But will anything really happen or will this just be another excuse for yet more surveillance of home computer usage?
The track record of the House of Lords hasn't been so good over the long run has it?
I would bet that if Lucas gains any traction great pressure will be brought to shut him up one way or another.
Unfortunately it's heading in the other direction. The statement was made in the context of a debate on the Digital Economy Bill, which is designed to make it easier to punish "copyright violators" (although, as numerous Lords have pointed out, they're actually just people accused of copyright violation), by making it easier to get information from ISPs and allowing copyright holders to have a user's internet connection shut off if they refuse to stop downloading (i.e. if the record company still has "evidence" after they have written to the user and threatened them). All in all, an absolutely disastrous bill.
*Shameless plug* If you agree and want to try to get answers from Mandelson, sign the DigitalWrong letter. This is going to be printed up on huge bits of card with all the messages people have left and presented to Lord Mandelson, since he doesn't bother replying to individual letters.
Another reason is weather. US weather has more extremes than Europe. There's a reason that all the early colonists from England died of tropical diseases.
This is only true if you're talking about extreme phenomena like tornadoes that are a problem for more than just cyclists. Europe is pretty big, especially if you interpret it as the bounds of the continental plate rather than the EU; there are plenty of places in Europe that get a lot of snow, and there are plenty of places that get very very hot. There are even places that get both, just like in the US. And, just like in the US, there are plenty of places that are not permanently either snowed-under or pushing 40 degrees C. I don't think anyone's suggesting that you use this in every single location at all times of year.
The US military is something like ten times larger than the next country's military spend for goodness sake. How about easing off on the military spend and using the money for peaceful exploration of space.
Do you really need a military budget that big?
And that works great until the developed world needs to use military force for something - whether it be terrorist-hunting in Afghanistan, peacekeeping in Eastern Europe, or defending ourselves from the territorially or ideologically motivated attacks that history has shown to be inevitable. Simply put, the sort of military victory that the public demands requires both extremely complex and expensive technology and for our ground troops to outnumber theirs wherever possible. This is incredibly expensive, and not a job that would be easy to divide up between other countries even if they were willing to take it on.
This is a bit off topic, but it's something that always strikes me when reading these sorts of discussions: is the political arena in America really this polarised? Never on Slashdot have I seen a post saying, for example, that Obama has a lot of good ideas but some bad ones, or that the Republicans' platform reflects a different ordering of priorities and not just brain-damage. All we get is
"Really, is any science offered by the Left Wing actually true?" "Blah blah blah... Obama isn't cleaning up anything. The guy is a stiff." "This is esp. true since the current monkeys ratings are in the toilet. " "This is to be expected from people that can't tell the difference between fact and fiction - i mean most Republicans think the Bible is true!" (All taken from comments near the top of this article...)
I've railed against self-defeating polarisation on Slashdot before, but this is a whole new level - please tell me it's only true on Slashdot and not of Americans in general!
I'm sorry if this sounds rude, but if there's one thing that irritates me about Slashdot it's people acting smug and superior when they have completely failed to understand what the parent said.
The GP was not saying that Disney wasn't a feudal system. What they were saying was that even if you took away all of Disney's power the politicians would still side with them because Disney is good for the economy and file sharers aren't.
Please, for goodness' sake, take some English lessons, improve your reading comprehension and try not to get on your high horse until you have some vague idea of what's going on around you.
Just to add to that - Russian people in general are extremely proud of their country's military power; most large Russian towns will have regular military parades, parks with military hardware for people to take their photo with, retired missiles and jet fighters on display beside main roads and so on. Spending a large portion of their GDP on their armed forces isn't seen as a frivolity or opposed by anything but a tiny minority of Russian citizens.
Compared to what? As the GP said, it's not unattractive and it doesn't consume ridiculous system resources. Plus, it works on Firefox with NoScript on Ubuntu, which is more than a lot of sites can boast.
At first glance, you can't tell what are links, and what is just plain text.
I count a total of 4 lines of plain text on the entire page, excluding the timestamps. Basically if you can see it you can click on it - and if you were wondering whether something was a link or not, mousing-over reveals it. Were you actually confused by this site, or is the complain just a relic of outdated Nielsen usability logic?
There are just about zero visual clues as to where you should go, what you should do, or what you should be reading. There seems to be no coherent logic to the layout, either [...]
