2 NEW YORK STATE DEPT OF HEALTH NY $18,335,672,042 Percent of total: 5.764%
3 TEXAS HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES COMMISSION TX $13,514,862,175 Percent of total: 4.248%
4 PENNSYLVANIA DEPT OF PUBLIC WELFARE PA $11,168,181,944 Percent of total: 3.511%
The other states fall in at around or less than 1%. I understand those states are high population but that should mean more tax income to the state. So you're telling me that someone who lives in Minnesota is paying Federal taxes to support New York Health Dept and Texas Human Services Dept? I really don't like that when states like Texas are all about "smaller government" and "lower taxes" or that people flock to NYC to be at the "center of the world" yet their taxes don't reflect that cost and other states pick it up. So what, you just shift your debt off to other states and freeload on Federal relief? From the data, around 2007 this started becoming a huge disparity between states. Why? You switched to Vista? Ridiculous.
Thank you for restating how supply and demand curves work.
It's worse than that, what he's saying is selective economics. You want to see how selective economics works? I will now prove that used game sales increase the sales of games at retail prices: Everyone today knows they can resell a $60 PS3 game for $15 to Gamestop. So when they are figuring out the price, they are assuming that the game retains a resale value of $15--much like a person shopping for a car takes note of its blue book value. So you can pretty much look at it like you're putting down a $15 deposit on the game. Everyone assumes that they are going to play the game for a week and get tired of it. Fortunately, there's a few games that are really really good so that the player either keeps playing them or grows attached to the game in a special way. Now, people are buying more copies of the game because the in-the-end cost is $45, not $60. And a few people are holding on to the game instead of trading it back in. So in a world without used game sales, you would have made less sales. On top of that, if you make a really great game and most people keep it then there are a bunch of people buying your game figuring they will resell it and don't... and you make more cash. I still have my copy of Ocarina of Time for N64 in my room even though I don't play it.
See how anyone can use selective economics to meet their needs? By the way, all economics lessons are selective. Whether they try to be or not.
I know a lot of people that are very vocal about what is right and wrong with education today. Especially college institutions: "No one teaches C, everyone teaches four years of Java, no one understands the theory, a CS grad doesn't even know what a model-view-controller pattern is." The list goes on. Since you have your doctorate and have probably spent a lot of time in research and academia, what's wrong with most computer science or engineering programs in general today? What would you like to see more or less of? Are there any subject directions recently taken (EJB, garbage collectors, interpreted languages) you'd like to comment on?
You seem to be non-opposed to Java which, I'll admit, is rare to me for someone with a doctorate. I would like to hear your views since so often all I hear about Java is that it is slow and only good for people that want cheap software developed quick by beginner developers.
According to the NRC's Singer, the chief constraint that Jazz faces is that it works only on the Eclipse platform. Says Singer, "The only people who can adopt it are those who are using Eclipse." Singer also feels that some processes might not accommodate Jazz's idea of collaboration. "People use all sorts of tools and ways of communication to coordinate their work, to be able to collaborate, to be able to put together big pieces of software," she says. "Some of this has to do with following a particular process. Where Jazz might be constraining is when the model behind it does not jive with these preexisting processes." Meanwhile, Mike Milinkovich, the Eclipse Foundation's executive director, told eweek.com last March that IBM developers account for as much as 80 percent of Eclipse's development team. He questioned whether that kind of environment is good for Eclipse or Jazz. He also noted that some have charged IBM with killing off the Jazz developer tool competition with Eclipse. Finally, he wondered whether having two open source communities--one for Jazz and one for Eclipse--will ultimately weaken Eclipse.
I'm not sure but I would wager that's as true today as it was in 2007. How do you address those concerns?
I've also noticed--through use of the Rational Suite--that you can't just use one tool in the suite. You need them all. And, you know I understand it's IBM's business model, but it kind of rubs me the wrong way that I was using all these great Maven2 tools to do releases and automagically test and build inside subversion. But when we went to ClearCase, we had to do releases through ClearCase and our test and builds through CruiseControl and I never found any plugins for Maven2 to ClearCase. ClearCase was really too much for such a small team. We had to bring in an administrator part time who had 20 years of ClearCase experience and the team just complained non-stop about moving off subversion. Why is everyone trying to "own" the whole stack? Why can't I recognize one Rational product is great and just use that and integrate it in with the rest of my tools? It seems like if you buy one you soon find yourself buying them all. Great for IBM but not always what we need. Is Jazz the same way?
