Who would take an 8 hour drive instead of a 1 hour flight?
Uh, me, if it avoids being treated like a base criminal. And don't worry, my clients will be paying for any additional cost in time and fuel. I assure you I'm not the only person doing this, BTW. I wonder how much draconian (and meaningless) "security" measures like this have hurt the economy? Oh, right - probably directly proportional to the amount paid out to the various draconian (and meaningless) government agencies and contractors and oversee/implement them.
Unsubstantiated gossip. I host a fairly large network at AWS and the damn Chinese try to brute force it continuously. Fortunately, they're morons; all they do is run dictionary attacks on the login "admin" (which doesn't exist for any protocol on any server I host). If that's the best China can do, we don't have much to worry about.
. Also, if your job sometimes involves labor or maintenance tasks (rebooting a server, swapping RAM...) they're increasing the amount of time necessary to get your butt on premises to fix it, and potentially impacting their business while you do so.
A team of German and Japanese researchers created arrays of thin-film transistors (TFTs) by carefully depositing gold, aluminum oxide and organic molecules directly onto the notes through a patterned mask...
Well I'll be damned - if they have gold in them now this little bit of otherwise worthless paper actually has a minuscule bit of value...
Yes, yes, it's a gross invasion of privacy, an outrage, etc etc. I haven't been to a theatre in 10 years. Let's see - $12 to see a shitty excuse of a film with plotline/effects that I've seen 300 times already, acting so bad that it defies belief, an endless bombardment of mind-numbing, insulting advertising, and snacks and concessions marked up over 1000% - not my idea of a good time. I'd rather be slowly tortured to death, actually. And what's the point, really? Assuming I even want to see the film (legally), blue-ray on a high-def surround system (in my own house, where I assure you the cameras monitor only what I want them to monitor) is just as good.
Seriously, folks - screw these assholes. If you're going to see a movie in a theatre, you're bending over, spreading them, and begging for it. Don't whine when the bastards take advantage of the situation.
What a load of horseshit. "Maybe our politics will self-correct?????" Maybe the sky will rain flowers and chocolate and we'll all dance off into the rock-candy-mountain sunset singing kum-by-fucking-ya. Wikipedia only works because there are droves of well-meaning people guarding it constantly against nihilistic saboteurs. Applying some delusional happy-happy utopian vision to the cut-throat world of politics is kindergarten logic.
Whitehurst touches on the emergence of cloud computing in the enterprise as well, and this is integral to an intelligent discussion of the imminent death of the traditional licensing system of enterprise software. From TFA:
""People say [they are interested in the] cloud but what they are really espousing are frustrations with existing IT business models," Whitehurst said in an interview with IDG News Service after the presentation.
Whitehurst kicked off his talk by asking a seemingly simple question: "Why are costs of IT going up when the underlying costs to deliver those services halves every 18 months?" The cost of computing should come down, he reasoned, thanks to improving processing speeds and storage capacities. New, more powerful development tools and frameworks should also ease the cost of deployment. Yet IT expenditures continue to go up by about 3 percent to 5 percent a year.
That ease in the cost of deployment, coupled with the flexible infrastructure the cloud supplies, will eventually mean the death of the traditional "per-proc" style of enterprise licensing. Happily, it likely means fantastic opportunities for open-source to take back a large share of the market. I've spent the last year migrating my medium-sized enterprise to the cloud AND a near-100% opensource infrastructure. In my particular sector (healthcare) that's becoming a trend - it's not a coincidence that the move within the medium to medium-large enterprise to the cloud often goes hand-in-hand with a serious investigation of open-source software within the mission-critical, production infrastructure.
Agree - China's interest is in selling to the US - they have little or no concern whatsoever about goods received from the west, especially those as industrially useless as entertainment (except if it violates state dogma, of course). These talks are utterly meaningless.
I find it hard to believe that this information would really ever be useful - e-mail in particular. Even assuming the government were capable of accurately sorting out 90-something-percent of the total volume of e-mail as the spam that it is, that still leaves a volume of information that would be daunting, to say the least, to accurately sort and therefore take action on. Same with phone calls, except there one has voice-recognition to deal with (and the same volume, plus the far larger size of recorded voice calls).