It's a news site, and it has a list of news articles. The articles they judge most important are at the top with big pictures, the ones they consider less important are at the bottom without pictures. That is, undeniably, a "coherent logic", and it provides as much of a visual clue to where you can go as pretty much any other news site, or, indeed, contents page.
I use a couple dozen different computers for things, and if they can "track" "ME" from that, all the better. Additionally, there are other people who use the same computers that I do, and if they can sniff out who is browsing at what time, all the more power to them. I also use three different browsers on the same computer to browse various sites as well, because of how they are rendered and the speed of rendering.
Advertising companies don't need to be able to identify an individual in order for the data to be useful to them - if they can identify what sites the people that use your computer go to they can construct a demographic that is more useful to them than simply the average user of the site showing the adverts.
Put it this way: television companies can't tailor their adverts for specific viewers, but they still put significant effort into finding out information about those viewers. Why? Because the more precisely they can define the average viewer the more they can charge advertisers. Similarly, knowing the average user of your computer, while not as useful as knowing your exact tastes, is more than enough for them to want to track your computer's page views.
Perhaps more worryingly, unless your browsing habits are very similar it wouldn't take much to separate the different users of the computer. If you know what sites every computer visits you could say, for example, that computers that visit Slashdot are unlikely to visit mypinkpony.com - and you could infer, with a relatively high degree of confidence, that if a computer visits both of these sites it is likely that it has multiple users. Then, when the computer visits techreport.com you can ignore all but the sites that were visited shortly before or after visiting Slashdot, while treating sites like mypinkpony.com as a sign that the user has changed. Is it perfect? No, but it will allow you to reduce the noise significantly and build a fairly accurate picture of what to try to sell you.
Well, I'm not sure that there is a 100% correlation between writing "its" when you mean "it's" and not being able to communicate effectively; someone could be both eloquent and persuasive without having perfect grammar. The fact is, though, that it is used by recruiters because they have nothing but your application form to judge you on.
I know that is a lot of crap! I live in the uk and earn roughly £25K, prob about £35K?
Which one is it? £35k is over $55k, which would seem to vindicate the original poster's claim.
Also - and I offer this as friendly advice and in the knowledge that your Slashdot musings don't reflect on your worth as a human being - have you considered brushing up on your writing skills? Having recently been job hunting myself I can vouch for the fact that 95% of companies are looking for people with "good verbal and written communications skills"; in other words, people who can give a decent presentation and explain things clearly in writing. Differentiating between "you're" and your", "its" and "it's" may seem a very small thing, but it's a sign that recruiters will use - fairly or unfairly - to draw inferences about your communication skills. The difference between being stuck as a programmer or being bumped up to a higher-level and better-paid position could well be as simple as being able to demonstrate that you can write correctly.
Just my experience, please don't take it as a personal attack - I don't know anything about you after all - just a bit of general advice for the Slashdot crowd.
I still don't see where this is going - this strikes me as an attempt to move from theory to practice without considering the changes that implies.
Yes, it will halt in a significant manner. It will either say "I have discovered a template, here it is, you can use it to block spam" or it will say "I have not discovered a template, please send me more spam to analyse". There are only two possibilities, both of them significant.
and then the researchers discovered the Halting problem and pretended it didn't exist.
I don't quite see your point - the halting problem proves that you cannot create an algorithm that will tell whether an arbitrary program will ever halt. It has no significance for this particular program, since it would be trivial to ensure that it does halt.
In most CIS countries the police are corrupt. They have to be to survive, as their official pay is between 50 to 200 USD per month. And you need about 500 USD, so do the math...
I don't disagree with your overall assessment that the police are often corrupt, but the figures you give are a bit off - pay for a police officer in Russia starts at about 400 dollars a month (11,000 rubles), and outside Moscow you can certainly survive on that - when I was living there last year I could easily buy a day's worth of groceries for 100 rubles (~4 dollars), and I wasn't trying to save money - food grown domestically is just very cheap. And my rent was about 1000 rubles a month - ~$33.
Again, that's not to say that your overall assessment is wrong, just that the police aren't forced into poverty by their pay.
Question: I heard that the pay for police officers has increased. How much do police officers earn today?
Answer: According to a press study by MVD Russia, in December 2008 police officers' pay was as follows: Officers: [...] 16900 rubles. Constables and patrol officers [...] 11300 rubles.)
i didn't say google was dependent on mozilla. they do pay them $66 million though, so obviously having them there on the default home page is worth something wouldn't you say?