I mean, it's fine if the answer is that if I want to use Jazz I have to use Eclipse... or if I want to use Composer I have to use Concert and Manager. But it would then seem that collaboration is only being aimed at a very certain type of developer. This may be a "loaded question" but is IBM hoping Eclipse will become the be-all-end-all integrated development environment? I know Flex Builder and Workshop are already built on top of it, is world domination in sight?
On your influential book regarding design patterns, you listed 23 design patterns that would become the foundation for the concept of design patterns in computer science. Since then, many more types and subtypes have arisen but a lot of them seem to be derivatives or a combination of others. What new design patterns if any do you wish you had included in your book or that you feel are necessary for competent developers to learn?
Jazz seems to rely heavily on developer community and their collaboration--and the influence for Jazz is said to be the World Wide Web.
The Jazz portfolio consists of a common platform and a set of tools that enable all of the members of the extended development team to collaborate more easily.
The biggest problem I have with collaboration tools is the metadata. No one does it right. Someone writes a blog or uploads a document but doesn't tag it. Enterprise search is broken. Management hands us wikis yet no one has the time or patience to maintain them. The protective blanket of "it's agile, baby" shields us from any beat downs. And with every new tool I realize that it's not the tool that improves collaboration, it's the team. Look at Slashdot's tagging system. Does it help me that one hundred stories are tagged with "no"? Collaboration seems to spontaneously work but is often out of your control when it does and doesn't. How does Jazz fix these problems? How does Jazz improve collaboration when it seems to me that tools are such a small part of collaboration? Will a small development team be able to use such a large set of tools?
Dr Gamma was also one of the fathers of Eclipse and the original lead on the Eclipse Java development tools.
Eclipse has been going on since the early 2000s and six days ago enjoyed the release of Galileo (v3.5). If you've had time to look at recent release, what are your opinions on what Eclipse has become? Has it made any wrong turns? How do you respond to criticisms of "bloat" or "too resource intensive"? Do you see it becoming more than what it is or transforming?
Filters are censorship. But, if implemented correctly, they're one of the most innocuous forms of censorship. I was initially lead to believe that Green Dam Youth Escort was community driven:
In 2008, under instructions from political leaders, the MIIT implemented a "community-oriented green open Internet filtering software project" with the support of the Central Civilisation Office and the Ministry of Finance. Its aim was to build a "green, healthy network environment, to protect the healthy growth of young people".
Trials commenced in Zhengzhou, Nanjing, Lanzhou, and Xi'an in October 2008 after the ministry negotiated with the software suppliers and 50 web portals to make the software publicly available without charge, and more than 2,000 installations took place. Trials rolled out to 10 more cities, including Chengdu, Shenyang, Harbin, and Qingdao. The ministry claimed that by December 2008, the software had been downloaded more than 100,000 times, and 3 million times since the end of March 2009. Five leading PC vendors in mainland China, Founder, Lenovo, Tongfang, Great Wall and HEDY, also participated in trial installations.
Ok, no biggie. We've got Spamhaus, right? That's a community censorship project against something we don't want--spam! And I love it. But Green Dam Youth Escort seems to be passing the boundaries of what a "filter" does:
According to the Epoch Times, hackers in China had accessed the keyword library and administrative codes, revealing only 2,700 keywords relating to pornography, and over 6,500 politically sensitive keywords which included '4 June', 'Tibet' and 'Falun Gong'. Chinese users of the software have apparently found that it injects a DLL file into Internet Explorer that prohibits the usage of FreeGate, one of the programs commonly used to bypass the Golden Shield Project.
Alright, swapping out a dynamically linked library is transcending a "filter"... or any label we've invented so far. I must have missed the reports on that but that's pretty shocking to me. If I had to dub this anything it'd be 1984ware.
Apparently, the data will be free to download and use.
You know, it never ceases to amaze me that CNN, BBC, Fox News, everybody who's a major player can't link to the original source of information (and Japan's site). One might find the warehouse inventory search tool (note registration required for ASTER global digital elevation model) interesting to play around with if they are interested in the story.
Re:Hundred Millions or Hundred Thousands?
on
China Bans Gold Farming
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Seeing as that was a move that the government regretted so much that it's practically purged from their history...
