This is what happens when non-programmers try and converse about programming whilst having a certain arrogance that prevents them seeing that they're way out of their depth.
He also listed.NET as interpreted which is flat out wrong (unless you're talking about code executing on the DLR but given his level of understanding I doubt he even knows what that is).
The idea you can write more concise code in C or Shellcode than the others is also laughable. The fact you have to explicitly write code for dynamic memory allocations alone in C prevents that. C is a language I love because it was my first language, but there's a time and a place for it and way too many idiots who think it's a magic solution to all software's problems whilst forgetting how much more unstable and how many more severe root escalation vulnerabilities and buffer overflows we suffered when everything was written in C.
PHP practically encourages bad software development practices and the tutorials are even worse in pushing insecure development practices, but at least even given this the most harm that seems to get done is normally nothing more than an SQL injection vulnerability - bad, but at least they're not rooting your server with those mistakes which is a step up from the days where arbitrary executables were getting executed on remote machines left and right and so forth.
New functionality, runs shit on older hardware. It's not really news it's just the way the world works.
The classic Windows style GUI and toolbars and most common controls haven't changed in decades yet computing power has increased tremendously. WPF is the first attempt at doing something about that because given the change in computing power we can definitely do better now with those interfaces.
If that means running shit on old hardware then well yeah, that's the price we pay for advancement. There's always still the option of WinForms et. al. if you want to produce something for old systems or even C and Win32 API if you want to go far back enough.
This has always been a myth. Even before.NET in a very C++ world people were using various libraries like MFC that had to be installed.
Installing.NET is no different to installing things like new Winsock versions, through to MFC updates, through to MSXML. Nothing's changed, it's all just in one big package called.NET now.
"But it also makes it much easier to write rubbish"
This hasn't changed either. People said the same about BASIC, and COBOL and assembly programmers have even said the same about C and C++ when they came about.
"Whatever happened to C++ and fast reliable software?"
That makes no sense, C# and.NET let you write fast, reliable software. In fact, the very nature of.NET means it's more reliable by default because it has better handling of common programming mistakes and the JIT compiler means you can get equally good performance out of it,.NET even gives you a decent amount of control over the GC so is lesser plagued by the nature of that in say Java and even Java can perform equally well otherwise.
CCC's problems have nothing to do with the development environment, language, and framework used and everything to do with the same incompetence that has left ATI's drivers shit for over a decade - they just seem to have abysmally poor procedures in place for maximising software quality.
Don't have a problem with it if it's anything like BF3.
At the end of the day BF3 still had way more content than most games, and the premium subscription was slightly less than a new game but also had more content.
I've got no problem paying for DLC if the original game has enough content to be classed as a perfectly reasonable retail buy and the DLC also has enough content relative to it's cost.
That's been completely true of BF3 and BF3's Premium subscription.
It's one thing to complain about 6hr long games that cost $60, and it's one thing to complain about $40 of DLC that gives you peanuts, but that didn't apply to BF3 and hopefully wont apply to BF4.
DLC like that included with Premium are just like the modern version of add-on packs. I didn't see any point moaning that I had to pay £20 for Command and Conquer covert operations after having blown £30 on Command and Conquer itself a year before back in the 90s, so I don't see the point whinging now that companies are still selling pay-for addon packs providing they're reasonably priced.
That doesn't act as an argument about competent cops being given leeway to apply common sense though, it just means the processes for mitigating corruption aren't strong enough because bent cops will be bent cops regardless.
"You prefer to punish people driving a perfectly safe speed."
1) Speed limit was 30, increased to 50. 2) That's a safe speed at 6am in the morning on a sunny day 3) That's not a safe speed any other time 4) Driver drives at this speed at another time and inevitably kills someone because of the very fact it wasn't safe at that time 5) If it had been kept at 30 instead, no one would've died
What don't you get about this? You're pretending an unsafe speed is safe. You're saying we should use the maximum speed in optimal conditions to set the speed limit - so on a normal 30 road this could in fact be 100mph because a supercar in perfect conditions could probably just hit that speed and still break in time but that's 70mph over the safe limit for 99.9999% of cars and conditions.
Better to keep the speeds safe for most cars across most of the year and let the police have the freedom to judge if something is safe or not and hence whether to pursue or not, far more objective than people deciding it for themselves because people will always tell themselves they're a safe driver, even when they're not.
No the road shouldn't be 50, roads aren't set to the highest you can get away with for a reason, because conditions change.
Unless you want to pay billions to change road signs multiple times throughout the year then you have to have a speed that is a reasonable compromise between year round safety.
The road is 30 because normally it is quite busy and normally it's not safe to do anything over that, especially when there are hundreds of kids around going to/from school, or when it's winter and there's snow and ice on the roads. That doesn't mean it's not safe to do 35, or even 40 at times when it's dead quiet in the middle of summer.
Road signs can't possibly reflect the safety of a road in all differing conditions throughout the year and that's why you need to have cops that are competent enough at making the right choices, because it's cheaper to have competent cops than it is to have ever changing speed limits across every road in a country. Even if you have digital road signs what happens if you pass it at 50 and it changes to 30? should a cop have a choice whether to pull you and/or let you off then?
How the hell does someone die being rear ended whilst stationary at a light unless the person who rear ended them is travelling at an absurdly high speed towards the rear of said stationary vehicle?
Are you sure you didn't just make that up as I haven't seen that in the news in the UK at all. Maybe you can point to a news article on it, even if it's not national news a local paper will cover it.
