"Next time you're looking down the barrel of a gun, or at a multi-billion dollar company out to crush you, tell me how brave you're going to be."
I wouldn't, the difference is I wouldn't say I'll put my arse on the line and take other people's money under that false premise either.
In fact, I'll be even more honest, if I was going to do something like this in the first place I'd not even be big headed enough to try and plaster my name all over it and would release it anonymously or under a pseudonym that I had taken care to protect.
I don't think anyone's faulting him for not standing up to a big company, I think people are faulting him for saying he would and taking their money under that premise. This is why love or hate The Pirate Bay guys, at least they put their arses on the line through it all- they deserve far more respect than this kid. The same goes for Assange, love or hate him, at least he had the balls to put his life on the line for what he believed.
All this said I wouldn't say I didn't see this coming- GeoHot did what he did by building on other's work and he wasn't particularly forthcoming in admitting that, it was all me me me and frankly he showed a high level of immaturity in general. I would never expect a kid like that to stand up to his ideals, whatever was on the line. The guy was just never mature enough in the first place to really be taken seriously as a defender of consumer rights, he's no doubt smart technically, but seemed utterly inept when it came to acting with some degree of maturity.
I think you should look up the scientology proctests they did across the globe, if anything it underscores how suprisingly many there.
I was somewhat amused to be watching Louis Theroux's latest documentary about the Phelps family the other day and noticed that some of the anti-protesters had anonymous masks and so forth on. It's not the first time I've seen them at random protests either.
If anything real life protests have done them a world of good in illustrating how big and how global anonymous actually is, it's completely dispelled the myth that there's literally only just a very small group behind it. Plenty have turned out for public protest, and many times more are likely to be involved yet prefer to stick to the digital world.
To be fair it's not even really anything to do with technical literacy. This is exactly the same type of tripe The Register kicks out all the time about companies like Google and that's supposed to be a technical news site.
Really, it's just the way Britain's version of the "right wing" press works, which both the Daily Mail and The Register sit firmly in, they pick a popular target, write shit about it, in other words, they basically troll it, then watch as people come flocking to read it because they're angry enough about the flamebait headline to actually care and read it.
You see it on Slashdot sometimes- how many times have articles here been blatant flamebait posted knowing full well it'd rile up hits and discussion? That's basically The Daily Mail, The Register and so forth's modus operandi, they're based entirely off doing just that in almost every article, which again gives them a readership of ignorant zealots, and people who are not so stupid, but who care enough about a topic that their anger gets the better of them and they read it.
I'll admit I've done it myself before, just this weekend I was at my parents who had a copy of the Daily Mail and there was some article in there entitled something like "Gays blamed for the fall of Rome", which sounded so utterly absurd, that I just had to read it. More fool me, I think my IQ halved reading it.
Or for those with a short attention span, to cut a long story short, most of the British press is made up of untalented blatant trolls.
I'd say it's not even simply a question of who is doing the educating, but how much time is granted to it too.
To anyone on Slashdot they could pick up the technical intricacies of the case in fairly short time but only because they have a few years or more experience in understanding computing in general. If this judge doesn't have that prerequisite knowledge and they're trying to teach him the technical details without having time to either teach him them fully, or to teach him the background, then we risk seeing a rulling made based on a half-assed understanding of the subject.
Frankly I'm not convinced a judge should be ruling on these sorts of things without at least having gone through and succesfully completed at least a first year of a computer science degree and any prereqs he needs to reach that level. As you say, if no judge is available, then it should be postponed until one is and has gone through the required prerequisites.
There is nothing more scary than a judge ruling on something fundamental to the future of the industry with only an outline half arsed grasp of the topic at hand.
Have you ever studied set theory or relational algebra? I'm sure if you had you'd understand why SQL is the way it is.
It's based on the relational model which provides a mathematical foundation which maybe used to provide mathematically correct models that prove the outcome of an operation. This is important if you want a solid guarantee that your software will do what you think it should do as you have the means to prove that.
I'm not sure what your problem with joins are, could you expand?
It sounds like your issue is that your SQL skills and general database knowledge isn't very strong, and that you simply dislike it because you don't really understand why it is the way it is- when you understand that justification you realise that for the most part, it is the way it is for damn good reason.
They did the same with Call of Duty: World at War, I don't have too much of a problem with Minecraft being released on that date as it's really unrelated to war, but I felt the CoD: WaW stunt was a bit tasteless, 11/11 isn't something that should be trivialised as a marketing stunt for a game about war as it's frankly disrespectful.
"The "war" has lasted a week, with a grand total of 160 military and 60 civilian deaths on Georgian side (and about 1000 wounded). The amount of damage from that was very limited on both sides of the conflict - and that was more than 2 years ago by now."
Yes, and the US stormed through most of Afghanistan in a similar period, and Gaddafi's airforce was completely disabled in a day or two recently, what's your point? Modern armies are fast and efficient, in that short week Russia went from Georgia's borders to within short distance of it's capital city. I think you completely misunderestimate the amount of damage to infrastructure that occurs in such a short period in such modern wars involving super power militaries.