You live in a pretty fucked up world where sweeping a mistake under the rug is a sign of regret. I don't know about you but I was raised that if you fuck up, you admit it and then you apologize for it. If that's me asserting my Occidental values on the Orient, I'm sorry. That's just how things should be. The survivors of those killed deserve it and the dead should be honored and memorialized. They died for reform and they should not be forgotten. I think that is a fundamental respect that underlies all cultural boundaries.
Re:Hundred Millions or Hundred Thousands?
on
China Bans Gold Farming
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Personally, I'm quite happy when oppressive people with power tighten their grip. It follows the law of tension: the harder it's wound, the more likely it is to snap.
Normally I would agree with you. But as a kid I watched tanks clear a square in China. As a result of this, the Red Cross would later report twenty five hundred people dead with seven to ten thousand wounded. The same government that dealt with those protests in that way is still in power today, twenty years later.
If that didn't do it, I don't see banning gold farming and regulating the internet doing it. The Chinese government is a new kind of oppression that has survived many attempts to move in the opposite direction. It must be a decision made simultaneously by billions of people to change this. If you're sitting their waiting for that tension to snap, you may be waiting a lot longer than you think.
The trading of virtual currency for real cash employs hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and generates between $200 million and $1 billion annually, according to a 2008 survey conducted by Richard Heeks at the University of Manchester. He estimates that between 80% and 85% of gold farmers are based in China.
Dear god! Eight tenths of one billion dollars is a lot of cash!
The Chinese government estimates that trade in virtual currency exceeded several billion yuan last year, a figure that it claims has been growing at a rate of 20% annually. One billion yuan is currently equal to about $146,000.
So what is it, hundreds of millions or hundreds of thousands? Because one is a nice chunk of change while the other is, across China's population, laughable.
These numbers just aren't adding up here. There seems to be a large disparity between what the Chinese government reports and what Heeks' study finds. It's entirely possible that Heeks' is stretching stats to make his research sound more important and news worthy. It's also possible China is understating the impact their ban will have so they can "cure you of your illnesses." The reality is probably both a little of column A and a little of column B.
Some game companies have recognized the futility of trying to ban the practice and have built virtual commerce into their game infrastructure.
And now China will realize that futility. One would think that China would enjoy the tax on those who report this income but now it's just going to all go under-the-table. Hell, I'd say tax it but I'm certain China wants to look like the caring government attempting to heal the afflicted youth.
Market Cap is a mixture of future expectations, growth, hype, and irrational exhuberance.
I hate to break it to you but one of the most important life lessons I learned was "something's only worth what someone will pay for it." And market cap reflects that because it does a good job of telling you what people value the company at. Yes, some of it's the result of a PR engine but there's no way to avoid that. If you don't think the value of everything around you depends on Wall Street and idiots looking to make a buck, you're deluded.
GMGMQ probably doesn't have a future and the public knows this. But they've got asset sheets. Those assets are probably worth half a billion. I don't know, I'm just guessing. VA Sourceforge or whatever it is that owns Slashdot indeed has a brighter future. But be realistic, man! That future plus their assets are worth 1/10th of GMGMQ's assets right now. I don't understand your comparison. All it does is point out that the public views GM as more valuable than Sourceforge and when it drops to zero after everything is sold off... well, the market cap will reflect this. And since something's only worth what someone will pay for it, all of this is a good measure of how valuable these companies are.
... but the statement that they "aren't that big" does seem objectively true, by most measures other than public fame.
I disagree. I am no economist or accountant but I believe market cap is a better way to measure the public consensus on the value of a company. And if you look at these figures, Google rivals IBM and Microsoft kills both of them. But this is all moot since they are all large-cap companies falling into the $10 billion to $200 billion range. If Google exists in this range, they cannot go around saying they're "not that big." You effectively compared three of the largest companies in the world today while ignoring 99.9999% of the other ones. You should be truly objective and put those three companies into context of the bigger picture. What's a small to medium search company's market cap? Not over $10 billion.
Your market cap is $134 billion to put this into perspective IBM's is $139 billion and Microsoft's is $211 billion.
You may well employ far fewer than either of those two giants, but you aren't "running with the big dogs" now... you are a big dog. If you're pulling in more than a billion per quarter in sheer profit, you're going to lose that argument. Money is more important than number of employees when you're relating to other companies.
