Right so you now regularly intend to speak out against Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and far right extremism because they do carry out similar attacks across the globe?
If you can't understand that most muslims are non-white caucasian and that most islamophobes single out muslims over other arguably worse, but same race killers (like Adam Lanza and friends) because they are racist, even if they can't admit it deep down, then I can't really help you understand why I said what I said and the reason I said it for.
The likes of the IRA, the far right, and ETA have killed far more in the West than muslims in recent decades yet they are not singled out in the same manner, and the reason is simply the underlying racism towards the ethnic groups that primarily comprise the muslim population.
"There were some. As far as I can remember these were aimed at military targets or other paramilitary groups."
Then you can't remember very far and should probably avoid the topic given that fact.
"Really? What race am I discriminating against? What race am I? Go on tell"
Look, I don't play games. I have zero respect for people who like to pretend they're the good citizen, that they're objective, fair, sensible, rational individuals and that this is nothing to do with race because they "have friends who are muslim" and so on. I prefer to call a spade a spade, and you're likely discriminating against people who aren't white caucasian Westerners. Even if you were an anomally and it's not about race for you, then the fact you generalise 1.3bn people as all being the same still doesn't exactly paint you in any better a light. It still fully paints you with the same level of idiocy so it's by the by, it doesn't matter, you're either a racist or as bad as one because however you cut it you still have that simplistic feeble mindset.
If you hold a political view at least have the courage of your convictions to accept it and admit you're part of the far right and a fascist. Acting as something whilst you're pretending to be another just defines you as a coward who doesn't have enough faith in his beliefs to stand behind them. It says that deep down you want to be a reasonable member of society but you know you're letting your anger and hatred based on your primalistic tribalism take control rather than an ability to pursue rational thought but that you can't control it, because you're mentally weak, and hence, so are your arguments.
Yes, unfortunately that list also for some unknown reason (well I lie, it's not known, that list has been produced by someone with a bias) completely missing many other incidents.
There were in the same period attacks that would also fall under the lose definition used (or even a much tighter definition) of terrorist attacks by Shining Path rebels in Peru, Farc rebels in Colombia, Buddhists in Burma (against muslims), PIRA in Ireland, Hindus in India (against muslims). I could probably go on if I bother to Google for other parts of the world that the Western press rarely gives a fuck about but there's little point given that there's enough here to run a bulldozer over the worthfulness of that list.
Further, it seems a little odd to take a list so many attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq and pretend they're somehow evidence of muslims being somehow a problematic grouping of people without considering the context of those attacks and that they were triggered by the actions of Bush and Blair's modern Christian crusades and that most attacks are against other muslims so are as much demonstrative of civil war, than terrorism.
But anyway, I don't know why I'm bothering, you've made enough posts in response to enough stories that have absolutely no relevance to Islam proclaiming your hate for it for it to be obvious you are a fully signed up far right propagandist and hence inherently unable to think rationally or converse sensibly on this topic, but I guess for the benefit of others, perhaps they can at least see that terrorism happens globally, and that muslims are as much victims as they are perpetrators. You only have to look at the suffering muslims faced in Afghanistan in the 80s by the USSR, and Chechnya as a result of Putin's policies for example to see that they haven't exactly had an easy ride themselves. You may think a few attacks in the West are evidence of some horrible group of people far worse than anyone else, but here's an idea - why not go live somewhere like Burma, or Islamic areas of India for a while and then tell me they're the bad guys not the victims - you don't know what terrorism is unless you've seen or bothered to even read about how some of these communities suffer daily.
Yes, that's basically what happens when hyperinflation occurs as it did in for example, Zimbabwe under Mugabe's epic economic policies. The cost of things rises so fast you can't realistically determine what you should and shouldn't pay for something day by day to the point currency becomes meaningless and people start trading in cows and daughters or whatever instead.
Your view is like the extreme counter-view to those who believe there is some inherent grand designer controlling the universe though which is equally as false.
The fact is that some degree of order can and does arise out of randomness, that's the whole reason we're here- evolution is an emergent process. There are species of plant, all different, that have still managed to evolve identically shaped and coloured flowers, the reason being that they're all pollinated by a specific population of hummingbird that is more attracted to this colour and can more effectively pollinate this shape of flower. If we find a new species of plant not in bloom in the region but that is otherwise likely to be pollinated by said hummingbird then we can predict with an incredible degree of accuracy what that flower is going to look like, we couldn't do this if at least some degree of order didn't arise from the randomness of the universe.
As such, this is why statements like this, aren't exactly correct:
"It's the same reason you hear people who are wealthy spouting off about how they deserved it, or got there with "hard work", and everyone else is just lazy freeloaders. These people, on a very basic emotional level, reject the idea of random chance."