Even if true then the person who rear-ended them would be classed as at-fault in the UK because there's simply no excuse for flying into the back of a stationary vehicle, especially at high enough speed to kill someone. What if they'd simply broken down? or what if they'd fallen unconscious because of a medical condition they didn't know they'd had? Are you implying they should be at fault then as well?
Texting has literally zero to do with the cause of the accident you mention and everything to do with someone speeding into the back of a stationary vehicle, and this is coming from someone that fucking hates people who feel the need to use their phone even in the slightest whilst in control of a car.
Even when I see idiots pull over round blind corners in the middle of country lanes to make phone calls you'd have zero excuse for going into the back of them because legally you're only supposed to drive at a speed which allows you to stop in time to avoid hitting something at the limit of your visibility. I know most people ignore it, but it'll be used against you if you do crash into the back of someone and that's exactly why the person in your example wouldn't have a leg to stand on crashing into the back of a stationary vehicle with lethal force. There's absolutely no excuse for it.
I know, I know, it's fantasy, but yes, a cop that has the competence to act like something other than an autonomous robot and recognise when the law is unjust and counterproductive to enforce and so doesn't enforce it is exactly the type of cop I would love to have.
No I don't support bent cops who enforce it selectively to their or their friends benefit, but I don't think asking cops to apply a bit of common sense in law enforcement is really too much to ask.
In fact, I do have a friend who is a police officer and she does draw a distinction between pulling a commuter for going 35 in a 30 zone at 6 am in the morning on a road that is open, with good visibility and there is no one around and pulling a jack ass going 50 down the same road when it's busy, parked cars make it harder to see and there are kids walking home from school. She understands that the latter is actually a danger, but the former simply isn't and that pulling the former does nothing other than ruin someone's day, and make them hate the cops for such unnecessary enforcement.
The world isn't ever black and white and the idea that the law should only be enforced in a black and white manner simply means it has less respect from citizens because it doesn't reflect the real world. Some (all?) countries even allow cops explicitly to exercise a bit of common sense so it's not like the binary mindset on Slashdot that the law can only ever be applied black and white if an officer is doing what they should anyway is even correct. For example, police have the leeway to opt to not pursue prosecution in the UK for speeding if you can prove for example that your life was under threat.
Ultimately the best police officers are the ones that recognise what the law is intended to achieve - in this case, road safety, and that if enforcing the letter of the law doesn't achieve that, then it's pointless and possibly even counter-productive to enforce.
So yes, the cop in TFA is a jackass, incompetent, and emblematic of the inevitable race to the bottom of judging cops on how many convictions they get rather than how well they're doing in improving public safety which is the fundamental point of a police force.
Besides, one might argue in just focussing on people texting this cop is being selective in enforcement of laws anyway, because he's choosing to spend all his time enforcing texting laws and none of his time enforcing other laws letting breaches of them go unhandled. Really, this guy is just trying to make himself look like he has an awesome perp catch rate and nothing more, he's a lazy waste of tax payer's money, taking the easy route to try and make himself look like a relevant member of law enforcement by the figures.
Blackberry's strength was always in the enterprise. There are still thousands of massive organisations to this day using Blackberry devices.
You're right that the BYOD trend is eating into this but I don't think it's as widespread as you believe - a lot of employees explicitly want a separate work device if not only so they can turn it off when they get home and not have to deal with work in their own time.
But ignoring all that there's no reason Blackberry couldn't move into providing enterprise solutions on iOS/Android keeping it's server products (which are a decent profit centre) relevant. This means even in a fully BYOD world where every company does this they'd all still be linked back to HQ via Blackberry's solutions.
So yes it can still be relevant, it just needs to change to a software and services company. This doesn't mean it couldn't still produce some phones - if it kept to a niche of providing secure solid phones for companies that want devices that are sturdy and secure then it could still do well at that.
If Watsa gets this then he'll do just fine on his investment. Trying to compete with Android and iOS in the consumer market is the wrong path for Blackberry, consumer isn't their strength, business is.
It's not even encouraging, Apple are scraping the barrel for ways to bolster their image now.
Normally when a company releases two different phone models they're treated as two different phone models, when you get the latest Samsung Galaxy stats you get Galaxy S4 stats, you don't get combined sales of the S4, S3, the S and all the other Galaxies in between including the budget models, the mini models and so forth.
The real story here is that Apple's flagship iPhone only sold 5 million units which is stagnant on last years figure. Their new budget device sold 4 million units, which is a good start for a new device. Except, now you have to factor in the fact that they opened up to a 1.3 billion person market on release day this time and when you do that, even if you eliminate hundreds of millions of Chinese who are poor and only factor in those with Western standards of wealth this is a sizeable increase in the initial release market. Apple always released in China afterwards, so effectively they're trading sales that used to come a few months later and frontloading them into the release weekend.
There's another problem too, historically Apple sold it's last gen model alongside it's new model and when it released a new model the last gen model went down in price so sold a lot too, it didn't actually used to bundle those numbers into it's new handset release, but this year it's different, the 5C has replaced that and is being bundled into this number.
So whilst in 2012 Apple sold 5 million iPhone 5 handsets on opening weekend, it may have sold 4 million or more iPhone 4S because the price of them decreased with the iPhone 5 release. This year it's sold 5 million flagship devices again which means it's stagnant, it's possibly sold no more budget devices than it did last year, and it's only achieved this by frontloading a whole bunch of China sales.