You can find the lab site here with several papers freely available in pre-publication form on arxiv from the researchers. I'm trying to find the "basic algorithms" the article alludes to that these rudimentary processors can perform. I thought only a handful were applicable (Shor's algorithm) to quantum computing. Anyone know?
Many news web sites use advertising networks rather than serving ads from their own servers.
Luckily I don't deal with ads. But if I did, I would try to work something out where I'd have a temporary directory with the cached ads... especially if they were some hit-the-monkey-resource-intensive-flash-ad. Then I'd have a cron job or maybe just a servlet running on a timer that queries my ad provider's site for new ads, replace the ads in the directory with their names being generic so that they can be randomly selected based on size and... you're a whole lot nicer for the internet. Sure, now it's your traffic that's being taxed but at least you're not taking part in a massive attack on your ad server.
I understand the beauty of not knowing anything about the ads and just getting whatever AdSense or AdWords or whoever serves you up your ads... but when they're hogs like the article's flash ads are, you would expect some better design or fallback.
Well, considering they host over 6,000 pdfs and the RFI is in PDF with the title of the document being "Microsoft Word - WvB RFI 6-24-09.doc" by Jason Crusan who used Acrobat Distiller 7.0.5(Windows), I think we know what everyone uses at NASA. Fine. I'm not going to bitch about that. Instead I'm going to point out that if you're already dependent on Adobe Acrobat Reader & Microsoft Word being around until the end of time supporting your old doctypes, you might as well release these in PDF from DOC sources too.
But, if I were doing this: Assuming these are all in images, put the images in whatever format you want and make a generic wiki page for each of them. Then let users log in (NASA fans should pour in) and translate the pages to annotated wiki pages with the footnotes (normally references) being all the side notes that were penciled in. They can categorize them by related missions and maybe even tag them... you will need at least one or two people on your staff to administrate. Diagrams and drawings will probably need to be cropped and retained as images. Keep those in a lossless format but distribute whatever saves you bandwidth.
Once that's done, ideally you'd put it in some XML standards based format (ODF or OOXML, yeah, that's another argument to be had) that you will always be able to read even if you have to build your own viewer/converter. Keep these sources indexed and provide for people the rendered PDF/PS/PNG/whocares and then you could probably build scripts to rebuild all from sources if you want. New technology comes out or people want to view them in HTML 5--no problem, just build a neat little XSLT for them.
As for indexing them, I can tell you one way not to do it. Don't do the thing that curators of classical music did. Man, that's like speaking another language to me. Arrange the notes by mission or date if you can and any natural titles that arise for the favorites, add to it as an alias.
That something they created could, in theory, be something that fuels their eventual downfall...
Like nuclear weapons? Like a dependency on oil? Like a botched military campaign in a neighboring country? Like your own revolutionary spirit being turned against you after you become the abusive people in power? Sometimes I think it's hard to find a powerful tool that is not a double edged sword.
If you are a Linux or *BSD or Mac OS/X user, we have a detailed recipe for setting up and registering a
Squid proxy for the revolutionaries' use. Update: We are no longer recommending people set up plaintext squid proxies. The Iranian regime appears to be doing deep-packet inspection on all traffic now.
According to sources, the RIAA is unhappy about Audrey's motion, and is preparing a sack of money to send the Judge asking the Judge not to allow her to make it.
There, fixed that for you. Actually, to be fair:
According to sources, the RIAA is unhappy about Audrey's motion, and is preparing a letter to send the Judge reminding the Judge that he's bought and paid for just like the lawmakers and Judges up the rest of the chain.
More realistic although it's a shame this lower court Judge probably won't profit personally from the case unlike those installed into prestigious positions and those accepting lobbying money for their political campaigns.
This is about stopping used games sales, nothing more, nothing less
No, there's more to it than that. It's also about adding an extra level of complexity to your purchase and guaranteeing that yet another thing could go wrong with your already insanely expensive purchase. If the industry is looking to profit $6 billion dollars from this move, I can almost assure you that it's going to be about $6 billion in annoyance to the consumer. For some reason treating your customer like a criminal from square one is the latest rage these days.