You said they could "subvert" Google.
Subvert: 1. to overthrow (something established or existing). 2. to cause the downfall, ruin, or destruction of.
So Mozilla are going to "indirectly overthrow or cause the downfall of Google" - I still don't follow how.
if they can't get funding it's because there's a lack of interest in the project. if there's a lack of interest, let it die a natural death. that's not a bad thing, it's just the evolution of software. are you crying that netscape / netscape browser isn't around anymore?
If they can't get funding then there's a lack of funding for the project. 25% of people use Firefox, and it has been downloaded over one billion times. There's interest in the project, and there will still be interest in it if the funding gets cut tomorrow. There isn't a magic relationship between people wanting a software project and someone paying for it - the Firefox developers have to find a way to make it attractive to a sponsor.
having google the default home page, or not, is black and white.
Well, that's true, but it's got absolutely nothing to do with what I wrote. I don't mean to be rude - really I don't - but please read what I write and make sure you understand before you hit reply, because I'm spending a lot of time responding to things I didn't say and explaining what words mean.
I was responding to you when you wrote: "yes, it's easy to change the default back to google, but heck, it's also easy to uninstall the MSFT / bing toolbar. maybe mozilla should ship that one out of the box. who cares if it's not what the user's want right?", because you implied that if we make one concession to commercial interests we have to concede everything. This is clearly not the case.
as sad as it makes the average/. user, people do make decisions based on things that might seem silly to you.
No, you know what, they don't. I don't think their reasons are "silly" just because I don't care about them, I accept that people use a lot of different factors to come to a decision and that they won't necessarily agree with me. In fact, I said that pretty explicitly.
You, on the other hand, said "not having google as the default search engine [...] will [...] turn lowbie users away from firefox". Only one of us is generalising about what people want, and only one of us is calling those people silly.
Some people will choose Firefox because it has Google as its default search engine. Others won't care. If Firefox changes its default search engine to Bing then the people that don't care about Firefox and just want Google as the default search engine will all move to Chrome. They won't lose anything. The people that want to use Firefox because they prefer it can use Firefox - whereas they can't if the project goes under.
IE didn't lose BTW, it's beating FF handily. unless you are stating a subjective opinion that it's better. in which case i'd redirect you somewhere other than/. where that can be debated fairly.
The phrase was "lose out" - I refer you to my comment above about reading comprehension.
there is no reason to try to subvert chrome indirectly by spiting google search
I don't follow this - how would it "subvert Chrome indirectly"? I don't think Google is really dependant on Firefox toolbar-searches to stay afloat!
mozilla should continue to do what's best for the user and compete on those merits.
If Mozilla don't have any money, they can't pay any developers. If they can't pay any developers, they can't keep their browser up to date. While I'm sure users love having Google as their default search-engine, I think they like new features more, I think they like speed increases more, and I think they like increased security more. If having Google search was the dealbreaker they could have stopped developing years ago with nothing to fear from IE.
yes, it's easy to change the default back to google, but heck, it's also easy to uninstall the MSFT / bing toolbar. maybe mozilla should ship that one out of the box. who cares if it's not what the user's want right?
Ah yes, I'd forgotten we were in the world of black and white, where compromise is impossible and everything must be taken to the extreme. There is a balance to be found; Mozilla want to make a product for people to use. To do that they need to make a product that people like. They also need to find a source of money to pay the people to make it. If they go 100% to the users' corner they will not have a product, if they go 100% to the corporate corner they will not have any users. Somewhere around the middle - say, at the point where a search engine sponsors them to become the default choice - would let them have a product and users. Of course, this isn't the only source of funding, but you get the idea.
supporting bing hurts google / chrome, and that's a good thing right?
You keep saying this; I didn't actually say anything about hurting Google or Chrome. I'm not really sure where you're going with it - software development isn't a zero-sum game, especially when it's not done for profit.
google is more important to most people than mozilla. not having google as the default search engine is not only going to lose them the $$$ from google but will also turn lowbie users away from firefox. "hey, i want the browser that uses google search."... that's chrome.
Well as I said, if you're right then this isn't a problem - no need for development money, all people want is Google in the top-right hand corner and they will be happy if the project stagnates. Alternatively it's just about possible that people want a variety of things, and possibly even that different people value different things... differently! Internet Explorer didn't lose out to Firefox because it didn't have Google search - it lost out because Firefox was a better browser. These days Firefox is losing out to Chrome because some of its users value speed and reliability over extensions.
