Not only do we find out exactly what our target likes to consume, but we also find out how they like to consume it. We see how they browse to determine their specific attention spans and intelligence. We scan their pornography habits to learn about their libido, their obsessions, and their fears. We aggregate vast amounts of data about the way they use the internet to create a complete psychological profile of our targets, and then we use cognitive behavioral techniques to triangulate patterns in this profile. We make as robust a model of their operating intelligence as we possibly can. And then we make little movies meant only for our specific subjects. We make movies designed to steer them toward our products, whatever these products may be. These movies are designed to make each subject breathless, pliant, confused, over-stimulated, and highly amenable to suggestion.”
They're a game developer. There probably aren't going to be a lot of women or ethnic minorities working their just because the industry is still pretty heavily slanted towards white males.
This is a poor example. It assumes that Bill does't already have a phone and isn't buying minutes already. Unless Bill has been living under a rock or is so opposed to buying his own phone which can still be had for cheap, he already has a phone and is buying service from someone. In that case, getting a newer, shinier phone doesn't give anyone additional value outside of the thief. If Bill is poor or on hard times, he's not going to be doing business with a major carrier, so they won't get Bill's business anyway. If Bill is still the kind of person without a phone, it's likely he doesn't want one at all. The upfront cost to get a basic phone is next to nothing compared to the long term cost of the service, even with the providers who aren't trying to bend you over backwards.
Arrington is an asshole, but he hasn't pissed off as many people. Bill Gates probably wouldn't get nearly as much support, although some people still might try to look past his history at Microsoft. However, I think if it happened to someone like Rupert Murdoch, Darl McBride, etc. you'd at most get some posts saying that while the government shouldn't act this way, they couldn't have picked a bigger dickhead to harass.
You can even go the other way as well. If this happened to someone who was almost universally loved like Linus or Woz, almost no one would even try to take the governments side.
I don't even think that Microsoft cares about the ruling. They just want to screw over Google in any way that they possibly can. If the sides were flipped, Microsoft would change their argument. It's all about making Android as expensive as possible so that the third party handset manufacturers dump it in favor of Windows Phone.
No matter where you are, there's going to be something less than ideal. Want to have some guy who's the best in the world specializes in only doing a single procedure that's horrendously expensive? Go to the U.S. Want good care that you might have to wait a while for, but won't bankrupt you in the process? Go to Europe. Want something good, cheap, and not available in the U.S. or Europe? Try Mexico or Asia.
If you've got enough money you can always get what you want.
I don't know if that's quite true. I live in a small state and there's very little campaigning ever done here. Why? Same reason that there's not a lot of campaigning done in other states: it's pretty much a given that no matter who runs under the Republican ticket, they'll get the most votes here. Kind of like how it really doesn't matter in California and New York, because they're going to go to the Democrats. Why bother campaigning beyond a token appearance when everyone already knows that baring any major scandals, the results are practically a given. So really, it's just the states that have early primaries or the swing states that get the most attention.
Also the system was originally designed in such a way so that the larger, more populous states wouldn't have too strong of an influence over the federal government.
Why does the government need to directly employ these people? There's nothing stopping them from being a private company contracted to do a job. In fact, it would make little sense for the government to employ them full time unless it had plenty of other projects that needed doing. Otherwise once they've done a job, there's no more work, so either they need to be fired or they just get stuck with some busy work that's not terribly useful.
I think that the OP's point was that these projects aren't actually that difficult. It's just that the companies that get hired to do them are either incompetent or have no real interest in actually making a successful project. Since it's on the government dime, the people that they're working for don't have a lot of actual skin in the game. Sure they want the system overhauled, but if it doesn't work out, the actual representatives in government who allocated the money for it really couldn't care as it wasn't their money that was being spent.
It still works on some level though, otherwise they wouldn't bother doing it. Same reason there's still loads of spam. You don't need 50 million people to buy what you're selling. Just over the cost is fine, and anything beyond that is gravy. The market is relatively free, so it's going to tend towards equilibrium. So baring any external forces (e.g. government regulations) or some other massive change in the market, advertising isn't going to go away. At least there're things like ad block on the internet. Prior to DVRs there wasn't a good way to get around advertising on TV or the radio. Even if you left the room while it was on, it still ate into the program schedule. Even if you don't block ads on the web, they're by and large less obtrusive than what we had before.
