Or where our water supply is hijacked by a multinational illuminati-esque superpower spending multiple billions of dollars drilling and building super secret underground dams restricting the flow of ground water in a coordinated attempt with the CIA and other world powers to make millions by raising the price of water, which still rains in large quantities.
Oh yeah, I saw Quantum of Solace this weekend, too. Now I'm envisioning James Bond making snarky comments while he smashes one of these dehumidifiers with his Aston Martin.
No, but you can fix it with changing the interference to the correct kind. Many economic markets are what are termed "market failures". This does not mean the kind of failure like we saw with the banks last month; it means a market that, when completely unfettered, does not allocate resources efficiently. All markets are market failures to some degree (simply because of human nature and the laws of physics, no market can be perfectly efficient), but some markets are much closer to a true market failure than others. Transportation, utilities, and telecommunications are some of the more severe market failures, which is why they tend to be heavily regulated.
Many markets don't need any regulation beyond straightforward fraud and antitrust abuse prevention. Everything else is just details.
Don't be naive; they block what they think they have to to avoid shitstorms from the FCC. They'll show everything else. It's not like MTV was wandering out in the woods and whilst contemplating nature came up with a moral line. It's strictly what they (and, I must confess, we -- I work for an MTVN subsidiary) won't get shit for.
Hive mind? Slashdot is made up of a lot of different people, dude. If you can prove that it's the same people saying those two contradictory things, I'll eat my hat. I'm pretty certain those circles don't overlap on the Venn diagram.
Well, actually, there is one case where it is: Games. Particularly, online multiplayer games, in the form of anti-cheat technology. For a single-player game, I would much, much rather have an open source game, even if I have to pay for the content. But for a multiplayer game, it seems like the game has to at least be closed, if not heavily protected, for many genres of game.
Doesn't matter if the game's closed, the entire functionality of the client is on the user's computer. It slows down anyone who wants to manipulate the client, but it cannot ever stop them.
But we're not talking about DRM any more; anti-cheat protections are a different beast, and one that almost no one objects to (unless they interfere with the normal operation of the game).
It is, however, possible for a DRM'd system to have additional capabilities that the non-DRM'd media alone wouldn't have.
I don't see the distinction. A site could offer for-pay music downloads ($N per track), with no DRM anywhere in sight, and once you pay for a song, you can go back and redownload it as often as you want.
I think what you mean is that music publishers are unlikely to offer certain functionality in their download scheme if the music isn't DRMed, which is probably true (assuming we're talking about RIAA members, here).
Repeat after me: All DRM is inherently defective and bad for consumers. Consider the baseline: completely unfettered media. You can do with it whatever you want.
All forms of DRM add fetters to that situation without giving any additional abilities or functionality. There is absolutely nothing that can be done with DRMed media that cannot be done (in a technical sense) with unfettered media.
Society fails miserably when the implicit rules that regulate our behaviour are abused; then it needs regulating by an authority of some kind. It's a 'bad apple' kind of dilemma.
Laws and contracts are a feature of large populations where everyone cannot be personally familiar with even a small percentage of the other people. The social contract of which you are so enamored is certainly a real thing, and it is a convenient way to reference the set of unwritten rules that most people agree on, but it does us no good when two members of society disagree on one of those unwritten rules -- as happens on a daily basis. When that happens, we have, again, laws and contracts to fall back on.
It doesn't even have to be a situation where one person is being an obvious "bad apple." Sometimes two good people simply cannot come to an accommodation, simply because their interests are diametrically opposed.
You, and some of the other replies, are (unfortunately) of the opinion that if everyone would just behave we wouldn't have these problems. Meanwhile, the rest of us over here in the Land of Reality know that that's never going to happen, so we've come up with laws and contracts that deal with our high population density and our modern age. You're infected with nostalgitis.:-)
This is because I share the line with the neighbours, and because it's fair. That said, we usually max out our isp's loose 60GB cap.
I can't be certain, because of the way you worded this, but it sounds like you're splitting a single connection between you and your neighbors. If that's the case, then I'd be surprised if that wasn't specifically prohibited by the terms of the contract with your ISP. I do believe that violating a written contract also violates the social contract.;-)
I'm... not sure what exactly is "abusive" about terms in a contract? If it's in the contract that there's overage charges for going beyond a certain point, and the customer is aware of this, then so what? The customer's aware of it, and they can choose not to sign the contract if they don't like it. And I'm not even certain this is some kind of endemic problem; I don't know a single person who's had trouble with overage charges on their cellphone. People just get bigger plans if they talk that much. (I've never even come within 50% of using all my monthly minutes. Our inexpensive family talk plan hit the rollover cap of 3000 minutes a long time ago.)