As other news outlets have pointed out they also did away with pre-orders to force people to queue up on release day to try and artificially inflate queue levels to the same level they used to get for past releases when they did allow pre-orders.
It's like their share price decline that they stemmed with a share buyback and dividend, it's great that that stopped it declining, but it doesn't change the fact it means they're still not as strong now as they were when they didn't have to take such measures.
There's nothing encouraging here at all, as you say, year on year comparisons of quarterly financial reportings tell a more realistic story, it's the long term trend that matters. But currently it's pretty clear that in a like for like comparison their flagship device has actually done worse than last year - only shifting the same amount of handsets as last year but in a much much larger opening market, whether their budget offering has beaten their old last-gen discounted models is anyone's guess though, perhaps there's an increase in profit for them there, we'll see.
The double standards being applied to try and bolster the view that Apple is breaking records is stupid, and desperate.
Well for me I find learning some things not fun at all, but the reason I say interesting is because I view them as a requirement to get to the next step that I will find fun.
For example, I did a whole course on statistics that used medical statistics as it's examples and I found it utterly piss boring, but it was a means to an end to get to the interesting parts that are relevant to things like machine learning. I'm sure in contrast though some students loved the medical statistics examples and if they'd used something more interesting to me the other students would've found those examples boring and uninteresting, but at the end of the day the materials have to be learnt if you want to get anywhere but it's not always going to be "play" even.
I agree that everyone learns in different ways, I've certainly never been great under the classic schooling system but have always been way above the average when it comes to self directed learning in my own time but I'm not convinced this making learning fun thing works.
If we're talking about producing high calibre software developers then you don't need to do anything, the passion for the topic alone will keep them going and they wont find any of it boring enough to put them off and wont need special gimmicks to keep them interested. You can't force people into a profession they're not interested in and expect good results.
If however we're talking about programming just because we feel it's a skill people should know then I'm still not convinced it's right to force it on them even if we can try and make it interesting. I had to do English Literature at school and despite doing well I really could not give a flying fuck about it, it was the single most dull and pointless subject I've ever had to do and I miss not a single thing from largely forgetting everything about it after my exams. Spending a couple of weeks "evaluating" a poem about fucking daffodils or whatever and determining "what he really meant" was an utterly senseless amount of idiocy. He meant what he fucking wrote and any other interpretation you put on it or hidden meanings you decide to "find" in it given the fact he's dead is merely arbitrary and pointless and an exercise in making shit up, and if you didn't happen to make the same shit up that the teacher made up then you were "wrong". Really, it was a waste of my time making me do that subject when I could instead have done something else that was actually productive for my future and learnt something that mattered to me with all those hours of lessons instead.
I never ever found maths fun, I always found it difficult at school, but despite it not being "fun" and despite me struggling with it and having teachers tell me I wasn't cut out for it I still persevered and eventually got a 1st class honours degree in the subject simply for the fact that even though I never found it fun because I found it difficult originally, and even though I found it hard, I did find it genuinely interesting.
So sure the guy in the summary may have found Ruby a bit more fun, but honestly if he's not got the interest to learn the parts of development that made C++ boring for him his programming abilities are never going to get past the point of any relevance. Either you like the subject enough to push through the hard sometimes even boring bits or you don't. Some things can be taught to some people in a way they view as slightly less boring but everyone's different so everyone's going to encounter bits they deem boring but that's just the way it is. Chances are if you manage to make teaching of a subject fun for everyone who takes it then all you've done is eliminate the difficult, but essential bits to become competent in the subject in question.
Learning isn't easy, MOOCs make it more available but they can't necessarily make a topic more accessible beyond a minimum amount of intelligence, will and effort required to work through and understand the materials. There's always going to have to be some base level of interest and willpower required to get through the course successfully, that is, until we get to the point where we can write knowledge directly into people's brains, Matrix style.
Same is true even with my old Galaxy Nexus, and the Nexus 7 and these are both now what, 18 months to 2 years old?
Honestly, since Android 4 the "Android feels slow/laggy meme" is dead unless you're buying a budget phone, but it seems silly to compare say a £150 Android device to a £500 iPhone and then complain that the Android does seem as good. Of course it wont be as good, it's less than 1/3rd the price.
Spend about £200 though and you'll get something that feels as good as any version of iOS. It still wont have the same degree of power for things like gaming, if that's what you're after then you will have to spend more, but if you don't play high end mobile games much on your phone but want a smooth interface for what you do do, £200 for an Android 4.x phone is plenty.
People don't hate on the homeless, they hate on people who have options to get out of a shit situation and don't take them because they favour some immediate comfort instead.
For example, this guy is buying expensive energy drinks and cigarettes, he could instead save that money to rent somewhere even if only for a couple of months to get a bank account and get himself into a position where he's much better placed to get a permanent job.
Compare and contrast this to a homeless guy here in the UK where I live, he's an ex-Afghan translator, given permission to stay after he translated for British troops in Afghanistan risking his life, he is homeless because he had no real money to bring with him. We have a program here called Big Issue whereby homeless people are given magazines that they sell for £2, £1 is paid back for the magazine, the other £1 is profit. This guy is out there every day of every year for 12 - 14 hours a day whether it's raining, freezing cold, or really hot, mostly, being the UK though, it's cold and rainy.