Slashdot Mirror
2 NEW YORK STATE DEPT OF HEALTH NY $18,335,672,042 Percent of total: 5.764%
3 TEXAS HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES COMMISSION TX $13,514,862,175 Percent of total: 4.248%
4 PENNSYLVANIA DEPT OF PUBLIC WELFARE PA $11,168,181,944 Percent of total: 3.511%
The other states fall in at around or less than 1%. I understand those states are high population but that should mean more tax income to the state. So you're telling me that someone who lives in Minnesota is paying Federal taxes to support New York Health Dept and Texas Human Services Dept? I really don't like that when states like Texas are all about "smaller government" and "lower taxes" or that people flock to NYC to be at the "center of the world" yet their taxes don't reflect that cost and other states pick it up. So what, you just shift your debt off to other states and freeload on Federal relief? From the data, around 2007 this started becoming a huge disparity between states. Why? You switched to Vista? Ridiculous.
Thank you for restating how supply and demand curves work.
It's worse than that, what he's saying is selective economics. You want to see how selective economics works? I will now prove that used game sales increase the sales of games at retail prices: Everyone today knows they can resell a $60 PS3 game for $15 to Gamestop. So when they are figuring out the price, they are assuming that the game retains a resale value of $15--much like a person shopping for a car takes note of its blue book value. So you can pretty much look at it like you're putting down a $15 deposit on the game. Everyone assumes that they are going to play the game for a week and get tired of it. Fortunately, there's a few games that are really really good so that the player either keeps playing them or grows attached to the game in a special way. Now, people are buying more copies of the game because the in-the-end cost is $45, not $60. And a few people are holding on to the game instead of trading it back in. So in a world without used game sales, you would have made less sales. On top of that, if you make a really great game and most people keep it then there are a bunch of people buying your game figuring they will resell it and don't ... and you make more cash. I still have my copy of Ocarina of Time for N64 in my room even though I don't play it.
See how anyone can use selective economics to meet their needs? By the way, all economics lessons are selective. Whether they try to be or not.
I know a lot of people that are very vocal about what is right and wrong with education today. Especially college institutions: "No one teaches C, everyone teaches four years of Java, no one understands the theory, a CS grad doesn't even know what a model-view-controller pattern is." The list goes on. Since you have your doctorate and have probably spent a lot of time in research and academia, what's wrong with most computer science or engineering programs in general today? What would you like to see more or less of? Are there any subject directions recently taken (EJB, garbage collectors, interpreted languages) you'd like to comment on?
You seem to be non-opposed to Java which, I'll admit, is rare to me for someone with a doctorate. I would like to hear your views since so often all I hear about Java is that it is slow and only good for people that want cheap software developed quick by beginner developers.
According to the NRC's Singer, the chief constraint that Jazz faces is that it works only on the Eclipse platform. Says Singer, "The only people who can adopt it are those who are using Eclipse."
Singer also feels that some processes might not accommodate Jazz's idea of collaboration. "People use all sorts of tools and ways of communication to coordinate their work, to be able to collaborate, to be able to put together big pieces of software," she says. "Some of this has to do with following a particular process. Where Jazz might be constraining is when the model behind it does not jive with these preexisting processes."
Meanwhile, Mike Milinkovich, the Eclipse Foundation's executive director, told eweek.com last March that IBM developers account for as much as 80 percent of Eclipse's development team. He questioned whether that kind of environment is good for Eclipse or Jazz. He also noted that some have charged IBM with killing off the Jazz developer tool competition with Eclipse. Finally, he wondered whether having two open source communities--one for Jazz and one for Eclipse--will ultimately weaken Eclipse.
I'm not sure but I would wager that's as true today as it was in 2007. How do you address those concerns?
... or if I want to use Composer I have to use Concert and Manager. But it would then seem that collaboration is only being aimed at a very certain type of developer. This may be a "loaded question" but is IBM hoping Eclipse will become the be-all-end-all integrated development environment? I know Flex Builder and Workshop are already built on top of it, is world domination in sight?
I've also noticed--through use of the Rational Suite--that you can't just use one tool in the suite. You need them all. And, you know I understand it's IBM's business model, but it kind of rubs me the wrong way that I was using all these great Maven2 tools to do releases and automagically test and build inside subversion. But when we went to ClearCase, we had to do releases through ClearCase and our test and builds through CruiseControl and I never found any plugins for Maven2 to ClearCase. ClearCase was really too much for such a small team. We had to bring in an administrator part time who had 20 years of ClearCase experience and the team just complained non-stop about moving off subversion. Why is everyone trying to "own" the whole stack? Why can't I recognize one Rational product is great and just use that and integrate it in with the rest of my tools? It seems like if you buy one you soon find yourself buying them all. Great for IBM but not always what we need. Is Jazz the same way?
