I don't know why people still lump Russia and China in together with North Korea as if they're still in some part of communist cold war pact.
Russia has more interest in South Korea than North because it wants South Korea to consume it's gas which it does so to a greater degree than the North. Russia has supported all Western resolutions at the UN against North Korea in part for this reason.
North Korea's only real allies are China, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela. No one else cares.
North Korea already lost Russia's support, long ago, they've no interest in a nuclear armed war mongering nation on their border no matter how much they usually enjoy sticking one to the US.
To be fair, not just Dresden, most cities that were victims of Hitler's blitzes were too- Stalingrad for example.
Whilst London was too big to obliterate, Hitlers attempts during the Battle of Britain destroyed enough of it that if it had been most other cities at the time in size it would've been destroyed.
The thing that never ceases to amaze me about Slashdot is that you can say the most uncontroversial thing and there will always be somewhere there to tell you you are wrong. You can say the world isn't flat and there will be someone here to tell you it is.
You are that guy, the guy telling me the world is flat.
Really, if you think MySQL is comparable to MSSQL in terms of stability then you really just shouldn't be working with databases at all. MSSQL and MySQL aren't even in the same class.
When I lost faith in it professionally was when I used to use it (was with InnoDB btw) was when a database we'd had running for about 9 months randomly corrupted itself forcing the service to crash and stop.
I could fix the corrupt files with the command line tools, but it then repeated a few days later.
The best I could track it down to was a DELETE FROM query it didn't like for some reason (there was nothing particularly special about it) that would arbitrarily cause the corruption.
I just couldn't justify it's continued use after that. If there's two things I need a database to do it's to not crash and ensure data persistence, if it fails at those things then I can't deem it fit for any kind of production application.
"... but it's not unusually cold. This is what the weather is like in the UK. Spring is a fairly unpredictable time of year, in a part of the world where the weather is generally unpredictable."
Yes it is unusually cold. The summed average since records began for where I am for example suggests a day time high of 12c and a night time low of 5c for this time of year, but actual temperatures for a few weeks now have been below 2c during the day and below 0c at night. It's the coldest recorded March for over 50 years, how is this not unusual?
"A couple of years ago we had weeks of -25ÃC weather during the winter, but in the last two it barely got below freezing. This winter, of course, it's going to be back to really cold, or maybe it's going to be back to really warm, or maybe just kind of middling with lots of rain."
We didn't get -25c where I am, that was up in the highlands, where I am we got low of -18c, but guess what again the historical average was for that time of year? 3c by day, 1c by night. Again, that's a long way out from the averages - an extreme outlier in fact.
We're almost certainly never going to have an average year (if we did, did you know that South of Newcastle no part of the UK would actually drop as low as 0c on even one day of the year?), there's no such thing, but by and large, the extremes of the last few years have been blatant outliers, way outside any normal expected range, and way more erratic than we had for decades previous. Worse, even where we have had outliers in the past, such as bad winter in the 70s, those erratic periods were one offs - single year events, this erratic nature has been going on for 5 winters now. You're always going to see some variation, but normal variation in my part of the UK for example would be between about -8c and +28c for my part of the UK, instead the past few years it's changed to about -18c to +32c - that's a 14c expansion outside the previous normal expected range, and that's no small change.
You may have also noticed that outside of the winters we've also had some of the worst floods and some of the worst droughts we've had in decades.
British weather is about as far from normal as it's ever been, and has been for at least 5 years now, unless you define erratic and extreme as the new normal.
"I would love to have a reactive foam for a backboard that is flexible normally but solidifies into a backboard when the texting bimbo in the minivan runs me off the road and I come off the bike."
Does she do this often? Have you considered contacting the police?
If you were making $50k an hour, is there any reason you were using lightweight databases in the first place when given that income you could've trivially just stumped up for something a bit more reliable like Oracle or MSSQL Server?
Yeah, I wouldn't use MySQL regardless for anything serious, but I've still played around with it and used it for prototype projects, and frankly the.NET connector and GUI management tools have made far more progress under Oracle than they were making beforehand.
That's not to defend Oracle either of course, but I think it's unfair to say Oracle has let MySQL stagnate, they haven't, and that's not a reason to ditch MySQL. The fact Oracle are scum and that MySQL is still crap regardless are better reasons to ditch MySQL, but certainly not lack of progress.
"although the fact that there were three cuts so close in time was, and remains, hard to believe."
I debunked this conspiracy theory at the time. I can't be arsed to do it in such detail again, but the gist of it was that using the ITU's stats on cable cuts 3 cuts in a week wasn't out of the norm and submarine cables tend to get cut all the time (at least once a week). It's a more common occurrence than people realise.
Couple this with the fact that Egypt has the Suez canal which is one of the busiest (or even simply the busiest?) shipping lane in the world and there's really nothing hard to believe about that sort of incident at all.
