When you are eating that excellent food does it matter if it was made by a straight white male or a lesbian black female?
It does if the whole point of the thing is to sit in a room while they talk about it for a couple hours. Then it matters who made it.
But my point about the food was that after eating the same meal 4 days in a row, it doesn't matter if it was excellent food, I want a change of menu to keep from getting bored. Same goes for speakers.
The product is what is important and not who presents it.
I disagree. The presenter is as important as the product if I have to listen to them for a couple hours. If I want the product without the presenter I'll read a reference book.
It is too easy for the following to occur....
And that would be taking it too far. I'm not suggesting that you -must- have some quota of women; merely that one should try to incorporate them. If you invited them and they cancelled, you use your backup, so be it. You don't go cancelling someone one else...
I do not care one bit about a presenter's "personality and life experience" when dealing with technical issues. As has been said "Just the facts mam".
You appear to be easy to satisfy, as long as there are competent speakers on the topics you apparently don't care. That's fine, but not everyone is you. So if you go to a conference with good speakers you'll be happy. So what do you care if the organizers go the extra mile to try and incorporate diversity too? Maybe the person sitting next to you will appreciate it and its no skin off your ass.
The fact that you don't personally care doesn't mean its not worth doing.
I would agree if the topic was social and not factual. How to write good software has nothing to do with the gender, sexual preference or ethnicity of the writer.
But the event itself is social -- you are sitting there listening to them talk. And I'd rather listen to a diverse group of people talk about their code then a bunch of cookie cutter clones, because each presentation will be more interesting if the presenters are different.
If it comes down to selecting and excellent white male speaker or a mediocre black female speaker I would choose the better speaker regardless of diversity.
What if its an excellent white male speaker from google California vs an excellent black female from IBM, South Africa... and to top it off you ALREADY have an excellent white male speaker from google California for another topic?
You seem keen to propose circumstances where the choice is between hyper-qualified white guy and some mediocre minority and then complain that diversity brings the quality down for the sake of diversity. That's a false choice. Nobody is suggesting this is the choice you should make.
Are you really suggesting that the only excellent speakers in any topic related to Ruby are white guys? That there are no excellent female presenters in the field?
I'm proposing quite the opposite, I'm proposing making it BETTER by adding diversity.
Do African Americans write software different from Caucasians? Do heterosexuals write programs differently than homosexuals? The answer to both question is no.
If they are excellent speakers their personality and life experience shines through their presentation. That adds to the experience, makes it more engaging and more interesting.
I don't go to conferences for the food either, but you know what, a good diverse menu makes the whole thing better too.
You can have that diversity within a single ethnic group.
I agree. But if all you have is a line up of 'white guys' then there is a strong signal you MIGHT not. So you should stand back and evaluate whether you actually have the best lineup you could have. You might, but odds are you don't.
Just go find people with different approaches to life.
Good idea. Of course, if you deliberately set out to "find a group of people with different approaches to life" and you end up with nothing but white guys...
Then I'd step back and evaluate whether I'd done the best job that I could. I'm sure women consistently approach life differently to men...so how is it my search for "people who approach life differently" didn't end up with any women in it?
Your approach seems to be racist, in that it assumes members of racial groups are all identical.
Not at all. It assumes the converse: that members of different racial groups and genders are different.
The premise that all members of a given group is identical is clearly false, but if all you have are members of one group you are definitely leaving some pretty obvious diversity on the table.
Nobody would ever suggest you have all 4 speakers all talk about the exactly the same thing. That's a straw man argument.
I'm suggesting 4 diverse individuals to talk about 4 diverse topics is going to be better than having all 4 speakers be upper middle class, white, male, silicon valley startup alumni.
You are at this conference and you are there for the 'subject matter' so the SUBJECTS MATTER, but only a complete idiot would pretend the life experience of the presenter doesn't dramatically impact how interesting they are. If all your presenters had essentially the same lives, they'll be less interesting as a group then a group with more diversity.
Being a white males is not a "background", it is a skin color and gender
Yes it is. But it helps define you; how you perceive the word, and how it perceives you. It will flavor your presentation, and that flavor will help differentiate it from the rest of the presentations. There are many other things I would look at in terms of diversity beyond just the physical characteristics too chasing diversity. But to pretend the obvious physical characteristics don't generate diversity is just blinding yourself to the real world.