I mean, it's fine if the answer is that if I want to use Jazz I have to use Eclipse
On your influential book regarding design patterns, you listed 23 design patterns that would become the foundation for the concept of design patterns in computer science. Since then, many more types and subtypes have arisen but a lot of them seem to be derivatives or a combination of others. What new design patterns if any do you wish you had included in your book or that you feel are necessary for competent developers to learn?
The Jazz portfolio consists of a common platform and a set of tools that enable all of the members of the extended development team to collaborate more easily.
The biggest problem I have with collaboration tools is the metadata. No one does it right. Someone writes a blog or uploads a document but doesn't tag it. Enterprise search is broken. Management hands us wikis yet no one has the time or patience to maintain them. The protective blanket of "it's agile, baby" shields us from any beat downs. And with every new tool I realize that it's not the tool that improves collaboration, it's the team. Look at Slashdot's tagging system. Does it help me that one hundred stories are tagged with "no"? Collaboration seems to spontaneously work but is often out of your control when it does and doesn't. How does Jazz fix these problems? How does Jazz improve collaboration when it seems to me that tools are such a small part of collaboration? Will a small development team be able to use such a large set of tools?
Dr Gamma was also one of the fathers of Eclipse and the original lead on the Eclipse Java development tools.
Eclipse has been going on since the early 2000s and six days ago enjoyed the release of Galileo (v3.5). If you've had time to look at recent release, what are your opinions on what Eclipse has become? Has it made any wrong turns? How do you respond to criticisms of "bloat" or "too resource intensive"? Do you see it becoming more than what it is or transforming?
The filter, called Green Dam Youth Escort
Filters are censorship. But, if implemented correctly, they're one of the most innocuous forms of censorship. I was initially lead to believe that Green Dam Youth Escort was community driven:
In 2008, under instructions from political leaders, the MIIT implemented a "community-oriented green open Internet filtering software project" with the support of the Central Civilisation Office and the Ministry of Finance. Its aim was to build a "green, healthy network environment, to protect the healthy growth of young people".
Trials commenced in Zhengzhou, Nanjing, Lanzhou, and Xi'an in October 2008 after the ministry negotiated with the software suppliers and 50 web portals to make the software publicly available without charge, and more than 2,000 installations took place. Trials rolled out to 10 more cities, including Chengdu, Shenyang, Harbin, and Qingdao. The ministry claimed that by December 2008, the software had been downloaded more than 100,000 times, and 3 million times since the end of March 2009. Five leading PC vendors in mainland China, Founder, Lenovo, Tongfang, Great Wall and HEDY, also participated in trial installations.
Ok, no biggie. We've got Spamhaus, right? That's a community censorship project against something we don't want--spam! And I love it. But Green Dam Youth Escort seems to be passing the boundaries of what a "filter" does:
According to the Epoch Times, hackers in China had accessed the keyword library and administrative codes, revealing only 2,700 keywords relating to pornography, and over 6,500 politically sensitive keywords which included '4 June', 'Tibet' and 'Falun Gong'. Chinese users of the software have apparently found that it injects a DLL file into Internet Explorer that prohibits the usage of FreeGate, one of the programs commonly used to bypass the Golden Shield Project.
Alright, swapping out a dynamically linked library is transcending a "filter" ... or any label we've invented so far. I must have missed the reports on that but that's pretty shocking to me. If I had to dub this anything it'd be 1984ware.
Apparently, the data will be free to download and use.
You know, it never ceases to amaze me that CNN, BBC, Fox News, everybody who's a major player can't link to the original source of information (and Japan's site). One might find the warehouse inventory search tool (note registration required for ASTER global digital elevation model) interesting to play around with if they are interested in the story.
Seeing as that was a move that the government regretted so much that it's practically purged from their history ...
You live in a pretty fucked up world where sweeping a mistake under the rug is a sign of regret. I don't know about you but I was raised that if you fuck up, you admit it and then you apologize for it. If that's me asserting my Occidental values on the Orient, I'm sorry. That's just how things should be. The survivors of those killed deserve it and the dead should be honored and memorialized. They died for reform and they should not be forgotten. I think that is a fundamental respect that underlies all cultural boundaries.