But not a day goes by where he doesn't smile to everyone, sometimes does a little jig, or comically bows to people to make them smile and everyone loves him for it and he's getting somewhere. I gave him £20 on my last week of work before Christmas for a magazine and I've seen others give him more than £2 too - in fact one guy buys him a coffee just about every morning when it's cold. He's got himself a phone now, and some decent clothes and a new backpack so he's getting there certainly.
That's really the issue. It's not that people hate homeless people, on the contrary when people see a hard working homeless person who also tries to cheer others up despite being in a shit place themselves people are happy to try and help them too by giving charity.
But what people don't like are spoilt jerks with an entitlement attitude as in the article here who has a laptop, a smartphone, who buys cigarettes and energy drinks and then whines that he's so hard done by. If he's buying cigarettes and energy drinks then of course he wont ever save up enough capital to start improving his life - he's throwing away all the income he gets on unnecessary shit.
Because generally if you're homeless it means you can't afford rent or a mortgage.
You may struggle to get a job if you haven't got a permanent address.
So if you save up those dollars spent on cigarettes and energy drinks you could save up enough to rent somewhere with an address for a couple of months, during which time you could get a job and bank account given your new permanent address which would allow you to sustain that and not be homeless.
The point is that by not living like "dogs" as you put it they're sustaining their current situation, whilst if they lived like "dogs" (seriously, giving up cigarettes and substituting energy drinks for something cheaper is hardly living like a dog) for a couple of months they'd then be able to have a much better lifestyle again.
I take issue with people who moan about their predicament being long term when they have many ways of escaping their predicament, they just choose not to take them.
So it's fine if this guy wants to leave like this and be homeless but have his smokes and energy drink, that's okay, but at the same time he needs to stfu about being homeless because that's actually a choice he's making when he opts for energy drinks and cigarettes rather than amassing a bit of cash to escape homelessness. You can't make a choice about something then complain about it.
The official line is that Snowden was just some basic contractor who was a network administrator but other sources that have done some digging seem to think he was one of the NSA's hired hackers contracted to attack other nation state's infrastructure.
Only it seems he turned on the NSA and hacked them instead, hence the access to all this data.
The problem is that the NSA was likely using the very algorithms and systems it had put backdoors into assuming that no one else would know about the backdoors so it wouldn't be problematic for them. It also meant that someone like Snowden who'd been informed of all the back doors he could use could exploit the same backdoors inside the NSA itself which would've made things trivial for him.
The US has placed way too much trust in it's staff but most importantly it's contractors for too long. It was first obvious with Manning, one might wonder why a near bottom of the ladder analyst sat in Iraq would have access to every diplomatic cable across the globe for example but for some reason he did.
They've had the balance between sharing of intel to allow analysts to make fast optimal decisions and keeping it secure wrong for a while now but that's not something that can be quickly fixed either. This likely stems from the post-9/11 expansion of the security services where all these new security agencies, contractors and staff were all demanding access to various bits of information so they just opened it up to everyone as it was the only way they could fulfil all the requests.
Well given that Britain is the second largest military force in NATO after the US you'd think that we'd not need to hack it to find out what was going on.
"Can you point me to just one case of a terrorist who successfully blew himself up because a judge mistakenly denied a reasonable warrant request?"
Perhaps somewhat ironically, a number of attacks that have succeeded such as the butchering of a soldier in London earlier this year were by people who were not only known to the security services, but whom the security services tried to recruit.
You're right, the security services can't even catch people sat right under their own noses when they have all the information and have been granted all the warrants they possible could have been. Giving them permission to snoop beyond those boundaries is only going to give them more information they can't properly use making it even less likely again that they'll catch the real threats.
Well if he was a "network engineer" then chances are his not in the bottom 7% of the population so it shouldn't matter.
Unless of course he is, in which case maybe that's why he's not a network engineer any more.
We have even higher unemployment rates in the UK than the US right now I believe but I guarantee you if I came to work tomorrow and the doors were locked finding myself unemployed that by the end of the week I'd have a new job, even if it was just in McDonalds or whatever until I find the job I want.
Most people who are unemployed have "failed" because they weren't trying hard enough or would prefer to lounge around on welfare. I even sympathise with them to some degree because for some losing your job can be soul destroying and if they're genuinely depressed finding motivation to look no doubt feels impossible, but ultimately they're not unemployed because there are no jobs out there. About the only time that holds true is in isolated rural communities, but even this doesn't prevent you moving somewhere where there are jobs.
Someone competent enough to be a network engineer is only genuinely "unable to find employment" where there's no longer a single job listed on Monster.com paying under £30k a year or whatever the US equivalent wage would be and when McDonalds etc. are no longer recruiting anyone for an extended period.
Regarding your mention of "overqualified" I'll give you a hint: that's an employers way of saying "We didn't like you because you came across like an idiot, but we don't want you to feel too bad about it, so we'll pretend you're just too good for us". No one actually doesn't hire specifically because of overqualification in itself.
Any future employer is going to look more positively at you taking a job like that than having no job at all for a period because it at least shows a will to work and a period of interaction with customers and so forth.
That's way better than a period of doing nothing and achieving nothing.
Yet that's the exact arguments the UK government uses when it doesn't want to do something.
"We can't just not hand over Julian Assange because the whole extradition looks fishy because that would be illegal"
We have separation of our judicial branch from our government for a reason and they can't just pick and choose when they ignore the law even with their attempt at hijacking the judiciary with their politically appointed supreme court.
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This is what happens when non-programmers try and converse about programming whilst having a certain arrogance that prevents them seeing that they're way out of their depth.
