Funnily enough it was actually a pretty big market well before America joined the 21st century with the release of the iPhone and started actually getting some decent phones. As far back as 2002 I had a Nokia 7650 that I was playing Doom on.
Apps, ringtones etc. were already a billion dollar market well before the advent of the iPhone, and whilst I never really bought any apps myself a lot of people did, particularly in the EU and Asia where the cell phone market has historically been far more advanced than that of the US.
"I'd rather trust the Nilsen analysis (Android 40%, Apple 28%, RIM 19%, MS 8% of the smartphone market)"
Even that's just the US smartphone market.
For global marketshare, Q3 2011, it was Android 52%, Symbian 17%, Apple 15%, RIM 11%, MS 1.2%.
But as you say, this is just a paid survey, a marketing story dressed up as a statistical analysis. Slashdot has done quite well in avoiding these for some time now, but I guess it can't last forever.
You always know it's this sort of story when they have to resort to measuring some obscure statistic that can be measured in a number of different ways, and by using things like a cross OS framework (Java ME) vs. an OS (iOS and Android) to try and muddy the waters somewhat more to reach the conclusion they're being paid to reach and publish.
It's not an inherent problem with government, just with the US electoral system.
We have exactly the same problem here in the UK where coalitions are extremely rare despite the fact we have one currently. It was illustrated well with the last government where Labour held, due to our flawed electoral system, 100% of power, for 13 years straight. Towards the end of it we had some of the most authoritarian laws and systems you could imagine being proposed and put in place.
It's also illustrated in Canada now, Canada has had weak minority governments for years and as a result it's been pretty good, now Harper has a majority the governments direction has become pretty awful.
The fundamental benefit of coalition/minority governments is they result in health democracy because laws that have universal support and are deemed to be good by the majority are passed easily because the opposition will support it too, whilst bad laws are the ones that get blocked. Whilst coalitions have been demonised here in the British press with comments from people like David Cameron claiming coalitions force too many backroom deals, what they're really saying is: "Coalitions force balance, we don't want that, we want to be able to do what the fuck we want and who cares if only 35% of the population support us in that". For all the bad rap our current coalition has got it's at least better than it could have been, people here forget that yes the £9,000 tuition fees thing is awful, but if it was a purely Tory administration for example, the fees would've been £12,000 which is what the Tories wanted. Certainly under a single party majority Tory administration the country would be far worse off than it even is now.
Concentrating power into government only leads to dictatorship by design if the system is setup so that the government is untouchable by other candidates and candidate parties when they step out of line. This doesn't happen when electoral systems are more representative of the people, where they are not in the US system, and where they are not in the UK system amongst others. In the UK for example the last Labour government had 100% of power with only 33% of the support of the population, in the US 51% of votes is enough for 100% of power- which will often mean 49% of people, (or around 130million) getting fucked.
The key to healthy democracy is that politicians are kept on their toes, at risk of losing power if they piss off the electorate.
If a company doesn't give an honest answer they risk being absolutely slaughtered in the courts if they get found out through for example, a whistleblower. Rulings to the order of millions of pounds have been made for unfair dismissal and the like in the UK, this would be treated no differently, and as such few companies are stupid enough to take the risk.
The place where I've most seen breach of these laws is where it's often preached that there is greatest fairness - public sector, but by virtue of the fact public sector tends to have zero accountability, and no care for financial prudence because government always bails it out when it runs short of cash the strong deterrents in place aren't often enough in public sector as where a company would go bust, or take a hefty dent to it's profits and hence someone would lose their job in private sector, this just doesn't happen in public sector.
Though otherwise, for the most part, employee protection laws in Europe actually have some teeth.
I've yet to find a company that doesn't completely ignore those requirements themselves if you send them a compelling enough CV.
Your complaint is common on Slashdot, but believe it or not, many software development managers are as pragmatic as you are, and if you're the best they've had along in a while then they'll take you on regardless and teach you what you don't know.
Software development managers know the chance of ticking every requirement box is pretty low, but by putting out what they expect, they at least filter out the time wasters who know full well they don't come close to the expectations, whilst the ones who at least tick some of the boxes will give it a go. The longer they go without finding someone, the more lax they'll be with matching people to requirements.
"And with a kid, i barely have time to clean my house, let alone try to learn something I see in a job application. My wife gets mad if my free time isn't spent with her..."
I'm afraid this is the choice you made. Whilst it's nice to believe that you should be able to have everything you ever wanted in life there are unfortunately pros and cons to the decisions you make. Your life choice puts you in a position where you can't be competitive in an industry that requires a genuine passion for the topic to the extent you're willing to continue to learn about that topic in your free time if you want to do well within the industry in question. I understand that it's really shitty, but it's just the way it is. Why should an employer have to settle for someone who can't keep up to date in a fast moving industry because of his life choices when there's equally deserving candidates out there who can? As for your wife, the solution is simple - you put it to her that if you're to improve your career, so you can buy her more nice things, she's going to have to let you have some study time, otherwise she's going to have to settle for no improvement in quality of life as you grow older. Let her make the choice if she's what's holding you back.
The rocket programme is a source of national pride for Russia, and what external forces would have an interest in sabotage? the rest of the world is dependent on Russia's launch facilities now for the most part, and let's be honest, the difficulty with a rocket programme isn't so much figuring out how to run one, that groundwork has mostly already been done and is pretty well known, but the issue is of cost to run the programme - even the US has had to pull back from funding this sort of thing.
Providing the rockets are checked before final assembly/delivery then when the risk of sabotage is so low as there's simply no purpose to it I'm not sure what can go wrong. It's not as if terrorists are going to steal an entire rocket, and do we even know if this plant even contains the sensitive parts, the fuel and so forth? If this is just a plant where construction is carried out, or if these pics are simply from the mechanical construction part then I'm not sure what the big deal is - as GP said it seems to be that the "OMG Terrorists!" attitude is now being applied universally by Slashdotters, even though Slashdotters have long known the threat of terrorism is relatively minor and most security theatre surrounding it is pointless.
Perhaps this is the fundamental difference between Russia being able to continue a state funded rocket programme, and the US not? Because the US burns money on unnecessary red tape and Russia just gets on with it. Sure Russia has had a number of failures recently, but the US has had a number of successive space failures too even with high security.
Borders are arbitrary and one cannot help where they are born. We're all humans and personally I believe that's fundamentally more important than an arbitrary man made definition like borders.
But even if you accept the existence of borders, then it's still more grey than you make out. Was stepping in to prevent further persecution of the Jews in World War II really such a bad thing? I suppose you can argue that it was because Hitler stepped out of his borders than the allies were able to step in, but then how is this different to Afghanistan? The Taliban are an ISI funded export rather than something native to Afghanistan, prior to the soviet invasion Afghanistan wasn't too unstable, it was a fairly decent country, but on the soviet exit the Pakistani (and to an extent, US) backed Taliban were well enough funded and equipped to fill the void.
