Lets see. I can download a best-selling song for $0.99. I can download a best-selling app for $1.99. I can download a best-selling book for $19.99. Yeah, something's wrong there. At the very least, ebook prices should be closer to paperback prices than hardcover prices. Ideally they should be similar to song & app prices.
I've never understood why this gets thrown around as a measure of the quality of health care received, when there are tons of other factors that have much more of an affect on this (exercise, smoking, eating right, etc.).
But healthy living (exercise, smoking, eating right, etc.) is all a part of true health care, it's just not a part of critical health care. Health care dollars spent on prevention are far more effective than those spent on critical care.
Perhaps their motto should be "Smart phones for dumb people"? I'm only half joking. Traditional dumb phones are pretty much gone now, but there's still a huge market of people who want a phone that is "just a phone" but don't want to fiddle around with installing apps (maybe a few basic preinstalled apps like browser, email & scheduler). Unfortunately, it's also a market that's very price sensitive so I don't know how much money Nokia can make with that strategy (and in many parts of the world they'd be competing with Blackberry who also seem to have accidentally fallen into that market)
Anti-corporate "journalists" like Daisey and Michael Moore do irreparable damage to the causes they supposedly support by playing loose with the facts. If I were conspiracy minded, I might assume they were working for the very corporations they rail against.
I've read the entire bill, and as far as I can tell the only bad thing about it is the digital locks provision, which is just a small part.
But that's the evil brilliance of bill. That one little digital lock provision undermines everything else in the bill like a puppy-killing unicorn. Removing a "digital lock" (AKA DRM) is illegal EVEN IF you are doing it to create something that is otherwise legal under the other parts of the bill like time-shifting, format-shifting and yes even the noncommercial Star Wars re-edit (it's pretty hard to re-edit something without source material, and the Star Wars prequels have never been released in a non-DRM format).
What if someone there was going around saying that there was no point in looking for life on other planets and aggressively fighting spending money on searching because life arose on earth through the random process of evolution and the chance of it happening twice in the same solar system is infinitesimally small?
Keep in mind that in the US federal elections, voter turn-out is rarely more than 50% of eligible voters. This means either:
1) Stupid people don't vote and everything is OK.
2) Smart people don't vote (which makes you question how smart they really are).
3) Stupid people account for way more than 50% of the population (in which case your country is screwed anyway regardless of what kind of government it has).
That's not entirely true. They saw digital photography coming before most people did (they still have many of the original digital photography patents to show for it). They had digital cameras on the market while Canon and Nikon were still saying bits would never replace film, and Sony was still making cassette Walkmans. Their biggest problem was public perception rather than reality. People still saw them as a film company rather than a camera company.
This Sunday Times article is just the latest in a string of Rupert Murdoch media outlets (mostly the Wall Street Journal) posting exaggerated and questionably-researched stories about "hacking scandals" at large internet companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. The strategy seems to be to distract the public from real hacking scandals at News of the World and other Murdoch owned properties and make it appear that hacking is a normal activity for successful companies. What, you thought that scandal was old news? More detailscontinue to get out (despite Murdoch's attempts to cover it up).
The purpose of the blackout is raise awareness for the SOPA/PIPA issue among the general public who use websites like Wikipedia and Google but due to a lack of coverage in the mainstream press haven't heard much about the proposed legislation. I doubt any reader of Slashdot isn't already keenly aware of this issue.
I think the expectation of privacy is considerably different between submitting a query to a search engine and posting a message marked "PRIVATE" to a social network. A bit like the difference between making a call to 411 for directory assistance (where I expect the call may be recorded) and making a private telephone call (where I expect only the government to be able to record it, and only with a warrant, though perhaps I'm being a bit nostalgic in that regard).
Just like you could download any other browser on Windows.
But you couldn't uninstall IE because it was a "vital part of the OS" (at least until they were forced to). You could also install any office suite you wanted, but only MSOffice had access to hidden APIs that made it run at a decent speed (a huge advantage in the early days of Windoze). Despite all that (and plenty more), Microsoft ended up with a slap on the wrist that didn't even pay for a fraction of the costs the DOJ put into the investigation. I suspect Google will end up the same and once again the taxpayers will get the bill for some ambitious government lawyer's need to make a name for himself.
Every piece of code I've written professionally is the property of the company I wrote it for and covered by NDA's (or worse). I could show some Turbo Pascal MSDOS programs I wrote in school but that's hardly representative of my current abilities.
That's why they ask the publisher for an advance fee. And publisher are willing to pay it for a book with a guaranteed market. Also, only some schools enforce that rule.
While it's currently fashionable for Neo-cons to call themselves libertarians, the philosophy of Libertarianism actually covers everything from far-left anarchists to far-right objectivists.
You have to launch them or their replacements from somebody's territory which is going to a whole lot less countries than what you can stick ground stations in.
Actually international waters are the best place to launch a satellite from and are not in anyone's sovereign territory.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always called it the "number sign", but most voice mail systems refer to it as the "pound key" for some reason.
This is just the latest in a long line of punctuation-inspired architecture:
^ Pyramids
/ Leaning Tower of Pisa
~ Guggenheim Museum
|| World Trade Center
The Windows OS kernel is mostly in C with some assembly (just like Unix/Linux/BSD/OSX). The Windows GUI is mostly C++ (but so is KDE).