Diversity (in and of itself) has literally zero merit.
Actually, it has a great deal of merit.
Diversity means different viewpoints, different perspectives, different approaches. Diverse speakers will appeal to and engage a more diverse audience. Diversity is more interesting.
Do you REALLY want a Ruby (or anything else, for that matter) conference with One White Guy expert and PURELY FOR THE SAKE OF DIVERSITY one homeless female immigrant from Uzbeckistan who has never handled an electronic device in her life and can barely speak any english?
Nice strawman argument you got there. Was anyone really proposing a homeless woman with no tech experience, and no english from Uzbeckistan?
Diversity is a good thing, and it should be deliberately incorporated. That doesn't mean we should have a black homeless woman 'quota', and it doesn't mean that there should be a law enforcing such a quota. But if I'm planning an event, and I notice I've got a lineup of consisting of nothing but 'white guys' then yeah, I'll step back and re-evaluate whether that's the most interesting line up I could have, and whether incorporating speakers with different backgrounds would be more interesting -- because it probably would.
Most grads in math, physics, chemistry also end up doing relatively "mundane" jobs. A degree in bio-chem and you can be a lab technician. A degree in geology and you analyze oil drill results. Physics degree -- you might end up working on radio antennae...
All he has to do is convince a million of his fans to leave Facebook and setup their own pod.
Pretty much.
Technically speaking, you are right, they just provide RSS feeds. A billion or so of them, filtered and correlated and available 24x7. With unlimited photo storage, the ability to update the feeds from a smartphone in an app so easy to use that everyone from a 2 year old kid to an 80+ year old grand parent can use.
The problem isn't SAAS per se, its the lock in to the facebook platform. If I shell out for a hosted Joomla or Drupal or whatever flavor of the day CMS you like... Diaspora even. That can be outsourced SAAS, and I could have 5 9's uptime and effectively unlimited photo storage, and enough bandwidth to serve millions for pretty close to chump change.
But I'd be in shock if the host one day decided to charge me $3000 to post an update to the site's RSS feed.... The thing is, such a think already exists. www.nba.com Obviously that site did not have the market penetration that the Mavericks needed. If it did, they would have been better off convincing people to visit www.nba.com/mavericks, instead of Liking a FB page.
Exactly, this BLEW my mind, when I started seeing major enterprises who ALREADY had web functional presences sending their users off to facebook/what-am-i-thinking
They should have had the spigot turned the other way, let users find them on facebook, like the on facebook, whatever, but have all that as a launchpad to www.my-own-bloody-site.com.
Facebook owns the market segment called Facebook.
And this is only valuable because enterprises fell over themselves to get onto it. They handed over the power to connect with users to be cool, or something.
Half the people I know with facebook accounts only created them precisely to enter a contest, or leave a comment, or some other nonsense on a site that should have hosted it themselves.
As an enterprise, you absolutely want to be able to connect with facebook users, and go after that segment, but the last thing you should be doing is driving users into facebook, and becoming dependent on it.
That is simply too stupid for words; and yet its exactly where a lot of companies are right now.
Everyone capable of having a reasoned thought process around the subject will come to realize that the cost is pretty reasonable
This Facebook fan page shit is basically just RSS. You know what it costs to serve an RSS feed update? Next to nothing.
The trick is to get a million people to sign up to the RSS feed.
And that is sort of the 'bait and switch' situation. Facebook had what are essentially 'facebook-RSS' feeds, that other facebook users could 'subscribe to'. And it was free.
So companies spent millions of hours and dollars promoting the shit out of them to get a million subscribers... and then they have the carpet yanked out from under them -- now the feeds cost thousands to update -- at least if you want any sort of reliability that users will get the update.
They'd have perhaps been better off spending all that effort promoting actual RSS feeds all along, and then when they'd accumulated a million users facebook wouldn't be able to step in and insert a toll booth.
Too bad they got all caught up in the facebook hype. To paraphrase you 'anyone capable of having a reasoned thought process around the subject will come to realize that building a business venture on top of a social network platform gives away power to the social network platform, and really... all they REALLY provide is a cheesy proprietary hosted CMS.
Not really. Security clearance is all about secrets not about actions.