It seems a bit unreasonable to allow external forces to fuck up a country, then when it comes to sorting that country out because things got too bad to have an anti-interventionlist attitude.
Yes but the point is in 40 years, despite the nation's very existence being threatened by 5 of it's neighbours launching a combined (but rapidly failed) assault against it, Israel has still never used nukes and that seems to be pretty promising.
The difference between Israel and Iran is that Israel prefers to go head on with things, if Israel is going to have a nuclear programme it'll just out and out refuse to sign up to the NPT, if Israel is going to go to war it'll just roll tanks and planes across the border.
In contrast, Iran plays things subversively, if Iran is going to have a nuclear programme it pretends it's an innocent member of the NPT and does it in secret, breaking the rules as an NPT signatory when inspectors catch it out. If Iran is going to go to war, it funds militias and insurgents to do the dirty work for it.
But the real shame is that Iran's tactic works - people like you see the nation that's at least forthright about it's actions as the bad guy, and actually remain oblivious to the nation that's arguably the real biggest destabilising force in the region.
Like I say, I really don't like Israel nowadays, it's become everything it claims to hate, but people's anti-Western hate has become so rediculous that they're actually willing to back up Iran's propaganda, when ironically most conflict in the middle east has actually been caused by Iran over the last 10 - 20 years. Israel only invaded Lebanon after an Iranian funded Hezbollah incursion. The US war in Iraq, and now Afghanistan only became such a bloodbath because Iran has tried to destabilise these nations funding multiple insurgent groups to ensure Iran isn't threatened by a neighbour as powerful as Iraq was. This doesn't make the US or Israeli actions right, but let's not pretend Iran is the innocent puppy people with an anti-Israeli/anti-US attitude like to play along that it is.
Fundamentally the point is this, Israel sticks to actions which are relevant to it's own state security, however right or wrong these actions might be. Iran, in contrast, is constantly playing games with other nations, be it funding insurgents in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and so on. Therein lies the reason Iran can't be trusted with nuclear weapons - whilst we know Israel would only use them defensively, we can't say the same for Iran, Iran has proven time and time again it's willing to carry out subversive actions in foreign nations to further it's own influence on the region, or to put it more simply, Israel only gives a fuck about making sure Israel is okay, Iran gives a fuck about trying to turn as much of the middle east as possible into puppet states, as in Lebanon, and as it's been trying with Iraq - if you want to see further what I'm talking about here, I suggest you read into the Mahdi army in Iraq, where it's save haven is, who it's biggest financial backers are, and it's role in the Iraqi violence. For Lebanon, it is of course Hezbollah. It's the fundamental difference between aggression and defence, Israel is a defensive nation (incursions into foreign territory have all been reactive), Iran is an aggressive nation - that's why Iran can't be trusted with nukes.
Whilst Mossad has assassinated people responsible for attacks on it's people in foreign states, can you really name any countries where Israel has installed a puppet militia stronger than the elected military and government to try and make it pro-Israel like Iran has? No? Didn't think so.
I do generally agree with you and sympathise with your point, but I think it's utterly naive to believe that solving the Palestinian/Israeli problem would somehow bring peace to the middle east. Syria and Iran absolutely hate the likes of Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and you'd still have the Turks invading Northern Iraq to kill Kurds, and vice versa if the hard line right wing AKP stay in power there.
Solving the Israel problem would sort a big chunk of the problems, but there'd still be a long way to go, and frankly the toppling of the Syrian and Iranian regimes is still part of what is required to stabilise the middle east, as is the toppling of the Saudi regime, and a return to secular moderate political leaning in Turkey. Yemen too needs to be pulled back from the brink of civil war and it's anyone's guess as to how to solve the Yemen problem as it's got too many warring factions, and is a borderline failed state - at that point you need to likely split it up and build a number of much smaller nations from scratch representing the separate factions whilst somehow eliminating the heightened level of zealous militancy there, and ensuring each new state was willing to work in a progressive manner with the other new states despite their population not seeing eye to eye. That's a pretty tall order.
If America armed a bunch of Americans to go over the border into Iran, or armed anti-government protesters in Iran with all the kit they need to create their own military which they then used to force their will onto the country, would you say America had started a war?
If your answer is no, then you're absolutely right, Iran has started no wars, if your answer is yes, then Iran is implicated in every war caused by Hezbollah's agression, both internal civil wars within Lebanon, and external wars with the likes of Israel.
Whatever your previous answer, if you think that to perform this type of action is wrong, then it's irrelevant as to whether Iran has technically started any direct wars, committing proxy wars is just as problematic, so saying Iran hasn't started any wars is irrelevant when the fundamental point is that it's still an aggressive destabilising force in the region. If you don't think this sort of action is wrong (whoever is doing it, whether it's Mossad, the CIA, or the Republican Guard) then, well, there's really no helping you as it would mean your understanding of the cause of serious international disputes is so dire you shouldn't even really be discussing the topic.
Whilst I agree his use of the term "unquestionably" was probably a poor choice of words, because it is still questionable, the evidence is pretty strong and Iran's lack of will to allow international inspectors to prove that it isn't working on nuclear weapons is always going to be a cause for concern when many other countries routinely allow inspectors to demonstrate their nuclear programme is not designed for nuclear arms development. Iran isn't some super high-tech nation, so their allegation that the IAEA inspectors are spies and Iran has some nuclear technology to steal that no one else in the world has is laughably weak.
It's also completely false to suggest Iran hasn't started wars, whilst you may well be accurate in saying Iran hasn't sent tanks rolling across it's borders into it's neighbours backyard, there's no real question that wars between Israel and Lebanon are the result of Iranian stirring of tensions and arming, training, and inciting Hezbollah and in fact the destabilisation of Lebanon in general is Iran's fault, by creating a second military within it's borders it's allowed the Islamist militia in question to leave the secular military and civilian governmental administration powerless, despite the fact that the secular administration and military had the legitimate backing of the people. Iran has very much caused wars, but it does so by proxy.
Also, whilst I'm quite anti-Israel nowadays, particularly so since they elected their current overly right wing administration that has absolutely no interest in peace, and since they continue to prevent any hope of peace in the middle east by the continuation of settlement building your comments are a little disturbing, I mean, "Oh, FYI Jews have nukes." - really? they do? which ones? the ones living in Russia? the ones in New York? the Jewish lobby in California? Oh, you mean Israel the nation has nukes? You mean, the nation of which a quarter is not actually even Jewish?
"For the sake of MAD balance Iran should as well"
MAD only works when all people in control of the nukes are sensible enough to not want a nuclear war. Thus far, Iran's leadership has shown little evidence they're that smart. Specifically, there's a very real concern that Iran would continue it's tactics of proxy war and pass nuclear weaponry to the likes of Hezbollah and hope that plausible deniability is enough to prevent them from a retaliatory strike.
The Iranian oil bourse? it's a great conspiracy theory, but erm, the latest round of sanctions are threatening to specifically target Iran's oil, precisely because the West has figured out that it can actually get by without Iranian oil thanks to the likes of Saudi Arabia offering to increase production.