I know some people get excited when they see a chance for conspiracy but I'm afraid the world is often much less exciting. Much as I might be amused by the idea that this woman is part of a crack commando unit for example, I think she really was probably just looking for salvage:
"Ok, I'm not saying that Global warming isn't happening, but you're just so off base I've got to correct you."
Ok, I'm not the GP, but you're just so off base I've got to correct you.
"2. There is no carbon in the atmosphere. It's Carbon dioxide, a GAS. One's an element, the others not."
You realise this makes no sense? Do you know what gasses are comprised of? Elements. Can you guess which elements carbon dioxide is comprised of? I'll give you a hint, one of them is the element carbon, hence by definition, if the gas carbon dioxide exists in the atmosphere, so must the element carbon.
"That's fine... but the fact of the matter is burning fossil fuels doesn't significantly increase CO2 in the atmosphere. Even diehard global warming supporting scientists wouldn't say that."
Are you sure? In 2001 atmospheric CO2 concentration reached 391ppm, up from about 300ppm in 1950, or 280ppm from pre-industrial times. Scientists agree the sources of this are human activity (simply because human activity is the only thing releasing enough CO2 consistently to achieve this), this is a 30% increase in 60 years. So this leaves two possibilities:
1) You're lying about scientific consensus on the reason for atmospheric CO2 increase
2) You're claiming that a 30% increase in concentration is insignificant
Either option makes you look pretty stupid, but if you pick option 2 you can at least pretend you were just using weasel words, rather than being outright malicious if you pick 1. Still, I'll leave it up to you.
"5. God damn it learn what carbon is!"
God damn it learn what CO2 is made of!
"7. What in your entire previous six points had anything to do with logic?"
Honestly, I'd answer, but given your point number 2 (and my explanation of why it's stupid above) then I don't think it's worth trying, because you'd need to be capable of pursuing logical thought to start with, which your point 2 demonstrates most certainly isn't actually the case.
Might I suggest in future that if you're going to attack someone and be nasty to them, you at least make sure you know what you're on about first?
In Zuckerberg's case he at least did attract funding and so forth off his own back through his own networking and business efforts, this kid couldn't even do that - his Daddy, Murdoch and co. had to do it all for him. Don't get me wrong, I think Zuckerberg is sold as being some kind of technical genius, which he's absolutely not, but what he is is a genuine entrepreneur - he had an idea, he implemented it himself, and he built up a business around it by himself. The same goes for Gates, Larry Page and Sergei Brin. It's not that people like Gates and Zuckerberg didn't have rich parents with decent connections and so forth, but they were at least the ones who did the work - it was they who were the entrepreneurs that built their respective companies, not their parents. Their companies all had something genuine to offer too, a real actual product.
Contrast that to this kid and at absolute best he had an idea (one wonders if he even had that himself), then his Daddy did all the business work, got all the real talent in who managed the company (they hired in an external CEO even apparently so he didn't even do management), and who contracted out the real actual development to third parties.
It creates a false picture - you'll have kids believing they can be just like him and end up soul destroyingly disappointed when it doesn't work out. The media has sold this guy as being just some nobody kid who wrote an app all by himself and off his own back got Yahoo to pay $36million for it. In reality all that's happened is a VP at Morgan Stanley has got a bunch of investors together to build up a company in which he's used his son as a PR figurehead, to flog to Yahoo that doesn't actually have anything of value to offer in itself. Most kids Dad's aren't VPs at Morgan Stanley.
Or to cut a long story short, what I take issue with are the lies - the lies that this was a rags to riches story, the lies that this company had some great new thing, the lies that the kid did it all by himself, the lies that Yahoo has bought in some kind of worthwhile talent and technology with this acquisition.
The problem is that Slashdot is so commercial now it's impossible to tell if the site itself tries to shape conversations by throwing in extra mods.
To be fair though, in my case, my post was actually a troll, though I'm surprised mods wasted mod points on it given that it was rather harmless, more fool them I guess.
The problem is for a bunker like this that whilst yes it's designed to be able to be self sufficient for 10 years, it's also designed that way with the assumption that the surrounding area will be uninhabitable/free of threats. They're specifically designed that a nuke or two goes off outside and that's it.
What they're not designed against is someone able to stand around using a thermal lance, and/or repeated shaped charges and so forth because they were built under the assumption that if "outside" was safe enough to stand around doing that, then there'd be no real need to be bunkered up in the first place.
Effectively whilst yes they're self sufficient, yes they retain structural integrity in the face of a nuclear blast or two, no, they're not invulnerable against persistent targeted close range attacks with specialised equipment.
If the authorities can find reason to get in, and really really want to get in, they can.
As an aside, I didn't actually realise until reading a bit more about it just now, but his Dad doesn't just work at Morgan Stanley, he's a VP there. Also, his mother is a lawyer, who works for, guess who?
Yahoo.