Lets see. I can download a best-selling song for $0.99. I can download a best-selling app for $1.99. I can download a best-selling book for $19.99. Yeah, something's wrong there. At the very least, ebook prices should be closer to paperback prices than hardcover prices. Ideally they should be similar to song & app prices.
But healthy living (exercise, smoking, eating right, etc.) is all a part of true health care, it's just not a part of critical health care. Health care dollars spent on prevention are far more effective than those spent on critical care.
The Mormons declare prior art. They've been baptizing ghosts into their "social network" for years.
Perhaps their motto should be "Smart phones for dumb people"? I'm only half joking. Traditional dumb phones are pretty much gone now, but there's still a huge market of people who want a phone that is "just a phone" but don't want to fiddle around with installing apps (maybe a few basic preinstalled apps like browser, email & scheduler). Unfortunately, it's also a market that's very price sensitive so I don't know how much money Nokia can make with that strategy (and in many parts of the world they'd be competing with Blackberry who also seem to have accidentally fallen into that market)
Anti-corporate "journalists" like Daisey and Michael Moore do irreparable damage to the causes they supposedly support by playing loose with the facts. If I were conspiracy minded, I might assume they were working for the very corporations they rail against.
But that's the evil brilliance of bill. That one little digital lock provision undermines everything else in the bill like a puppy-killing unicorn. Removing a "digital lock" (AKA DRM) is illegal EVEN IF you are doing it to create something that is otherwise legal under the other parts of the bill like time-shifting, format-shifting and yes even the noncommercial Star Wars re-edit (it's pretty hard to re-edit something without source material, and the Star Wars prequels have never been released in a non-DRM format).
What if someone there was going around saying that there was no point in looking for life on other planets and aggressively fighting spending money on searching because life arose on earth through the random process of evolution and the chance of it happening twice in the same solar system is infinitesimally small?
Keep in mind that in the US federal elections, voter turn-out is rarely more than 50% of eligible voters. This means either:
1) Stupid people don't vote and everything is OK.
2) Smart people don't vote (which makes you question how smart they really are).
3) Stupid people account for way more than 50% of the population (in which case your country is screwed anyway regardless of what kind of government it has).
That's not entirely true. They saw digital photography coming before most people did (they still have many of the original digital photography patents to show for it). They had digital cameras on the market while Canon and Nikon were still saying bits would never replace film, and Sony was still making cassette Walkmans. Their biggest problem was public perception rather than reality. People still saw them as a film company rather than a camera company.
This Sunday Times article is just the latest in a string of Rupert Murdoch media outlets (mostly the Wall Street Journal) posting exaggerated and questionably-researched stories about "hacking scandals" at large internet companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. The strategy seems to be to distract the public from real hacking scandals at News of the World and other Murdoch owned properties and make it appear that hacking is a normal activity for successful companies. What, you thought that scandal was old news? More details continue to get out (despite Murdoch's attempts to cover it up).
They tried to have a Best Western category, but they were sued by some hotel chain.
So instead of being like catching a bullet with a baseball mitt, it's like catching a bullet by shooting another bullet at it.
The purpose of the blackout is raise awareness for the SOPA/PIPA issue among the general public who use websites like Wikipedia and Google but due to a lack of coverage in the mainstream press haven't heard much about the proposed legislation. I doubt any reader of Slashdot isn't already keenly aware of this issue.
I think the expectation of privacy is considerably different between submitting a query to a search engine and posting a message marked "PRIVATE" to a social network. A bit like the difference between making a call to 411 for directory assistance (where I expect the call may be recorded) and making a private telephone call (where I expect only the government to be able to record it, and only with a warrant, though perhaps I'm being a bit nostalgic in that regard).
But you couldn't uninstall IE because it was a "vital part of the OS" (at least until they were forced to). You could also install any office suite you wanted, but only MSOffice had access to hidden APIs that made it run at a decent speed (a huge advantage in the early days of Windoze). Despite all that (and plenty more), Microsoft ended up with a slap on the wrist that didn't even pay for a fraction of the costs the DOJ put into the investigation. I suspect Google will end up the same and once again the taxpayers will get the bill for some ambitious government lawyer's need to make a name for himself.
Which means 16 days from now there will be a massive increase in the popularity of burqas among Iranian internet cafe users.
Every piece of code I've written professionally is the property of the company I wrote it for and covered by NDA's (or worse). I could show some Turbo Pascal MSDOS programs I wrote in school but that's hardly representative of my current abilities.
That's why they ask the publisher for an advance fee. And publisher are willing to pay it for a book with a guaranteed market. Also, only some schools enforce that rule.
If you discover this feature, an email gets sent to Homeland Security and you win a free plane ride to Gitmo.
While it's currently fashionable for Neo-cons to call themselves libertarians, the philosophy of Libertarianism actually covers everything from far-left anarchists to far-right objectivists.
Actually international waters are the best place to launch a satellite from and are not in anyone's sovereign territory.
Considering Skype is now owned by Microsoft who has absolutely no interest in promoting RIM's products, I'm hardly surprised.