No, the situation in this part of the world is precisely what it says on the tin, it's concern of a nation running a covert nuclear weapons operation without having been able to demonstrate itself as a trustworthy citizen of the world capable of adhering to MAD principles even if it does acquire nuclear weapons. The lack of trust largely stemming from it's destabilisation of the middle east through proxy war including previously proven subversive actions in Lebanon, Israel, Palestinian territories, Iraq, and Afghanistan, as well as possible but as yet unproven subversive actions in Yemen, Egypt, and other parts of the Middle East and Africa. Finally yes, I realise you'll probably tell me that countries like America are guilty of this too - and yes, you're right. But that doesn't excuse Iran, and countries like America, Israel and so forth do at least have a 40+ year track record of demonstrating that they're not actually willing to use nukes unless their very existence is threatened, and even then possibly not.
"Your socialist revision of history is appalling. "
Sorry, I think you must've completely missed out an entire paragraph of your post explaining the connection between being anti-sanctions and being a socialist. Do you think you could kindly post this for us so we can all understand the link between being socialist and being anti-sanctions?
I don't really disagree with the point that sanctions can be effective, though I think they're important because people will only rise up against their leadership when their living standards become poor enough to justify the risk, and sanctions most certainly speed that up. They're an effective way of pursuing destabilisation without the inherent risks of backlash that boots on the ground cause.
But by implying anyone you disagree with is somehow socialist when no demonstration of their actual overall political leaning is demonstrated you simply show yourself up as even more ignorant and bigoted than the GP.
There are countless socialist countries in the world, many succesful nations in Europe like Norway and France make great examples. The idea that anyone who you believe is wrong is a lesser person because they must be socialist is intellectually bankrupt and is demonstrative of the type of anti-intellectualism that is rife within political leanings that truly have been historically problematic, like nationalism.
Oh, did I forget to mention that socialist countries like France have been some of the biggest drivers of sanctions against Iran?
Yeah, I'd have to agree. People are quick to call Zuckerberg a genius for the groundbreaking idea that was Facebook, yet Facebook was nothing more than a slightly less tacky MySpace, and before that we had Friends Reunited which was almost identical.
There was absolutely nothing groundbreaking about Facebook, Zuckerberg just had the contacts and the business sense to be able to cash in on it and grow it better than even the likes of Rupert Murdoch failed so hard to do with MySpace.
Absolutely, I'm just very interested in cacti and have a massive collection including some species not yet officially described so have a decent understanding of the family including some of the quirks of various genus and species within, but have never heard of this hence why I was intrigued to hear more about it. Any chance you'd be able to see if you can find out which species it was?
Part the reason for my intrigue is some species are deemed very tough to germinate, and hence in small pots people get low germination rates, if it's because of something like this then it could open a whole new understanding of germination of some species, but as I say it's not something I've ever heard of. I have heard of it in other plant families though certainly.
Each time I've had any new car the 3 CVV digits on the rear changes too.
With all my debit cards, the last 4 digits of the card changes each time too.
Also, I don't think I've ever had a debit card for it's full term. My banks always sent me out a new card before the old one expires for various reasons such as adding chip and pin, adding contactless payment tech, or this time simply for "security reasons" without elaborating what they are.
I don't think I've even ever had a credit expire on it's given date and be replaced by one with only a fixed number of months added on. It's always expired early too IIRC.
Money out of the Red Cross' coffers means they've got less money to waste on things like suggesting online gamers are committing warcrimes. That's between wasting money suing games companies who dare use the red cross on health packs and stuff too.
Money out of Save the Children's coffers means they have less money to continue to campaign for web censorship.
It may suck for CARE, but I've no idea who the fuck they are.
Either way, if the Red Cross and Save the Children were effected it could only be a good thing, these are charities that have long lost their way and already have too much money such that they're focussing on things that are no longer core to their goal as a charity but are detrimental to society.
Perhaps anonymous did us a favour after all. The first two at least aren't charities that I'd shed a tear for if they had to tighten their belts and return to focussing on what they were created to focus on due to the loss of income.
Absolutely, I've seen this directly a number of times, it's in fact a major factor in deciding to leave my old job.
I worked for an engineering firm, and it's background was that it had split in two about 10 years ago, with it's IT staff going to the other section, leaving no one in IT in the section I was working at. As a result they chose one of the engineers who had a "passing interest in IT" to become the IT manager. Over the next 10 years by paying enough consultants he'd managed to cobbled together something that roughly resembled a network.
I joined the firm as a software developer, with the aim of starting out their software development section from the ground up, but as I had an IT support background I found myself rapidly becoming relied upon for IT support help because I was the first person who had entered the organisation in 10 years who actually had a proper idea of how IT should really be done.
The problems weren't just technical though, the IT manager held grudges, if someone had asked for some last minute help before they went on a business trip, he wouldn't like that, he'd hold it against them and do his best not to help them, sometimes outright maliciously moving their network file share without telling them and waiting until they'd spent some time figuring out why they couldn't connect before fixing it for them. He was socially inept to a massive degree such that when our phone lines went down he dissapeared to another site because he was too scared of the concept of picking up the phone and talking to someone at the other end to get it sorted such that our company was without phones for 2 solid weeks. For the same reason he wouldn't get quotes from other IT suppliers such that the supplier he'd been using all this time was charging him £800 for £450 laptops with the same kind of markup on everything from software to printer cartridges- the fact the supplier had a brand new £50k car, and took him to lunch every christmas didn't act as a clue that his supplier had far too much spare money. I offered to train him on IT security so he could get a policy written and in place pointing out that if we got hacked and data covered by the data protection act stolen, he could be held personally responsible and at the end of the training he said "Right, so can you write the policy then?" as if nothing I'd spent the last couple of days teaching him had actually entered his inept mind - his excuse was that he was too busy, but then as he also had never bothered with IT support issue tracking software and did everything ad hoc, ignoring those users he didn't like's issues then how could anyone ever know what his workload was? Laughably when I'd already made the decision to leave, he managed to lose the entire intranet due to hard drive failure because well, setting up a backup on a Linux box would require some actual effort on his behalf. Lucky I'd taken a copy of the database for local dev work on it. He'd avoid sharing anything with me because he saw me as a threat, knowing full well I could do his job AND mine, but it didn't really work, because I understood his systems better than he did anyway so the only stuff he was hiding was stuff I could figure out myself anyway. Oh, and he didn't believe in UPS' on servers because he had one on a server once and it made it crash, apparently.
I raised it with HR a number of times when it reached a point where it was an outright danger to the business, and whilst they recognised my concerns the attitude was "Well, we've got to give him a chance...", as if the last 10 years of utter ineptitude wasn't bad enough, but the problem is that they'd never known any better - to them, this was a good IT manager, they had no idea how it was supposed to be. Our company was taken over and as part of that our UK operations expanded, lo and behold, they'd been taken over by someone with IT even shitter than they had so he was promoted to head of UK IT, when in reality what they should've done at that point was bring someone wh
Agreed. I chase a career because to me chasing a career is constantly increasing my knowledge, the more and more I know about computing, software development, and maths, the further my career goes.