I'd rather have a public servant agree to adhere to the letter of the law (as applicable to the rest of us) and not be put in a position where his/her behavior, acceptable for the general public, would put his/her job in jeopardy.
As long as he kept his actions a secret from his wife, he was putting himself in a compromised position. The fact that it was legal is almost irrelevant.
So they assert they own the copyright, and issue cease and desist orders based on that assertion, because they don't know who owns the copyright?
Seems one could challenge the cease and desist by requesting they identify precisely what they are claiming ownership of, and proof that they do in fact own it.
If, they can provide that, great, then request a license.
If not, I'm not, then the C&D doesn't hold a lot of water.
That's how I'd tackle a C&D for most abandonware. This is a little different though; ID still sells Doom; its on their website last I checked, its on Steam too; so they clearly feel they have all the authority they need to copy and distribute copies, and negotiation distribution of the Doom WADs that are always at the heart of these C&D orders. If they can still sell them, they can give them away, so the argument that they don't have the rights to just distribute them is bunk.
They'll pay a lawyer to write a C&D letter. ID didn't care, they wouldn't do that, and they don't need to do that. And if they were really worried about who owns what, they could simply let whoever else apparently would lay claim to the assets send their own C&D letters.
Does anyone seriously believe that someone would hold a grudge against some company for 19 years, and then extends the grudge against a company who buys up the remains of that company when they get in trouble?
Not necessarily, but by failing to disclose this he hid the fact not only that he might have an unlikely grudge, but that he'd been involved in patent litigation before and therefore would be drawing on all kinds of legal experience and legal information that:
a) may not be relevant today -- it was 20 years ago b) may have him drawing on information that wasn't in -this- case.
Razer has ergo left mice though; which pretty much makes them the only game in town for me. For better or for worse.
I've been happy with the hardware over the last 3 mice I've had; although I did RMA one. And the drivers for the last one was MISERABLE* until they released synapse which came out and fixed it. So while i don't exactly care for any of the cloud stuff in synapse it did at least make the mouse work properly.
* by miserable: v2.x of the drivers would have the buttons become unresponsive during UAC elevation. worthless.
v3.x of the drivers caused the mouse to flake out if it was ever unplugged and then plugged in again until you rebooted. This was more tolerable, but the glitchiness was triggered by sleep/wake, and so on.
But even if you looked at it vs the paid ones... So what?
Rather than spend a couple dollars on a local native app you'd rather set up and maintain a web server to save not even enough money to buy a starbucks coffee.
What I don't get is, if just a handful of kryptonite brings Superman to his knees, how did his parents survive on a whole planet of the stuff?
I am not at all a comic-book-guy; however I was under the impression that kryptonite was radioactive chunks of his home planet created in the destruction of the planet.
So there wasn't kryptonite on krypton while people lived on it.
But I'm sure some comic-book-guy can give you half a dozen arguments about 'canon' and likely as it applies to various timelines or whatever given that they've retconned and rebooted the franchise plenty over the years.
Me? I saw the first 3 movies with Reeves, the new one with Kevin Spacey as Lex, and read the comics casually for a couple years 20 years ago...
A problem that doesn't exist? How about the high cost of counting ballots by hand?
Canada does it. Its pretty efficient.
Oh noes you will cry out, America has 10x the population, and it will cost 10x as much, and require 10x as many people.
This is all true. But that 10x cost is divided by 10x the population, making it cost the same per capita.
Another way of looking at it would be to consider that the 50 states each essentially run their own elections, and even the most populous states aren't more populous than Canada.
The point is that Canada manages it just fine, and there is no valid argument that it can't be scaled in the USA.
Paper ballots are counted by elections canada temporary staff, with oversight by full time employees, and members of the party. I've participated in a couple myself.
My observations:
Disputes over spoiled ballots are pretty much a non-issue.
Their are several protocols in place to safegaurd against fraud. Stuffing the ballot box would not be simple at all. Each station has a ballot box linked to a list of voters, and a record of who voted. The votes are counted against the number of voters on the list who voted.
Per the procedures:
At the polling station specified on the voter information card, the poll clerk crosses the voter's name off the voters list. The deputy returning officer hands the voter a folded ballot with the initials of the deputy returning officer on the outside.
(At this point the voter goes behind the voter screen to make their mark.)