To make these sorts of statements you don't have to reject the idea of random chance at all, it can simply be that you believe that on average, those who work hard, are more likely to do better, whilst those that are lazy, are more likely to be less well off. Neither guarantees either outcome, but they do increase the possibility and as a result, allow for a generalisation based on the fact that in general it is true. This is because intentionally, or unintentionally, much of the human race has structured it's society towards this goal (though various ideologies do act against this).
Believing "Nothing I do matters man, the universe is just random" is as silly as believing "Everything will be okay, our Lord is looking over us to make sure that's the case".
Research into chaos theory tells us that minor changes in starting conditions for some processes can result in wildly different outcomes, but it also doesn't preclude the fact that sometimes these outcomes are such that the process tends towards some value. It's perfectly reasonable to consider that something resembling a just world is an attractor in this respect that we are tending towards - certainly although modern justice for example is far from perfect, many would surely argue that in the UK for example we're still doing much better than the mediaeval days of dunking many thousands of women declared witches and if they drown declaring them innocent, or if they survive declaring them witches and burning them alive. Tending towards a more just state could simply be a result of an evolutionary process whereby our species inherently tends towards it because it aids the survival of our species, there doesn't need to be some overarching actor pulling the strings.
But here's where I think the point you're getting at lies - even if we are on a tendency towards the world being more just, we still shouldn't put absolute faith in it now precisely because we're certainly not there yet (and hence would still be tending towards it) and so if such a state exists, and is some kind of state that we do indeed tend towards, then there's still the possibility of fluctuation and variation along the way that folks like Assange could be the victim of, and I suspect it is this randomness that you are alluding to?
To be fair I wouldn't say your laptop was typical of the time. I bought a Dell Inspiron 8200 that same year and it had a 2ghz P4 processor, 512mb RAM, a 60gb HDD, and a GeForce graphics card (can't remember specs of it) but your point still holds regardless.
Absolutely, but sometimes in life there are sure fire bets where the risk is so minimal it's silly not to invest in them and in government this is especially the case.
Unless somehow all modern Biology turns out to be wrong, it's pretty clear cut that stem cell research funding is going to yield new treatments that would be worth a fortune in exports for example. Similarly it's pretty clear cut that nano material research is going to yield new products that again would build a good export market.
The government isn't in the situation of stock market style gambling, they're in a situation where there are some obvious areas for investment that could yield 99.9999% guaranteed improvement in economic productivity. They opt not to do so because a) It would require them accepting they were wrong, which like most Slashdotters they simply cannot do, and b) It would require they get over their ideological boundaries (i.e. religious objections to some stem cell research), and c) In some cases said industry hasn't given them and wont give them the pre-requisite backhander bribe - and I mean bribe in the broadest sense, e.g. a party funding contribution.
"slashdot got by without advertising when it was much smaller."
This isn't really true, the ads really came into play as Slashdot peaked/started to see somewhat of a decline.
In this respect, I think you're missing one of the most important methods of site survival that's been key in shaping the web along the way, and that's that many people who have built successful sites along the way, managed to sell them, get bought out, or were given corporate sponsorship without ads because it benefits an agenda. Slashdot was seen as a useful site for driving awareness of the FOSS community for a long time and was bought for precisely that purpose.
"people want free content, and advertising is how they get it, whether YOU like it or not."
You're still assuming free content is only possible with advertising, again, that's blatantly and demonstrably false.
"the people that were putting stuff out 13 years ago without ads, they are still around. and the ones that aren't? advertising didn't kill them."
On the contrary, look at sites like Gamedev.net, it started adding more and more ads and suffered massive decline in the process, the ad model has killed as many sites as it has saved.
Once more, this assumption that ads are essential and necessary shows little more than ignorance of how the web used to be, and you can say I sound like an elitist asshole all you want, that's fine, if that's how you express yourself when you get angry that someone has provided a counterpoint with examples then that's your choice, but it's not going to change the fact that for the best part of a decade the majority of the internet ran ad free, and did so successfully without financial ruin. The real fundamental problem now is that people believe they have a right to make money from every web site, and so less do it simply for the enjoyment of running a site and building a community or whatever, and that's okay in itself, but it doesn't have to be that way - that way is a choice, and that's simply my point.
As an aside, I work for a firm that has just released a web based product completely free and ad free that's already in the millions of users territory, we do this because the data we get from the site is extremely useful for our core business - again, even in terms of the commercial world the idea that you need ads for a site to offer free services is simply not true. It's a short sighted and simplistic view of the web.
I think you mistake my comments for the idea that I'm somehow a "It should all be free man" type of hippy, that's simply not true, what I do believe though is that the need for ads is completely overstated and frankly I think the online ad industry is going to see decline at some point to the degree that the contribution to many site's operations will be worthless - already a number of companies have started to realise that often online advertising can cost a lot and net you nothing. I think when this happens and the decline in ad money occurs, people are going to have to find other models and for some, that may include looking to the past to see how it used to be done before ads were thrown around left and right as if they're some kind of essential life support machine for a site.