So basically the story is this, his Dad knows a lot of people who have a lot of money and got them to invest (Rupert Murdoch, Ashton Kutcher, Steven Fry, Li Ka Shing). These investors used their contact to bring people on board to his company, the people they brought on board are all.com veterans with over a decade of experience.
After a couple of years of hype, and still only 1 million downloads on iTunes, his mother finally stitches up a deal with Yahoo for him.
I honestly wonder now if more than anything what Yahoo was paying for was simply to get in the good graces of people like Rupert Murdoch, Steven Fry and so forth, this seems to have nothing to do with D'Aloisio's talent (or lack of) and be entirely about everyone involved but him - a Morgan Stanley VP, and a whole bunch of rich well known names combined with a media mogul being paid for their services via a conduit called "Summly" through which they get their relative share of the buy out in relation to their original investment.
It makes a bit more sense now, Yahoo pays $36mill, gets some positive PR, the support of a few prominent media figureheads, and a hip young face for it's company. This also explains why they're scrapping the Summly app itself too - even they know it's of little value or relevance and no better than they could do internally anyway.
But none of those are $36million dollar talents still, especially as the funding development part was all done by his Dad who worked at Morgan Stanley and already had all the connections required.
This is really the problem, they seem to have paid $36million for a kid who let his Dad handle the business and investment side of things, let 3rd parties do both the hard, and most the easy development, and the only thing that seems even slightly attributable to him was the idea of an "iPhone news aggregator" and a bit of iOS front end development.
I also have to ask if you've even seen Summly? the UI isn't exactly groundbreaking and the output is often pretty useless such that you're better off just using something like Google Currents on Android. Even if you assume that Yahoo wanted this kid for what he's created then that doesn't say that Yahoo is taking him on to massively improve their existing mobile offering, but in fact to offer more of the same - lacklustre apps that may make a million or so downloads (that's all that Summly achieved) but aren't exactly killer.
Honestly, the perceived success of this kid and his app seems to be entirely marketing based, cooked up by his Dad who managed to get Li Ka Shing to stump up a million or so. This is without question a PR coup for his Dad who has turned his son into a multi-millionaire, but it's also more evidence that Yahoo is throwing money down the drain without any real evidence of being able to have anything to show for doing so.
"Excuse me. You have no right whatsoever to force me to forget that I just read what you wrote. What kind of fantasy world do you live in?"
But you're not a corporation are you?
In most countries in the world now there is an implementation of some kind of data protection act, I live in the UK, so I'll stick to what ours says, but this applies at least to everywhere in the EU, and to many other countries beyond.
In the UK the data protection act states that corporations must have reason to hold on to data about you, and apart from a specific few exceptions (i.e. law enforcement) they need your explicit permission. Further, it also states that a company can't arbitrarily pass on your personal information to another company without your permission.
So realistically most of these companies are already in breach of the data protection act - if I set up a Facebook profile, and Google then indexes that, it's arguable that Google has already broken the law, because I have never at any point given them permission to acquire and hold my data, let alone publish it, so under existing legislation they are already in breach.
The problem is because social media is a fairly new area, companies such as this are pretending it's all a grey area, and that the DPA somehow doesn't apply to them over it.
The right to be forgotten isn't some kind of thing where you can say "Forget me internet, forget me now!", and the whole internet has to then seek out data on you and forget you. No, it's just a formalisation of existing law reasserting that it does apply to internet companies who think they're special - it's like a DMCA for personal data, such that if I find out Google or whoever has indexed my personal data without my permission, then I have the right to go and tell them to delete it.
That's all it is, it's something that most companies in the world already do - for example if you've ended up on a mailing list for some shop in the UK and want to get off it you can already demand they remove your details from their system, the right to be forgotten already exists there in that respect as an aspect of the DPA. There shouldn't be some kind of magical exception for the likes of Google, Facebook etc. just because their business model is to plaster your information over the internet, rather than to send you annoying junk mail.
No one has any illusions that the right to be forgotten will somehow erase your entire existence from the internet, that's a myth made up by vested interests trying to pretend the law would be unworkable, all it is is a way for people to ensure their data is removed when it's been published or used without their permission. I really don't see how that is in any way unreasonable- how do you think Mark Zuckerberg would feel if I decided to just use his private personal information how I felt, like say, his bank account details? It's not really much to ask that you have final say over how your private data be used.
Note: I'm not singling Google out in this post for any specific reason, just using them as an example. Other tech companies are easily just as bad on this, normally worse.
Yes but Google wasn't paying this far over the odds for them relative to what they could provide for the company.
For example, Google only paid $50million for Android. So between $36million and $48million for a kid who made an iOS app, most of the work for which was outsourced to other firms and that has only achieved a million downloads (small fry compared to some apps- for example, Evernote's Android version alone has 10mill), or $50million for a mobile OS that's in use on hundreds of millions, rapidly approaching over a billion phones and tablets around the world.