Does that make it right? Of course not - but the volume of information would allow a careful person to remain pretty anonymous.
That's all fine and well, but it doesn't translate into making the "learned" person a better employee - which is ultimately what we're all destined for. Learned people - even the most well-rounded, well-educated people in the world - do not necessarily make good worker bees. In fact, the more learned one becomes, the less apt that person is to make a good "employee," because they're not actually able to think for themselves. That presents a myriad of problems in the modern workplace: 1) this "learned" person, by being capable of rational thought, realizes that the modern workplace is inhuman and pointless, existing only to increase the wealth of a few while using up and discarding the majority (including himself), 2) the "learned" person is capable of consistently out-thinking his superiors, therefore making him "unmanageable," etc.
All that is to say, "learned" people tend to starve to death in modern society. One may hold very specialized knowledge (such as a high level of education in a specific area of a hard science) and do very well in the workforce, but true education is about far more than being well-versed in a single field. The point of every modern university is to create a workforce (and make money doing it), not educate its students.
Ecomomics
on
Less Is Moore
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Proof that Moore's law is driven by economics as much as (or even more than) technological discovery/innovation?
I'm not ready to condemn this MS move as some sort of veiled treachery quite yet. There's no denying that Open Source is finally beginning to transform the marketplace. Couple of reasons for that IMHO - one is Microsoft's decline in recent years, if not as a market-share holder than at least in terms of reputation (and I mean reputation in the eyes of the average consumer, not the tech world). The other might be the slow but sure loss of market-share by entertainment giants (extrapolate to your heart's content - it's not coincidence that Vista's copyright protection measures caused, in large part, it's bad reputation, and those measures were dictated by the entertainment industry).
I think we just might be beginning to see the fall of copyright law, at least as we know it today. Open source has contributed a lot to that. MS just might be beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
As Richard Florida's research shows, public investment in sports arenas negatively correlates with economic growth.
What about other studies that show (definitively) that investment in sports tends to keep kids off the streets and away from crime? I don't think your study holds water, so to speak. And regarding your comment about shutting down football, that's rather draconian. Stopping public money for football is one thing, but outlawing it is quite another.
If football players were told "you are likely to need intensive medical care from your forties until your premature death, so start saving now" perhaps they would think twice and choose some less destructive recreational activities.
Possibly, but not necessarily, and here again, I think that's not necessary. Most of them know exactly what they're doing and what the costs will be. Most of them play because they enjoy the game (or for any number of other reasons which are just as legitimate and acceptable). And it my humble opinion, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Think about a soldier, for example. When you volunteer for service, unless you're a complete idiot, you know what the risks are. Will it deter people from volunteering for the military if we force the armed forces to spend massive amounts of money telling recruits that they might get shot? Would that be a good thing? I know serving one's country and playing football are two very different things, but the analogy can still be made.
Not to create massive waves of controversy or anything, but this is a non-story. Of course it causes problems. Everyone knew this already - including the athletes. All you're doing by spreading this kind of panicky attitude is asking for silly legislation which outlaws a perceived danger. Eventually we must understand that we can't protect people from everything, and we can't escape from danger. Sometimes it really is ok to live dangerously. It's funny, but once upon a time mankind understood this, and while he may not have lived as long, his life was far more interesting, and I would argue that he was a better human being for it.
Good points - one thing one might add is the fact that anyone using Comcast/Charter/Misc-cable-company internet service for anything other than just light surfing and maybe an online game now and then is relying on a television company to provide a mission-critical service. Stop and think about that for a minute - the cable companies are not and never were true info-communications companies. They're in the business of providing entertainment, not rock-solid communications. The technology cable companies use to provide internet service just isn't (and never was) meant for heavy, serious use.
If your internet is mission-critical, or if you're an enthusiast user, for crying out loud, go with the companies who actually know how to provide telecommunications services (if you're too far from the hub, I feel your pain, but hang in there - the network gets bigger daily).