He also listed .NET as interpreted which is flat out wrong (unless you're talking about code executing on the DLR but given his level of understanding I doubt he even knows what that is).
The idea you can write more concise code in C or Shellcode than the others is also laughable. The fact you have to explicitly write code for dynamic memory allocations alone in C prevents that. C is a language I love because it was my first language, but there's a time and a place for it and way too many idiots who think it's a magic solution to all software's problems whilst forgetting how much more unstable and how many more severe root escalation vulnerabilities and buffer overflows we suffered when everything was written in C.
PHP practically encourages bad software development practices and the tutorials are even worse in pushing insecure development practices, but at least even given this the most harm that seems to get done is normally nothing more than an SQL injection vulnerability - bad, but at least they're not rooting your server with those mistakes which is a step up from the days where arbitrary executables were getting executed on remote machines left and right and so forth.
But has that ever been different?
New functionality, runs shit on older hardware. It's not really news it's just the way the world works.
The classic Windows style GUI and toolbars and most common controls haven't changed in decades yet computing power has increased tremendously. WPF is the first attempt at doing something about that because given the change in computing power we can definitely do better now with those interfaces.
If that means running shit on old hardware then well yeah, that's the price we pay for advancement. There's always still the option of WinForms et. al. if you want to produce something for old systems or even C and Win32 API if you want to go far back enough.
"requiring little in the way of dependencies"
This has always been a myth. Even before .NET in a very C++ world people were using various libraries like MFC that had to be installed.
Installing .NET is no different to installing things like new Winsock versions, through to MFC updates, through to MSXML. Nothing's changed, it's all just in one big package called .NET now.
"But it also makes it much easier to write rubbish"
This hasn't changed either. People said the same about BASIC, and COBOL and assembly programmers have even said the same about C and C++ when they came about.
"Whatever happened to C++ and fast reliable software?"
That makes no sense, C# and .NET let you write fast, reliable software. In fact, the very nature of .NET means it's more reliable by default because it has better handling of common programming mistakes and the JIT compiler means you can get equally good performance out of it, .NET even gives you a decent amount of control over the GC so is lesser plagued by the nature of that in say Java and even Java can perform equally well otherwise.
CCC's problems have nothing to do with the development environment, language, and framework used and everything to do with the same incompetence that has left ATI's drivers shit for over a decade - they just seem to have abysmally poor procedures in place for maximising software quality.
Don't have a problem with it if it's anything like BF3.
At the end of the day BF3 still had way more content than most games, and the premium subscription was slightly less than a new game but also had more content.
I've got no problem paying for DLC if the original game has enough content to be classed as a perfectly reasonable retail buy and the DLC also has enough content relative to it's cost.
That's been completely true of BF3 and BF3's Premium subscription.
It's one thing to complain about 6hr long games that cost $60, and it's one thing to complain about $40 of DLC that gives you peanuts, but that didn't apply to BF3 and hopefully wont apply to BF4.
DLC like that included with Premium are just like the modern version of add-on packs. I didn't see any point moaning that I had to pay £20 for Command and Conquer covert operations after having blown £30 on Command and Conquer itself a year before back in the 90s, so I don't see the point whinging now that companies are still selling pay-for addon packs providing they're reasonably priced.
Right and they should be fired.
That doesn't act as an argument about competent cops being given leeway to apply common sense though, it just means the processes for mitigating corruption aren't strong enough because bent cops will be bent cops regardless.
"You prefer to punish people driving a perfectly safe speed."
1) Speed limit was 30, increased to 50.
2) That's a safe speed at 6am in the morning on a sunny day
3) That's not a safe speed any other time
4) Driver drives at this speed at another time and inevitably kills someone because of the very fact it wasn't safe at that time
5) If it had been kept at 30 instead, no one would've died
What don't you get about this? You're pretending an unsafe speed is safe. You're saying we should use the maximum speed in optimal conditions to set the speed limit - so on a normal 30 road this could in fact be 100mph because a supercar in perfect conditions could probably just hit that speed and still break in time but that's 70mph over the safe limit for 99.9999% of cars and conditions.
Better to keep the speeds safe for most cars across most of the year and let the police have the freedom to judge if something is safe or not and hence whether to pursue or not, far more objective than people deciding it for themselves because people will always tell themselves they're a safe driver, even when they're not.
No the road shouldn't be 50, roads aren't set to the highest you can get away with for a reason, because conditions change.
Unless you want to pay billions to change road signs multiple times throughout the year then you have to have a speed that is a reasonable compromise between year round safety.
The road is 30 because normally it is quite busy and normally it's not safe to do anything over that, especially when there are hundreds of kids around going to/from school, or when it's winter and there's snow and ice on the roads. That doesn't mean it's not safe to do 35, or even 40 at times when it's dead quiet in the middle of summer.
Road signs can't possibly reflect the safety of a road in all differing conditions throughout the year and that's why you need to have cops that are competent enough at making the right choices, because it's cheaper to have competent cops than it is to have ever changing speed limits across every road in a country. Even if you have digital road signs what happens if you pass it at 50 and it changes to 30? should a cop have a choice whether to pull you and/or let you off then?
What the fuck?
How the hell does someone die being rear ended whilst stationary at a light unless the person who rear ended them is travelling at an absurdly high speed towards the rear of said stationary vehicle?
Are you sure you didn't just make that up as I haven't seen that in the news in the UK at all. Maybe you can point to a news article on it, even if it's not national news a local paper will cover it.