Users want a thousand different things each, and none of them want the same thousand. Implementing the "best features" is a balancing act.
Well, Opera seems to be doing decently, selling mobile browsers or whatever they do (I don't use Opera browsers, I'm somewhat unfamilar with their products)
That's why I said the consumer web-browser market. There is a market for specialized web browsers, but not standard ones; no one would pay for a copy of Firefox. Their only hope would be moving into a niche market, but trying to compete with Opera - which has more experience and a huge head start - seems doomed to failure.
All of this said, calling F/OSS business models bust because one particular company wouldn't be able to do it is particularly stupid. Business models are not "one size fits all".
That's nice to note - but given that I wasn't "calling F/OSS business models bust" it seems a bit tagged-on. There isn't really such a thing as an "open source business model" - some companies charge for the product, others for support, just like software companies always have, and I can't see any reason it would be impossible for open-source programs if it works for closed-source. What I said - and I stick by it - is that there is no money to be made from selling Firefox, nor is there any money to be made providing support for Firefox.
The user's best interest is not very well served by Mozilla going bankrupt and having to stop work on Firefox. Compared to that, having to change your default search engine if you prefer Google doesn't seem too much of a hardship.
Other common F/OSS business models include dual licensing and paid support. Examples include Redhat, formerly Trolltech (aquired by Nokia), and many others.
Neither of those are possible for Mozilla - why would anyone pay for support for a web browser? Why would anyone pay for a web browser? I don't see any way you could make a profit from the consumer web-browser market.
I serously doubt that ISPs would want to take on the role of online copyright police, though some might welcome it as an excuse to block or throttle bandwidth-heavy, potentially infringing traffic (anything P2P, for instance, or perhaps -- even more nefariously -- anything not explicitly added to an ISPs whitelist of official content). Otherwise, it seems to me the added burden of filtering illegal downloads specifically is something ISPs would rather avoid (but which the RIAA would love to impose).
Absolutely - there's a similar bill over here in Britain that has been estimated to cost £500m ($800m), or approximately £25 ($40) per user, a cost that the ISP would pass straight on to the customer. I would assume that the cost per subscriber would be about the same in the US - I wonder if the RIAA is offering to pay...
The problem is that often, and maybe even in the case of bicycle helmets, the actual dangers are grossly overblown.
Surely what's important is less the probability of a serious injury than the advantage:disadvantage ratio. Even if you're just cycling down the street, and conditions are perfect, and you're totally awesome at cycling and nothing could possibly go wrong, putting on a helmet requires so little effort and inconvenience that it's probably still worth it.
Many people browse IT websites at work. In this industry, how to you propose we keep ourselves updated? You sound like one of those irritating prudes who can't understand how the normal world works.
Firstly, if you're meeting deadlines and producing quality code then this seems reasonable - but the submitter specifically states that his colleagues aren't. A lot of people here seem to be over-generalising this - it isn't an attack on IT in general, it's a specific case where people have taken things too far and their work is suffering.
Secondly, the majority of web browsing isn't them keeping themselves updated. I know it wasn't when I was working as a programmer, and I'm sure it isn't for you either. Even if you are working on a huge, over-arching project that uses dozens of different components and a wide variety of ideas there's no way they change often enough to justify more than 10-20 minutes web browsing a day. That isn't to say there aren't other uses of the internet for an IT worker, or even that personal use of the web should be banned - people need to relax from time to time. Just that if you aren't meeting your deadlines because you're on the web all day it's time to stop pretending it's helping you and accept that you need to knuckle down.
They've got a lot better, but it still happens. More common though is that the gate doesn't work - it validates your ticket but doesn't open, so that if you don't realise and push through the unlocked, but not open, gate, you're left with a useless ticket.
Having lived in Paris and taken the metro every day I can assure you that people get through those gates just like any other style. To get through the tall ones people just wait until someone else is going through and then follow close behind them.
Slashdot Mirror
But will anything really happen or will this just be another excuse for yet more surveillance of home computer usage?
The track record of the House of Lords hasn't been so good over the long run has it?
I would bet that if Lucas gains any traction great pressure will be brought to shut him up one way or another.