Maybe slowdowns past a soft cap is a better way to go, whatever -- I don't really give a shit what telecom companies decide to do to deal with their failure to provision properly, as long as they don't try to blame people for using what they've been promised.
I guess I don't see the connection between "proposes overage charges" and "must be a telecom company sock-puppet". I didn't suggest overage charges because I think it's the best way to go, it was just an example of how an ISP can deal with the overuse situation without blaming users. Really, a sock-puppet with a 5-digit ID? Is it your first day here? Oh, and finally:
The fact that the government is even allowing them to even suggest caps is ludicrous on its face
...what? ISPs shouldn't be allowed to sell a finite amount of bandwidth for a finite price? I really have to ask this again: are you fucking mental?
Astroturfing? Are you fucking mental? I've had this account since 1999.
I'm as pissed as the next guy that some ISPs are trying to silently impose bandwidth caps without announcing them -- that's bullshit and it needs to be squashed. But it sure as hell isn't reasonable to blame the users for using what they were promised.
Wow, that's the neatest deflection of responsibility I've ever seen in this debate. It's horse puckey, of course.:)
The problem with your whole argument is that you're acting as if the end-users have some unwritten responsibility to share nicely, rather than simply being responsible for adhering to the terms of their contract with the ISP. Bandwidth hogs certianly do use up way more bandwidth than the average (and whether or not they're using that bandwidth to commit copyright infringement is utterly irrelevant).
But the problem is that ISPs tell their users "We'll give you 24/7 access to X bandwidth, for $Y a month." Then some users use up X bandwidth 24/7 (dutifully paying their $Y a month) and the ISPs (like you) start whining "HOW DARE THEY USE THE BANDWIDTH WE PROMISED THEM!"
You do not get to say "These hogs are supposed to be sharing nicely, not using up all the bandwidth we're providing them with!" This is a business transaction, your rosy moral view of the world has nothing to do with it. It'd be nice if everyone behaved politely all the time, but they don't, which is why we have laws and contracts. That way, there's force behind agreements, so when you whine "They're using too much bandwidth" they can point at the contract and say "You said we could, right here in writing."
But you sold them X bandwidth for $Y a month. That's in the contract. If it's not a viable business model for you to sell people this (because too many of them actually use that bandwidth) then you need to change the contracts so that people are paying for the bandwidth they use.
An entirely sensible business model is to give X bandwidth for $Y dollars up to Z bytes per month, and then charge overage fees when the user goes beyond Z bytes per month. That's what ISPs are starting to switch to. But whining that some users use up too much bandwidth -- when YOU CONTROL how much bandwidth they have, and YOU DECIDED how much to give them -- is idiotic.
...if you aren't taking the initiative to get yourself better pay, better benefits, or a better job, then I'm sorry, but you need to grow a spine.
I'm 30 years old, and I've been at my current job for almost 8 years. Two and a half years ago I was making slightly more than half of what I'm making now. I had let raises come to me in their own time, which wasn't very quickly under the old management; we got bought by a giant media conglomerate, who has worked to improve our pay and benefits tremendously, but it still wasn't something that just happened by magic.
I worked out what I *should* be earning per year if I'd received an annual cost-of-living increase, as well as if I'd received any kind of merit increase. The amount was about 10% higher than my salary at the time. So I drew up some charts and sent it off to the VP of my section.
Within a week, they had given me a raise to more than that amount. They knew I was good at my job and were afraid I would leave (I in fact was feeling disillusioned and did interview somewhere else, and almost took that job, but the circumstances just weren't quite right). And I realized that this had only happened because I had taken the initiative to tell them that I deserved more than I was earning.
And that began it. What came along with the raise was also more responsibility; and I realized that you will not get a significant raise for doing the same shit you're doing now. Go ask for responsibility, go ask for new tasks. One of my co-workers constantly whined about not getting to do any of the interesting work; but whenever we'd point out that they should go ask for such things, they'd complain that there was no point.
