Surely with so many (especially young) people being 'web first' with not just their buying habits, but now in terms of what they do in their spair time, we'd expect more of them to want to get a career in it?"
Actually I would expect just the opposite, it's the mundane everydayness if IT and the web which leads to it's preception as boring.
Show me an IT project which could be thought of as cool and breaking new ground, there aren't really any. There are incremental improvements, over what went before but nothing like 60s 70s and maybe the 80s when every new project was something new if only in a geeky way.
IT has become a commodatity market, good for lowering prices, not good for making interesting work.
Kids change fads more often than they change their underwear some times.
Maybe, but not changing their underwear is itself just a fad, soon all the hip kids will be taking multiple pairs of underwear to school and changing between each class. You mark my words.
2. Capitalism is a race to the bottom. Companies do not compete to provide a better product cheaper, because generally better and cheaper do not go together -- that's what science is, not business. Therefore, companies compete to provide a worse product cheaper. There is absolutely no incentive whatsoever to produce a good product, so why spent a lot of capital on excellent software developers?
Thats a little harsh, I would say that the race is to produce a product which is "Just Good Enough" cheaper than the competition. It's the customer that decides what "Just Good Enough" actually is at any given price.
Based on your argument, the world would be filled with terrible open source projects which never did anything useful since they are the cheapest and the worse and although those application do exist, they don't get used much.
My CBF1000 does over 50 mpg which is well beyond most small cars, maybe the smart FourTwo matches my mpg but then you aren't getting the 4 seats and a large [boot/trunk], in fact you are just getting an enclosed motorbike which can't filter so needs to have the engine running for longer.
If the car was used to capacity, i.e. always carrying 4 people, then the Passenger Miles Per Gallon for a small car would be better than a motorbike but in the UK average car occupancy remains at about 1.2 people.
I would imagine a lot of western music is censored because it would corrupt the mind of young people (i.e. doesn't sing the praises of the communist party)
In fact, I'm intrigued as to what music under RIAA jurisdiction would be acceptable?
The thing about Bletchley Park is that it was really the system as a whole that was responsible for the code breaking not a single piece of equipment or a room
The staff there were isolated from the surrounding villages to maintain secrecy and so the whole site really was integral to the process from a "The life of a code breaker" sort of story. It really wasn't a single room filled with a bunch a smart people who could have been moved at the drop of a hat.
Think I'll have a visit to Bletchley Park, if only to give some money to them
I think copyrights should last as long as the work is being actively revised, promoted, and/or otherwise used commercially
I see CD's being published in batches or 1,000 with loads of back catelogue tracks on them and and mysteriously only ever sold to people in the music industry but technically still being used commercially so the copyright remains, each song getting rotated through the cd compliation albums once every 10 years (or what ever the copyright cutoff is set to).
Hm, must be something in the English-Metric conversion, because TFA says there's 25 million lost.
The confusion is because the HMRC lost 15,000 personal records on a CD last month; and now in a seperate incident the same department has lost another 25,000,000 personal records also on CD
The 2 news stories are getting mangled into a single issue.
If people really wanted to keep the fact that they got smashed and rode horseback on their friend private, they'd just open up notepad and type away. Instead, they decide to broadcast that on a social website so their friends can see their drunken antics.
You get smashed, you don't type on you facebook about your antics, but you friend does and you share all same contacts, whats more, those contacts include people who are not necessarily friends but more acquitances, work colleagues etc.
Information has been passed to everyone you might know with out you doing anything to start that process off
I suppose you could argue that that situation is the same as having your friend talking to her friends about what happened but it's the scale and indiscriminate nature of who gets that information that kills privacy.
Thats hardly a fair comment.
The buyers are looking to buy items at the best price, stands to reason that targetted ads are going to appeal to them and indeed from a buyers point of view, the more sources for an item that they are intrested in the better.
It's the sellers who are the ones losing out to targetted ads and it's not like they have a choice to prevent potential buyers from seeing targetted ads.
Making a weapon requires foresight into the possible effects they may have.
Although the article refers to this tool as a weapon I'm personally not convinced that it is designed as a weapon because I'm not convinced it's primary use is to kill the prey.