Unfortunately it's heading in the other direction. The statement was made in the context of a debate on the Digital Economy Bill, which is designed to make it easier to punish "copyright violators" (although, as numerous Lords have pointed out, they're actually just people accused of copyright violation), by making it easier to get information from ISPs and allowing copyright holders to have a user's internet connection shut off if they refuse to stop downloading (i.e. if the record company still has "evidence" after they have written to the user and threatened them). All in all, an absolutely disastrous bill.
*Shameless plug* If you agree and want to try to get answers from Mandelson, sign the DigitalWrong letter. This is going to be printed up on huge bits of card with all the messages people have left and presented to Lord Mandelson, since he doesn't bother replying to individual letters.
Another reason is weather. US weather has more extremes than Europe. There's a reason that all the early colonists from England died of tropical diseases.
This is only true if you're talking about extreme phenomena like tornadoes that are a problem for more than just cyclists. Europe is pretty big, especially if you interpret it as the bounds of the continental plate rather than the EU; there are plenty of places in Europe that get a lot of snow, and there are plenty of places that get very very hot. There are even places that get both, just like in the US. And, just like in the US, there are plenty of places that are not permanently either snowed-under or pushing 40 degrees C. I don't think anyone's suggesting that you use this in every single location at all times of year.
The US military is something like ten times larger than the next country's military spend for goodness sake. How about easing off on the military spend and using the money for peaceful exploration of space.
Do you really need a military budget that big?
And that works great until the developed world needs to use military force for something - whether it be terrorist-hunting in Afghanistan, peacekeeping in Eastern Europe, or defending ourselves from the territorially or ideologically motivated attacks that history has shown to be inevitable. Simply put, the sort of military victory that the public demands requires both extremely complex and expensive technology and for our ground troops to outnumber theirs wherever possible. This is incredibly expensive, and not a job that would be easy to divide up between other countries even if they were willing to take it on.
This is a bit off topic, but it's something that always strikes me when reading these sorts of discussions: is the political arena in America really this polarised? Never on Slashdot have I seen a post saying, for example, that Obama has a lot of good ideas but some bad ones, or that the Republicans' platform reflects a different ordering of priorities and not just brain-damage. All we get is
"Really, is any science offered by the Left Wing actually true?"
"Blah blah blah... Obama isn't cleaning up anything. The guy is a stiff."
"This is esp. true since the current monkeys ratings are in the toilet. "
"This is to be expected from people that can't tell the difference between fact and fiction - i mean most Republicans think the Bible is true!" (All taken from comments near the top of this article...)
I've railed against self-defeating polarisation on Slashdot before, but this is a whole new level - please tell me it's only true on Slashdot and not of Americans in general!
I'm sorry if this sounds rude, but if there's one thing that irritates me about Slashdot it's people acting smug and superior when they have completely failed to understand what the parent said.
The GP was not saying that Disney wasn't a feudal system. What they were saying was that even if you took away all of Disney's power the politicians would still side with them because Disney is good for the economy and file sharers aren't.
Please, for goodness' sake, take some English lessons, improve your reading comprehension and try not to get on your high horse until you have some vague idea of what's going on around you.
Just to add to that - Russian people in general are extremely proud of their country's military power; most large Russian towns will have regular military parades, parks with military hardware for people to take their photo with, retired missiles and jet fighters on display beside main roads and so on. Spending a large portion of their GDP on their armed forces isn't seen as a frivolity or opposed by anything but a tiny minority of Russian citizens.
It's a terribly designed site.
Compared to what? As the GP said, it's not unattractive and it doesn't consume ridiculous system resources. Plus, it works on Firefox with NoScript on Ubuntu, which is more than a lot of sites can boast.
At first glance, you can't tell what are links, and what is just plain text.
I count a total of 4 lines of plain text on the entire page, excluding the timestamps. Basically if you can see it you can click on it - and if you were wondering whether something was a link or not, mousing-over reveals it. Were you actually confused by this site, or is the complain just a relic of outdated Nielsen usability logic?
There are just about zero visual clues as to where you should go, what you should do, or what you should be reading. There seems to be no coherent logic to the layout, either [...]
It's a news site, and it has a list of news articles. The articles they judge most important are at the top with big pictures, the ones they consider less important are at the bottom without pictures. That is, undeniably, a "coherent logic", and it provides as much of a visual clue to where you can go as pretty much any other news site, or, indeed, contents page.