The voter then re-folds the ballot so that the deputy returning officer's initials are visible and hands it to the deputy returning officer. The deputy returning officer checks the initials and the number shown on the counterfoil, removes the counterfoil and discards it, and returns the ballot to the voter. The voter, or the deputy returning officer at the voter's request, places the folded ballot in the ballot box. The poll clerk then places a mark in the "Voted" column beside the elector's name on the voters list.
The ballots themselves have counterfeit protections, and are carefully accounted for. As each vote is cast serial numbers are checked. (But not recorded alongside the voter who placed the vote.)
Really you'd have to corrupt a pretty large chunk of the polling staff, then they could simply ignore the votes and write down whatever totals they wanted as long as it added up to the number of people who voted, and certify and transmit the results them. You'd still have to get it past the other parties observers, but they usually don't send enough people to watch everything all the time.* And then as long as no one called for a recount, no one would ever know.
* Of course they *could* and if fraud were a significant problem, they probably would. In my experience we usually have a couple party affiliated observers in a polling site with 6 or 7 polling stations. The closer the anticipated race the more scrutiny.
I suspect it isn't payphones, per se, that need to be maintained
Payphones are getting vandalized more now then before.
Probably in part because they are not as busy, so there is more opportunity, and because the vandals have cell phones so they aren't screwing themselves over...
Slashdot Mirror
When you are eating that excellent food does it matter if it was made by a straight white male or a lesbian black female?
It does if the whole point of the thing is to sit in a room while they talk about it for a couple hours. Then it matters who made it.
But my point about the food was that after eating the same meal 4 days in a row, it doesn't matter if it was excellent food, I want a change of menu to keep from getting bored. Same goes for speakers.
The product is what is important and not who presents it.
I disagree. The presenter is as important as the product if I have to listen to them for a couple hours. If I want the product without the presenter I'll read a reference book.
It is too easy for the following to occur. ...
And that would be taking it too far. I'm not suggesting that you -must- have some quota of women; merely that one should try to incorporate them. If you invited them and they cancelled, you use your backup, so be it. You don't go cancelling someone one else...
I do not care one bit about a presenter's "personality and life experience" when dealing with technical issues. As has been said "Just the facts mam".
You appear to be easy to satisfy, as long as there are competent speakers on the topics you apparently don't care. That's fine, but not everyone is you. So if you go to a conference with good speakers you'll be happy. So what do you care if the organizers go the extra mile to try and incorporate diversity too? Maybe the person sitting next to you will appreciate it and its no skin off your ass.
The fact that you don't personally care doesn't mean its not worth doing.
I would agree if the topic was social and not factual. How to write good software has nothing to do with the gender, sexual preference or ethnicity of the writer.
But the event itself is social -- you are sitting there listening to them talk. And I'd rather listen to a diverse group of people talk about their code then a bunch of cookie cutter clones, because each presentation will be more interesting if the presenters are different.
If it comes down to selecting and excellent white male speaker or a mediocre black female speaker I would choose the better speaker regardless of diversity.
What if its an excellent white male speaker from google California vs an excellent black female from IBM, South Africa... and to top it off you ALREADY have an excellent white male speaker from google California for another topic?
You seem keen to propose circumstances where the choice is between hyper-qualified white guy and some mediocre minority and then complain that diversity brings the quality down for the sake of diversity. That's a false choice. Nobody is suggesting this is the choice you should make.
Are you really suggesting that the only excellent speakers in any topic related to Ruby are white guys? That there are no excellent female presenters in the field?
I'm proposing quite the opposite, I'm proposing making it BETTER by adding diversity.
Do African Americans write software different from Caucasians? Do heterosexuals write programs differently than homosexuals? The answer to both question is no.
If they are excellent speakers their personality and life experience shines through their presentation. That adds to the experience, makes it more engaging and more interesting.
I don't go to conferences for the food either, but you know what, a good diverse menu makes the whole thing better too.
You can have that diversity within a single ethnic group.
I agree. But if all you have is a line up of 'white guys' then there is a strong signal you MIGHT not. So you should stand back and evaluate whether you actually have the best lineup you could have. You might, but odds are you don't.
Just go find people with different approaches to life.
Good idea. Of course, if you deliberately set out to "find a group of people with different approaches to life" and you end up with nothing but white guys...