Personally, I'm quite happy when oppressive people with power tighten their grip. It follows the law of tension: the harder it's wound, the more likely it is to snap.
Normally I would agree with you. But as a kid I watched tanks clear a square in China. As a result of this, the Red Cross would later report twenty five hundred people dead with seven to ten thousand wounded. The same government that dealt with those protests in that way is still in power today, twenty years later.
If that didn't do it, I don't see banning gold farming and regulating the internet doing it. The Chinese government is a new kind of oppression that has survived many attempts to move in the opposite direction. It must be a decision made simultaneously by billions of people to change this. If you're sitting their waiting for that tension to snap, you may be waiting a lot longer than you think.
The trading of virtual currency for real cash employs hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and generates between $200 million and $1 billion annually, according to a 2008 survey conducted by Richard Heeks at the University of Manchester. He estimates that between 80% and 85% of gold farmers are based in China.
Dear god! Eight tenths of one billion dollars is a lot of cash!
The Chinese government estimates that trade in virtual currency exceeded several billion yuan last year, a figure that it claims has been growing at a rate of 20% annually. One billion yuan is currently equal to about $146,000.
So what is it, hundreds of millions or hundreds of thousands? Because one is a nice chunk of change while the other is, across China's population, laughable.
These numbers just aren't adding up here. There seems to be a large disparity between what the Chinese government reports and what Heeks' study finds. It's entirely possible that Heeks' is stretching stats to make his research sound more important and news worthy. It's also possible China is understating the impact their ban will have so they can "cure you of your illnesses." The reality is probably both a little of column A and a little of column B.
Some game companies have recognized the futility of trying to ban the practice and have built virtual commerce into their game infrastructure.
And now China will realize that futility. One would think that China would enjoy the tax on those who report this income but now it's just going to all go under-the-table. Hell, I'd say tax it but I'm certain China wants to look like the caring government attempting to heal the afflicted youth.
Market Cap is a mixture of future expectations, growth, hype, and irrational exhuberance.
I hate to break it to you but one of the most important life lessons I learned was "something's only worth what someone will pay for it." And market cap reflects that because it does a good job of telling you what people value the company at. Yes, some of it's the result of a PR engine but there's no way to avoid that. If you don't think the value of everything around you depends on Wall Street and idiots looking to make a buck, you're deluded.
... well, the market cap will reflect this. And since something's only worth what someone will pay for it, all of this is a good measure of how valuable these companies are.
GMGMQ probably doesn't have a future and the public knows this. But they've got asset sheets. Those assets are probably worth half a billion. I don't know, I'm just guessing. VA Sourceforge or whatever it is that owns Slashdot indeed has a brighter future. But be realistic, man! That future plus their assets are worth 1/10th of GMGMQ's assets right now. I don't understand your comparison. All it does is point out that the public views GM as more valuable than Sourceforge and when it drops to zero after everything is sold off
... but the statement that they "aren't that big" does seem objectively true, by most measures other than public fame.
I disagree. I am no economist or accountant but I believe market cap is a better way to measure the public consensus on the value of a company. And if you look at these figures, Google rivals IBM and Microsoft kills both of them. But this is all moot since they are all large-cap companies falling into the $10 billion to $200 billion range. If Google exists in this range, they cannot go around saying they're "not that big." You effectively compared three of the largest companies in the world today while ignoring 99.9999% of the other ones. You should be truly objective and put those three companies into context of the bigger picture. What's a small to medium search company's market cap? Not over $10 billion.
Your market cap is $134 billion to put this into perspective IBM's is $139 billion and Microsoft's is $211 billion.
... you are a big dog. If you're pulling in more than a billion per quarter in sheer profit, you're going to lose that argument. Money is more important than number of employees when you're relating to other companies.
You may well employ far fewer than either of those two giants, but you aren't "running with the big dogs" now
Soon a PC with a Quantum Processor, Holographic Memory and optical storage.
Running Duke Nukem Forever on a three dimensional console inside your flying car as it pilots itself to your workplace ...
You can find the lab site here with several papers freely available in pre-publication form on arxiv from the researchers. I'm trying to find the "basic algorithms" the article alludes to that these rudimentary processors can perform. I thought only a handful were applicable (Shor's algorithm) to quantum computing. Anyone know?