"funded by advertising. (or basically any other webcomic getting a modest amount of traffic)"
Funny, never noticed any on XKCD.
"how about google? gmail?"
No thanks, I'm quite content with rich clients that better let me managed my e-mail and keep it under my control.
"let me tell you, bandwidth doesn't pay for itself."
No shit. That doesn't mean it has to be paid for by advertising or paywalls though.
"sure, some of those things could survive with a paywall or donation model, especially now that they are already established. but the barrier to entry all of a sudden becomes much greater."
Which again is why the web didn't exist before adverts became the norm at the dawn of the millenium. Oh wait, no, that's wrong. The web was thriving way before that.
"Without ads, how are you going to pay your hosting costs for anything more than a trivial amount of traffic?"
The way I always did, out of my own pocket enjoying the fruits of my labour in terms of the wage I've gained by getting a decent job having been spotted giving useful content free online, via donations, whatever. Wikipedia is one of the highest traffic sites on the net and it runs entirely without ads.
"you can make an awesome site, and make it freely available, but you will become a victim of your own success - if your site actually DOES become huge, so will your hosting bill, and you'd better have some plan in place to pay for it."
Again, because of course no site has ever got large without ads.
Anyone who thinks that a first gen device in a largely brand new field is going to be some perfect super-device with no flaws is an idiot.
Even the iPhone, entering an existing field had a piss poor set of hardware for it's first iteration, the resolution was crap, it didn't have 3G, it didn't have MMS support, it didn't have GPS, it didn't have apps, I don't even think it had an accelerometer, and it was generally quite underpowered. That didn't exactly stop it selling well and leading to a revolution in the market though did it?
Wait for the full HD version next year or whatever if that's what you want. It's still a better device than anything else in it's field precisely because there is nothing else in it's field right now and that alone is an achievement.
Sure but the counter to that is that austerity isn't automatically deficit reduction - some of the cuts our government has made has resulted in a decrease in economic output which has led to a net increase in debt relative to GDP.
I wasn't so much suggesting whether or not our politicians are non-retarded enough to implement sane policy, simply that trying to hit debt targets by factoring in convenient one-off windfalls isn't exactly a smart long term plan and is a method you'd use for no other reason than a clear inability to deal with the actual underlying problem - whether that's through sensible cuts, sensible investment, or a mixture of both. The issue is that the current muppet certainly can't get the whole austerity thing right, so he may as well have a go at the investment thing and see if he's better at that. Ideally he'd just fuck off full stop and let someone with half a brain when it comes to this sort of thing take over (e.g. Vince Cable), but we're not that lucky.
"I know, but still massive debt is not nice thing to carry in future, because things can get ugly pretty quickly."
That really depends on whether your economy grows with that increased debt.
Consider this, you have £10,000 of debt, and are struggling to break even each month. A good friend starts a new business with a genuinely great idea and is looking for £5,000 of investment. If you borrow £5,000 and 2 years down the road his company has been successful such that you can cash in half your shares in the company for say, £50,000 then is that £15,000 of debt really very scary any more?
It's the proportion of debt to GDP that really matters in this respect - the net size of the debt doesn't matter too much if you can shrink it as a proportion of GDP because shrinking it as a proportion means you have to give up less of your money to pay it off.
What matters, as always, is that said investment is sensible. Spending £5bn to roll out 50mbps broadband to the whole country would easily pay for itself over time for example with the increased ability for people to remotely work for higher paying companies, sell their products and services online - even to other countries - even if they live in the middle of nowhere where previously they'd have been unable to and relatively unproductive as a result, move government services online meaning you can save money by cutting the need to maintain expensive buildings which in turn frees up buildings for private business to grow into and make use of, decrease use of north sea oil which could instead be exported for profit and so on.
Similarly as another example, investment in scientific research can help kick-start whole new industries (stem cell medicines, products based on nano-materials, green technologies) which can export products to the rest of the world.
There's certainly a challenge in getting the investment right, but there's nothing inherently scary about increased debt if you have credible plans to grow your wealth in greater proportion relative to it.
He didn't mention MVC, he was talking about WebForms so I don't think what he said is true, as all attempts to make web development like forms development to date has been complete and utter crap. WebForms forces you into a paradigm that often suffers impedance mismatch relative to the way the web and HTTP actually works in practice, and often can result in unnecessary transport overheard to support the faux event-based model.