Then I'd step back and evaluate whether I'd done the best job that I could. I'm sure women consistently approach life differently to men...so how is it my search for "people who approach life differently" didn't end up with any women in it?
Your approach seems to be racist, in that it assumes members of racial groups are all identical.
Not at all. It assumes the converse: that members of different racial groups and genders are different.
The premise that all members of a given group is identical is clearly false, but if all you have are members of one group you are definitely leaving some pretty obvious diversity on the table.
Nobody would ever suggest you have all 4 speakers all talk about the exactly the same thing. That's a straw man argument.
I'm suggesting 4 diverse individuals to talk about 4 diverse topics is going to be better than having all 4 speakers be upper middle class, white, male, silicon valley startup alumni.
You are at this conference and you are there for the 'subject matter' so the SUBJECTS MATTER, but only a complete idiot would pretend the life experience of the presenter doesn't dramatically impact how interesting they are. If all your presenters had essentially the same lives, they'll be less interesting as a group then a group with more diversity.
Being a white males is not a "background", it is a skin color and gender
Yes it is. But it helps define you; how you perceive the word, and how it perceives you. It will flavor your presentation, and that flavor will help differentiate it from the rest of the presentations. There are many other things I would look at in terms of diversity beyond just the physical characteristics too chasing diversity. But to pretend the obvious physical characteristics don't generate diversity is just blinding yourself to the real world.
Diversity (in and of itself) has literally zero merit.
Actually, it has a great deal of merit.
Diversity means different viewpoints, different perspectives, different approaches. Diverse speakers will appeal to and engage a more diverse audience. Diversity is more interesting.
Do you REALLY want a Ruby (or anything else, for that matter) conference with One White Guy expert and PURELY FOR THE SAKE OF DIVERSITY one homeless female immigrant from Uzbeckistan who has never handled an electronic device in her life and can barely speak any english?
Nice strawman argument you got there. Was anyone really proposing a homeless woman with no tech experience, and no english from Uzbeckistan?
Diversity is a good thing, and it should be deliberately incorporated. That doesn't mean we should have a black homeless woman 'quota', and it doesn't mean that there should be a law enforcing such a quota. But if I'm planning an event, and I notice I've got a lineup of consisting of nothing but 'white guys' then yeah, I'll step back and re-evaluate whether that's the most interesting line up I could have, and whether incorporating speakers with different backgrounds would be more interesting -- because it probably would.
First to file isn't magically immune to prior art.
Same as any other science degree.
Most grads in math, physics, chemistry also end up doing relatively "mundane" jobs. A degree in bio-chem and you can be a lab technician. A degree in geology and you analyze oil drill results. Physics degree -- you might end up working on radio antennae...
All he has to do is convince a million of his fans to leave Facebook and setup their own pod.
Pretty much.
Technically speaking, you are right, they just provide RSS feeds. A billion or so of them, filtered and correlated and available 24x7. With unlimited photo storage, the ability to update the feeds from a smartphone in an app so easy to use that everyone from a 2 year old kid to an 80+ year old grand parent can use.
The problem isn't SAAS per se, its the lock in to the facebook platform. If I shell out for a hosted Joomla or Drupal or whatever flavor of the day CMS you like... Diaspora even. That can be outsourced SAAS, and I could have 5 9's uptime and effectively unlimited photo storage, and enough bandwidth to serve millions for pretty close to chump change.
But I'd be in shock if the host one day decided to charge me $3000 to post an update to the site's RSS feed. ... The thing is, such a think already exists. www.nba.com Obviously that site did not have the market penetration that the Mavericks needed. If it did, they would have been better off convincing people to visit www.nba.com/mavericks, instead of Liking a FB page.
Exactly, this BLEW my mind, when I started seeing major enterprises who ALREADY had web functional presences sending their users off to facebook/what-am-i-thinking
They should have had the spigot turned the other way, let users find them on facebook, like the on facebook, whatever, but have all that as a launchpad to www.my-own-bloody-site.com.
Facebook owns the market segment called Facebook.
And this is only valuable because enterprises fell over themselves to get onto it. They handed over the power to connect with users to be cool, or something.
Half the people I know with facebook accounts only created them precisely to enter a contest, or leave a comment, or some other nonsense on a site that should have hosted it themselves.