I use a couple dozen different computers for things, and if they can "track" "ME" from that, all the better. Additionally, there are other people who use the same computers that I do, and if they can sniff out who is browsing at what time, all the more power to them. I also use three different browsers on the same computer to browse various sites as well, because of how they are rendered and the speed of rendering.
Advertising companies don't need to be able to identify an individual in order for the data to be useful to them - if they can identify what sites the people that use your computer go to they can construct a demographic that is more useful to them than simply the average user of the site showing the adverts.
Put it this way: television companies can't tailor their adverts for specific viewers, but they still put significant effort into finding out information about those viewers. Why? Because the more precisely they can define the average viewer the more they can charge advertisers. Similarly, knowing the average user of your computer, while not as useful as knowing your exact tastes, is more than enough for them to want to track your computer's page views.
Perhaps more worryingly, unless your browsing habits are very similar it wouldn't take much to separate the different users of the computer. If you know what sites every computer visits you could say, for example, that computers that visit Slashdot are unlikely to visit mypinkpony.com - and you could infer, with a relatively high degree of confidence, that if a computer visits both of these sites it is likely that it has multiple users. Then, when the computer visits techreport.com you can ignore all but the sites that were visited shortly before or after visiting Slashdot, while treating sites like mypinkpony.com as a sign that the user has changed. Is it perfect? No, but it will allow you to reduce the noise significantly and build a fairly accurate picture of what to try to sell you.
Well, I'm not sure that there is a 100% correlation between writing "its" when you mean "it's" and not being able to communicate effectively; someone could be both eloquent and persuasive without having perfect grammar. The fact is, though, that it is used by recruiters because they have nothing but your application form to judge you on.
Ah, OK, that makes sense then!
I know that is a lot of crap! I live in the uk and earn roughly £25K, prob about £35K?
Which one is it? £35k is over $55k, which would seem to vindicate the original poster's claim.
Also - and I offer this as friendly advice and in the knowledge that your Slashdot musings don't reflect on your worth as a human being - have you considered brushing up on your writing skills? Having recently been job hunting myself I can vouch for the fact that 95% of companies are looking for people with "good verbal and written communications skills"; in other words, people who can give a decent presentation and explain things clearly in writing. Differentiating between "you're" and your", "its" and "it's" may seem a very small thing, but it's a sign that recruiters will use - fairly or unfairly - to draw inferences about your communication skills. The difference between being stuck as a programmer or being bumped up to a higher-level and better-paid position could well be as simple as being able to demonstrate that you can write correctly.
Just my experience, please don't take it as a personal attack - I don't know anything about you after all - just a bit of general advice for the Slashdot crowd.
I still don't see where this is going - this strikes me as an attempt to move from theory to practice without considering the changes that implies.
Yes, it will halt in a significant manner. It will either say "I have discovered a template, here it is, you can use it to block spam" or it will say "I have not discovered a template, please send me more spam to analyse". There are only two possibilities, both of them significant.
and then the researchers discovered the Halting problem and pretended it didn't exist.
I don't quite see your point - the halting problem proves that you cannot create an algorithm that will tell whether an arbitrary program will ever halt. It has no significance for this particular program, since it would be trivial to ensure that it does halt.
In most CIS countries the police are corrupt. They have to be to survive, as their official pay is between 50 to 200 USD per month. And you need about 500 USD, so do the math...
I don't disagree with your overall assessment that the police are often corrupt, but the figures you give are a bit off - pay for a police officer in Russia starts at about 400 dollars a month (11,000 rubles), and outside Moscow you can certainly survive on that - when I was living there last year I could easily buy a day's worth of groceries for 100 rubles (~4 dollars), and I wasn't trying to save money - food grown domestically is just very cheap. And my rent was about 1000 rubles a month - ~$33.
Again, that's not to say that your overall assessment is wrong, just that the police aren't forced into poverty by their pay.
(Figures from http://www.moiplan.ru/view/Kakaya_zarplata_u_milicionerov.html
Brief Translation:
Question:
I heard that the pay for police officers has increased. How much do police officers earn today?
Answer:
According to a press study by MVD Russia, in December 2008 police officers' pay was as follows: Officers: [...] 16900 rubles. Constables and patrol officers [...] 11300 rubles.)
According to the article he's been in jail for 3 days already, so I'm not sure that's a safe bet.
i didn't say google was dependent on mozilla. they do pay them $66 million though, so obviously having them there on the default home page is worth something wouldn't you say?