Even if true then the person who rear-ended them would be classed as at-fault in the UK because there's simply no excuse for flying into the back of a stationary vehicle, especially at high enough speed to kill someone. What if they'd simply broken down? or what if they'd fallen unconscious because of a medical condition they didn't know they'd had? Are you implying they should be at fault then as well?
Texting has literally zero to do with the cause of the accident you mention and everything to do with someone speeding into the back of a stationary vehicle, and this is coming from someone that fucking hates people who feel the need to use their phone even in the slightest whilst in control of a car.
Even when I see idiots pull over round blind corners in the middle of country lanes to make phone calls you'd have zero excuse for going into the back of them because legally you're only supposed to drive at a speed which allows you to stop in time to avoid hitting something at the limit of your visibility. I know most people ignore it, but it'll be used against you if you do crash into the back of someone and that's exactly why the person in your example wouldn't have a leg to stand on crashing into the back of a stationary vehicle with lethal force. There's absolutely no excuse for it.
Yes actually.
I know, I know, it's fantasy, but yes, a cop that has the competence to act like something other than an autonomous robot and recognise when the law is unjust and counterproductive to enforce and so doesn't enforce it is exactly the type of cop I would love to have.
No I don't support bent cops who enforce it selectively to their or their friends benefit, but I don't think asking cops to apply a bit of common sense in law enforcement is really too much to ask.
In fact, I do have a friend who is a police officer and she does draw a distinction between pulling a commuter for going 35 in a 30 zone at 6 am in the morning on a road that is open, with good visibility and there is no one around and pulling a jack ass going 50 down the same road when it's busy, parked cars make it harder to see and there are kids walking home from school. She understands that the latter is actually a danger, but the former simply isn't and that pulling the former does nothing other than ruin someone's day, and make them hate the cops for such unnecessary enforcement.
The world isn't ever black and white and the idea that the law should only be enforced in a black and white manner simply means it has less respect from citizens because it doesn't reflect the real world. Some (all?) countries even allow cops explicitly to exercise a bit of common sense so it's not like the binary mindset on Slashdot that the law can only ever be applied black and white if an officer is doing what they should anyway is even correct. For example, police have the leeway to opt to not pursue prosecution in the UK for speeding if you can prove for example that your life was under threat.
Ultimately the best police officers are the ones that recognise what the law is intended to achieve - in this case, road safety, and that if enforcing the letter of the law doesn't achieve that, then it's pointless and possibly even counter-productive to enforce.
So yes, the cop in TFA is a jackass, incompetent, and emblematic of the inevitable race to the bottom of judging cops on how many convictions they get rather than how well they're doing in improving public safety which is the fundamental point of a police force.
Besides, one might argue in just focussing on people texting this cop is being selective in enforcement of laws anyway, because he's choosing to spend all his time enforcing texting laws and none of his time enforcing other laws letting breaches of them go unhandled. Really, this guy is just trying to make himself look like he has an awesome perp catch rate and nothing more, he's a lazy waste of tax payer's money, taking the easy route to try and make himself look like a relevant member of law enforcement by the figures.
Blackberry's strength was always in the enterprise. There are still thousands of massive organisations to this day using Blackberry devices.
You're right that the BYOD trend is eating into this but I don't think it's as widespread as you believe - a lot of employees explicitly want a separate work device if not only so they can turn it off when they get home and not have to deal with work in their own time.
But ignoring all that there's no reason Blackberry couldn't move into providing enterprise solutions on iOS/Android keeping it's server products (which are a decent profit centre) relevant. This means even in a fully BYOD world where every company does this they'd all still be linked back to HQ via Blackberry's solutions.
So yes it can still be relevant, it just needs to change to a software and services company. This doesn't mean it couldn't still produce some phones - if it kept to a niche of providing secure solid phones for companies that want devices that are sturdy and secure then it could still do well at that.
If Watsa gets this then he'll do just fine on his investment. Trying to compete with Android and iOS in the consumer market is the wrong path for Blackberry, consumer isn't their strength, business is.
And developers.
And apps.
It's not even encouraging, Apple are scraping the barrel for ways to bolster their image now.
Normally when a company releases two different phone models they're treated as two different phone models, when you get the latest Samsung Galaxy stats you get Galaxy S4 stats, you don't get combined sales of the S4, S3, the S and all the other Galaxies in between including the budget models, the mini models and so forth.
The real story here is that Apple's flagship iPhone only sold 5 million units which is stagnant on last years figure. Their new budget device sold 4 million units, which is a good start for a new device. Except, now you have to factor in the fact that they opened up to a 1.3 billion person market on release day this time and when you do that, even if you eliminate hundreds of millions of Chinese who are poor and only factor in those with Western standards of wealth this is a sizeable increase in the initial release market. Apple always released in China afterwards, so effectively they're trading sales that used to come a few months later and frontloading them into the release weekend.
There's another problem too, historically Apple sold it's last gen model alongside it's new model and when it released a new model the last gen model went down in price so sold a lot too, it didn't actually used to bundle those numbers into it's new handset release, but this year it's different, the 5C has replaced that and is being bundled into this number.
So whilst in 2012 Apple sold 5 million iPhone 5 handsets on opening weekend, it may have sold 4 million or more iPhone 4S because the price of them decreased with the iPhone 5 release. This year it's sold 5 million flagship devices again which means it's stagnant, it's possibly sold no more budget devices than it did last year, and it's only achieved this by frontloading a whole bunch of China sales.