In contrast, I'd say their MVC implementation is actually quite excellent, and it scales as well as the competition- it's only really a handful of the Java alternatives that may scale slightly better (or a custom C++ solution, but that has it's costs in terms of increased development time and higher potential for security nightmares and serious bugs). Just about all of the other alternatives scale much more poorly - Ruby, PHP, and yes, I'm afraid even Python right now (even though it's a great language in it's own right). As such I wouldn't really say ASP.NET MVC has scalability as a concern, it's not one of it's weaknesses relative to the market in general, in fact, it's one of it's strengths in that it's the only true mainstream alternative to Java in most cases. The other things you say are however largely valid:
- Cost is certainly true, though if scalability is an issue you will surely be working on something with a large enough budget that the cost of IDE is a negligible fraction of the total cost of development. This is also a cost that may even be paid for in increased developer productivity through having decent tools. Similarly the increased cost of Windows Server hosting isn't likely to be an issue if you've got a product that requires some reasonable degree of scalability, the additional cost is once again going to be a tiny fraction of your total costs, though if you're really trying to maximise profit margins this will have some impact. The cost thing is of course an issue if you're a lone developer or a small start-up, that's certainly true.
- Cross platform, obviously a bit of a problem here and I agree. If you don't want to use Windows I wouldn't even bother looking at a Mono based solution, by the time you're done fucking around with Mono you may as well have just used Java or whatever in the first place.
Seriously though, I don't really know why people bitch about XML etc. being ugly. It may be true, but of all the alternatives I've seen they're all just as bad, and often even have more quirks and of course, completely lack any level of worthwhile support.
Come up with something better, then you can complain.
Yes, with Windows 8 Microsoft seem to have missed the obvious reason why so many people continue to use Windows - because it's Windows.
It's familiar, it's easy to use, people know it, stuff works. So what do they do? they go and change everything with Windows 8 ultimately giving people something they don't want.
Windows is at it's strongest when they simply improve stability, performance, and so on - why do they think Windows 7 was such a success when Vista was such a flop? really all that changed was that Windows 7 was more stable, more compatible and performed better.
They didn't need a massive step change to the user interface, people are happy with it, know it, and can use it, they just want something that'll work for them. Few people will move away from Windows whilst it remains fast, stable, and continues to work, but if it changes completely and they have to learn a new UI then they're more likely to think, well, if I have to learn a whole new interface I could just as well learn Apple's interface, or one of the Linux interfaces so maybe now is a good time to switch...
Windows 9 - just give me Windows 7 with the latest DirectX, the latest IE, and whatever performance, security and stability improvements you came up with in Windows 8 - I'm fine with that, and I'll even pay you for it. I don't want you to completely fuck up my user experience though.
Interesting that it was a Labour MP that raised it, but the Tories most certainly do care - as I mentioned, the only way Osborne was able to claim he'd hit his borrowing targets was by factoring in £3.5bn from this auction, the fact that wasn't achieved means Osborne likely wont hit his borrowing targets and it'll give his opponents, and opponents of the Conservatives in general plenty of ammunition against him.
It was a cheap trick that lent him a lot of criticism at the time, that combined with the fact it hasn't even worked as he planned doesn't exactly bode well for him.
But none of those theoretical restrictions you suggest could make an unfair auction happened did they so it's a stupid argument.
You can't come up with theoretical ideas as to how you can make such an auction unfair and then claim the auction was unfair based on that even though such theoretical ideas didn't happen in practice.
The auction itself was pretty transparent, there's nothing there that demonstrates corruption. There's decent plurality in the UK mobile market too so to use examples of three stakeholders is meaningless when we know for an absolute fact there was seven. This isn't like the landline market where BT still has an inherited monopoly, the UK mobile space is far from "artificially limited by regulation".
Having read a bit more about this the only criticism I can find is that there was no minimum increase in the bid bidders had to make (i.e. they could just bid a trivial amount more rather than say, £10million more than the next bid down) but that if anything would've further distorted the resultant figure away from the market value - if the market value was say, £15million then all that would do is mean companies either bid £5million too low, or £5million too high to pay for it.
Unless you have some evidence of actual wrongdoing that no one else is aware of then you're just clutching at straws, the price that was paid was the price that a healthy market determined. Maybe they could've squeezed a bit more out of those companies if they'd artificially restricted the auction to force higher prices, but as Ofcom said - their job wasn't to get money for the public purse, their job is to get companies to utilise the spectrum, and that makes sense. If the government wanted more money they should've bypassed Ofcom and forced the companies to pay x amount.
All that's happened is that the government has overestimated the worth of the spectrum, turns out reality disagreed with the price they perceived it to be worth, so it was stupid of Osborne to hedge his deficit reduction budget strategy on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Right so you now regularly intend to speak out against Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and far right extremism because they do carry out similar attacks across the globe?
Give this, why do you single out Islam?
If you can't understand that most muslims are non-white caucasian and that most islamophobes single out muslims over other arguably worse, but same race killers (like Adam Lanza and friends) because they are racist, even if they can't admit it deep down, then I can't really help you understand why I said what I said and the reason I said it for.
The likes of the IRA, the far right, and ETA have killed far more in the West than muslims in recent decades yet they are not singled out in the same manner, and the reason is simply the underlying racism towards the ethnic groups that primarily comprise the muslim population.