What talent were they hiring exactly? The guy outsourced the AI to a 3rd party company and also the Android development too. At best this guy can do iOS front ends and recognise that people like news aggregators that summaries news for them. They could've found far more talent than this in their existing staff whom they'd pushed out of the company by withdrawing the option to work from home for them.
There's literally nothing this kid did, knows, or can do that is worth $36million+
"The 90s dotcom bubble was run by nerds, with tons of big ideas for what the Internet should be, but little business sense, and even less long-term work ethic."
This isn't true at all. The 90s dotcom bubble was caused by investors who saw the success of the likes of Microsoft over the previous decade and thought that every tech company could be a Microsoft and so threw money at them left, right and centre.
All that the "nerds" were doing was playing around with the internet as they'd always played around with technology, they didn't have any long term strategy (and I'm not really sure what your jibe about work ethic is all about - they didn't see it as work), because they were doing what they loved, and clueless investors were coming across their work and offering silly money for it, something which no one is going to say no to. I suspect the vast majority knew full well that these investors seemed to be hyping just a little too much, but they're not exactly going to say no to being made a multi-millionaire from doing what they loved are they?
I don't think this particular bubble is any different, the "nerds" have been quite vocal in saying how stupid it was to pay up to $700 for Apple shares, and how utterly stupid it was to float Facebook at the price it was being floated out. Once more, the only people making these mistakes are idiot investors who literally have more money than sense.
The problem then, and the problem now are business types who know really nothing about technology or the technology market believing there's something magical about it and that even the most absurdly silly little startups are somehow going to make them billionaires overnight.
FWIW, eBay and Amazon weren't even created in the 90s bubble, they were created before it started and were doing well before it started, if anything their successes were triggers for the boom in that idiot investors saw their success and assumed every dotcom could be that kind of success. They were only "survivors" of it in the same way Microsoft and IBM were - already well established tech companies with already well established business models.
"By "sending a message" they are by their own admission, using an unusual punishment."
Why do you assume that? The message they're sending could just as well be that this is a fairly new crime, and hence the decision is that this is actually the standard punishment for this sort of crime going forward. There needn't be an assumption that the punishment is unusual, on the contrary, this could be normal punishment for this sort of crime going forward.
You can only reasonably jump to the conclusion you have if there have been a decent number of equivalent cases whereby they gave lesser sentences and if hence this particular case stands out. There haven't been enough cases yet for that to be true.
"$76?!? Was that "international ExpressMail" (next day from US to Europe), with a box larger than a padded envelope?"
Not sure what it was exactly, but it was from GameInstitute some years back when I wanted to learn a bit about 3D Studio Max and their course looked pretty decent, the courses themselves weren't exactly cheap as is, but when it turned out I had to pay $76 just for shipping of a CD I just gave up on the idea, IIRC there was actually a more expensive option (maybe with UPS?) that I believe was even more ridiculous, something like $126 which I just couldn't fathom, it's not as if I was ordering an elephant and again, these values were definitely just for postage alone as the postage element was dynamically calculated separately from everything else.
"The two most expensive countries I've found have been Germany & (surprisingly) Canada. Shipping *anything* to or from Germany is slow (customs-wise) and expensive."
I don't find Germany slow to/from the UK, but I do find it expensive. It seems to be because DHL basically has their mail system tied up such that everything seems to be a courier delivery, 17 euros seems to be about the minimum postage I get from there which is far more than much of the rest of Europe. Normally equivalent postage to/from elsewhere in Europe would cost about 5 euros at most. France isn't much better in this respect though- you seem to have a choice ordering something to the UK of either the typical 3 - 5 euro postage, but extremely slow (3 week delivery, rather than a few days to/from other places in Europe for the same price) or Germany style courier prices.
Two countries I've found to be surprisingly good have been Brazil and Malaysia. Brazil I've sent/received seeds to/from a botanist friend at a university there and it's been about a 2 to 3 day delivery time and only cost me £1.95 for a standard A4 (roughly letter in the US?) sized padded envelope. Malaysia I paid something silly like £0.30 and had an orchid specimen arrive in under 48 hours which was frankly incredible - better than the postal service I get internally in the UK a lot of the time.
The point is, that if the patents all only cover one or two things, then you only need to do one or two things to get around the patents. It also means that there's only one or two things to try and invalidate, be it through prior art, obviousness or whatever.
That's a much easier task than working around or fighting 89 or whatever distinct patents. Stating there are 89 patents overstates the relevance of them for no other reason than fear mongering because there aren't 89 or whatever different patents per se, just one or two different patents, filed in 30 odd jurisdictions or whatever the actual numbers are.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know why people still lump Russia and China in together with North Korea as if they're still in some part of communist cold war pact.
Russia has more interest in South Korea than North because it wants South Korea to consume it's gas which it does so to a greater degree than the North. Russia has supported all Western resolutions at the UN against North Korea in part for this reason.