As other news outlets have pointed out they also did away with pre-orders to force people to queue up on release day to try and artificially inflate queue levels to the same level they used to get for past releases when they did allow pre-orders.
It's like their share price decline that they stemmed with a share buyback and dividend, it's great that that stopped it declining, but it doesn't change the fact it means they're still not as strong now as they were when they didn't have to take such measures.
There's nothing encouraging here at all, as you say, year on year comparisons of quarterly financial reportings tell a more realistic story, it's the long term trend that matters. But currently it's pretty clear that in a like for like comparison their flagship device has actually done worse than last year - only shifting the same amount of handsets as last year but in a much much larger opening market, whether their budget offering has beaten their old last-gen discounted models is anyone's guess though, perhaps there's an increase in profit for them there, we'll see.
The double standards being applied to try and bolster the view that Apple is breaking records is stupid, and desperate.
Well for me I find learning some things not fun at all, but the reason I say interesting is because I view them as a requirement to get to the next step that I will find fun.
For example, I did a whole course on statistics that used medical statistics as it's examples and I found it utterly piss boring, but it was a means to an end to get to the interesting parts that are relevant to things like machine learning. I'm sure in contrast though some students loved the medical statistics examples and if they'd used something more interesting to me the other students would've found those examples boring and uninteresting, but at the end of the day the materials have to be learnt if you want to get anywhere but it's not always going to be "play" even.
I agree that everyone learns in different ways, I've certainly never been great under the classic schooling system but have always been way above the average when it comes to self directed learning in my own time but I'm not convinced this making learning fun thing works.
If we're talking about producing high calibre software developers then you don't need to do anything, the passion for the topic alone will keep them going and they wont find any of it boring enough to put them off and wont need special gimmicks to keep them interested. You can't force people into a profession they're not interested in and expect good results.
If however we're talking about programming just because we feel it's a skill people should know then I'm still not convinced it's right to force it on them even if we can try and make it interesting. I had to do English Literature at school and despite doing well I really could not give a flying fuck about it, it was the single most dull and pointless subject I've ever had to do and I miss not a single thing from largely forgetting everything about it after my exams. Spending a couple of weeks "evaluating" a poem about fucking daffodils or whatever and determining "what he really meant" was an utterly senseless amount of idiocy. He meant what he fucking wrote and any other interpretation you put on it or hidden meanings you decide to "find" in it given the fact he's dead is merely arbitrary and pointless and an exercise in making shit up, and if you didn't happen to make the same shit up that the teacher made up then you were "wrong". Really, it was a waste of my time making me do that subject when I could instead have done something else that was actually productive for my future and learnt something that mattered to me with all those hours of lessons instead.
I never ever found maths fun, I always found it difficult at school, but despite it not being "fun" and despite me struggling with it and having teachers tell me I wasn't cut out for it I still persevered and eventually got a 1st class honours degree in the subject simply for the fact that even though I never found it fun because I found it difficult originally, and even though I found it hard, I did find it genuinely interesting.
So sure the guy in the summary may have found Ruby a bit more fun, but honestly if he's not got the interest to learn the parts of development that made C++ boring for him his programming abilities are never going to get past the point of any relevance. Either you like the subject enough to push through the hard sometimes even boring bits or you don't. Some things can be taught to some people in a way they view as slightly less boring but everyone's different so everyone's going to encounter bits they deem boring but that's just the way it is. Chances are if you manage to make teaching of a subject fun for everyone who takes it then all you've done is eliminate the difficult, but essential bits to become competent in the subject in question.
Learning isn't easy, MOOCs make it more available but they can't necessarily make a topic more accessible beyond a minimum amount of intelligence, will and effort required to work through and understand the materials. There's always going to have to be some base level of interest and willpower required to get through the course successfully, that is, until we get to the point where we can write knowledge directly into people's brains, Matrix style.
Same is true even with my old Galaxy Nexus, and the Nexus 7 and these are both now what, 18 months to 2 years old?
Honestly, since Android 4 the "Android feels slow/laggy meme" is dead unless you're buying a budget phone, but it seems silly to compare say a £150 Android device to a £500 iPhone and then complain that the Android does seem as good. Of course it wont be as good, it's less than 1/3rd the price.
Spend about £200 though and you'll get something that feels as good as any version of iOS. It still wont have the same degree of power for things like gaming, if that's what you're after then you will have to spend more, but if you don't play high end mobile games much on your phone but want a smooth interface for what you do do, £200 for an Android 4.x phone is plenty.
People don't hate on the homeless, they hate on people who have options to get out of a shit situation and don't take them because they favour some immediate comfort instead.
For example, this guy is buying expensive energy drinks and cigarettes, he could instead save that money to rent somewhere even if only for a couple of months to get a bank account and get himself into a position where he's much better placed to get a permanent job.
Compare and contrast this to a homeless guy here in the UK where I live, he's an ex-Afghan translator, given permission to stay after he translated for British troops in Afghanistan risking his life, he is homeless because he had no real money to bring with him. We have a program here called Big Issue whereby homeless people are given magazines that they sell for £2, £1 is paid back for the magazine, the other £1 is profit. This guy is out there every day of every year for 12 - 14 hours a day whether it's raining, freezing cold, or really hot, mostly, being the UK though, it's cold and rainy.
But not a day goes by where he doesn't smile to everyone, sometimes does a little jig, or comically bows to people to make them smile and everyone loves him for it and he's getting somewhere. I gave him £20 on my last week of work before Christmas for a magazine and I've seen others give him more than £2 too - in fact one guy buys him a coffee just about every morning when it's cold. He's got himself a phone now, and some decent clothes and a new backpack so he's getting there certainly.