I reactivated my résumé on Monster.com a while back, and got a dozen calls and emails within three days. There are a lot of IT jobs out there; if you think your company is underpaying you, tell them how you feel and that you think you deserve a raise. Most IT companies are always looking for people to hire, so if you put your résumé out there, your own company will see that you're looking for a new job, and if you're valuable to them, that can make them want to improve your situation before you up and leave. (This can backfire if you have spiteful managers who think "How dare he look for another job!"... but then, why would you want to work for such people?)
Go out and GRAB IT. The single biggest mistake I've made in my entire life was turning down an offer to run the department I'm in. (I turned it down because the VP who made the offer was a psycho and I didn't want to be reporting directly to him. He was gone three months after he offered me the position; I should have taken it.)
Why. Actors, writers and directors are far more creative, also have to put up with crunch times and they all have unions.
Yeah, I figured someone would bring up the entertainment industry. Some of the entertainment unions are better than others, because they don't function like your standard auto workers' union. The Writers Guild of America, for example, does basically nothing to get you work. You have to get jobs yourself. All the WGA's agreements with the studios do is guarantee a certain minimum amount of pay for certain work, and other financial rewards, as well as systems for determining screen credit, residuals, etc. More senior guild members don't automatically get any kind of preference or advantage; and you don't need to join the guild in order to work as a writer (although once you do enough work to qualify to join, you have to join if you want any of the studios to hire you again -- but there's no Catch-22 where you have to be a member to get work, and you have to get work to be a member, like there are with a lot of unions; and there are smaller production companies that aren't WGA signatories, and you don't have to be a WGA member to work for them).
IT workers are no less interchangeable than auto workers. Just look at companies like IBM that lay off thousands of people while continuing to import H1-B workers.
Well, I think the only reason they can lay off thousands of IT workers is because they're not unionized;) But then again, it's not the absolute numbers that matter when you have 350,000 employees, it's the percentages.
And look how shitty the results are in many of those let's-exchange-skilled-locals-for-cheap-foreigners situations. It's not exactly an even exchange, even if it saves you money in the short-term. IBM still employs tens of thousands of Americans, here in America, by the way.
Whatever form an IT union might take, I certainly wouldn't want it to look anything like the UAW or, for example, most police unions. Incompetent employees end up being really hard to get rid of, and when one simple mistake can wipe out vast amounts of critical data, those aren't people you want to have to keep around. Collective bargaining is a good thing, but the form a lot of American unions have taken do much more harm than good.
Unions are good for industries where workers are easily interchangeable -- assembly-line stuff, for example. In order to protect employees from being treated like interchangeable parts, you need some level of collective ability.
Not so great for jobs that require a high degree of independent, creative thought, tend to have projects that go into crunch time, and have advanced skill sets. I'm not against unions in principle; in the employer-employee relationship, employers invariably have significantly more power, and there's no reason why employees shouldn't be able to come up with ways to tip the balance in their favor (or at least, less in the employer's favor). But American-style unionization isn't always the way to go, and I believe especially not for IT workers.
In fact, especially at my company I'd be against tech unionization. I make really good money and rarely have to deal with significant overtime or crunch time. My company (a giant media conglomerate) is very good to its employees. None of the issues I have with the company would be even remotely addressed by unionization.
Using a separate process for each tab isn't "bloaty"; it means that when you kill a process, all of the memory for that process is cleared up. With Firefox's threaded model, it's a lot harder to clean up all the memory you don't need.
To put it another way, with a process model, you only use as much memory as what you have open uses. With a threaded model, you're still using up memory from tabs you closed a long time ago.
I never get why people are so worried when apps USE their RAM. That's what it's for. As long as it's not due to leak (ie ram usage after a point, remains constant rather than growing infinitely) then I don't get the problem.
The problem is when an app uses way more RAM than it needs to, reducing the amount of RAM I have available for other things. People aren't complaining that an app uses RAM; they're complaining that it uses way too much. RAM may be cheap, but I only have a finite amount, and my motherboard only supports so much.
There are some other contenders - flywheels, for instance -- but do *you* want an aging flywheel, high mass, high speed, coming apart in your basement? Me either. I saw a 4-inch grinder wheel come apart once and chunks of it outright severed a 2x4 in the wall next to the workbench.
Flywheels are typically made of lighter, less-dense fibrous materials. If they suffer a catastrophic failure they basically explode into sand. And they're contained inside a containment vessel, which is more than strong enough to deal with the flywheel falling apart, even at high speeds.