I never realised that wanting to increase my knowledge, and enjoy the benefits of getting compensated for having more knowledge in a subject area, and being able to help colleagues by using that knowledge made me a fool and caused me to automatically have a sad and lonely life. I'll have to let my girlfriend of 7 years know this, as I was under the impression we'd been really happy all this time.
Or perhaps the reality is that not being bothered about learning anything new, and sitting around in a 30hr a week dead end job, makes you the sort of person who would make broad and ignorant generalisations about everyone else and how they should be living their lives as if there's only one way to achieve happiness. I know which one I'll be placing my bets on.
Learning, is, for many, extremely fulfilling, and having a career most certainly can be as simple as enjoying learning, and applying what you have learnt in ways that impress the boss, impress potential employers and so forth. If you like learning but can't or don't apply what you learn in your work, then you're missing a trick and I'd argue the fundamental problem isn't that you don't want a career, but that you picked the wrong career and are hence stuck in one you're not bothered about progressing in.
Having a career doesn't necessarily mean striving to be the boring man in the suit at the top of the company, it can instead be as exciting as striving to be the head of R&D at an important tech company where you get to literally drive the direction of technology research, and hence to some degree, technology itself. It can be about working to achieve a role where you have staff under you such that you can work on things you'd never be able to do single handedly in your spare time, but would love to try, and getting paid decently in the process to boot. Again, I don't really see what's so bad about that. It sure as hell sounds far more attractive to me than being stuck in a 30hr dead end job, with a $69,000 house, a $9,000 car, and with the need to ignorantly proclaim everyone who doesn't live that lifestyle is unhappy.
Really, this discussion highlights the two different types of people in the working world - the go-getters who work hard to get and do what they want, and the layabouts who just want an easy lifestyle. Neither is necessarily inherently bad, but I must admit the entitlement attitude some layabouts have can be frustrating - if you want an easy lifestyle and so forth that's fine, but don't, as with the guy in the summary, think for one second that you're entitled to anything. Through my life I've personally been career oriented, and it's given me a massive headstart in life, I worked hard on my career when I was young and went a long way, and that's meant I can now be more of a layabout whilst enjoying the fruits of previously being a go-getter. I can be a layabout in a far higher paid, far more interesting job. I can have the $500,000 house with no mortgage as I bought and paid it off early through hard work, and believe it or not, my house is even made of brick! I don't have the BMW or Audi because cars aren't really my thing, I'm content with my crappy Peugeot, but I do have a 288sq ft heated greenhouse, because growing tropical plants is my thing. A hobby I could never enjoy had I not been career oriented and got myself toa point where I could afford such a thing.
My advice to the guy in the summary? Nothing in life comes for free, if you want to be a software developer, quit your job and find an employer that will pay you for that. Sometimes in life you reach a point with an employer where if you don't do something, your career will suffer, and if you do do something, your career will thrive long term, but you will feel put out short term. In some cases, you can be put out and not go anywhere sure, but fundamentally t
No it's not. I've had MySQL database a number of times.
Whilst you're right all data should be backed up, this doesn't absolve MySQL of the fact that it more frequently fucks up your data than any other database requiring a restore.
Even if you have hourly backups there's still potential for data loss in that case, sure only an hours worth of work, but the point of the GP stands - never use MySQL for important data, even if the data loss it's instability causes isn't large, it's still unnecessarily time consuming to resolve.
I've learnt the hard way that using MySQL for anything other than throw away databases can cause more trouble than it's worth, especially when things like Postgres is free and doesn't suffer these issues like MySQL does.
They're not Japan's either. I don't ever recall there being international agreement that international territory is fair game and the first one to loot it dry of some specific resource so no other nation can enjoy it gets first dibs.
At least Australia's claim has the backing of a number of countries and was signed into international treaty in 1933. In contrast Japan's commercial hunting of whales flies in the face of established international law, and runs against the vast majority of international opinion. Australia's claim may be weak, but Japan's actions are outright illegal as they are carrying out a commercial hunt when they only have research whaling rights and there is much documented proof of this. The problem is, who is going to dare bring the world's 3rd biggest economy to trial?
FWIW, even Norway recognises Australia's claim, and Norway is the most pro-whaling nation on earth, arguably more so than even Japan.
There's more too it than that too though, as part of Australia's claim to those waters, as with the British in it's claimed South Atlantic ocean territory those nations take on the responsibility of responding to distress calls and general policing of those waters too.
Should that territory become a hotbed of pirate activity, or should a bunch of Japanese ships find themselves in trouble in those waters, you can be rest assured Japan would suddenly find itself begging Australia to help, which would be a tad hypocritical if not recognising their claim.
Besides, the whole thing is academic anyway, Japan can't even afford to continue the hunt with it's failed economy for much longer. Sea Sheperd is just helping up the cost for Japan condemning their hunt to abandonment even earlier.
Really, it's not even profitable now as is, it's only the fact that the Japanese are so shit scared of admitting on the public stage that yes, actually, perhaps they were wrong about whaling, that they continue it anyway. Whether true or not, I hear even many Japanese people are getting a bit fed up of their government pouring money down the drain on a loss making whaling fleet when the economy there is so fucked. You'd have to be pretty stupid to want to subsidise something so pointless when there are much larger priorities the country could be spending money on.
What do you mean they show their sales figures? They show what they claim to be are their sales figures, when in reality it's just handsets sold to stores.
There's no more validity in Apple claimed sales stats than Samsung sales stats, it's mere petty fanboyism to suggest there is.
To be honest I don't even think this is the first time for them, which would make this more of a story, but afaik their original leak was never admitted/publicised.
The reason I have my suspicions this wasn't the first time is I signed up to Rift after I'd just created a new e-mail account, I gave up playing after my months trial and hadn't used the e-mail for anything else after either, about 4 months later I started getting spam on that address, and not just any spam, but phishing e-mails aimed at gamers like fake WoW e-mails and such, and originally even a fake Trion e-mail.
It seems unlikely given the address wasn't used elsewhere and that the e-mail was so targetted that this is the first time they've had a data breach, and if that's the case, then I'd argue that they indeed aren't concerned with security. Once is unfortunate, twice is a fucking joke.
The issue is that in the article the CEO of the company in question was talking about kids chatting through Facebook etc. rather than specific corporate IM systems. Whether he meant by this that he was intending to let his younger employees communicate via Facebook at work, or whether he was planning to use such a corporate IM system as you mention is the grey area in the article. As someone else pointed out in response to me also, I had my suspicions this was a way around e-mail audit trail logs, but perhaps I was just being unnecessarily cynical!
Slashdot Mirror
Funnily enough it was actually a pretty big market well before America joined the 21st century with the release of the iPhone and started actually getting some decent phones. As far back as 2002 I had a Nokia 7650 that I was playing Doom on.