Quote from the article
Scientists have documented tool use among chimpanzees for decades, but the tools have been simple and used to extract food rather than to kill it. Some chimpanzees slide thin sticks or leaf blades into termite mounds
Another quote from the article
Then, grasping the weapons in a "power grip," they jabbed them into tree-branch hollows where bush babies -- small, monkeylike mammals -- sleep during the day
To me, this looks a lot like tool for probing into holes which the Chimpanzee couldn't otherwise reach and maybe for pulling the prey out. I think calling it a weapon is a little far fetched until it's proved the point of the tool is to kill rather than just reach an inaccessible place, otherwise you could call a stick being plunged into a termite mound a weapon.
I was thinking in terms of thrusters to be able to align the probe towards earth/anything interesting that might be out there such as a Vogon Construction Fleet.
it takes 8 minutes to send a signal as far as mars and 4 years to send one to Alpha Centuri, which Voyager 1 is predicted to reach in later 2009. here in the lab, however, we are working on some technology that should help alleviate this problem.
I can't work out what you are trying to say here, it reads as if you are expecting Voyager 1 to reach Alpha Centuri around 2009 which I'm sure you don't believe.
Alpha Centuri is 13000AU away and Voyager 1 is moving at about 3.5 AU per year, is moving in the wrong direction and only has enough fuel to last until 2020ish.
Are all these IT Projects and police cameras actually a secret plot to harness George Orwell's spinning body as the primary power source for the U.K?
The irony is that George Orwells spinning body can only just generate enough power to run all the extra cameras and servers so there has been no net gain to the UK power supply
This is exactly what I was going to post. Where's mod points when you really really need them? (Maybe if they lasted more than a couple days, I could save them for posts that really deserve them.)
What they need is a superstar programmer who can work out how to change that line in the configuration;)
Nope, it means 49995 machines registered the download/install and then were either left turned off, or promptly got reinstalled back to something without Vista running on it.
Note: The above was sarcasm. If you did not know it was sarcasm, consult your physician and they will issue you a prescription for a pill that will make it better.
Note: the previous note was also sarcasm, do not consult your physician.
nor is anyone acknowledging the fact that terrorism causes counter-terrorism, not the other way around.
Thats a chicken and an egg situation, feelings of resentment at being racially singled out in counter-terrorism operations are often given by muslims being interviewed on TV as reason why they don't feel like Britian is there home/why they are more like to engage in terrorism now than before 9/11.
An increase in hostile feelings amoung Muslims is then given as the reason we need yet more counter-terrorism and so the circle goes on. For example, look at the Forest Gate Raid http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5242564.stm, 200 officers raid a house, roads are shutdown in all directions, a no-fly zone is setup and 1 family member shot 'accidently'.
Only trouble was that they weren't terrorist, and I don't believe that there was any evidence to link them to terrorism other than a single source who named them. But look at how they look, a more sterotypical looking pair of terrorist I never did see - you may as well just go around arresting everyone in a trench coat for being a pedo</sarcasm>
I'm not saying that they were innocent of everything, I notice that the brother who was shot was later charged on porngraph charges, but the scale of the operation, the lack of evidence and accidental shooting does nothing for community relations.
Exhibit A - Microsoft. They have something like 70% profit margins, earn billions of dollars in pure profit every single quarter...yet they are considered a lackluster company and their reflects this perception.
That is at least partly Microsoft's own fault.
Historically Microsoft refused to issue Dividends, their arguement was alway that investors made money by the share price going up and so were hugely focused on that one goal which works while a company is still growing but it can't be sustained indefinately.
Which is where compensation comes in, if there is a reasonable chance he won't be able to work again then AOL should have to pay for ruining the guys career.
That of course, is assuming that he really is as innocent in all of this as he claims to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I would expect just the opposite, it's the mundane everydayness if IT and the web which leads to it's preception as boring.
Show me an IT project which could be thought of as cool and breaking new ground, there aren't really any. There are incremental improvements, over what went before but nothing like 60s 70s and maybe the 80s when every new project was something new if only in a geeky way.