Flywheels aren't all that cost-effective compared to many of the alternatives, but their failure modes aren't really a big deal. It's not like it's a giant chunk of steel that fragments into shrapnel when it fails.
Demolition companies are just as concerned with preventing debris from ejecting sideways from the building as it collapses as they are with preventing the building as a whole from falling sideways.
However, to my knowledge, no building as large as the WTC towers have ever been demolished under controlled conditions, and few (if any) buildings with the same internal design (the steel tube core). The steel core of the WTC towers may have very well lent itself to a vertical collapse under any conditions.
Again, not saying anything conclusive, but merely because three buildings happened to fall more or less straight down when they collapsed is no proof that something secret went on. It could also be argued that since WTC 1 and 2 were more or less identical in structure, they should have been expected to collapse the same way given the similar conditions (of being impacted by jet planes), therefore it's only "two" perfect collapses. (Other problem: define "perfect collapse", the WTC 1/2 debris impacted other buildings, that's hardly perfect.)
It could *also* be argued that if you're going to demolish giant skyscrapers and kill thousands of people, you're also not going to care about collateral damage, so why not make them topple sideways so that it looks more accidental? Basically, it's bogus to assume that a straight-down collapse implies shenanigans in the first place.
The FBI can decide whatever they want as far as their regulations are concerned, but if it gets to court, any evidence they gather illegally is useless.
It's not that hard to get a warrant, and if they're too fucking lazy to call up a judge and explain why they think a warrant is needed, they're endangering the public.
-jcr
You're right, as far as that goes, but it's not far enough. You're operating under the assumption that the FBI's only goal is to get criminals convicted of crimes. That's definitely one of their goals (more precisely, it's the primary or only goal of some of their employees), but the goal of this particular outrage is a power grab; if this were legal, it would make their jobs easier, and give them more power.
Strategically, they're betting on McCain winning in November; if he does, he'll likely fully support tactics like this, so they get to keep doing what they're doing. If Obama wins, the FBI higher-ups will likely get replaced regardless of this (and if they're lucky, they'll just get a new set of marching orders).
Slashdot Mirror
Or where our water supply is hijacked by a multinational illuminati-esque superpower spending multiple billions of dollars drilling and building super secret underground dams restricting the flow of ground water in a coordinated attempt with the CIA and other world powers to make millions by raising the price of water, which still rains in large quantities.
Oh yeah, I saw Quantum of Solace this weekend, too. Now I'm envisioning James Bond making snarky comments while he smashes one of these dehumidifiers with his Aston Martin.
No, but you can fix it with changing the interference to the correct kind. Many economic markets are what are termed "market failures". This does not mean the kind of failure like we saw with the banks last month; it means a market that, when completely unfettered, does not allocate resources efficiently. All markets are market failures to some degree (simply because of human nature and the laws of physics, no market can be perfectly efficient), but some markets are much closer to a true market failure than others. Transportation, utilities, and telecommunications are some of the more severe market failures, which is why they tend to be heavily regulated.
Many markets don't need any regulation beyond straightforward fraud and antitrust abuse prevention. Everything else is just details.
Comedy Central
Don't be naive; they block what they think they have to to avoid shitstorms from the FCC. They'll show everything else. It's not like MTV was wandering out in the woods and whilst contemplating nature came up with a moral line. It's strictly what they (and, I must confess, we -- I work for an MTVN subsidiary) won't get shit for.
Well, if you're a small-time fraudster, it only takes a one-man ring to rule the mall.
Hive mind? Slashdot is made up of a lot of different people, dude. If you can prove that it's the same people saying those two contradictory things, I'll eat my hat. I'm pretty certain those circles don't overlap on the Venn diagram.
Now.. you have to look at it continuously, navigate through nine menus, etc.
Then you're doing it wrong. *holds down 3 without looking at phone, it autodials wife's cellphone*
Doesn't matter if the game's closed, the entire functionality of the client is on the user's computer. It slows down anyone who wants to manipulate the client, but it cannot ever stop them.
But we're not talking about DRM any more; anti-cheat protections are a different beast, and one that almost no one objects to (unless they interfere with the normal operation of the game).
I don't see the distinction. A site could offer for-pay music downloads ($N per track), with no DRM anywhere in sight, and once you pay for a song, you can go back and redownload it as often as you want.