"There were some. As far as I can remember these were aimed at military targets or other paramilitary groups."
Then you can't remember very far and should probably avoid the topic given that fact.
"Really? What race am I discriminating against? What race am I? Go on tell"
Look, I don't play games. I have zero respect for people who like to pretend they're the good citizen, that they're objective, fair, sensible, rational individuals and that this is nothing to do with race because they "have friends who are muslim" and so on. I prefer to call a spade a spade, and you're likely discriminating against people who aren't white caucasian Westerners. Even if you were an anomally and it's not about race for you, then the fact you generalise 1.3bn people as all being the same still doesn't exactly paint you in any better a light. It still fully paints you with the same level of idiocy so it's by the by, it doesn't matter, you're either a racist or as bad as one because however you cut it you still have that simplistic feeble mindset.
If you hold a political view at least have the courage of your convictions to accept it and admit you're part of the far right and a fascist. Acting as something whilst you're pretending to be another just defines you as a coward who doesn't have enough faith in his beliefs to stand behind them. It says that deep down you want to be a reasonable member of society but you know you're letting your anger and hatred based on your primalistic tribalism take control rather than an ability to pursue rational thought but that you can't control it, because you're mentally weak, and hence, so are your arguments.
"You have played one too many FPS."
That or I'm taking the piss. You figure it out.
Yes, unfortunately that list also for some unknown reason (well I lie, it's not known, that list has been produced by someone with a bias) completely missing many other incidents.
There were in the same period attacks that would also fall under the lose definition used (or even a much tighter definition) of terrorist attacks by Shining Path rebels in Peru, Farc rebels in Colombia, Buddhists in Burma (against muslims), PIRA in Ireland, Hindus in India (against muslims). I could probably go on if I bother to Google for other parts of the world that the Western press rarely gives a fuck about but there's little point given that there's enough here to run a bulldozer over the worthfulness of that list.
Further, it seems a little odd to take a list so many attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq and pretend they're somehow evidence of muslims being somehow a problematic grouping of people without considering the context of those attacks and that they were triggered by the actions of Bush and Blair's modern Christian crusades and that most attacks are against other muslims so are as much demonstrative of civil war, than terrorism.
But anyway, I don't know why I'm bothering, you've made enough posts in response to enough stories that have absolutely no relevance to Islam proclaiming your hate for it for it to be obvious you are a fully signed up far right propagandist and hence inherently unable to think rationally or converse sensibly on this topic, but I guess for the benefit of others, perhaps they can at least see that terrorism happens globally, and that muslims are as much victims as they are perpetrators. You only have to look at the suffering muslims faced in Afghanistan in the 80s by the USSR, and Chechnya as a result of Putin's policies for example to see that they haven't exactly had an easy ride themselves. You may think a few attacks in the West are evidence of some horrible group of people far worse than anyone else, but here's an idea - why not go live somewhere like Burma, or Islamic areas of India for a while and then tell me they're the bad guys not the victims - you don't know what terrorism is unless you've seen or bothered to even read about how some of these communities suffer daily.
Yes except that's a complete lie given that there were a number of bombings that resulted in deaths and injuries where no warnings were given.
Don't try and pretend there's any difference simply because you're racist, terrorists are terrorists.
"couldn't they use some kind of anaesthetic bullets?"
What, call the local vet and tell him to bring his tranquilliser gun because they have a wild terrorist on the loose?
Yes, that's basically what happens when hyperinflation occurs as it did in for example, Zimbabwe under Mugabe's epic economic policies. The cost of things rises so fast you can't realistically determine what you should and shouldn't pay for something day by day to the point currency becomes meaningless and people start trading in cows and daughters or whatever instead.
Your view is like the extreme counter-view to those who believe there is some inherent grand designer controlling the universe though which is equally as false.
The fact is that some degree of order can and does arise out of randomness, that's the whole reason we're here- evolution is an emergent process. There are species of plant, all different, that have still managed to evolve identically shaped and coloured flowers, the reason being that they're all pollinated by a specific population of hummingbird that is more attracted to this colour and can more effectively pollinate this shape of flower. If we find a new species of plant not in bloom in the region but that is otherwise likely to be pollinated by said hummingbird then we can predict with an incredible degree of accuracy what that flower is going to look like, we couldn't do this if at least some degree of order didn't arise from the randomness of the universe.
As such, this is why statements like this, aren't exactly correct:
"It's the same reason you hear people who are wealthy spouting off about how they deserved it, or got there with "hard work", and everyone else is just lazy freeloaders. These people, on a very basic emotional level, reject the idea of random chance."
To make these sorts of statements you don't have to reject the idea of random chance at all, it can simply be that you believe that on average, those who work hard, are more likely to do better, whilst those that are lazy, are more likely to be less well off. Neither guarantees either outcome, but they do increase the possibility and as a result, allow for a generalisation based on the fact that in general it is true. This is because intentionally, or unintentionally, much of the human race has structured it's society towards this goal (though various ideologies do act against this).