North Korea's only real allies are China, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela. No one else cares.
North Korea already lost Russia's support, long ago, they've no interest in a nuclear armed war mongering nation on their border no matter how much they usually enjoy sticking one to the US.
To be fair, not just Dresden, most cities that were victims of Hitler's blitzes were too- Stalingrad for example.
Whilst London was too big to obliterate, Hitlers attempts during the Battle of Britain destroyed enough of it that if it had been most other cities at the time in size it would've been destroyed.
The thing that never ceases to amaze me about Slashdot is that you can say the most uncontroversial thing and there will always be somewhere there to tell you you are wrong. You can say the world isn't flat and there will be someone here to tell you it is.
You are that guy, the guy telling me the world is flat.
Really, if you think MySQL is comparable to MSSQL in terms of stability then you really just shouldn't be working with databases at all. MSSQL and MySQL aren't even in the same class.
When I lost faith in it professionally was when I used to use it (was with InnoDB btw) was when a database we'd had running for about 9 months randomly corrupted itself forcing the service to crash and stop.
I could fix the corrupt files with the command line tools, but it then repeated a few days later.
The best I could track it down to was a DELETE FROM query it didn't like for some reason (there was nothing particularly special about it) that would arbitrarily cause the corruption.
I just couldn't justify it's continued use after that. If there's two things I need a database to do it's to not crash and ensure data persistence, if it fails at those things then I can't deem it fit for any kind of production application.
"... but it's not unusually cold. This is what the weather is like in the UK. Spring is a fairly unpredictable time of year, in a part of the world where the weather is generally unpredictable."
Yes it is unusually cold. The summed average since records began for where I am for example suggests a day time high of 12c and a night time low of 5c for this time of year, but actual temperatures for a few weeks now have been below 2c during the day and below 0c at night. It's the coldest recorded March for over 50 years, how is this not unusual?
"A couple of years ago we had weeks of -25ÃC weather during the winter, but in the last two it barely got below freezing. This winter, of course, it's going to be back to really cold, or maybe it's going to be back to really warm, or maybe just kind of middling with lots of rain."
We didn't get -25c where I am, that was up in the highlands, where I am we got low of -18c, but guess what again the historical average was for that time of year? 3c by day, 1c by night. Again, that's a long way out from the averages - an extreme outlier in fact.
We're almost certainly never going to have an average year (if we did, did you know that South of Newcastle no part of the UK would actually drop as low as 0c on even one day of the year?), there's no such thing, but by and large, the extremes of the last few years have been blatant outliers, way outside any normal expected range, and way more erratic than we had for decades previous. Worse, even where we have had outliers in the past, such as bad winter in the 70s, those erratic periods were one offs - single year events, this erratic nature has been going on for 5 winters now. You're always going to see some variation, but normal variation in my part of the UK for example would be between about -8c and +28c for my part of the UK, instead the past few years it's changed to about -18c to +32c - that's a 14c expansion outside the previous normal expected range, and that's no small change.
You may have also noticed that outside of the winters we've also had some of the worst floods and some of the worst droughts we've had in decades.
British weather is about as far from normal as it's ever been, and has been for at least 5 years now, unless you define erratic and extreme as the new normal.
Aww the nostalgia, I haven't seen a real life OS zealot in a long time.
I though you all died off along with the dream of the year of the Linux desktop.
Have you considered applying to CITES for reverting back to critically endangered status? I believe they currently have you listed as extinct.
"I would love to have a reactive foam for a backboard that is flexible normally but solidifies into a backboard when the texting bimbo in the minivan runs me off the road and I come off the bike."
Does she do this often? Have you considered contacting the police?
If you were making $50k an hour, is there any reason you were using lightweight databases in the first place when given that income you could've trivially just stumped up for something a bit more reliable like Oracle or MSSQL Server?
Yeah, I wouldn't use MySQL regardless for anything serious, but I've still played around with it and used it for prototype projects, and frankly the .NET connector and GUI management tools have made far more progress under Oracle than they were making beforehand.
That's not to defend Oracle either of course, but I think it's unfair to say Oracle has let MySQL stagnate, they haven't, and that's not a reason to ditch MySQL. The fact Oracle are scum and that MySQL is still crap regardless are better reasons to ditch MySQL, but certainly not lack of progress.
"although the fact that there were three cuts so close in time was, and remains, hard to believe."
I debunked this conspiracy theory at the time. I can't be arsed to do it in such detail again, but the gist of it was that using the ITU's stats on cable cuts 3 cuts in a week wasn't out of the norm and submarine cables tend to get cut all the time (at least once a week). It's a more common occurrence than people realise.
Couple this with the fact that Egypt has the Suez canal which is one of the busiest (or even simply the busiest?) shipping lane in the world and there's really nothing hard to believe about that sort of incident at all.