Those 2 years since the war have been years in which even the richest nations on the planet are struggling to pay for the upkeep of their non-war damaged infrastructure. Christ, it's taken a couple of months for our local council to find the resources to even fill in a handful of large potholes in our local area here in the UK.
You're failing to understand my comment because you don't seem to be able to grasp the simple fact that scavenging is not theft.
In plenty of countries across the globe, collecting and taking abandon materials is not illegal, it is not theft, it is scavenging.
Once you've got that concept in your mind- when you've managed to understand the distinction between the two, and that once again, what is illegal in your country and illegal under your moral standards is not illegal under everyone's and is common place in other countries, then you can begin to understand further the point that if such scavenging is indeed legal in Georgia, and if this woman was indeed simply scavenging, then it is wrong to call her a thief.
In every country in the world some degree of scavenging is acceptable, there are few countries where taking berries from naturally occuring plants for example is not illegal, the boundary is usually drawn at either human produced items, or clearly non-abandoned human produced items.
I'm amazed so many people think their moral standards are shared identically across the globe, it's almost as if you think your view of the world is the One True View (tm) and that anyone else with a different opinion of moral standards is automatically wrong because they are different to you.
So on the contrary to your last sentence, scavenging is actually tolerated or even legal in many poor countries because the governments there recognise it's much better to let the poor make use of abandoned resources and survive off them, than it is for them to expect welfare, or to commit real actual crime to survive instead. To illustrate how stupid your last comment is, here in the UK we've had contractors from large wealthy corporations accidently cut through fibre before, across the globe ships anchors regularly tear through fibre pipes (as regularly as 3 times a week on average believe it or not)- obviously it's something that actually happens far more as a result of large wealthy corporations and not as a result of "poor" people.
But as I say, you wont be able to comprehend this latter point until you grasp the rather simplistic point that scavenging and theft are two different things, and until you realise that not every part of the world is the same as your little part of the world.
But we're not talking about a rich western nation are we? We're talking about a country which has in recent years been at war with a super power- Russia, which also makes life as hard as possible for the nation economically such that it's poor- all this in the middle of a recession which Georgia was not immune to, and hence has plenty of decaying infrastructure. Whether it's areas abandoned as a result of war, whether it's leftovers of the destruction of that, or whether it's simple decay due to economic decline, we're not talking about a country that has the funds to make sure it's infrastructure is up and running, and has the money to pay people to go clean up in deprived areas. It's perfectly possible that in poor areas of countries such as this that there are resources merely lying around that would otherwise just be left to decay over time because the money just isn't there to invest in cleaning up the area and solving the area's problems.
"And of course, the French people get a valuable lesson in why they should care about who can access their accounts. Let the French people decide whether this is a good idea or not at the next election!"
The same French people that have given a neo-Nazi party (France's National Front) a massive share of the vote each time they've had chance the last few years?
I wont hold up my hopes then, I'm pretty sure my grandad didn't help liberate their country only for them to try and vote the nazis back in themselves 60 years on.
Yes, because your set of moral standards are accepted globally to be the One True Set of Moral Standards (tm).
Sorry no, I suppose you think the poor Nigerians scavenging in the massive rubbish tips sailed over to their country by the West simply to find what they need to survive at thieves too?
Fringe cases like this which are theft in your country, are accepted, legal and essential to survival for some people in other countries. Don't try and apply your moral view of the world in your no doubt cushy western lifestyle to the rest of the world, it makes you sound ignorant. Some countries have such a problem with poverty that they recognise that letting the poor scavenge abandoned stuff to reuse for their survival is actually essential to help these people survive.
It may be that you're right, and the wrong light has been shone on this woman and she really is a theif stealing that which has not been abandoned, but your comment makes it sound very much like you're suggesting scavenging is always theft. It's not.
Being too general is only a handicap if you're one of those people who thinks "Right, my degree is done, I don't have to learn anything ever again now", for those who keep learning however it's perhaps the single best starting point in life.
Something like accounting is trivial for a math graduate to pick up and in the UK you either have to do a starter course which takes a couple of years, or have a degree to do a chartered accountancy course anyway, so why not do the degree and do maths? At least then retraining to engineering or something later in life is much easier if you choose to. Contrast that to following a purely accounting or business course and you're stuck with them for life unless you put a much bigger investment into retraining. Even if you do something like physics then you'll find moving into something like say, financial mathematics trivial because of your experience of calculus that physics relies heavily on.
Contrast these scenarios:
- A graduate in say Physics or Maths goes on to become a chartered accountant, they work the role for 10 years but want something more for life, their accountancy skills make them well founded for financial mathematics and their degree means they find the subject easy and can excel in it.
- Someone who went straight into accountancy or became a chartered accountant following a business degree similarly works the role for 10 years and looks to go further, they'd like to go into financial mathematics but it will require a massive investment in learning the underlying maths, and will take them years to become competent enough at the subject to really thrive in such a role
Even for the likes of accountants mathematics makes the world of difference.