You said they could "subvert" Google.
Subvert:
1. to overthrow (something established or existing).
2. to cause the downfall, ruin, or destruction of.
So Mozilla are going to "indirectly overthrow or cause the downfall of Google" - I still don't follow how.
if they can't get funding it's because there's a lack of interest in the project. if there's a lack of interest, let it die a natural death. that's not a bad thing, it's just the evolution of software. are you crying that netscape / netscape browser isn't around anymore?
If they can't get funding then there's a lack of funding for the project. 25% of people use Firefox, and it has been downloaded over one billion times. There's interest in the project, and there will still be interest in it if the funding gets cut tomorrow. There isn't a magic relationship between people wanting a software project and someone paying for it - the Firefox developers have to find a way to make it attractive to a sponsor.
having google the default home page, or not, is black and white.
Well, that's true, but it's got absolutely nothing to do with what I wrote. I don't mean to be rude - really I don't - but please read what I write and make sure you understand before you hit reply, because I'm spending a lot of time responding to things I didn't say and explaining what words mean.
I was responding to you when you wrote:
"yes, it's easy to change the default back to google, but heck, it's also easy to uninstall the MSFT / bing toolbar. maybe mozilla should ship that one out of the box. who cares if it's not what the user's want right?",
because you implied that if we make one concession to commercial interests we have to concede everything. This is clearly not the case.
as sad as it makes the average /. user, people do make decisions based on things that might seem silly to you.
No, you know what, they don't. I don't think their reasons are "silly" just because I don't care about them, I accept that people use a lot of different factors to come to a decision and that they won't necessarily agree with me. In fact, I said that pretty explicitly.
You, on the other hand, said "not having google as the default search engine [...] will [...] turn lowbie users away from firefox". Only one of us is generalising about what people want, and only one of us is calling those people silly.
Some people will choose Firefox because it has Google as its default search engine. Others won't care. If Firefox changes its default search engine to Bing then the people that don't care about Firefox and just want Google as the default search engine will all move to Chrome. They won't lose anything. The people that want to use Firefox because they prefer it can use Firefox - whereas they can't if the project goes under.
IE didn't lose BTW, it's beating FF handily. unless you are stating a subjective opinion that it's better. in which case i'd redirect you somewhere other than /. where that can be debated fairly.
The phrase was "lose out" - I refer you to my comment above about reading comprehension.
there is no reason to try to subvert chrome indirectly by spiting google search
I don't follow this - how would it "subvert Chrome indirectly"? I don't think Google is really dependant on Firefox toolbar-searches to stay afloat!
mozilla should continue to do what's best for the user and compete on those merits.
If Mozilla don't have any money, they can't pay any developers. If they can't pay any developers, they can't keep their browser up to date. While I'm sure users love having Google as their default search-engine, I think they like new features more, I think they like speed increases more, and I think they like increased security more. If having Google search was the dealbreaker they could have stopped developing years ago with nothing to fear from IE.
yes, it's easy to change the default back to google, but heck, it's also easy to uninstall the MSFT / bing toolbar. maybe mozilla should ship that one out of the box. who cares if it's not what the user's want right?
Ah yes, I'd forgotten we were in the world of black and white, where compromise is impossible and everything must be taken to the extreme. There is a balance to be found; Mozilla want to make a product for people to use. To do that they need to make a product that people like. They also need to find a source of money to pay the people to make it. If they go 100% to the users' corner they will not have a product, if they go 100% to the corporate corner they will not have any users. Somewhere around the middle - say, at the point where a search engine sponsors them to become the default choice - would let them have a product and users. Of course, this isn't the only source of funding, but you get the idea.
supporting bing hurts google / chrome, and that's a good thing right?
You keep saying this; I didn't actually say anything about hurting Google or Chrome. I'm not really sure where you're going with it - software development isn't a zero-sum game, especially when it's not done for profit.
google is more important to most people than mozilla. not having google as the default search engine is not only going to lose them the $$$ from google but will also turn lowbie users away from firefox. "hey, i want the browser that uses google search." ... that's chrome.
Well as I said, if you're right then this isn't a problem - no need for development money, all people want is Google in the top-right hand corner and they will be happy if the project stagnates. Alternatively it's just about possible that people want a variety of things, and possibly even that different people value different things... differently! Internet Explorer didn't lose out to Firefox because it didn't have Google search - it lost out because Firefox was a better browser. These days Firefox is losing out to Chrome because some of its users value speed and reliability over extensions.