Apps, ringtones etc. were already a billion dollar market well before the advent of the iPhone, and whilst I never really bought any apps myself a lot of people did, particularly in the EU and Asia where the cell phone market has historically been far more advanced than that of the US.
"I'd rather trust the Nilsen analysis (Android 40%, Apple 28%, RIM 19%, MS 8% of the smartphone market)"
Even that's just the US smartphone market.
For global marketshare, Q3 2011, it was Android 52%, Symbian 17%, Apple 15%, RIM 11%, MS 1.2%.
But as you say, this is just a paid survey, a marketing story dressed up as a statistical analysis. Slashdot has done quite well in avoiding these for some time now, but I guess it can't last forever.
You always know it's this sort of story when they have to resort to measuring some obscure statistic that can be measured in a number of different ways, and by using things like a cross OS framework (Java ME) vs. an OS (iOS and Android) to try and muddy the waters somewhat more to reach the conclusion they're being paid to reach and publish.
It's not an inherent problem with government, just with the US electoral system.
We have exactly the same problem here in the UK where coalitions are extremely rare despite the fact we have one currently. It was illustrated well with the last government where Labour held, due to our flawed electoral system, 100% of power, for 13 years straight. Towards the end of it we had some of the most authoritarian laws and systems you could imagine being proposed and put in place.
It's also illustrated in Canada now, Canada has had weak minority governments for years and as a result it's been pretty good, now Harper has a majority the governments direction has become pretty awful.
The fundamental benefit of coalition/minority governments is they result in health democracy because laws that have universal support and are deemed to be good by the majority are passed easily because the opposition will support it too, whilst bad laws are the ones that get blocked. Whilst coalitions have been demonised here in the British press with comments from people like David Cameron claiming coalitions force too many backroom deals, what they're really saying is: "Coalitions force balance, we don't want that, we want to be able to do what the fuck we want and who cares if only 35% of the population support us in that". For all the bad rap our current coalition has got it's at least better than it could have been, people here forget that yes the £9,000 tuition fees thing is awful, but if it was a purely Tory administration for example, the fees would've been £12,000 which is what the Tories wanted. Certainly under a single party majority Tory administration the country would be far worse off than it even is now.
Concentrating power into government only leads to dictatorship by design if the system is setup so that the government is untouchable by other candidates and candidate parties when they step out of line. This doesn't happen when electoral systems are more representative of the people, where they are not in the US system, and where they are not in the UK system amongst others. In the UK for example the last Labour government had 100% of power with only 33% of the support of the population, in the US 51% of votes is enough for 100% of power- which will often mean 49% of people, (or around 130million) getting fucked.
The key to healthy democracy is that politicians are kept on their toes, at risk of losing power if they piss off the electorate.
If a company doesn't give an honest answer they risk being absolutely slaughtered in the courts if they get found out through for example, a whistleblower. Rulings to the order of millions of pounds have been made for unfair dismissal and the like in the UK, this would be treated no differently, and as such few companies are stupid enough to take the risk.
The place where I've most seen breach of these laws is where it's often preached that there is greatest fairness - public sector, but by virtue of the fact public sector tends to have zero accountability, and no care for financial prudence because government always bails it out when it runs short of cash the strong deterrents in place aren't often enough in public sector as where a company would go bust, or take a hefty dent to it's profits and hence someone would lose their job in private sector, this just doesn't happen in public sector.
Though otherwise, for the most part, employee protection laws in Europe actually have some teeth.
I've yet to find a company that doesn't completely ignore those requirements themselves if you send them a compelling enough CV.
Your complaint is common on Slashdot, but believe it or not, many software development managers are as pragmatic as you are, and if you're the best they've had along in a while then they'll take you on regardless and teach you what you don't know.
Software development managers know the chance of ticking every requirement box is pretty low, but by putting out what they expect, they at least filter out the time wasters who know full well they don't come close to the expectations, whilst the ones who at least tick some of the boxes will give it a go. The longer they go without finding someone, the more lax they'll be with matching people to requirements.
"And with a kid, i barely have time to clean my house, let alone try to learn something I see in a job application. My wife gets mad if my free time isn't spent with her..."
I'm afraid this is the choice you made. Whilst it's nice to believe that you should be able to have everything you ever wanted in life there are unfortunately pros and cons to the decisions you make. Your life choice puts you in a position where you can't be competitive in an industry that requires a genuine passion for the topic to the extent you're willing to continue to learn about that topic in your free time if you want to do well within the industry in question. I understand that it's really shitty, but it's just the way it is. Why should an employer have to settle for someone who can't keep up to date in a fast moving industry because of his life choices when there's equally deserving candidates out there who can? As for your wife, the solution is simple - you put it to her that if you're to improve your career, so you can buy her more nice things, she's going to have to let you have some study time, otherwise she's going to have to settle for no improvement in quality of life as you grow older. Let her make the choice if she's what's holding you back.
Yep, this is my suspicion too.
The rocket programme is a source of national pride for Russia, and what external forces would have an interest in sabotage? the rest of the world is dependent on Russia's launch facilities now for the most part, and let's be honest, the difficulty with a rocket programme isn't so much figuring out how to run one, that groundwork has mostly already been done and is pretty well known, but the issue is of cost to run the programme - even the US has had to pull back from funding this sort of thing.
Providing the rockets are checked before final assembly/delivery then when the risk of sabotage is so low as there's simply no purpose to it I'm not sure what can go wrong. It's not as if terrorists are going to steal an entire rocket, and do we even know if this plant even contains the sensitive parts, the fuel and so forth? If this is just a plant where construction is carried out, or if these pics are simply from the mechanical construction part then I'm not sure what the big deal is - as GP said it seems to be that the "OMG Terrorists!" attitude is now being applied universally by Slashdotters, even though Slashdotters have long known the threat of terrorism is relatively minor and most security theatre surrounding it is pointless.
Perhaps this is the fundamental difference between Russia being able to continue a state funded rocket programme, and the US not? Because the US burns money on unnecessary red tape and Russia just gets on with it. Sure Russia has had a number of failures recently, but the US has had a number of successive space failures too even with high security.
Borders are arbitrary and one cannot help where they are born. We're all humans and personally I believe that's fundamentally more important than an arbitrary man made definition like borders.
But even if you accept the existence of borders, then it's still more grey than you make out. Was stepping in to prevent further persecution of the Jews in World War II really such a bad thing? I suppose you can argue that it was because Hitler stepped out of his borders than the allies were able to step in, but then how is this different to Afghanistan? The Taliban are an ISI funded export rather than something native to Afghanistan, prior to the soviet invasion Afghanistan wasn't too unstable, it was a fairly decent country, but on the soviet exit the Pakistani (and to an extent, US) backed Taliban were well enough funded and equipped to fill the void.
It seems a bit unreasonable to allow external forces to fuck up a country, then when it comes to sorting that country out because things got too bad to have an anti-interventionlist attitude.