Wishful thinking, unfortunately. Let me explain how such a strategy will work in real life.
When you call, you'll get a fat, retartded, waste of flesh employee who is paid close to minimum wage to act as a "firewall" - basically he/she sits there and makes certain you can never talk to anyone who actually matters. Said employee will have likely spent a few months at the call center already, gradually becoming more and more jaded (and therefore immune) to everything the customer has to say. Within a few months, they will have heard every threat you can throw at them, also (my favorite was the old "I'll cancel if you don't do X" line - being paid next to nothing means the employee could give a rat's behind about whether or not you keep your account or not), so don't expect to somehow get their attention. Furthermore, what you may not realize if you've never worked in such a call center (I have) is that said employee is actually carrying on a conversation and/or reading something totally un-work-related while only pretending to talk to you (that "mute" button on the phone sure comes in handy).
So you can talk about your right to sue, demand they give you what they promised, etc etc all day until you're blue in the face. No one who cares about this will ever hear you. Ever. And if you get too forceful or threatening, said employee who took your call will do one of three things. 1) transfer your call back into the queue, 2) hang up on you, or 3) make a note on your account basically saying that you're a pain in the ass. If you're unlucky enough to get option 3, you will never, ever, get anything accomplished with that company again. You'll be lucky if you ever speak to a live person for more than a few seconds before the line gets "disconnected" or you're "transferred to the right department."
Oh and by the way, if you do decide to actually go to court, and you get an attorney crazy/stupid enough to take your case, it will get thrown out, and you may end up paying the cable company you tried to sue a lot of money for court costs. In your contract, it explicitly states that no download/upload speeds are in any way guaranteed. So they could give you dial-up speeds and there would be absolutely nothing you could do about it.
Be happy you have AT&T. Where I am, we only have Comcast (or Comshaft, as they're more commonly known; the verb form is "Comcassed", as in, "to be brutally violated and charged for it"). If you're too far from a DSL hub - tough luck, sucker.
AT&T has tried to break into the market recently. Comcast is fighting it tooth and nail (the bill is in state congress - the fact that litigation is required to allow free market competition is a whole other issue, of course). The really hilarious part is that Comcast's smear-campaign commercials (played about every 30 seconds on every station, of course), they say they're fighting the "intrusion" because AT&T is trying to destroy the free market. Bastards.
My understanding is that this investigation is actually intended to look at possible anti-trust violations in light of this merger, not so much privacy concerns. Is that not correct? If it is, any attorneys out there who know enough anti-trust law to speculate on whether this investigation will hold water? At first glance that accusation seems a bit flimsy to me, but I haven't had a chance to read up on it much, and I'm no expert in anti-trust law.
I'm highly inclined to doubt the credibility of this story. This would certainly not be the first time the "Daily Mail" has had problems in that department, and the story just doesn't have a whole lot of substance as far as sources go. Anyone out there who happens to have a copy of the cited study, or perhaps some corresponding stories from other news sources?
If not I think it's probably safe to write this one off as either patently untrue, a joke (in very bad taste), or badly hyped and overstated.
Heh no. I sort of he's coming from but he missed the boat, badly. I think that what developers should try to understand is that there is no "magic formula" for creating a good game. You can't feed the "fun" factor into a checklist and hit every point to get a good game. I think that in order to design a good game, it's necessary to try to think in entirely different terms. Great games are born from innovative and creative concepts, which are then mobilized using creative and fun stories, interfaces, graphics, etc. I'm not at all saying it's a crap shoot - I'm saying that once you start thinking in terms of formula, you lose the creative aspect of the game, and arguably, the fun factor as well. And that's what makes a game great - and of course it's also what ultimately makes it sell.
Very good point though I think you could go farther than that - if there is a sign advertising the WiFi, wouldn't it have to explicitly state where you can or cannot be to use it (i.e., inside, outside on the patio, in the parking lot, etc). Also, what if you just come and sit on the patio and use it? How is that different from sitting in the parking lot? Shouldn't the "terms of access" on the sign explicitly state whether or not you have to purchase something from the shop in order to use it?