Users want a thousand different things each, and none of them want the same thousand. Implementing the "best features" is a balancing act.
Well, Opera seems to be doing decently, selling mobile browsers or whatever they do (I don't use Opera browsers, I'm somewhat unfamilar with their products)
That's why I said the consumer web-browser market. There is a market for specialized web browsers, but not standard ones; no one would pay for a copy of Firefox. Their only hope would be moving into a niche market, but trying to compete with Opera - which has more experience and a huge head start - seems doomed to failure.
All of this said, calling F/OSS business models bust because one particular company wouldn't be able to do it is particularly stupid. Business models are not "one size fits all".
That's nice to note - but given that I wasn't "calling F/OSS business models bust" it seems a bit tagged-on. There isn't really such a thing as an "open source business model" - some companies charge for the product, others for support, just like software companies always have, and I can't see any reason it would be impossible for open-source programs if it works for closed-source. What I said - and I stick by it - is that there is no money to be made from selling Firefox, nor is there any money to be made providing support for Firefox.
The user's best interest is not very well served by Mozilla going bankrupt and having to stop work on Firefox. Compared to that, having to change your default search engine if you prefer Google doesn't seem too much of a hardship.
Other common F/OSS business models include dual licensing and paid support. Examples include Redhat, formerly Trolltech (aquired by Nokia), and many others.
Neither of those are possible for Mozilla - why would anyone pay for support for a web browser? Why would anyone pay for a web browser? I don't see any way you could make a profit from the consumer web-browser market.
I serously doubt that ISPs would want to take on the role of online copyright police, though some might welcome it as an excuse to block or throttle bandwidth-heavy, potentially infringing traffic (anything P2P, for instance, or perhaps -- even more nefariously -- anything not explicitly added to an ISPs whitelist of official content). Otherwise, it seems to me the added burden of filtering illegal downloads specifically is something ISPs would rather avoid (but which the RIAA would love to impose).
Absolutely - there's a similar bill over here in Britain that has been estimated to cost £500m ($800m), or approximately £25 ($40) per user, a cost that the ISP would pass straight on to the customer. I would assume that the cost per subscriber would be about the same in the US - I wonder if the RIAA is offering to pay...
The British provisions are being debated over here at the moment - the ideas sound pretty similar; among other provisions, they would force ISPs to disconnect people accused of copyright infringement, which over here has lead to the brilliant question in the House of Lords: If someone's child downloads a film while waiting around in Parliament, does Parliament get its internet access shut off?
The problem is that often, and maybe even in the case of bicycle helmets, the actual dangers are grossly overblown.
Surely what's important is less the probability of a serious injury than the advantage:disadvantage ratio. Even if you're just cycling down the street, and conditions are perfect, and you're totally awesome at cycling and nothing could possibly go wrong, putting on a helmet requires so little effort and inconvenience that it's probably still worth it.
Many people browse IT websites at work. In this industry, how to you propose we keep ourselves updated? You sound like one of those irritating prudes who can't understand how the normal world works.
Firstly, if you're meeting deadlines and producing quality code then this seems reasonable - but the submitter specifically states that his colleagues aren't. A lot of people here seem to be over-generalising this - it isn't an attack on IT in general, it's a specific case where people have taken things too far and their work is suffering.
Secondly, the majority of web browsing isn't them keeping themselves updated. I know it wasn't when I was working as a programmer, and I'm sure it isn't for you either. Even if you are working on a huge, over-arching project that uses dozens of different components and a wide variety of ideas there's no way they change often enough to justify more than 10-20 minutes web browsing a day. That isn't to say there aren't other uses of the internet for an IT worker, or even that personal use of the web should be banned - people need to relax from time to time. Just that if you aren't meeting your deadlines because you're on the web all day it's time to stop pretending it's helping you and accept that you need to knuckle down.
They've got a lot better, but it still happens.
More common though is that the gate doesn't work - it validates your ticket but doesn't open, so that if you don't realise and push through the unlocked, but not open, gate, you're left with a useless ticket.
Having lived in Paris and taken the metro every day I can assure you that people get through those gates just like any other style. To get through the tall ones people just wait until someone else is going through and then follow close behind them.