Yes but the point is in 40 years, despite the nation's very existence being threatened by 5 of it's neighbours launching a combined (but rapidly failed) assault against it, Israel has still never used nukes and that seems to be pretty promising.
The difference between Israel and Iran is that Israel prefers to go head on with things, if Israel is going to have a nuclear programme it'll just out and out refuse to sign up to the NPT, if Israel is going to go to war it'll just roll tanks and planes across the border.
In contrast, Iran plays things subversively, if Iran is going to have a nuclear programme it pretends it's an innocent member of the NPT and does it in secret, breaking the rules as an NPT signatory when inspectors catch it out. If Iran is going to go to war, it funds militias and insurgents to do the dirty work for it.
But the real shame is that Iran's tactic works - people like you see the nation that's at least forthright about it's actions as the bad guy, and actually remain oblivious to the nation that's arguably the real biggest destabilising force in the region.
Like I say, I really don't like Israel nowadays, it's become everything it claims to hate, but people's anti-Western hate has become so rediculous that they're actually willing to back up Iran's propaganda, when ironically most conflict in the middle east has actually been caused by Iran over the last 10 - 20 years. Israel only invaded Lebanon after an Iranian funded Hezbollah incursion. The US war in Iraq, and now Afghanistan only became such a bloodbath because Iran has tried to destabilise these nations funding multiple insurgent groups to ensure Iran isn't threatened by a neighbour as powerful as Iraq was. This doesn't make the US or Israeli actions right, but let's not pretend Iran is the innocent puppy people with an anti-Israeli/anti-US attitude like to play along that it is.
Fundamentally the point is this, Israel sticks to actions which are relevant to it's own state security, however right or wrong these actions might be. Iran, in contrast, is constantly playing games with other nations, be it funding insurgents in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and so on. Therein lies the reason Iran can't be trusted with nuclear weapons - whilst we know Israel would only use them defensively, we can't say the same for Iran, Iran has proven time and time again it's willing to carry out subversive actions in foreign nations to further it's own influence on the region, or to put it more simply, Israel only gives a fuck about making sure Israel is okay, Iran gives a fuck about trying to turn as much of the middle east as possible into puppet states, as in Lebanon, and as it's been trying with Iraq - if you want to see further what I'm talking about here, I suggest you read into the Mahdi army in Iraq, where it's save haven is, who it's biggest financial backers are, and it's role in the Iraqi violence. For Lebanon, it is of course Hezbollah. It's the fundamental difference between aggression and defence, Israel is a defensive nation (incursions into foreign territory have all been reactive), Iran is an aggressive nation - that's why Iran can't be trusted with nukes.
Whilst Mossad has assassinated people responsible for attacks on it's people in foreign states, can you really name any countries where Israel has installed a puppet militia stronger than the elected military and government to try and make it pro-Israel like Iran has? No? Didn't think so.
I do generally agree with you and sympathise with your point, but I think it's utterly naive to believe that solving the Palestinian/Israeli problem would somehow bring peace to the middle east. Syria and Iran absolutely hate the likes of Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and you'd still have the Turks invading Northern Iraq to kill Kurds, and vice versa if the hard line right wing AKP stay in power there.
Solving the Israel problem would sort a big chunk of the problems, but there'd still be a long way to go, and frankly the toppling of the Syrian and Iranian regimes is still part of what is required to stabilise the middle east, as is the toppling of the Saudi regime, and a return to secular moderate political leaning in Turkey. Yemen too needs to be pulled back from the brink of civil war and it's anyone's guess as to how to solve the Yemen problem as it's got too many warring factions, and is a borderline failed state - at that point you need to likely split it up and build a number of much smaller nations from scratch representing the separate factions whilst somehow eliminating the heightened level of zealous militancy there, and ensuring each new state was willing to work in a progressive manner with the other new states despite their population not seeing eye to eye. That's a pretty tall order.
If America armed a bunch of Americans to go over the border into Iran, or armed anti-government protesters in Iran with all the kit they need to create their own military which they then used to force their will onto the country, would you say America had started a war?
If your answer is no, then you're absolutely right, Iran has started no wars, if your answer is yes, then Iran is implicated in every war caused by Hezbollah's agression, both internal civil wars within Lebanon, and external wars with the likes of Israel.
Whatever your previous answer, if you think that to perform this type of action is wrong, then it's irrelevant as to whether Iran has technically started any direct wars, committing proxy wars is just as problematic, so saying Iran hasn't started any wars is irrelevant when the fundamental point is that it's still an aggressive destabilising force in the region. If you don't think this sort of action is wrong (whoever is doing it, whether it's Mossad, the CIA, or the Republican Guard) then, well, there's really no helping you as it would mean your understanding of the cause of serious international disputes is so dire you shouldn't even really be discussing the topic.
"Bullshit."
No really, it's almost certainly not.
Whilst I agree his use of the term "unquestionably" was probably a poor choice of words, because it is still questionable, the evidence is pretty strong and Iran's lack of will to allow international inspectors to prove that it isn't working on nuclear weapons is always going to be a cause for concern when many other countries routinely allow inspectors to demonstrate their nuclear programme is not designed for nuclear arms development. Iran isn't some super high-tech nation, so their allegation that the IAEA inspectors are spies and Iran has some nuclear technology to steal that no one else in the world has is laughably weak.
It's also completely false to suggest Iran hasn't started wars, whilst you may well be accurate in saying Iran hasn't sent tanks rolling across it's borders into it's neighbours backyard, there's no real question that wars between Israel and Lebanon are the result of Iranian stirring of tensions and arming, training, and inciting Hezbollah and in fact the destabilisation of Lebanon in general is Iran's fault, by creating a second military within it's borders it's allowed the Islamist militia in question to leave the secular military and civilian governmental administration powerless, despite the fact that the secular administration and military had the legitimate backing of the people. Iran has very much caused wars, but it does so by proxy.
Also, whilst I'm quite anti-Israel nowadays, particularly so since they elected their current overly right wing administration that has absolutely no interest in peace, and since they continue to prevent any hope of peace in the middle east by the continuation of settlement building your comments are a little disturbing, I mean, "Oh, FYI Jews have nukes." - really? they do? which ones? the ones living in Russia? the ones in New York? the Jewish lobby in California? Oh, you mean Israel the nation has nukes? You mean, the nation of which a quarter is not actually even Jewish?
"For the sake of MAD balance Iran should as well"
MAD only works when all people in control of the nukes are sensible enough to not want a nuclear war. Thus far, Iran's leadership has shown little evidence they're that smart. Specifically, there's a very real concern that Iran would continue it's tactics of proxy war and pass nuclear weaponry to the likes of Hezbollah and hope that plausible deniability is enough to prevent them from a retaliatory strike.
The Iranian oil bourse? it's a great conspiracy theory, but erm, the latest round of sanctions are threatening to specifically target Iran's oil, precisely because the West has figured out that it can actually get by without Iranian oil thanks to the likes of Saudi Arabia offering to increase production.