Either way I find it hard to believe that the guy could be charged with a felony for this unless the law states that "any access of any WiFi, regardless of location, without prior explicit consent of the owner (in writing or before witnesses, so that it may be presented to the court) is hereby considered a felony and may be prosecuted as such." If the law doesn't say that or something like it, I imagine there is a strong case for getting this guy off with nothing and probably for some juicy civil suits to follow.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if they could do anything to me, as an EU citizen, who committed no actual crime...
Um, yeah. They could.
Who would take an 8 hour drive instead of a 1 hour flight?
Uh, me, if it avoids being treated like a base criminal. And don't worry, my clients will be paying for any additional cost in time and fuel. I assure you I'm not the only person doing this, BTW. I wonder how much draconian (and meaningless) "security" measures like this have hurt the economy? Oh, right - probably directly proportional to the amount paid out to the various draconian (and meaningless) government agencies and contractors and oversee/implement them.
Unsubstantiated gossip. I host a fairly large network at AWS and the damn Chinese try to brute force it continuously. Fortunately, they're morons; all they do is run dictionary attacks on the login "admin" (which doesn't exist for any protocol on any server I host). If that's the best China can do, we don't have much to worry about.
. Also, if your job sometimes involves labor or maintenance tasks (rebooting a server, swapping RAM...) they're increasing the amount of time necessary to get your butt on premises to fix it, and potentially impacting their business while you do so.
And that's why I'm 100% in the cloud. :)
A team of German and Japanese researchers created arrays of thin-film transistors (TFTs) by carefully depositing gold, aluminum oxide and organic molecules directly onto the notes through a patterned mask...
Well I'll be damned - if they have gold in them now this little bit of otherwise worthless paper actually has a minuscule bit of value...
Yes, yes, it's a gross invasion of privacy, an outrage, etc etc. I haven't been to a theatre in 10 years. Let's see - $12 to see a shitty excuse of a film with plotline/effects that I've seen 300 times already, acting so bad that it defies belief, an endless bombardment of mind-numbing, insulting advertising, and snacks and concessions marked up over 1000% - not my idea of a good time. I'd rather be slowly tortured to death, actually. And what's the point, really? Assuming I even want to see the film (legally), blue-ray on a high-def surround system (in my own house, where I assure you the cameras monitor only what I want them to monitor) is just as good. Seriously, folks - screw these assholes. If you're going to see a movie in a theatre, you're bending over, spreading them, and begging for it. Don't whine when the bastards take advantage of the situation.
What a load of horseshit. "Maybe our politics will self-correct?????" Maybe the sky will rain flowers and chocolate and we'll all dance off into the rock-candy-mountain sunset singing kum-by-fucking-ya. Wikipedia only works because there are droves of well-meaning people guarding it constantly against nihilistic saboteurs. Applying some delusional happy-happy utopian vision to the cut-throat world of politics is kindergarten logic.
Whitehurst touches on the emergence of cloud computing in the enterprise as well, and this is integral to an intelligent discussion of the imminent death of the traditional licensing system of enterprise software. From TFA:
""People say [they are interested in the] cloud but what they are really espousing are frustrations with existing IT business models," Whitehurst said in an interview with IDG News Service after the presentation. Whitehurst kicked off his talk by asking a seemingly simple question: "Why are costs of IT going up when the underlying costs to deliver those services halves every 18 months?" The cost of computing should come down, he reasoned, thanks to improving processing speeds and storage capacities. New, more powerful development tools and frameworks should also ease the cost of deployment. Yet IT expenditures continue to go up by about 3 percent to 5 percent a year.