I think what you mean is that music publishers are unlikely to offer certain functionality in their download scheme if the music isn't DRMed, which is probably true (assuming we're talking about RIAA members, here).
Repeat after me: All DRM is inherently defective and bad for consumers. Consider the baseline: completely unfettered media. You can do with it whatever you want.
All forms of DRM add fetters to that situation without giving any additional abilities or functionality. There is absolutely nothing that can be done with DRMed media that cannot be done (in a technical sense) with unfettered media.
Followed by, of course, Beastly Branding.
Laws and contracts are a feature of large populations where everyone cannot be personally familiar with even a small percentage of the other people. The social contract of which you are so enamored is certainly a real thing, and it is a convenient way to reference the set of unwritten rules that most people agree on, but it does us no good when two members of society disagree on one of those unwritten rules -- as happens on a daily basis. When that happens, we have, again, laws and contracts to fall back on.
It doesn't even have to be a situation where one person is being an obvious "bad apple." Sometimes two good people simply cannot come to an accommodation, simply because their interests are diametrically opposed.
You, and some of the other replies, are (unfortunately) of the opinion that if everyone would just behave we wouldn't have these problems. Meanwhile, the rest of us over here in the Land of Reality know that that's never going to happen, so we've come up with laws and contracts that deal with our high population density and our modern age. You're infected with nostalgitis. :-)
This is because I share the line with the neighbours, and because it's fair. That said, we usually max out our isp's loose 60GB cap.
I can't be certain, because of the way you worded this, but it sounds like you're splitting a single connection between you and your neighbors. If that's the case, then I'd be surprised if that wasn't specifically prohibited by the terms of the contract with your ISP. I do believe that violating a written contract also violates the social contract. ;-)
I'm... not sure what exactly is "abusive" about terms in a contract? If it's in the contract that there's overage charges for going beyond a certain point, and the customer is aware of this, then so what? The customer's aware of it, and they can choose not to sign the contract if they don't like it. And I'm not even certain this is some kind of endemic problem; I don't know a single person who's had trouble with overage charges on their cellphone. People just get bigger plans if they talk that much. (I've never even come within 50% of using all my monthly minutes. Our inexpensive family talk plan hit the rollover cap of 3000 minutes a long time ago.)
Maybe slowdowns past a soft cap is a better way to go, whatever -- I don't really give a shit what telecom companies decide to do to deal with their failure to provision properly, as long as they don't try to blame people for using what they've been promised.
I guess I don't see the connection between "proposes overage charges" and "must be a telecom company sock-puppet". I didn't suggest overage charges because I think it's the best way to go, it was just an example of how an ISP can deal with the overuse situation without blaming users. Really, a sock-puppet with a 5-digit ID? Is it your first day here? Oh, and finally:
The fact that the government is even allowing them to even suggest caps is ludicrous on its face
...what? ISPs shouldn't be allowed to sell a finite amount of bandwidth for a finite price? I really have to ask this again: are you fucking mental?
Astroturfing? Are you fucking mental? I've had this account since 1999.
I'm as pissed as the next guy that some ISPs are trying to silently impose bandwidth caps without announcing them -- that's bullshit and it needs to be squashed. But it sure as hell isn't reasonable to blame the users for using what they were promised.
Wow, that's the neatest deflection of responsibility I've ever seen in this debate. It's horse puckey, of course. :)
The problem with your whole argument is that you're acting as if the end-users have some unwritten responsibility to share nicely, rather than simply being responsible for adhering to the terms of their contract with the ISP. Bandwidth hogs certianly do use up way more bandwidth than the average (and whether or not they're using that bandwidth to commit copyright infringement is utterly irrelevant).
But the problem is that ISPs tell their users "We'll give you 24/7 access to X bandwidth, for $Y a month." Then some users use up X bandwidth 24/7 (dutifully paying their $Y a month) and the ISPs (like you) start whining "HOW DARE THEY USE THE BANDWIDTH WE PROMISED THEM!"
You do not get to say "These hogs are supposed to be sharing nicely, not using up all the bandwidth we're providing them with!" This is a business transaction, your rosy moral view of the world has nothing to do with it. It'd be nice if everyone behaved politely all the time, but they don't, which is why we have laws and contracts. That way, there's force behind agreements, so when you whine "They're using too much bandwidth" they can point at the contract and say "You said we could, right here in writing."