How is that even possible. Walk into any Verizon, Sprint, ect. store and there are dozens of other smart phones on displays. In some cases, the store employees might be trying to push some other phone (e.g. Nokia phone with Windows Phone) because they get some commission on it. Do they not watch any television or consume any media with advertisements? I've seen more ads for Samsung Galaxy phones or Verizon Droid phones than I have ads for the iPhone. Do these people not have friends with smartphones other than an iPhone. The last time I was out with friends, at least everyone had their phone out a some point, and it's pretty obvious that not every smart phone is an iPhone.
So who are these people and what kind of rock do they live under? There's no possible way for an average person to not be aware that there are other phones.
Maybe that's true for a lot of city schools where there are constant budget problems or other issues with having these things, but I went to school in a small town and just last year they actually expanded from just having a wood shop to having a metal shop and adding a course for high school students to work on motors and a few other things that they didn't have when I was still in school. We had chemistry lab (and biology) labs when I was in high school, where we worked on experiments that needed to be done under a fume hood, and after I graduated the school had made a new lab with more equipment. While there wasn't a rifle club, we did have hunter's safety in grade school. The teacher brought in guns and made sure that everyone knew how to handle them properly and understood that they were not toys and not something to ever goof around with.
While this may be true for a lot of schools now, I don't think that it's true for all of them. While some are running, others are actually improving education in those areas.
It isn't now. Any complete gun made by a 3D printer is probably going to be good for a single use, and that's assuming it doesn't hurt the person using it worse than their target. However, in 20 years I wouldn't be surprised if it's possible to 3D print a weapon good enough for multiple uses before failure. We're going to need new laws at that point, because even a blanket ban on guns isn't going to stop people from making them.
It's bad because much like you can have a computer program randomly combine letters, numbers, and symbols to generate a password, you can simply have the same program combine dictionary words together. There are hundreds of thousands of words in the English language, which would make the number of combinations quite large, but most of those words aren't commonly used so you could ignore them. If you had people generate a four word pass phrase, it's quite likely that most of them would contain only words from a relatively small subset of the English language.
When I use pass-phrases, I make sure to include some capital letters, numbers, and symbols. This makes it almost impossible to brute force. So for example, 2Correcthorse4batteryStapple! would be a much more secure password, that really isn't any more difficult to remember. It's only using 7 symbols, which makes it fairly easy to remember. Once you type it enough, muscle memory will allow you to enter it without too much issue.
You could make it even more complex by using slang words, words from other languages, proper nouns, or other such words.
This doesn't mean bloggers and tech reporters are stupid. I might even posit that opposite. Most of them exist to generate clicks. The mistake is in thinking that they're actually journalists. They're not. Their entire purpose is to churn out whatever will get the general populace to click through to the article. There's no careful research, no time spent to uncover the truth, no objectivity; it's all about getting ad impressions. And it really doesn't matter that it's crap because it's what most of the competition is doing and the real journalists aren't generate enough revenue because a well written story isn't as good as a quickly written story.
Hardware isn't good enough anymore. Almost everyone is using the same off-the-shelf parts and in some cases, the field (TI isn't selling OMAP SoCs any more) is growing smaller. It's made worse by the fact that there's one company (Samsung) that can make most of their own hardware and edge everyone else out on margins if they want. We can already see this happening as outside of Samsung, other handset manufacturers are barely profitable if at all.
Eventually Chinese manufacturers will be able to undercut Samsung, so they need to find a long-term solution to differentiate their product. The only other way to go is software. Any custom experience for Android that you can only get on Samsung just serves as a way to lock-in customers. Honestly, I'm not surprised that they haven't started their own app store by now. If they can get to a position of supreme dominance they can even start charging Google to put their Google apps on phones.
Samsung needs to be in a position where they can control as much of their own destiny as possible. Having to rely on Google for all of the software experience (that also is made available to all of their competitors) isn't a good proposition for them as a company. They need to have as much leverage and control over that as possible, and now that they're far and away the leading Android manufacturer, they're in a position to flex their muscles a little.
Should probably get high all of the time too, as apparently it makes time seem to pass more slowly. Then again I don't know how miserable you can be when you're always stoned, so it probably offsets any gains.
Do you maintain your own code? If it's as bad as you say it is, it shouldn't take much to convince everyone to improve the quality. Otherwise, try to start small. See if there's a really tiny project where you can try to implement some good practices. Make sure you document your process, and record some basic metrics (e.g. time spend developing, defect density, time spent fixing said defects, . Once you've done that, compare it to some of the other projects that have been done. If the results are good, you'll have a lot easier time selling it to management and to the rest of the team. And don't expect things to change overnight either. Successfully implementing change is a process unto itself and something that can take a while to do correctly.