I know some people get excited when they see a chance for conspiracy but I'm afraid the world is often much less exciting. Much as I might be amused by the idea that this woman is part of a crack commando unit for example, I think she really was probably just looking for salvage:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13158351
"Ok, I'm not saying that Global warming isn't happening, but you're just so off base I've got to correct you."
Ok, I'm not the GP, but you're just so off base I've got to correct you.
"2. There is no carbon in the atmosphere. It's Carbon dioxide, a GAS. One's an element, the others not."
You realise this makes no sense? Do you know what gasses are comprised of? Elements. Can you guess which elements carbon dioxide is comprised of? I'll give you a hint, one of them is the element carbon, hence by definition, if the gas carbon dioxide exists in the atmosphere, so must the element carbon.
"That's fine... but the fact of the matter is burning fossil fuels doesn't significantly increase CO2 in the atmosphere. Even diehard global warming supporting scientists wouldn't say that."
Are you sure? In 2001 atmospheric CO2 concentration reached 391ppm, up from about 300ppm in 1950, or 280ppm from pre-industrial times. Scientists agree the sources of this are human activity (simply because human activity is the only thing releasing enough CO2 consistently to achieve this), this is a 30% increase in 60 years. So this leaves two possibilities:
1) You're lying about scientific consensus on the reason for atmospheric CO2 increase
2) You're claiming that a 30% increase in concentration is insignificant
Either option makes you look pretty stupid, but if you pick option 2 you can at least pretend you were just using weasel words, rather than being outright malicious if you pick 1. Still, I'll leave it up to you.
"5. God damn it learn what carbon is!"
God damn it learn what CO2 is made of!
"7. What in your entire previous six points had anything to do with logic?"
Honestly, I'd answer, but given your point number 2 (and my explanation of why it's stupid above) then I don't think it's worth trying, because you'd need to be capable of pursuing logical thought to start with, which your point 2 demonstrates most certainly isn't actually the case.
Might I suggest in future that if you're going to attack someone and be nasty to them, you at least make sure you know what you're on about first?
In Zuckerberg's case he at least did attract funding and so forth off his own back through his own networking and business efforts, this kid couldn't even do that - his Daddy, Murdoch and co. had to do it all for him. Don't get me wrong, I think Zuckerberg is sold as being some kind of technical genius, which he's absolutely not, but what he is is a genuine entrepreneur - he had an idea, he implemented it himself, and he built up a business around it by himself. The same goes for Gates, Larry Page and Sergei Brin. It's not that people like Gates and Zuckerberg didn't have rich parents with decent connections and so forth, but they were at least the ones who did the work - it was they who were the entrepreneurs that built their respective companies, not their parents. Their companies all had something genuine to offer too, a real actual product.
Contrast that to this kid and at absolute best he had an idea (one wonders if he even had that himself), then his Daddy did all the business work, got all the real talent in who managed the company (they hired in an external CEO even apparently so he didn't even do management), and who contracted out the real actual development to third parties.
It creates a false picture - you'll have kids believing they can be just like him and end up soul destroyingly disappointed when it doesn't work out. The media has sold this guy as being just some nobody kid who wrote an app all by himself and off his own back got Yahoo to pay $36million for it. In reality all that's happened is a VP at Morgan Stanley has got a bunch of investors together to build up a company in which he's used his son as a PR figurehead, to flog to Yahoo that doesn't actually have anything of value to offer in itself. Most kids Dad's aren't VPs at Morgan Stanley.
Or to cut a long story short, what I take issue with are the lies - the lies that this was a rags to riches story, the lies that this company had some great new thing, the lies that the kid did it all by himself, the lies that Yahoo has bought in some kind of worthwhile talent and technology with this acquisition.
The problem is that Slashdot is so commercial now it's impossible to tell if the site itself tries to shape conversations by throwing in extra mods.
To be fair though, in my case, my post was actually a troll, though I'm surprised mods wasted mod points on it given that it was rather harmless, more fool them I guess.
The problem is for a bunker like this that whilst yes it's designed to be able to be self sufficient for 10 years, it's also designed that way with the assumption that the surrounding area will be uninhabitable/free of threats. They're specifically designed that a nuke or two goes off outside and that's it.
What they're not designed against is someone able to stand around using a thermal lance, and/or repeated shaped charges and so forth because they were built under the assumption that if "outside" was safe enough to stand around doing that, then there'd be no real need to be bunkered up in the first place.
Effectively whilst yes they're self sufficient, yes they retain structural integrity in the face of a nuclear blast or two, no, they're not invulnerable against persistent targeted close range attacks with specialised equipment.
If the authorities can find reason to get in, and really really want to get in, they can.
As an aside, I didn't actually realise until reading a bit more about it just now, but his Dad doesn't just work at Morgan Stanley, he's a VP there. Also, his mother is a lawyer, who works for, guess who?
Yahoo.