Believing "Nothing I do matters man, the universe is just random" is as silly as believing "Everything will be okay, our Lord is looking over us to make sure that's the case".
Research into chaos theory tells us that minor changes in starting conditions for some processes can result in wildly different outcomes, but it also doesn't preclude the fact that sometimes these outcomes are such that the process tends towards some value. It's perfectly reasonable to consider that something resembling a just world is an attractor in this respect that we are tending towards - certainly although modern justice for example is far from perfect, many would surely argue that in the UK for example we're still doing much better than the mediaeval days of dunking many thousands of women declared witches and if they drown declaring them innocent, or if they survive declaring them witches and burning them alive. Tending towards a more just state could simply be a result of an evolutionary process whereby our species inherently tends towards it because it aids the survival of our species, there doesn't need to be some overarching actor pulling the strings.
But here's where I think the point you're getting at lies - even if we are on a tendency towards the world being more just, we still shouldn't put absolute faith in it now precisely because we're certainly not there yet (and hence would still be tending towards it) and so if such a state exists, and is some kind of state that we do indeed tend towards, then there's still the possibility of fluctuation and variation along the way that folks like Assange could be the victim of, and I suspect it is this randomness that you are alluding to?
To be fair I wouldn't say your laptop was typical of the time. I bought a Dell Inspiron 8200 that same year and it had a 2ghz P4 processor, 512mb RAM, a 60gb HDD, and a GeForce graphics card (can't remember specs of it) but your point still holds regardless.
Absolutely, but sometimes in life there are sure fire bets where the risk is so minimal it's silly not to invest in them and in government this is especially the case.
Unless somehow all modern Biology turns out to be wrong, it's pretty clear cut that stem cell research funding is going to yield new treatments that would be worth a fortune in exports for example. Similarly it's pretty clear cut that nano material research is going to yield new products that again would build a good export market.
The government isn't in the situation of stock market style gambling, they're in a situation where there are some obvious areas for investment that could yield 99.9999% guaranteed improvement in economic productivity. They opt not to do so because a) It would require them accepting they were wrong, which like most Slashdotters they simply cannot do, and b) It would require they get over their ideological boundaries (i.e. religious objections to some stem cell research), and c) In some cases said industry hasn't given them and wont give them the pre-requisite backhander bribe - and I mean bribe in the broadest sense, e.g. a party funding contribution.
Hence the "largely" brand new field bit of my comment, I understand the likes of the military have been using this sort of thing for quite some time :)
Mostly I was referring to the fact that as you say, this is the first real entrant as a consumer device for day to day use.
"slashdot got by without advertising when it was much smaller."
This isn't really true, the ads really came into play as Slashdot peaked/started to see somewhat of a decline.
In this respect, I think you're missing one of the most important methods of site survival that's been key in shaping the web along the way, and that's that many people who have built successful sites along the way, managed to sell them, get bought out, or were given corporate sponsorship without ads because it benefits an agenda. Slashdot was seen as a useful site for driving awareness of the FOSS community for a long time and was bought for precisely that purpose.
"people want free content, and advertising is how they get it, whether YOU like it or not."
You're still assuming free content is only possible with advertising, again, that's blatantly and demonstrably false.
"the people that were putting stuff out 13 years ago without ads, they are still around. and the ones that aren't? advertising didn't kill them."
On the contrary, look at sites like Gamedev.net, it started adding more and more ads and suffered massive decline in the process, the ad model has killed as many sites as it has saved.
Once more, this assumption that ads are essential and necessary shows little more than ignorance of how the web used to be, and you can say I sound like an elitist asshole all you want, that's fine, if that's how you express yourself when you get angry that someone has provided a counterpoint with examples then that's your choice, but it's not going to change the fact that for the best part of a decade the majority of the internet ran ad free, and did so successfully without financial ruin. The real fundamental problem now is that people believe they have a right to make money from every web site, and so less do it simply for the enjoyment of running a site and building a community or whatever, and that's okay in itself, but it doesn't have to be that way - that way is a choice, and that's simply my point.
As an aside, I work for a firm that has just released a web based product completely free and ad free that's already in the millions of users territory, we do this because the data we get from the site is extremely useful for our core business - again, even in terms of the commercial world the idea that you need ads for a site to offer free services is simply not true. It's a short sighted and simplistic view of the web.
I think you mistake my comments for the idea that I'm somehow a "It should all be free man" type of hippy, that's simply not true, what I do believe though is that the need for ads is completely overstated and frankly I think the online ad industry is going to see decline at some point to the degree that the contribution to many site's operations will be worthless - already a number of companies have started to realise that often online advertising can cost a lot and net you nothing. I think when this happens and the decline in ad money occurs, people are going to have to find other models and for some, that may include looking to the past to see how it used to be done before ads were thrown around left and right as if they're some kind of essential life support machine for a site.