But you sold them X bandwidth for $Y a month. That's in the contract. If it's not a viable business model for you to sell people this (because too many of them actually use that bandwidth) then you need to change the contracts so that people are paying for the bandwidth they use.
An entirely sensible business model is to give X bandwidth for $Y dollars up to Z bytes per month, and then charge overage fees when the user goes beyond Z bytes per month. That's what ISPs are starting to switch to. But whining that some users use up too much bandwidth -- when YOU CONTROL how much bandwidth they have, and YOU DECIDED how much to give them -- is idiotic.
...if you aren't taking the initiative to get yourself better pay, better benefits, or a better job, then I'm sorry, but you need to grow a spine.
I'm 30 years old, and I've been at my current job for almost 8 years. Two and a half years ago I was making slightly more than half of what I'm making now. I had let raises come to me in their own time, which wasn't very quickly under the old management; we got bought by a giant media conglomerate, who has worked to improve our pay and benefits tremendously, but it still wasn't something that just happened by magic.
I worked out what I *should* be earning per year if I'd received an annual cost-of-living increase, as well as if I'd received any kind of merit increase. The amount was about 10% higher than my salary at the time. So I drew up some charts and sent it off to the VP of my section.
Within a week, they had given me a raise to more than that amount. They knew I was good at my job and were afraid I would leave (I in fact was feeling disillusioned and did interview somewhere else, and almost took that job, but the circumstances just weren't quite right). And I realized that this had only happened because I had taken the initiative to tell them that I deserved more than I was earning.
And that began it. What came along with the raise was also more responsibility; and I realized that you will not get a significant raise for doing the same shit you're doing now. Go ask for responsibility, go ask for new tasks. One of my co-workers constantly whined about not getting to do any of the interesting work; but whenever we'd point out that they should go ask for such things, they'd complain that there was no point.
I reactivated my résumé on Monster.com a while back, and got a dozen calls and emails within three days. There are a lot of IT jobs out there; if you think your company is underpaying you, tell them how you feel and that you think you deserve a raise. Most IT companies are always looking for people to hire, so if you put your résumé out there, your own company will see that you're looking for a new job, and if you're valuable to them, that can make them want to improve your situation before you up and leave. (This can backfire if you have spiteful managers who think "How dare he look for another job!"... but then, why would you want to work for such people?)
Go out and GRAB IT. The single biggest mistake I've made in my entire life was turning down an offer to run the department I'm in. (I turned it down because the VP who made the offer was a psycho and I didn't want to be reporting directly to him. He was gone three months after he offered me the position; I should have taken it.)
Why. Actors, writers and directors are far more creative, also have to put up with crunch times and they all have unions.
Yeah, I figured someone would bring up the entertainment industry. Some of the entertainment unions are better than others, because they don't function like your standard auto workers' union. The Writers Guild of America, for example, does basically nothing to get you work. You have to get jobs yourself. All the WGA's agreements with the studios do is guarantee a certain minimum amount of pay for certain work, and other financial rewards, as well as systems for determining screen credit, residuals, etc. More senior guild members don't automatically get any kind of preference or advantage; and you don't need to join the guild in order to work as a writer (although once you do enough work to qualify to join, you have to join if you want any of the studios to hire you again -- but there's no Catch-22 where you have to be a member to get work, and you have to get work to be a member, like there are with a lot of unions; and there are smaller production companies that aren't WGA signatories, and you don't have to be a WGA member to work for them).
IT workers are no less interchangeable than auto workers. Just look at companies like IBM that lay off thousands of people while continuing to import H1-B workers.
Well, I think the only reason they can lay off thousands of IT workers is because they're not unionized ;) But then again, it's not the absolute numbers that matter when you have 350,000 employees, it's the percentages.
And look how shitty the results are in many of those let's-exchange-skilled-locals-for-cheap-foreigners situations. It's not exactly an even exchange, even if it saves you money in the short-term. IBM still employs tens of thousands of Americans, here in America, by the way.
Whatever form an IT union might take, I certainly wouldn't want it to look anything like the UAW or, for example, most police unions. Incompetent employees end up being really hard to get rid of, and when one simple mistake can wipe out vast amounts of critical data, those aren't people you want to have to keep around. Collective bargaining is a good thing, but the form a lot of American unions have taken do much more harm than good.