So basically the story is this, his Dad knows a lot of people who have a lot of money and got them to invest (Rupert Murdoch, Ashton Kutcher, Steven Fry, Li Ka Shing). These investors used their contact to bring people on board to his company, the people they brought on board are all .com veterans with over a decade of experience.
After a couple of years of hype, and still only 1 million downloads on iTunes, his mother finally stitches up a deal with Yahoo for him.
I honestly wonder now if more than anything what Yahoo was paying for was simply to get in the good graces of people like Rupert Murdoch, Steven Fry and so forth, this seems to have nothing to do with D'Aloisio's talent (or lack of) and be entirely about everyone involved but him - a Morgan Stanley VP, and a whole bunch of rich well known names combined with a media mogul being paid for their services via a conduit called "Summly" through which they get their relative share of the buy out in relation to their original investment.
It makes a bit more sense now, Yahoo pays $36mill, gets some positive PR, the support of a few prominent media figureheads, and a hip young face for it's company. This also explains why they're scrapping the Summly app itself too - even they know it's of little value or relevance and no better than they could do internally anyway.
I vote for this question to be asked 10 times and nothing else.
But none of those are $36million dollar talents still, especially as the funding development part was all done by his Dad who worked at Morgan Stanley and already had all the connections required.
This is really the problem, they seem to have paid $36million for a kid who let his Dad handle the business and investment side of things, let 3rd parties do both the hard, and most the easy development, and the only thing that seems even slightly attributable to him was the idea of an "iPhone news aggregator" and a bit of iOS front end development.
I also have to ask if you've even seen Summly? the UI isn't exactly groundbreaking and the output is often pretty useless such that you're better off just using something like Google Currents on Android. Even if you assume that Yahoo wanted this kid for what he's created then that doesn't say that Yahoo is taking him on to massively improve their existing mobile offering, but in fact to offer more of the same - lacklustre apps that may make a million or so downloads (that's all that Summly achieved) but aren't exactly killer.
Honestly, the perceived success of this kid and his app seems to be entirely marketing based, cooked up by his Dad who managed to get Li Ka Shing to stump up a million or so. This is without question a PR coup for his Dad who has turned his son into a multi-millionaire, but it's also more evidence that Yahoo is throwing money down the drain without any real evidence of being able to have anything to show for doing so.
"Excuse me. You have no right whatsoever to force me to forget that I just read what you wrote. What kind of fantasy world do you live in?"
But you're not a corporation are you?
In most countries in the world now there is an implementation of some kind of data protection act, I live in the UK, so I'll stick to what ours says, but this applies at least to everywhere in the EU, and to many other countries beyond.
In the UK the data protection act states that corporations must have reason to hold on to data about you, and apart from a specific few exceptions (i.e. law enforcement) they need your explicit permission. Further, it also states that a company can't arbitrarily pass on your personal information to another company without your permission.
So realistically most of these companies are already in breach of the data protection act - if I set up a Facebook profile, and Google then indexes that, it's arguable that Google has already broken the law, because I have never at any point given them permission to acquire and hold my data, let alone publish it, so under existing legislation they are already in breach.
The problem is because social media is a fairly new area, companies such as this are pretending it's all a grey area, and that the DPA somehow doesn't apply to them over it.
The right to be forgotten isn't some kind of thing where you can say "Forget me internet, forget me now!", and the whole internet has to then seek out data on you and forget you. No, it's just a formalisation of existing law reasserting that it does apply to internet companies who think they're special - it's like a DMCA for personal data, such that if I find out Google or whoever has indexed my personal data without my permission, then I have the right to go and tell them to delete it.
That's all it is, it's something that most companies in the world already do - for example if you've ended up on a mailing list for some shop in the UK and want to get off it you can already demand they remove your details from their system, the right to be forgotten already exists there in that respect as an aspect of the DPA. There shouldn't be some kind of magical exception for the likes of Google, Facebook etc. just because their business model is to plaster your information over the internet, rather than to send you annoying junk mail.
No one has any illusions that the right to be forgotten will somehow erase your entire existence from the internet, that's a myth made up by vested interests trying to pretend the law would be unworkable, all it is is a way for people to ensure their data is removed when it's been published or used without their permission. I really don't see how that is in any way unreasonable- how do you think Mark Zuckerberg would feel if I decided to just use his private personal information how I felt, like say, his bank account details? It's not really much to ask that you have final say over how your private data be used.
Note: I'm not singling Google out in this post for any specific reason, just using them as an example. Other tech companies are easily just as bad on this, normally worse.
Yet Yahoo is actually ditching the app, and gave some fluffy response about how they'll integrate it's ideas into their new offerings.
So that argument is irrelevant, as they have that problem regardless.
Yes but Google wasn't paying this far over the odds for them relative to what they could provide for the company.