Probably because there was nothing stopping anyone from scanning a printed copy of the rulebook or module, converting it to a PDF, and then putting it online. Google even has an auto-complete option for PDF when I just typed in "dungeons and dragons 2nd edition" and wouldn't you know, the second link is to a torrent, and there are several other links within the top ten results to file sharing sites or other torrent sites.
Some people are going to pirate no matter what you do. However, there are a lot who will gladly pay if you give them to opportunity to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
It's too late for them to even try to monetize Android as attempting to charge for it will just drive their hardware partners down the same path as Amazon or towards other platforms like Ubuntu, Firefox OS, Windows Phone, Tizen, etc. That would be bad for Google as it might mean that fewer people use their services, which means fewer ad views, which means less revenue. I can't imagine that some of their hardware partners are overly thrilled that they've started selling Nexus devices at close to cost and have further eroded their profit margins, so some might be fine with testing other waters if Google wanted to start charging for the OS.
If you don't want your brand tarnished, you would deny the accusations. You might not care about dogs at all, but if you were accused to kicking them out of meanness on a regular basis, you'd likely deny doing it. How much you care about something is largely irrelevant when it comes to dealing with accusations of misconduct, whether they're true or false.
Where did you buy it from that you paid that much? I bought a 2GB 7850 over a year ago for around that price.
That would make it far too obvious. What they were likely hoping to do is get the trades in as close to the borderline as possible, at which point in time there's no way to prove that they're not legitimate.
The said thing is that this study ever had to be conducted in the first place.
I wouldn't call it sad. There's a lot of "common knowledge" that has turned out to be bullshit.
I think it's a good thing that this study was conducted. It shows that someone was willing to approach the problem from a scientific perspective rather than to either blame or sanctify video games based on an emotional response. This isn't the first study to suggest that video games do not result in violent behavior, but part of science is also replicating results.
You can use 1,000 people if you're sure that they're representative of the population as a whole. For example, no one would accept a presidential poll as reliable if the 1,000 people polled all happened to be people exiting out of the building where they just held party X's national convention.
You can also throw off the results with a leading question or other shenanigans. If you phrase the question as preventing dangerous weapons from being made or talk about infringing someone's freedom, you're going to see vastly different results. Hell, if you put enough space between the two questions, you could probably get the same people to answer differently each time without realizing it.
So how good is this poll? Are the methodologies available so that I might repeat it?
I don't want to come off as some tin-foil hat wearing nut-job, but one can't help making a connection between Google wanting to know as much information as possible about a person to influence search results and Page's comments.
I just think there's no good reason to open up if people don't want to. There are a lot of things that could be stigmatizing in a person's medical history and open them all to all kinds of forms of discrimination outside of being able to get health insurance. Things as simple as "Oh, you had an abortion once. You're not welcome here."
And for what it's worth, I'd like to see better privacy laws in place. The kind of data that companies are so easily able to gather these days is getting out of hand is probably going to lead to an entirely new set of problems in the future. For example, it's already been proven possible to out a gay person by analyzing their friends on social networks. If the world were a better place that wouldn't be a big deal, but it isn't. I'm reminded a short story where information gathering becomes so sophisticated that computers are able to generate targeted ads to influence a person in a single regard:
“Push combs the online footprint of our targets to determine everything we can about them,” said Yaroslava. “We use social networks, we use search histories, we use cell phone data, we use gaming protocols. All data is useful to us. Not only do we find out exactly what our target likes to consume, but we also find out how they like to consume it. We see how they browse to determine their specific attention spans and intelligence. We scan their pornography habits to learn about their libido, their obsessions, and their fears. We aggregate vast amounts of data about the way they use the internet to create a complete psychological profile of our targets, and then we use cognitive behavioral techniques to triangulate patterns in this profile. We make as robust a model of their operating intelligence as we possibly can. And then we make little movies meant only for our specific subjects. We make movies designed to steer them toward our products, whatever these products may be. These movies are designed to make each subject breathless, pliant, confused, over-stimulated, and highly amenable to suggestion.”
They're a game developer. There probably aren't going to be a lot of women or ethnic minorities working their just because the industry is still pretty heavily slanted towards white males.