It's too bad that the TSA can't protect us from summer blockbuster movies and not just graphic novels.
Personally I think they should stop Michael Bay from boarding any plane after seeing how disturbingly obsessed the man is with explosions.
Many news web sites use advertising networks rather than serving ads from their own servers.
Luckily I don't deal with ads. But if I did, I would try to work something out where I'd have a temporary directory with the cached ads ... especially if they were some hit-the-monkey-resource-intensive-flash-ad. Then I'd have a cron job or maybe just a servlet running on a timer that queries my ad provider's site for new ads, replace the ads in the directory with their names being generic so that they can be randomly selected based on size and ... you're a whole lot nicer for the internet. Sure, now it's your traffic that's being taxed but at least you're not taking part in a massive attack on your ad server.
... but when they're hogs like the article's flash ads are, you would expect some better design or fallback.
I understand the beauty of not knowing anything about the ads and just getting whatever AdSense or AdWords or whoever serves you up your ads
Well, considering they host over 6,000 pdfs and the RFI is in PDF with the title of the document being "Microsoft Word - WvB RFI 6-24-09.doc" by Jason Crusan who used Acrobat Distiller 7.0.5(Windows), I think we know what everyone uses at NASA. Fine. I'm not going to bitch about that. Instead I'm going to point out that if you're already dependent on Adobe Acrobat Reader & Microsoft Word being around until the end of time supporting your old doctypes, you might as well release these in PDF from DOC sources too.
... you will need at least one or two people on your staff to administrate. Diagrams and drawings will probably need to be cropped and retained as images. Keep those in a lossless format but distribute whatever saves you bandwidth.
But, if I were doing this: Assuming these are all in images, put the images in whatever format you want and make a generic wiki page for each of them. Then let users log in (NASA fans should pour in) and translate the pages to annotated wiki pages with the footnotes (normally references) being all the side notes that were penciled in. They can categorize them by related missions and maybe even tag them
Once that's done, ideally you'd put it in some XML standards based format (ODF or OOXML, yeah, that's another argument to be had) that you will always be able to read even if you have to build your own viewer/converter. Keep these sources indexed and provide for people the rendered PDF/PS/PNG/whocares and then you could probably build scripts to rebuild all from sources if you want. New technology comes out or people want to view them in HTML 5--no problem, just build a neat little XSLT for them.
As for indexing them, I can tell you one way not to do it. Don't do the thing that curators of classical music did. Man, that's like speaking another language to me. Arrange the notes by mission or date if you can and any natural titles that arise for the favorites, add to it as an alias.
That something they created could, in theory, be something that fuels their eventual downfall ...
Like nuclear weapons? Like a dependency on oil? Like a botched military campaign in a neighboring country? Like your own revolutionary spirit being turned against you after you become the abusive people in power? Sometimes I think it's hard to find a powerful tool that is not a double edged sword.
Support them by becoming a Tor relay
From nedanet:
If you are a Linux or *BSD or Mac OS/X user, we have a detailed recipe for setting up and registering a Squid proxy for the revolutionaries' use. Update: We are no longer recommending people set up plaintext squid proxies. The Iranian regime appears to be doing deep-packet inspection on all traffic now.
According to sources, the RIAA is unhappy about Audrey's motion, and is preparing a sack of money to send the Judge asking the Judge not to allow her to make it.
There, fixed that for you. Actually, to be fair:
According to sources, the RIAA is unhappy about Audrey's motion, and is preparing a letter to send the Judge reminding the Judge that he's bought and paid for just like the lawmakers and Judges up the rest of the chain.
More realistic although it's a shame this lower court Judge probably won't profit personally from the case unlike those installed into prestigious positions and those accepting lobbying money for their political campaigns.
This is about stopping used games sales, nothing more, nothing less
No, there's more to it than that. It's also about adding an extra level of complexity to your purchase and guaranteeing that yet another thing could go wrong with your already insanely expensive purchase. If the industry is looking to profit $6 billion dollars from this move, I can almost assure you that it's going to be about $6 billion in annoyance to the consumer. For some reason treating your customer like a criminal from square one is the latest rage these days.
It's amazing what kind of viruses you find on USB sticks these days!
And Microsoft chases OLPC once again.