Unions are good for industries where workers are easily interchangeable -- assembly-line stuff, for example. In order to protect employees from being treated like interchangeable parts, you need some level of collective ability.
Not so great for jobs that require a high degree of independent, creative thought, tend to have projects that go into crunch time, and have advanced skill sets. I'm not against unions in principle; in the employer-employee relationship, employers invariably have significantly more power, and there's no reason why employees shouldn't be able to come up with ways to tip the balance in their favor (or at least, less in the employer's favor). But American-style unionization isn't always the way to go, and I believe especially not for IT workers.
In fact, especially at my company I'd be against tech unionization. I make really good money and rarely have to deal with significant overtime or crunch time. My company (a giant media conglomerate) is very good to its employees. None of the issues I have with the company would be even remotely addressed by unionization.
Using a separate process for each tab isn't "bloaty"; it means that when you kill a process, all of the memory for that process is cleared up. With Firefox's threaded model, it's a lot harder to clean up all the memory you don't need.
To put it another way, with a process model, you only use as much memory as what you have open uses. With a threaded model, you're still using up memory from tabs you closed a long time ago.
I never get why people are so worried when apps USE their RAM. That's what it's for. As long as it's not due to leak (ie ram usage after a point, remains constant rather than growing infinitely) then I don't get the problem.
The problem is when an app uses way more RAM than it needs to, reducing the amount of RAM I have available for other things. People aren't complaining that an app uses RAM; they're complaining that it uses way too much. RAM may be cheap, but I only have a finite amount, and my motherboard only supports so much.
Better that than "CC Companies French Mythbusters Show On Security".
Why would they bother attacking Palin's lack of experience? They'll just ignore her and focus on McCain.
There are some other contenders - flywheels, for instance -- but do *you* want an aging flywheel, high mass, high speed, coming apart in your basement? Me either. I saw a 4-inch grinder wheel come apart once and chunks of it outright severed a 2x4 in the wall next to the workbench.
Flywheels are typically made of lighter, less-dense fibrous materials. If they suffer a catastrophic failure they basically explode into sand. And they're contained inside a containment vessel, which is more than strong enough to deal with the flywheel falling apart, even at high speeds.
Flywheels aren't all that cost-effective compared to many of the alternatives, but their failure modes aren't really a big deal. It's not like it's a giant chunk of steel that fragments into shrapnel when it fails.
Men? Women? Don't be ridiculous! Having people protect oil is inefficient. The solution is intelligent oil that can protect itself!
Demolition companies are just as concerned with preventing debris from ejecting sideways from the building as it collapses as they are with preventing the building as a whole from falling sideways.
However, to my knowledge, no building as large as the WTC towers have ever been demolished under controlled conditions, and few (if any) buildings with the same internal design (the steel tube core). The steel core of the WTC towers may have very well lent itself to a vertical collapse under any conditions.
Again, not saying anything conclusive, but merely because three buildings happened to fall more or less straight down when they collapsed is no proof that something secret went on. It could also be argued that since WTC 1 and 2 were more or less identical in structure, they should have been expected to collapse the same way given the similar conditions (of being impacted by jet planes), therefore it's only "two" perfect collapses. (Other problem: define "perfect collapse", the WTC 1/2 debris impacted other buildings, that's hardly perfect.)
It could *also* be argued that if you're going to demolish giant skyscrapers and kill thousands of people, you're also not going to care about collateral damage, so why not make them topple sideways so that it looks more accidental? Basically, it's bogus to assume that a straight-down collapse implies shenanigans in the first place.
The FBI can decide whatever they want as far as their regulations are concerned, but if it gets to court, any evidence they gather illegally is useless.
It's not that hard to get a warrant, and if they're too fucking lazy to call up a judge and explain why they think a warrant is needed, they're endangering the public.
-jcr
You're right, as far as that goes, but it's not far enough. You're operating under the assumption that the FBI's only goal is to get criminals convicted of crimes. That's definitely one of their goals (more precisely, it's the primary or only goal of some of their employees), but the goal of this particular outrage is a power grab; if this were legal, it would make their jobs easier, and give them more power.
Strategically, they're betting on McCain winning in November; if he does, he'll likely fully support tactics like this, so they get to keep doing what they're doing. If Obama wins, the FBI higher-ups will likely get replaced regardless of this (and if they're lucky, they'll just get a new set of marching orders).