This is a poor example. It assumes that Bill does't already have a phone and isn't buying minutes already. Unless Bill has been living under a rock or is so opposed to buying his own phone which can still be had for cheap, he already has a phone and is buying service from someone. In that case, getting a newer, shinier phone doesn't give anyone additional value outside of the thief. If Bill is poor or on hard times, he's not going to be doing business with a major carrier, so they won't get Bill's business anyway. If Bill is still the kind of person without a phone, it's likely he doesn't want one at all. The upfront cost to get a basic phone is next to nothing compared to the long term cost of the service, even with the providers who aren't trying to bend you over backwards.
Depends on the rich guy.
Arrington is an asshole, but he hasn't pissed off as many people. Bill Gates probably wouldn't get nearly as much support, although some people still might try to look past his history at Microsoft. However, I think if it happened to someone like Rupert Murdoch, Darl McBride, etc. you'd at most get some posts saying that while the government shouldn't act this way, they couldn't have picked a bigger dickhead to harass.
You can even go the other way as well. If this happened to someone who was almost universally loved like Linus or Woz, almost no one would even try to take the governments side.
I don't even think that Microsoft cares about the ruling. They just want to screw over Google in any way that they possibly can. If the sides were flipped, Microsoft would change their argument. It's all about making Android as expensive as possible so that the third party handset manufacturers dump it in favor of Windows Phone.
No matter where you are, there's going to be something less than ideal. Want to have some guy who's the best in the world specializes in only doing a single procedure that's horrendously expensive? Go to the U.S. Want good care that you might have to wait a while for, but won't bankrupt you in the process? Go to Europe. Want something good, cheap, and not available in the U.S. or Europe? Try Mexico or Asia.
If you've got enough money you can always get what you want.
I don't know if that's quite true. I live in a small state and there's very little campaigning ever done here. Why? Same reason that there's not a lot of campaigning done in other states: it's pretty much a given that no matter who runs under the Republican ticket, they'll get the most votes here. Kind of like how it really doesn't matter in California and New York, because they're going to go to the Democrats. Why bother campaigning beyond a token appearance when everyone already knows that baring any major scandals, the results are practically a given. So really, it's just the states that have early primaries or the swing states that get the most attention.
Also the system was originally designed in such a way so that the larger, more populous states wouldn't have too strong of an influence over the federal government.
Why does the government need to directly employ these people? There's nothing stopping them from being a private company contracted to do a job. In fact, it would make little sense for the government to employ them full time unless it had plenty of other projects that needed doing. Otherwise once they've done a job, there's no more work, so either they need to be fired or they just get stuck with some busy work that's not terribly useful.
I think that the OP's point was that these projects aren't actually that difficult. It's just that the companies that get hired to do them are either incompetent or have no real interest in actually making a successful project. Since it's on the government dime, the people that they're working for don't have a lot of actual skin in the game. Sure they want the system overhauled, but if it doesn't work out, the actual representatives in government who allocated the money for it really couldn't care as it wasn't their money that was being spent.
It still works on some level though, otherwise they wouldn't bother doing it. Same reason there's still loads of spam. You don't need 50 million people to buy what you're selling. Just over the cost is fine, and anything beyond that is gravy. The market is relatively free, so it's going to tend towards equilibrium. So baring any external forces (e.g. government regulations) or some other massive change in the market, advertising isn't going to go away. At least there're things like ad block on the internet. Prior to DVRs there wasn't a good way to get around advertising on TV or the radio. Even if you left the room while it was on, it still ate into the program schedule. Even if you don't block ads on the web, they're by and large less obtrusive than what we had before.
How is that even possible. Walk into any Verizon, Sprint, ect. store and there are dozens of other smart phones on displays. In some cases, the store employees might be trying to push some other phone (e.g. Nokia phone with Windows Phone) because they get some commission on it. Do they not watch any television or consume any media with advertisements? I've seen more ads for Samsung Galaxy phones or Verizon Droid phones than I have ads for the iPhone. Do these people not have friends with smartphones other than an iPhone. The last time I was out with friends, at least everyone had their phone out a some point, and it's pretty obvious that not every smart phone is an iPhone.
So who are these people and what kind of rock do they live under? There's no possible way for an average person to not be aware that there are other phones.