"do you like slashdot? funded by advertising."
Didn't used to be, and still isn't for me.
"do you like penny arcade?"
Not really.
"funded by advertising. (or basically any other webcomic getting a modest amount of traffic)"
Funny, never noticed any on XKCD.
"how about google? gmail?"
No thanks, I'm quite content with rich clients that better let me managed my e-mail and keep it under my control.
"let me tell you, bandwidth doesn't pay for itself."
No shit. That doesn't mean it has to be paid for by advertising or paywalls though.
"sure, some of those things could survive with a paywall or donation model, especially now that they are already established. but the barrier to entry all of a sudden becomes much greater."
Which again is why the web didn't exist before adverts became the norm at the dawn of the millenium. Oh wait, no, that's wrong. The web was thriving way before that.
"Without ads, how are you going to pay your hosting costs for anything more than a trivial amount of traffic?"
The way I always did, out of my own pocket enjoying the fruits of my labour in terms of the wage I've gained by getting a decent job having been spotted giving useful content free online, via donations, whatever. Wikipedia is one of the highest traffic sites on the net and it runs entirely without ads.
"you can make an awesome site, and make it freely available, but you will become a victim of your own success - if your site actually DOES become huge, so will your hosting bill, and you'd better have some plan in place to pay for it."
Again, because of course no site has ever got large without ads.
Anyone who thinks that a first gen device in a largely brand new field is going to be some perfect super-device with no flaws is an idiot.
Even the iPhone, entering an existing field had a piss poor set of hardware for it's first iteration, the resolution was crap, it didn't have 3G, it didn't have MMS support, it didn't have GPS, it didn't have apps, I don't even think it had an accelerometer, and it was generally quite underpowered. That didn't exactly stop it selling well and leading to a revolution in the market though did it?
Wait for the full HD version next year or whatever if that's what you want. It's still a better device than anything else in it's field precisely because there is nothing else in it's field right now and that alone is an achievement.
Are we still talking about the ants here or is this some sort of scheme to use migrant workers to clean up after a quake?
Sure but the counter to that is that austerity isn't automatically deficit reduction - some of the cuts our government has made has resulted in a decrease in economic output which has led to a net increase in debt relative to GDP.
I wasn't so much suggesting whether or not our politicians are non-retarded enough to implement sane policy, simply that trying to hit debt targets by factoring in convenient one-off windfalls isn't exactly a smart long term plan and is a method you'd use for no other reason than a clear inability to deal with the actual underlying problem - whether that's through sensible cuts, sensible investment, or a mixture of both. The issue is that the current muppet certainly can't get the whole austerity thing right, so he may as well have a go at the investment thing and see if he's better at that. Ideally he'd just fuck off full stop and let someone with half a brain when it comes to this sort of thing take over (e.g. Vince Cable), but we're not that lucky.
"I know, but still massive debt is not nice thing to carry in future, because things can get ugly pretty quickly."
That really depends on whether your economy grows with that increased debt.
Consider this, you have £10,000 of debt, and are struggling to break even each month. A good friend starts a new business with a genuinely great idea and is looking for £5,000 of investment. If you borrow £5,000 and 2 years down the road his company has been successful such that you can cash in half your shares in the company for say, £50,000 then is that £15,000 of debt really very scary any more?
It's the proportion of debt to GDP that really matters in this respect - the net size of the debt doesn't matter too much if you can shrink it as a proportion of GDP because shrinking it as a proportion means you have to give up less of your money to pay it off.
What matters, as always, is that said investment is sensible. Spending £5bn to roll out 50mbps broadband to the whole country would easily pay for itself over time for example with the increased ability for people to remotely work for higher paying companies, sell their products and services online - even to other countries - even if they live in the middle of nowhere where previously they'd have been unable to and relatively unproductive as a result, move government services online meaning you can save money by cutting the need to maintain expensive buildings which in turn frees up buildings for private business to grow into and make use of, decrease use of north sea oil which could instead be exported for profit and so on.
Similarly as another example, investment in scientific research can help kick-start whole new industries (stem cell medicines, products based on nano-materials, green technologies) which can export products to the rest of the world.
There's certainly a challenge in getting the investment right, but there's nothing inherently scary about increased debt if you have credible plans to grow your wealth in greater proportion relative to it.
He didn't mention MVC, he was talking about WebForms so I don't think what he said is true, as all attempts to make web development like forms development to date has been complete and utter crap. WebForms forces you into a paradigm that often suffers impedance mismatch relative to the way the web and HTTP actually works in practice, and often can result in unnecessary transport overheard to support the faux event-based model.