No, the situation in this part of the world is precisely what it says on the tin, it's concern of a nation running a covert nuclear weapons operation without having been able to demonstrate itself as a trustworthy citizen of the world capable of adhering to MAD principles even if it does acquire nuclear weapons. The lack of trust largely stemming from it's destabilisation of the middle east through proxy war including previously proven subversive actions in Lebanon, Israel, Palestinian territories, Iraq, and Afghanistan, as well as possible but as yet unproven subversive actions in Yemen, Egypt, and other parts of the Middle East and Africa. Finally yes, I realise you'll probably tell me that countries like America are guilty of this too - and yes, you're right. But that doesn't excuse Iran, and countries like America, Israel and so forth do at least have a 40+ year track record of demonstrating that they're not actually willing to use nukes unless their very existence is threatened, and even then possibly not.
"Your socialist revision of history is appalling. "
Sorry, I think you must've completely missed out an entire paragraph of your post explaining the connection between being anti-sanctions and being a socialist. Do you think you could kindly post this for us so we can all understand the link between being socialist and being anti-sanctions?
I don't really disagree with the point that sanctions can be effective, though I think they're important because people will only rise up against their leadership when their living standards become poor enough to justify the risk, and sanctions most certainly speed that up. They're an effective way of pursuing destabilisation without the inherent risks of backlash that boots on the ground cause.
But by implying anyone you disagree with is somehow socialist when no demonstration of their actual overall political leaning is demonstrated you simply show yourself up as even more ignorant and bigoted than the GP.
There are countless socialist countries in the world, many succesful nations in Europe like Norway and France make great examples. The idea that anyone who you believe is wrong is a lesser person because they must be socialist is intellectually bankrupt and is demonstrative of the type of anti-intellectualism that is rife within political leanings that truly have been historically problematic, like nationalism.
Oh, did I forget to mention that socialist countries like France have been some of the biggest drivers of sanctions against Iran?
Yeah, I'd have to agree. People are quick to call Zuckerberg a genius for the groundbreaking idea that was Facebook, yet Facebook was nothing more than a slightly less tacky MySpace, and before that we had Friends Reunited which was almost identical.
There was absolutely nothing groundbreaking about Facebook, Zuckerberg just had the contacts and the business sense to be able to cash in on it and grow it better than even the likes of Rupert Murdoch failed so hard to do with MySpace.
Absolutely, I'm just very interested in cacti and have a massive collection including some species not yet officially described so have a decent understanding of the family including some of the quirks of various genus and species within, but have never heard of this hence why I was intrigued to hear more about it. Any chance you'd be able to see if you can find out which species it was?
Part the reason for my intrigue is some species are deemed very tough to germinate, and hence in small pots people get low germination rates, if it's because of something like this then it could open a whole new understanding of germination of some species, but as I say it's not something I've ever heard of. I have heard of it in other plant families though certainly.
Each time I've had any new car the 3 CVV digits on the rear changes too.
With all my debit cards, the last 4 digits of the card changes each time too.
Also, I don't think I've ever had a debit card for it's full term. My banks always sent me out a new card before the old one expires for various reasons such as adding chip and pin, adding contactless payment tech, or this time simply for "security reasons" without elaborating what they are.
I don't think I've even ever had a credit expire on it's given date and be replaced by one with only a fixed number of months added on. It's always expired early too IIRC.
Meh, sounds like a good thing.
Money out of the Red Cross' coffers means they've got less money to waste on things like suggesting online gamers are committing warcrimes. That's between wasting money suing games companies who dare use the red cross on health packs and stuff too.
Money out of Save the Children's coffers means they have less money to continue to campaign for web censorship.
It may suck for CARE, but I've no idea who the fuck they are.
Either way, if the Red Cross and Save the Children were effected it could only be a good thing, these are charities that have long lost their way and already have too much money such that they're focussing on things that are no longer core to their goal as a charity but are detrimental to society.
Perhaps anonymous did us a favour after all. The first two at least aren't charities that I'd shed a tear for if they had to tighten their belts and return to focussing on what they were created to focus on due to the loss of income.
Absolutely, I've seen this directly a number of times, it's in fact a major factor in deciding to leave my old job.
I worked for an engineering firm, and it's background was that it had split in two about 10 years ago, with it's IT staff going to the other section, leaving no one in IT in the section I was working at. As a result they chose one of the engineers who had a "passing interest in IT" to become the IT manager. Over the next 10 years by paying enough consultants he'd managed to cobbled together something that roughly resembled a network.
I joined the firm as a software developer, with the aim of starting out their software development section from the ground up, but as I had an IT support background I found myself rapidly becoming relied upon for IT support help because I was the first person who had entered the organisation in 10 years who actually had a proper idea of how IT should really be done.
The problems weren't just technical though, the IT manager held grudges, if someone had asked for some last minute help before they went on a business trip, he wouldn't like that, he'd hold it against them and do his best not to help them, sometimes outright maliciously moving their network file share without telling them and waiting until they'd spent some time figuring out why they couldn't connect before fixing it for them. He was socially inept to a massive degree such that when our phone lines went down he dissapeared to another site because he was too scared of the concept of picking up the phone and talking to someone at the other end to get it sorted such that our company was without phones for 2 solid weeks. For the same reason he wouldn't get quotes from other IT suppliers such that the supplier he'd been using all this time was charging him £800 for £450 laptops with the same kind of markup on everything from software to printer cartridges- the fact the supplier had a brand new £50k car, and took him to lunch every christmas didn't act as a clue that his supplier had far too much spare money. I offered to train him on IT security so he could get a policy written and in place pointing out that if we got hacked and data covered by the data protection act stolen, he could be held personally responsible and at the end of the training he said "Right, so can you write the policy then?" as if nothing I'd spent the last couple of days teaching him had actually entered his inept mind - his excuse was that he was too busy, but then as he also had never bothered with IT support issue tracking software and did everything ad hoc, ignoring those users he didn't like's issues then how could anyone ever know what his workload was? Laughably when I'd already made the decision to leave, he managed to lose the entire intranet due to hard drive failure because well, setting up a backup on a Linux box would require some actual effort on his behalf. Lucky I'd taken a copy of the database for local dev work on it. He'd avoid sharing anything with me because he saw me as a threat, knowing full well I could do his job AND mine, but it didn't really work, because I understood his systems better than he did anyway so the only stuff he was hiding was stuff I could figure out myself anyway. Oh, and he didn't believe in UPS' on servers because he had one on a server once and it made it crash, apparently.
I raised it with HR a number of times when it reached a point where it was an outright danger to the business, and whilst they recognised my concerns the attitude was "Well, we've got to give him a chance...", as if the last 10 years of utter ineptitude wasn't bad enough, but the problem is that they'd never known any better - to them, this was a good IT manager, they had no idea how it was supposed to be. Our company was taken over and as part of that our UK operations expanded, lo and behold, they'd been taken over by someone with IT even shitter than they had so he was promoted to head of UK IT, when in reality what they should've done at that point was bring someone wh
"There are species of cacti that grow in perfect grids because they toxify the soil against even their own seedlings"
What species? I've never heard of this before.