IT has become a commodatity market, good for lowering prices, not good for making interesting work.
Kids change fads more often than they change their underwear some times.
Maybe, but not changing their underwear is itself just a fad, soon all the hip kids will be taking multiple pairs of underwear to school and changing between each class. You mark my words.
2. Capitalism is a race to the bottom. Companies do not compete to provide a better product cheaper, because generally better and cheaper do not go together -- that's what science is, not business. Therefore, companies compete to provide a worse product cheaper. There is absolutely no incentive whatsoever to produce a good product, so why spent a lot of capital on excellent software developers?
Thats a little harsh, I would say that the race is to produce a product which is "Just Good Enough" cheaper than the competition. It's the customer that decides what "Just Good Enough" actually is at any given price.
Based on your argument, the world would be filled with terrible open source projects which never did anything useful since they are the cheapest and the worse and although those application do exist, they don't get used much.
If the car was used to capacity, i.e. always carrying 4 people, then the Passenger Miles Per Gallon for a small car would be better than a motorbike but in the UK average car occupancy remains at about 1.2 people.
I would imagine a lot of western music is censored because it would corrupt the mind of young people (i.e. doesn't sing the praises of the communist party)
In fact, I'm intrigued as to what music under RIAA jurisdiction would be acceptable?
The thing about Bletchley Park is that it was really the system as a whole that was responsible for the code breaking not a single piece of equipment or a room
The staff there were isolated from the surrounding villages to maintain secrecy and so the whole site really was integral to the process from a "The life of a code breaker" sort of story. It really wasn't a single room filled with a bunch a smart people who could have been moved at the drop of a hat.
Think I'll have a visit to Bletchley Park, if only to give some money to them
The confusion is because the HMRC lost 15,000 personal records on a CD last month; and now in a seperate incident the same department has lost another 25,000,000 personal records also on CD
The 2 news stories are getting mangled into a single issue.
You get smashed, you don't type on you facebook about your antics, but you friend does and you share all same contacts, whats more, those contacts include people who are not necessarily friends but more acquitances, work colleagues etc.
Information has been passed to everyone you might know with out you doing anything to start that process off
I suppose you could argue that that situation is the same as having your friend talking to her friends about what happened but it's the scale and indiscriminate nature of who gets that information that kills privacy.
Thats hardly a fair comment. The buyers are looking to buy items at the best price, stands to reason that targetted ads are going to appeal to them and indeed from a buyers point of view, the more sources for an item that they are intrested in the better. It's the sellers who are the ones losing out to targetted ads and it's not like they have a choice to prevent potential buyers from seeing targetted ads.
I was thinking in terms of thrusters to be able to align the probe towards earth/anything interesting that might be out there such as a Vogon Construction Fleet.
Nope, it means 49995 machines registered the download/install and then were either left turned off, or promptly got reinstalled back to something without Vista running on it.
Still, MS must be proud of those 5 machines.
An increase in hostile feelings amoung Muslims is then given as the reason we need yet more counter-terrorism and so the circle goes on. For example, look at the Forest Gate Raid http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5242564.stm, 200 officers raid a house, roads are shutdown in all directions, a no-fly zone is setup and 1 family member shot 'accidently'.
Only trouble was that they weren't terrorist, and I don't believe that there was any evidence to link them to terrorism other than a single source who named them. But look at how they look, a more sterotypical looking pair of terrorist I never did see - you may as well just go around arresting everyone in a trench coat for being a pedo</sarcasm>
I'm not saying that they were innocent of everything, I notice that the brother who was shot was later charged on porngraph charges, but the scale of the operation, the lack of evidence and accidental shooting does nothing for community relations.
Historically Microsoft refused to issue Dividends, their arguement was alway that investors made money by the share price going up and so were hugely focused on that one goal which works while a company is still growing but it can't be sustained indefinately.
makes it alot easier for dial home scripts in the OS to contact MS to check for subscription/license numbers etc.
Which is where compensation comes in, if there is a reasonable chance he won't be able to work again then AOL should have to pay for ruining the guys career.
That of course, is assuming that he really is as innocent in all of this as he claims to be.