As an enterprise, you absolutely want to be able to connect with facebook users, and go after that segment, but the last thing you should be doing is driving users into facebook, and becoming dependent on it.
That is simply too stupid for words; and yet its exactly where a lot of companies are right now.
Everyone capable of having a reasoned thought process around the subject will come to realize that the cost is pretty reasonable
This Facebook fan page shit is basically just RSS. You know what it costs to serve an RSS feed update? Next to nothing.
The trick is to get a million people to sign up to the RSS feed.
And that is sort of the 'bait and switch' situation. Facebook had what are essentially 'facebook-RSS' feeds, that other facebook users could 'subscribe to'. And it was free.
So companies spent millions of hours and dollars promoting the shit out of them to get a million subscribers... and then they have the carpet yanked out from under them -- now the feeds cost thousands to update -- at least if you want any sort of reliability that users will get the update.
They'd have perhaps been better off spending all that effort promoting actual RSS feeds all along, and then when they'd accumulated a million users facebook wouldn't be able to step in and insert a toll booth.
Too bad they got all caught up in the facebook hype. To paraphrase you 'anyone capable of having a reasoned thought process around the subject will come to realize that building a business venture on top of a social network platform gives away power to the social network platform, and really... all they REALLY provide is a cheesy proprietary hosted CMS.
Or ... in other words... jack squat.
Making them easier to blackmail.
Not really. Security clearance is all about secrets not about actions.
I'd rather have a public servant agree to adhere to the letter of the law (as applicable to the rest of us) and not be put in a position where his/her behavior, acceptable for the general public, would put his/her job in jeopardy.
As long as he kept his actions a secret from his wife, he was putting himself in a compromised position. The fact that it was legal is almost irrelevant.
So they assert they own the copyright, and issue cease and desist orders based on that assertion, because they don't know who owns the copyright?
Seems one could challenge the cease and desist by requesting they identify precisely what they are claiming ownership of, and proof that they do in fact own it.
If, they can provide that, great, then request a license.
If not, I'm not, then the C&D doesn't hold a lot of water.
That's how I'd tackle a C&D for most abandonware. This is a little different though; ID still sells Doom; its on their website last I checked, its on Steam too; so they clearly feel they have all the authority they need to copy and distribute copies, and negotiation distribution of the Doom WADs that are always at the heart of these C&D orders. If they can still sell them, they can give them away, so the argument that they don't have the rights to just distribute them is bunk.
They'll pay a lawyer to write a C&D letter. ID didn't care, they wouldn't do that, and they don't need to do that. And if they were really worried about who owns what, they could simply let whoever else apparently would lay claim to the assets send their own C&D letters.
As long as it doesn't effect one's job performance its really nobody's business.
On the one hand there is the leverage and liability angle that he exposed the organization to.
One the other hand there is the whole basic integrity issue; which he's just demonstrated he lacks.
You don't want someone with that kind of character weakness heading the CIA. Period.
what are metrosexual-wannabes?
Men who apply make-up and don't end up looking better.
Does anyone seriously believe that someone would hold a grudge against some company for 19 years, and then extends the grudge against a company who buys up the remains of that company when they get in trouble?
Not necessarily, but by failing to disclose this he hid the fact not only that he might have an unlikely grudge, but that he'd been involved in patent litigation before and therefore would be drawing on all kinds of legal experience and legal information that:
a) may not be relevant today -- it was 20 years ago
b) may have him drawing on information that wasn't in -this- case.
Loose a suit that much, and you might just lose it entirely.
That question doesn't request a full history, it doesn't even request an explanation. It asks a yes-or-no question.
The juror's behavior amounts to this, while in voir dire for a rape crime.
Judge: "Have you or any one close to you ever been charged with a sex crime?"
Juror: "-sigh- I was charged with indecency for peeing in a dumpster behind a school when I was 19."
And then not mentioning the rape charges 5 years later...
When a cop, auditor, or lawyer asks you a question - You give exactly enough information to answer the question, and not half a breath more.
The juror wasn't on trial nor was he being audited. He was being vetted as a juror. Not disclosing material information is a waste of everyone's time.
Razer has ergo left mice though; which pretty much makes them the only game in town for me. For better or for worse.
I've been happy with the hardware over the last 3 mice I've had; although I did RMA one. And the drivers for the last one was MISERABLE* until they released synapse which came out and fixed it. So while i don't exactly care for any of the cloud stuff in synapse it did at least make the mouse work properly.