Maybe that's true for a lot of city schools where there are constant budget problems or other issues with having these things, but I went to school in a small town and just last year they actually expanded from just having a wood shop to having a metal shop and adding a course for high school students to work on motors and a few other things that they didn't have when I was still in school. We had chemistry lab (and biology) labs when I was in high school, where we worked on experiments that needed to be done under a fume hood, and after I graduated the school had made a new lab with more equipment. While there wasn't a rifle club, we did have hunter's safety in grade school. The teacher brought in guns and made sure that everyone knew how to handle them properly and understood that they were not toys and not something to ever goof around with.
While this may be true for a lot of schools now, I don't think that it's true for all of them. While some are running, others are actually improving education in those areas.
It isn't now. Any complete gun made by a 3D printer is probably going to be good for a single use, and that's assuming it doesn't hurt the person using it worse than their target. However, in 20 years I wouldn't be surprised if it's possible to 3D print a weapon good enough for multiple uses before failure. We're going to need new laws at that point, because even a blanket ban on guns isn't going to stop people from making them.
It's bad because much like you can have a computer program randomly combine letters, numbers, and symbols to generate a password, you can simply have the same program combine dictionary words together. There are hundreds of thousands of words in the English language, which would make the number of combinations quite large, but most of those words aren't commonly used so you could ignore them. If you had people generate a four word pass phrase, it's quite likely that most of them would contain only words from a relatively small subset of the English language.
When I use pass-phrases, I make sure to include some capital letters, numbers, and symbols. This makes it almost impossible to brute force. So for example, 2Correcthorse4batteryStapple! would be a much more secure password, that really isn't any more difficult to remember. It's only using 7 symbols, which makes it fairly easy to remember. Once you type it enough, muscle memory will allow you to enter it without too much issue.
You could make it even more complex by using slang words, words from other languages, proper nouns, or other such words.
This doesn't mean bloggers and tech reporters are stupid. I might even posit that opposite. Most of them exist to generate clicks. The mistake is in thinking that they're actually journalists. They're not. Their entire purpose is to churn out whatever will get the general populace to click through to the article. There's no careful research, no time spent to uncover the truth, no objectivity; it's all about getting ad impressions. And it really doesn't matter that it's crap because it's what most of the competition is doing and the real journalists aren't generate enough revenue because a well written story isn't as good as a quickly written story.
Hardware isn't good enough anymore. Almost everyone is using the same off-the-shelf parts and in some cases, the field (TI isn't selling OMAP SoCs any more) is growing smaller. It's made worse by the fact that there's one company (Samsung) that can make most of their own hardware and edge everyone else out on margins if they want. We can already see this happening as outside of Samsung, other handset manufacturers are barely profitable if at all.
Eventually Chinese manufacturers will be able to undercut Samsung, so they need to find a long-term solution to differentiate their product. The only other way to go is software. Any custom experience for Android that you can only get on Samsung just serves as a way to lock-in customers. Honestly, I'm not surprised that they haven't started their own app store by now. If they can get to a position of supreme dominance they can even start charging Google to put their Google apps on phones.
Samsung needs to be in a position where they can control as much of their own destiny as possible. Having to rely on Google for all of the software experience (that also is made available to all of their competitors) isn't a good proposition for them as a company. They need to have as much leverage and control over that as possible, and now that they're far and away the leading Android manufacturer, they're in a position to flex their muscles a little.
Should probably get high all of the time too, as apparently it makes time seem to pass more slowly. Then again I don't know how miserable you can be when you're always stoned, so it probably offsets any gains.
You're missing the last bit:
And those who can't teach, teach college.
Do you maintain your own code? If it's as bad as you say it is, it shouldn't take much to convince everyone to improve the quality. Otherwise, try to start small. See if there's a really tiny project where you can try to implement some good practices. Make sure you document your process, and record some basic metrics (e.g. time spend developing, defect density, time spent fixing said defects, . Once you've done that, compare it to some of the other projects that have been done. If the results are good, you'll have a lot easier time selling it to management and to the rest of the team. And don't expect things to change overnight either. Successfully implementing change is a process unto itself and something that can take a while to do correctly.
Probably because there was nothing stopping anyone from scanning a printed copy of the rulebook or module, converting it to a PDF, and then putting it online. Google even has an auto-complete option for PDF when I just typed in "dungeons and dragons 2nd edition" and wouldn't you know, the second link is to a torrent, and there are several other links within the top ten results to file sharing sites or other torrent sites.
Some people are going to pirate no matter what you do. However, there are a lot who will gladly pay if you give them to opportunity to do so.