That's really the issue. It's not that people hate homeless people, on the contrary when people see a hard working homeless person who also tries to cheer others up despite being in a shit place themselves people are happy to try and help them too by giving charity.
But what people don't like are spoilt jerks with an entitlement attitude as in the article here who has a laptop, a smartphone, who buys cigarettes and energy drinks and then whines that he's so hard done by. If he's buying cigarettes and energy drinks then of course he wont ever save up enough capital to start improving his life - he's throwing away all the income he gets on unnecessary shit.
Because generally if you're homeless it means you can't afford rent or a mortgage.
You may struggle to get a job if you haven't got a permanent address.
So if you save up those dollars spent on cigarettes and energy drinks you could save up enough to rent somewhere with an address for a couple of months, during which time you could get a job and bank account given your new permanent address which would allow you to sustain that and not be homeless.
The point is that by not living like "dogs" as you put it they're sustaining their current situation, whilst if they lived like "dogs" (seriously, giving up cigarettes and substituting energy drinks for something cheaper is hardly living like a dog) for a couple of months they'd then be able to have a much better lifestyle again.
I take issue with people who moan about their predicament being long term when they have many ways of escaping their predicament, they just choose not to take them.
So it's fine if this guy wants to leave like this and be homeless but have his smokes and energy drink, that's okay, but at the same time he needs to stfu about being homeless because that's actually a choice he's making when he opts for energy drinks and cigarettes rather than amassing a bit of cash to escape homelessness. You can't make a choice about something then complain about it.
He had monster energy drinks and cigarettes from before he was homeless?
What did he do, stockpile them thinking "Oh I better buy a load now in case I end up homeless"?
The official line is that Snowden was just some basic contractor who was a network administrator but other sources that have done some digging seem to think he was one of the NSA's hired hackers contracted to attack other nation state's infrastructure.
Only it seems he turned on the NSA and hacked them instead, hence the access to all this data.
The problem is that the NSA was likely using the very algorithms and systems it had put backdoors into assuming that no one else would know about the backdoors so it wouldn't be problematic for them. It also meant that someone like Snowden who'd been informed of all the back doors he could use could exploit the same backdoors inside the NSA itself which would've made things trivial for him.
The US has placed way too much trust in it's staff but most importantly it's contractors for too long. It was first obvious with Manning, one might wonder why a near bottom of the ladder analyst sat in Iraq would have access to every diplomatic cable across the globe for example but for some reason he did.
They've had the balance between sharing of intel to allow analysts to make fast optimal decisions and keeping it secure wrong for a while now but that's not something that can be quickly fixed either. This likely stems from the post-9/11 expansion of the security services where all these new security agencies, contractors and staff were all demanding access to various bits of information so they just opened it up to everyone as it was the only way they could fulfil all the requests.
Well given that Britain is the second largest military force in NATO after the US you'd think that we'd not need to hack it to find out what was going on.
"Can you point me to just one case of a terrorist who successfully blew himself up because a judge mistakenly denied a reasonable warrant request?"
Perhaps somewhat ironically, a number of attacks that have succeeded such as the butchering of a soldier in London earlier this year were by people who were not only known to the security services, but whom the security services tried to recruit.
You're right, the security services can't even catch people sat right under their own noses when they have all the information and have been granted all the warrants they possible could have been. Giving them permission to snoop beyond those boundaries is only going to give them more information they can't properly use making it even less likely again that they'll catch the real threats.
Well if he was a "network engineer" then chances are his not in the bottom 7% of the population so it shouldn't matter.
Unless of course he is, in which case maybe that's why he's not a network engineer any more.
We have even higher unemployment rates in the UK than the US right now I believe but I guarantee you if I came to work tomorrow and the doors were locked finding myself unemployed that by the end of the week I'd have a new job, even if it was just in McDonalds or whatever until I find the job I want.
Most people who are unemployed have "failed" because they weren't trying hard enough or would prefer to lounge around on welfare. I even sympathise with them to some degree because for some losing your job can be soul destroying and if they're genuinely depressed finding motivation to look no doubt feels impossible, but ultimately they're not unemployed because there are no jobs out there. About the only time that holds true is in isolated rural communities, but even this doesn't prevent you moving somewhere where there are jobs.
Someone competent enough to be a network engineer is only genuinely "unable to find employment" where there's no longer a single job listed on Monster.com paying under £30k a year or whatever the US equivalent wage would be and when McDonalds etc. are no longer recruiting anyone for an extended period.
Regarding your mention of "overqualified" I'll give you a hint: that's an employers way of saying "We didn't like you because you came across like an idiot, but we don't want you to feel too bad about it, so we'll pretend you're just too good for us". No one actually doesn't hire specifically because of overqualification in itself.
Not as much as a period of unemployment will.
Any future employer is going to look more positively at you taking a job like that than having no job at all for a period because it at least shows a will to work and a period of interaction with customers and so forth.
That's way better than a period of doing nothing and achieving nothing.
Yet that's the exact arguments the UK government uses when it doesn't want to do something.
"We can't just not hand over Julian Assange because the whole extradition looks fishy because that would be illegal"
We have separation of our judicial branch from our government for a reason and they can't just pick and choose when they ignore the law even with their attempt at hijacking the judiciary with their politically appointed supreme court.