For example, Google only paid $50million for Android. So between $36million and $48million for a kid who made an iOS app, most of the work for which was outsourced to other firms and that has only achieved a million downloads (small fry compared to some apps- for example, Evernote's Android version alone has 10mill), or $50million for a mobile OS that's in use on hundreds of millions, rapidly approaching over a billion phones and tablets around the world.
What talent were they hiring exactly? The guy outsourced the AI to a 3rd party company and also the Android development too. At best this guy can do iOS front ends and recognise that people like news aggregators that summaries news for them. They could've found far more talent than this in their existing staff whom they'd pushed out of the company by withdrawing the option to work from home for them.
There's literally nothing this kid did, knows, or can do that is worth $36million+
"The 90s dotcom bubble was run by nerds, with tons of big ideas for what the Internet should be, but little business sense, and even less long-term work ethic."
This isn't true at all. The 90s dotcom bubble was caused by investors who saw the success of the likes of Microsoft over the previous decade and thought that every tech company could be a Microsoft and so threw money at them left, right and centre.
All that the "nerds" were doing was playing around with the internet as they'd always played around with technology, they didn't have any long term strategy (and I'm not really sure what your jibe about work ethic is all about - they didn't see it as work), because they were doing what they loved, and clueless investors were coming across their work and offering silly money for it, something which no one is going to say no to. I suspect the vast majority knew full well that these investors seemed to be hyping just a little too much, but they're not exactly going to say no to being made a multi-millionaire from doing what they loved are they?
I don't think this particular bubble is any different, the "nerds" have been quite vocal in saying how stupid it was to pay up to $700 for Apple shares, and how utterly stupid it was to float Facebook at the price it was being floated out. Once more, the only people making these mistakes are idiot investors who literally have more money than sense.
The problem then, and the problem now are business types who know really nothing about technology or the technology market believing there's something magical about it and that even the most absurdly silly little startups are somehow going to make them billionaires overnight.
FWIW, eBay and Amazon weren't even created in the 90s bubble, they were created before it started and were doing well before it started, if anything their successes were triggers for the boom in that idiot investors saw their success and assumed every dotcom could be that kind of success. They were only "survivors" of it in the same way Microsoft and IBM were - already well established tech companies with already well established business models.
"By "sending a message" they are by their own admission, using an unusual punishment."
Why do you assume that? The message they're sending could just as well be that this is a fairly new crime, and hence the decision is that this is actually the standard punishment for this sort of crime going forward. There needn't be an assumption that the punishment is unusual, on the contrary, this could be normal punishment for this sort of crime going forward.
You can only reasonably jump to the conclusion you have if there have been a decent number of equivalent cases whereby they gave lesser sentences and if hence this particular case stands out. There haven't been enough cases yet for that to be true.
"$76?!? Was that "international ExpressMail" (next day from US to Europe), with a box larger than a padded envelope?"
Not sure what it was exactly, but it was from GameInstitute some years back when I wanted to learn a bit about 3D Studio Max and their course looked pretty decent, the courses themselves weren't exactly cheap as is, but when it turned out I had to pay $76 just for shipping of a CD I just gave up on the idea, IIRC there was actually a more expensive option (maybe with UPS?) that I believe was even more ridiculous, something like $126 which I just couldn't fathom, it's not as if I was ordering an elephant and again, these values were definitely just for postage alone as the postage element was dynamically calculated separately from everything else.
"The two most expensive countries I've found have been Germany & (surprisingly) Canada. Shipping *anything* to or from Germany is slow (customs-wise) and expensive."
I don't find Germany slow to/from the UK, but I do find it expensive. It seems to be because DHL basically has their mail system tied up such that everything seems to be a courier delivery, 17 euros seems to be about the minimum postage I get from there which is far more than much of the rest of Europe. Normally equivalent postage to/from elsewhere in Europe would cost about 5 euros at most. France isn't much better in this respect though- you seem to have a choice ordering something to the UK of either the typical 3 - 5 euro postage, but extremely slow (3 week delivery, rather than a few days to/from other places in Europe for the same price) or Germany style courier prices.
Two countries I've found to be surprisingly good have been Brazil and Malaysia. Brazil I've sent/received seeds to/from a botanist friend at a university there and it's been about a 2 to 3 day delivery time and only cost me £1.95 for a standard A4 (roughly letter in the US?) sized padded envelope. Malaysia I paid something silly like £0.30 and had an orchid specimen arrive in under 48 hours which was frankly incredible - better than the postal service I get internally in the UK a lot of the time.
The point is, that if the patents all only cover one or two things, then you only need to do one or two things to get around the patents. It also means that there's only one or two things to try and invalidate, be it through prior art, obviousness or whatever.
That's a much easier task than working around or fighting 89 or whatever distinct patents. Stating there are 89 patents overstates the relevance of them for no other reason than fear mongering because there aren't 89 or whatever different patents per se, just one or two different patents, filed in 30 odd jurisdictions or whatever the actual numbers are.