* by miserable:
v2.x of the drivers would have the buttons become unresponsive during UAC elevation. worthless.
v3.x of the drivers caused the mouse to flake out if it was ever unplugged and then plugged in again until you rebooted. This was more tolerable, but the glitchiness was triggered by sleep/wake, and so on.
With synapse it works properly at last.
That's less than double the regular price around here. Expensive, sure, but 'unconscionable gouging' doesn't really fit.
Can you name a device with a robust html5 browser that doesn't have an SSL client?
For free...?
Yes, free SSH clients.
But even if you looked at it vs the paid ones... So what?
Rather than spend a couple dollars on a local native app you'd rather set up and maintain a web server to save not even enough money to buy a starbucks coffee.
What I don't get is, if just a handful of kryptonite brings Superman to his knees, how did his parents survive on a whole planet of the stuff?
I am not at all a comic-book-guy; however I was under the impression that kryptonite was radioactive chunks of his home planet created in the destruction of the planet.
So there wasn't kryptonite on krypton while people lived on it.
But I'm sure some comic-book-guy can give you half a dozen arguments about 'canon' and likely as it applies to various timelines or whatever given that they've retconned and rebooted the franchise plenty over the years.
Me? I saw the first 3 movies with Reeves, the new one with Kevin Spacey as Lex, and read the comics casually for a couple years 20 years ago...
A problem that doesn't exist? How about the high cost of counting ballots by hand?
Canada does it. Its pretty efficient.
Oh noes you will cry out, America has 10x the population, and it will cost 10x as much, and require 10x as many people.
This is all true. But that 10x cost is divided by 10x the population, making it cost the same per capita.
Another way of looking at it would be to consider that the 50 states each essentially run their own elections, and even the most populous states aren't more populous than Canada.
The point is that Canada manages it just fine, and there is no valid argument that it can't be scaled in the USA.
Paper ballots are counted by elections canada temporary staff, with oversight by full time employees, and members of the party. I've participated in a couple myself.
My observations:
Disputes over spoiled ballots are pretty much a non-issue.
Their are several protocols in place to safegaurd against fraud. Stuffing the ballot box would not be simple at all. Each station has a ballot box linked to a list of voters, and a record of who voted. The votes are counted against the number of voters on the list who voted.
Per the procedures:
At the polling station specified on the voter information card, the poll clerk crosses the voter's name off the voters list. The deputy returning officer hands the voter a folded ballot with the initials of the deputy returning officer on the outside.
(At this point the voter goes behind the voter screen to make their mark.)
The voter then re-folds the ballot so that the deputy returning officer's initials are visible and hands it to the deputy returning officer. The deputy returning officer checks the initials and the number shown on the counterfoil, removes the counterfoil and discards it, and returns the ballot to the voter. The voter, or the deputy returning officer at the voter's request, places the folded ballot in the ballot box. The poll clerk then places a mark in the "Voted" column beside the elector's name on the voters list.
The ballots themselves have counterfeit protections, and are carefully accounted for. As each vote is cast serial numbers are checked. (But not recorded alongside the voter who placed the vote.)
Really you'd have to corrupt a pretty large chunk of the polling staff, then they could simply ignore the votes and write down whatever totals they wanted as long as it added up to the number of people who voted, and certify and transmit the results them. You'd still have to get it past the other parties observers, but they usually don't send enough people to watch everything all the time.*
And then as long as no one called for a recount, no one would ever know.
* Of course they *could* and if fraud were a significant problem, they probably would. In my experience we usually have a couple party affiliated observers in a polling site with 6 or 7 polling stations. The closer the anticipated race the more scrutiny.
Low risk assets are currently returning between 1 and 1.5%, not 5%.
Sounds like you are defining 'low risk' as 'negligible risk'. You can chase 5% yields and still maintain a low risk profile.
However, to get a good reliable ssh client on an arbitrary tablet/phone, using something HTML5 is quite convenient.
What major tablet or phone doesn't have good ssh clients available?
I suspect it isn't payphones, per se, that need to be maintained
Payphones are getting vandalized more now then before.
Probably in part because they are not as busy, so there is more opportunity, and because the vandals have cell phones so they aren't screwing themselves over...