Agreed. I chase a career because to me chasing a career is constantly increasing my knowledge, the more and more I know about computing, software development, and maths, the further my career goes.
I never realised that wanting to increase my knowledge, and enjoy the benefits of getting compensated for having more knowledge in a subject area, and being able to help colleagues by using that knowledge made me a fool and caused me to automatically have a sad and lonely life. I'll have to let my girlfriend of 7 years know this, as I was under the impression we'd been really happy all this time.
Or perhaps the reality is that not being bothered about learning anything new, and sitting around in a 30hr a week dead end job, makes you the sort of person who would make broad and ignorant generalisations about everyone else and how they should be living their lives as if there's only one way to achieve happiness. I know which one I'll be placing my bets on.
Learning, is, for many, extremely fulfilling, and having a career most certainly can be as simple as enjoying learning, and applying what you have learnt in ways that impress the boss, impress potential employers and so forth. If you like learning but can't or don't apply what you learn in your work, then you're missing a trick and I'd argue the fundamental problem isn't that you don't want a career, but that you picked the wrong career and are hence stuck in one you're not bothered about progressing in.
Having a career doesn't necessarily mean striving to be the boring man in the suit at the top of the company, it can instead be as exciting as striving to be the head of R&D at an important tech company where you get to literally drive the direction of technology research, and hence to some degree, technology itself. It can be about working to achieve a role where you have staff under you such that you can work on things you'd never be able to do single handedly in your spare time, but would love to try, and getting paid decently in the process to boot. Again, I don't really see what's so bad about that. It sure as hell sounds far more attractive to me than being stuck in a 30hr dead end job, with a $69,000 house, a $9,000 car, and with the need to ignorantly proclaim everyone who doesn't live that lifestyle is unhappy.
Really, this discussion highlights the two different types of people in the working world - the go-getters who work hard to get and do what they want, and the layabouts who just want an easy lifestyle. Neither is necessarily inherently bad, but I must admit the entitlement attitude some layabouts have can be frustrating - if you want an easy lifestyle and so forth that's fine, but don't, as with the guy in the summary, think for one second that you're entitled to anything. Through my life I've personally been career oriented, and it's given me a massive headstart in life, I worked hard on my career when I was young and went a long way, and that's meant I can now be more of a layabout whilst enjoying the fruits of previously being a go-getter. I can be a layabout in a far higher paid, far more interesting job. I can have the $500,000 house with no mortgage as I bought and paid it off early through hard work, and believe it or not, my house is even made of brick! I don't have the BMW or Audi because cars aren't really my thing, I'm content with my crappy Peugeot, but I do have a 288sq ft heated greenhouse, because growing tropical plants is my thing. A hobby I could never enjoy had I not been career oriented and got myself toa point where I could afford such a thing.
My advice to the guy in the summary? Nothing in life comes for free, if you want to be a software developer, quit your job and find an employer that will pay you for that. Sometimes in life you reach a point with an employer where if you don't do something, your career will suffer, and if you do do something, your career will thrive long term, but you will feel put out short term. In some cases, you can be put out and not go anywhere sure, but fundamentally t
No it's not. I've had MySQL database a number of times.
Whilst you're right all data should be backed up, this doesn't absolve MySQL of the fact that it more frequently fucks up your data than any other database requiring a restore.
Even if you have hourly backups there's still potential for data loss in that case, sure only an hours worth of work, but the point of the GP stands - never use MySQL for important data, even if the data loss it's instability causes isn't large, it's still unnecessarily time consuming to resolve.
I've learnt the hard way that using MySQL for anything other than throw away databases can cause more trouble than it's worth, especially when things like Postgres is free and doesn't suffer these issues like MySQL does.
They're not Japan's either. I don't ever recall there being international agreement that international territory is fair game and the first one to loot it dry of some specific resource so no other nation can enjoy it gets first dibs.
At least Australia's claim has the backing of a number of countries and was signed into international treaty in 1933. In contrast Japan's commercial hunting of whales flies in the face of established international law, and runs against the vast majority of international opinion. Australia's claim may be weak, but Japan's actions are outright illegal as they are carrying out a commercial hunt when they only have research whaling rights and there is much documented proof of this. The problem is, who is going to dare bring the world's 3rd biggest economy to trial?
FWIW, even Norway recognises Australia's claim, and Norway is the most pro-whaling nation on earth, arguably more so than even Japan.
There's more too it than that too though, as part of Australia's claim to those waters, as with the British in it's claimed South Atlantic ocean territory those nations take on the responsibility of responding to distress calls and general policing of those waters too.
Should that territory become a hotbed of pirate activity, or should a bunch of Japanese ships find themselves in trouble in those waters, you can be rest assured Japan would suddenly find itself begging Australia to help, which would be a tad hypocritical if not recognising their claim.
Besides, the whole thing is academic anyway, Japan can't even afford to continue the hunt with it's failed economy for much longer. Sea Sheperd is just helping up the cost for Japan condemning their hunt to abandonment even earlier.
Really, it's not even profitable now as is, it's only the fact that the Japanese are so shit scared of admitting on the public stage that yes, actually, perhaps they were wrong about whaling, that they continue it anyway. Whether true or not, I hear even many Japanese people are getting a bit fed up of their government pouring money down the drain on a loss making whaling fleet when the economy there is so fucked. You'd have to be pretty stupid to want to subsidise something so pointless when there are much larger priorities the country could be spending money on.
What do you mean they show their sales figures? They show what they claim to be are their sales figures, when in reality it's just handsets sold to stores.
There's no more validity in Apple claimed sales stats than Samsung sales stats, it's mere petty fanboyism to suggest there is.
To be honest I don't even think this is the first time for them, which would make this more of a story, but afaik their original leak was never admitted/publicised.
The reason I have my suspicions this wasn't the first time is I signed up to Rift after I'd just created a new e-mail account, I gave up playing after my months trial and hadn't used the e-mail for anything else after either, about 4 months later I started getting spam on that address, and not just any spam, but phishing e-mails aimed at gamers like fake WoW e-mails and such, and originally even a fake Trion e-mail.
It seems unlikely given the address wasn't used elsewhere and that the e-mail was so targetted that this is the first time they've had a data breach, and if that's the case, then I'd argue that they indeed aren't concerned with security. Once is unfortunate, twice is a fucking joke.
The issue is that in the article the CEO of the company in question was talking about kids chatting through Facebook etc. rather than specific corporate IM systems. Whether he meant by this that he was intending to let his younger employees communicate via Facebook at work, or whether he was planning to use such a corporate IM system as you mention is the grey area in the article. As someone else pointed out in response to me also, I had my suspicions this was a way around e-mail audit trail logs, but perhaps I was just being unnecessarily cynical!