That ease in the cost of deployment, coupled with the flexible infrastructure the cloud supplies, will eventually mean the death of the traditional "per-proc" style of enterprise licensing. Happily, it likely means fantastic opportunities for open-source to take back a large share of the market. I've spent the last year migrating my medium-sized enterprise to the cloud AND a near-100% opensource infrastructure. In my particular sector (healthcare) that's becoming a trend - it's not a coincidence that the move within the medium to medium-large enterprise to the cloud often goes hand-in-hand with a serious investigation of open-source software within the mission-critical, production infrastructure.
Agree - China's interest is in selling to the US - they have little or no concern whatsoever about goods received from the west, especially those as industrially useless as entertainment (except if it violates state dogma, of course). These talks are utterly meaningless.
I find it hard to believe that this information would really ever be useful - e-mail in particular. Even assuming the government were capable of accurately sorting out 90-something-percent of the total volume of e-mail as the spam that it is, that still leaves a volume of information that would be daunting, to say the least, to accurately sort and therefore take action on. Same with phone calls, except there one has voice-recognition to deal with (and the same volume, plus the far larger size of recorded voice calls). Does that make it right? Of course not - but the volume of information would allow a careful person to remain pretty anonymous.
Or, like me, they're actually bashing AT&T's ass-awful network. I love iOS, but refuse to deal with AT&T's dead zones.
That's all fine and well, but it doesn't translate into making the "learned" person a better employee - which is ultimately what we're all destined for. Learned people - even the most well-rounded, well-educated people in the world - do not necessarily make good worker bees. In fact, the more learned one becomes, the less apt that person is to make a good "employee," because they're not actually able to think for themselves. That presents a myriad of problems in the modern workplace: 1) this "learned" person, by being capable of rational thought, realizes that the modern workplace is inhuman and pointless, existing only to increase the wealth of a few while using up and discarding the majority (including himself), 2) the "learned" person is capable of consistently out-thinking his superiors, therefore making him "unmanageable," etc. All that is to say, "learned" people tend to starve to death in modern society. One may hold very specialized knowledge (such as a high level of education in a specific area of a hard science) and do very well in the workforce, but true education is about far more than being well-versed in a single field. The point of every modern university is to create a workforce (and make money doing it), not educate its students.
Proof that Moore's law is driven by economics as much as (or even more than) technological discovery/innovation?
I'm not ready to condemn this MS move as some sort of veiled treachery quite yet. There's no denying that Open Source is finally beginning to transform the marketplace. Couple of reasons for that IMHO - one is Microsoft's decline in recent years, if not as a market-share holder than at least in terms of reputation (and I mean reputation in the eyes of the average consumer, not the tech world). The other might be the slow but sure loss of market-share by entertainment giants (extrapolate to your heart's content - it's not coincidence that Vista's copyright protection measures caused, in large part, it's bad reputation, and those measures were dictated by the entertainment industry). I think we just might be beginning to see the fall of copyright law, at least as we know it today. Open source has contributed a lot to that. MS just might be beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Um, scratch above - I meant to say that I don't think your point of view holds water. I'm sure the study is perfectly legitimate.
As Richard Florida's research shows, public investment in sports arenas negatively correlates with economic growth.
What about other studies that show (definitively) that investment in sports tends to keep kids off the streets and away from crime? I don't think your study holds water, so to speak. And regarding your comment about shutting down football, that's rather draconian. Stopping public money for football is one thing, but outlawing it is quite another.
If football players were told "you are likely to need intensive medical care from your forties until your premature death, so start saving now" perhaps they would think twice and choose some less destructive recreational activities.
Possibly, but not necessarily, and here again, I think that's not necessary. Most of them know exactly what they're doing and what the costs will be. Most of them play because they enjoy the game (or for any number of other reasons which are just as legitimate and acceptable). And it my humble opinion, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Think about a soldier, for example. When you volunteer for service, unless you're a complete idiot, you know what the risks are. Will it deter people from volunteering for the military if we force the armed forces to spend massive amounts of money telling recruits that they might get shot? Would that be a good thing? I know serving one's country and playing football are two very different things, but the analogy can still be made.