In contrast, I'd say their MVC implementation is actually quite excellent, and it scales as well as the competition- it's only really a handful of the Java alternatives that may scale slightly better (or a custom C++ solution, but that has it's costs in terms of increased development time and higher potential for security nightmares and serious bugs). Just about all of the other alternatives scale much more poorly - Ruby, PHP, and yes, I'm afraid even Python right now (even though it's a great language in it's own right). As such I wouldn't really say ASP.NET MVC has scalability as a concern, it's not one of it's weaknesses relative to the market in general, in fact, it's one of it's strengths in that it's the only true mainstream alternative to Java in most cases. The other things you say are however largely valid:
- Cost is certainly true, though if scalability is an issue you will surely be working on something with a large enough budget that the cost of IDE is a negligible fraction of the total cost of development. This is also a cost that may even be paid for in increased developer productivity through having decent tools. Similarly the increased cost of Windows Server hosting isn't likely to be an issue if you've got a product that requires some reasonable degree of scalability, the additional cost is once again going to be a tiny fraction of your total costs, though if you're really trying to maximise profit margins this will have some impact. The cost thing is of course an issue if you're a lone developer or a small start-up, that's certainly true.
- Cross platform, obviously a bit of a problem here and I agree. If you don't want to use Windows I wouldn't even bother looking at a Mono based solution, by the time you're done fucking around with Mono you may as well have just used Java or whatever in the first place.
No it stands for XBox Live.
GO acronym wars!
Though technically XBL is an abbreviation, not an acronym.
I take it you never really liked Coldfusion then?
Seriously though, I don't really know why people bitch about XML etc. being ugly. It may be true, but of all the alternatives I've seen they're all just as bad, and often even have more quirks and of course, completely lack any level of worthwhile support.
Come up with something better, then you can complain.
Yes, with Windows 8 Microsoft seem to have missed the obvious reason why so many people continue to use Windows - because it's Windows.
It's familiar, it's easy to use, people know it, stuff works. So what do they do? they go and change everything with Windows 8 ultimately giving people something they don't want.
Windows is at it's strongest when they simply improve stability, performance, and so on - why do they think Windows 7 was such a success when Vista was such a flop? really all that changed was that Windows 7 was more stable, more compatible and performed better.
They didn't need a massive step change to the user interface, people are happy with it, know it, and can use it, they just want something that'll work for them. Few people will move away from Windows whilst it remains fast, stable, and continues to work, but if it changes completely and they have to learn a new UI then they're more likely to think, well, if I have to learn a whole new interface I could just as well learn Apple's interface, or one of the Linux interfaces so maybe now is a good time to switch...
Windows 9 - just give me Windows 7 with the latest DirectX, the latest IE, and whatever performance, security and stability improvements you came up with in Windows 8 - I'm fine with that, and I'll even pay you for it. I don't want you to completely fuck up my user experience though.
Interesting that it was a Labour MP that raised it, but the Tories most certainly do care - as I mentioned, the only way Osborne was able to claim he'd hit his borrowing targets was by factoring in £3.5bn from this auction, the fact that wasn't achieved means Osborne likely wont hit his borrowing targets and it'll give his opponents, and opponents of the Conservatives in general plenty of ammunition against him.
It was a cheap trick that lent him a lot of criticism at the time, that combined with the fact it hasn't even worked as he planned doesn't exactly bode well for him.
"It's only method when you have massive debt on which in current circumstances no one sane in head will lend you with actually payable kickback."
This isn't a problem for the UK, we can currently borrow as cheaply as we've ever been able to.
But none of those theoretical restrictions you suggest could make an unfair auction happened did they so it's a stupid argument.
You can't come up with theoretical ideas as to how you can make such an auction unfair and then claim the auction was unfair based on that even though such theoretical ideas didn't happen in practice.
The auction itself was pretty transparent, there's nothing there that demonstrates corruption. There's decent plurality in the UK mobile market too so to use examples of three stakeholders is meaningless when we know for an absolute fact there was seven. This isn't like the landline market where BT still has an inherited monopoly, the UK mobile space is far from "artificially limited by regulation".
Having read a bit more about this the only criticism I can find is that there was no minimum increase in the bid bidders had to make (i.e. they could just bid a trivial amount more rather than say, £10million more than the next bid down) but that if anything would've further distorted the resultant figure away from the market value - if the market value was say, £15million then all that would do is mean companies either bid £5million too low, or £5million too high to pay for it.
Unless you have some evidence of actual wrongdoing that no one else is aware of then you're just clutching at straws, the price that was paid was the price that a healthy market determined. Maybe they could've squeezed a bit more out of those companies if they'd artificially restricted the auction to force higher prices, but as Ofcom said - their job wasn't to get money for the public purse, their job is to get companies to utilise the spectrum, and that makes sense. If the government wanted more money they should've bypassed Ofcom and forced the companies to pay x amount.
All that's happened is that the government has overestimated the worth of the spectrum, turns out reality disagreed with the price they perceived it to be worth, so it was stupid of Osborne to hedge his deficit reduction budget strategy on it.