Not to create massive waves of controversy or anything, but this is a non-story. Of course it causes problems. Everyone knew this already - including the athletes. All you're doing by spreading this kind of panicky attitude is asking for silly legislation which outlaws a perceived danger. Eventually we must understand that we can't protect people from everything, and we can't escape from danger. Sometimes it really is ok to live dangerously. It's funny, but once upon a time mankind understood this, and while he may not have lived as long, his life was far more interesting, and I would argue that he was a better human being for it.
If your internet is mission-critical, or if you're an enthusiast user, for crying out loud, go with the companies who actually know how to provide telecommunications services (if you're too far from the hub, I feel your pain, but hang in there - the network gets bigger daily).
When you call, you'll get a fat, retartded, waste of flesh employee who is paid close to minimum wage to act as a "firewall" - basically he/she sits there and makes certain you can never talk to anyone who actually matters. Said employee will have likely spent a few months at the call center already, gradually becoming more and more jaded (and therefore immune) to everything the customer has to say. Within a few months, they will have heard every threat you can throw at them, also (my favorite was the old "I'll cancel if you don't do X" line - being paid next to nothing means the employee could give a rat's behind about whether or not you keep your account or not), so don't expect to somehow get their attention. Furthermore, what you may not realize if you've never worked in such a call center (I have) is that said employee is actually carrying on a conversation and/or reading something totally un-work-related while only pretending to talk to you (that "mute" button on the phone sure comes in handy).
So you can talk about your right to sue, demand they give you what they promised, etc etc all day until you're blue in the face. No one who cares about this will ever hear you. Ever. And if you get too forceful or threatening, said employee who took your call will do one of three things. 1) transfer your call back into the queue, 2) hang up on you, or 3) make a note on your account basically saying that you're a pain in the ass. If you're unlucky enough to get option 3, you will never, ever, get anything accomplished with that company again. You'll be lucky if you ever speak to a live person for more than a few seconds before the line gets "disconnected" or you're "transferred to the right department."
Oh and by the way, if you do decide to actually go to court, and you get an attorney crazy/stupid enough to take your case, it will get thrown out, and you may end up paying the cable company you tried to sue a lot of money for court costs. In your contract, it explicitly states that no download/upload speeds are in any way guaranteed. So they could give you dial-up speeds and there would be absolutely nothing you could do about it.
AT&T has tried to break into the market recently. Comcast is fighting it tooth and nail (the bill is in state congress - the fact that litigation is required to allow free market competition is a whole other issue, of course). The really hilarious part is that Comcast's smear-campaign commercials (played about every 30 seconds on every station, of course), they say they're fighting the "intrusion" because AT&T is trying to destroy the free market. Bastards.
My understanding is that this investigation is actually intended to look at possible anti-trust violations in light of this merger, not so much privacy concerns. Is that not correct? If it is, any attorneys out there who know enough anti-trust law to speculate on whether this investigation will hold water? At first glance that accusation seems a bit flimsy to me, but I haven't had a chance to read up on it much, and I'm no expert in anti-trust law.
If not I think it's probably safe to write this one off as either patently untrue, a joke (in very bad taste), or badly hyped and overstated.
Heh no. I sort of he's coming from but he missed the boat, badly. I think that what developers should try to understand is that there is no "magic formula" for creating a good game. You can't feed the "fun" factor into a checklist and hit every point to get a good game. I think that in order to design a good game, it's necessary to try to think in entirely different terms. Great games are born from innovative and creative concepts, which are then mobilized using creative and fun stories, interfaces, graphics, etc. I'm not at all saying it's a crap shoot - I'm saying that once you start thinking in terms of formula, you lose the creative aspect of the game, and arguably, the fun factor as well. And that's what makes a game great - and of course it's also what ultimately makes it sell.
Either way I find it hard to believe that the guy could be charged with a felony for this unless the law states that "any access of any WiFi, regardless of location, without prior explicit consent of the owner (in writing or before witnesses, so that it may be presented to the court) is hereby considered a felony and may be prosecuted as such." If the law doesn't say that or something like it, I imagine there is a strong case for getting this guy off with nothing and probably for some juicy civil suits to follow.