Possibly, but there's also some truth to the idea that Physics follows Maths, Chemistry follows Physics, Biology follows Chemistry, then things like Anthropology follows Biology and so on, with the point being that the further you move away from maths, the more specialised and less generically applicable your skills become.
So because of this there may well be some truth in what she says- those trained in Biology may well indeed find it harder to find work if they can't work specifically in their chosen field, whilst those who did a degree in say Maths can go find a job in finance, computing, engineering, or any number of other fields because their skillset is just that much more applicable to so many different fields.
I'm not sure this means we should really feel sorry for the biologists though- it's the choice you make. I did maths and found it quite hard going, and have in recent years taken up biology courses in my spare time with a focus on plants and I find it far easier to learn than I ever found maths, and certainly than I ever found physics or chemistry. I'd argue the reduced employment prospects are simply the price you pay in taking the slightly easier, and hence possibly often less stressful and more enjoyable subject. Of course that's just my personal experience, others may vary, but there you go.
I should note that I don't mean this to be taken out of context by the biologists out there- I'm not saying biology is easy easy, it's still a STEM subject and IMHO they are inherently much more tricky subjects than pretty much all non-STEM subjects, but of the STEM subjects I certainly believe that biology is one of the easier choices - take it and you'll still have much more work and have to be much smarter than many of the non-STEM subjects require, but you'll still be getting it easier than say, the physicists, and mathematicians for example. You've still got to be smarter than what, 80% of people who do the non-STEM degrees, so I'm certainly not saying biologists aren't smart people or any such thing. Interestingly though a pattern I notice with many top biologists is that they're often quite adept in subjects like maths anyway, which is probably what gives them the edge in the first place.
"... foreign courts are being used for foreign nations to extort money from business they did not produce and had little connection to its success.."
I agree this judgement is stupid and unacceptable, but I don't think this si really a fair argument. The fact is Google does business in Italy by providing services too it and takes money from Italy businesses, as such it must ensure it or it's business interests (i.e. subsidiaries) in Italy play by Italian law. This doesn't mean they have to adhere to the courts rulings on Google.com, Google.co.uk or any other subsidiary, just that Google.it are bound by it, and if they refuse to honour it then Italy is within it's rights to fine Google and even seize Google's Italian assets on non-payment.
Yes, the Italian courts are being completely retarded, but I don't think it's wrong that Italy should be able to judge against and fine if need be foreign companies operating on Italian soil an taking Italian money in the Italian market.
Really, it's down to Google to decide if they think the Italian market is worth it or not, but we can't criticise Italy for applying it's laws to a company that does decide it's market is worth it. That is, we can criticise those rulings for being fucking braindead, but we can't criticise Italy's right to make those rulings on a company making the concious decision to play in Italy's garden.
"If we look to the filesharing scene, there's an unambiguous answer: if/when a file/music/torrent search engine falls off the face of the earth, which happens quite regularly, people move on to another rather quickly. People are remarkably resilient that way. They basically adapt and use what's available."
But it's completely different, in the file sharing scene such sites are basically available as FOSS downloads in their most advanced formats, in contrast FOSS search engine offerings are a joke compared to the big boys. If it doesn't offer the same level of benefits as the players that have just had to leave the market then there's still going to be a lot of unhappy voices airing their complaints, and we're not just talking about end users- we're talking about influential CEO's who have had it up to their neck with their departments claiming the governments decision leading to closure of search engines has made their jobs a nightmare.
If you're working from a clean slate then you're right, people wont know any better if they're lumped with an inferior offering, but if they're used to something superior and lumped with something inferior they absolutely will not be happy and pacified by it.
"I don't think people would revolt if Google (say) voluntarily shut down tomorrow. Not even close."
That wasn't really the discussion though, the discussion was about a combined closure of search engines in the face of government meddling in the market as a whole- we're talking about the loss of most worthwhile competitors.
"3) Using the web is a low priority compared with the fundamentals, like working, having a house and a family,"
Of course, but what's that got to do with anything? No one said anything about the collapse of family life, it was merely a discussion about joint action by search engines to boycott a country that is really making life difficult for them to provide their service.
"4) The revolutions we've witnessed are about important things, like ending 20 years of dictatorship etc. Nobody is willing to get killed because their favourite search engine is 404'd."
Again where's that come from? I didn't say people would revolt or risk their lives over it, I merely made the point that if revolutions can help that quickly, then something like the loss of all worthwhile search engines could easily create a policy u-turn just as quickly. That of course has nothing to do with revolution in itself.
No offence, but you seem to be trying to mould the discussion to suit your argument rather than addressing the actual discussion at hand- you've jumped to some very odd irrelevant extremes in that last paragraph.
The simple fact is the discussion was whether search engines making a pact to pull out of a particular market altogether to try and persuade government to stop making things difficult for them would work, and frankly yes I think it would, because as I say:
a) The void created could not be filled quick and acceptably enough to prevent uproar
b) The effect on business and political standing of a leadership particularly in a democracy would be too much for a government to bear, and would be forced to u-turn
The discussion was nothing more than that, and my point was nothing more, or nothing less than that.
Russia- large geographically perhaps, it's not a particularly populous country relative to the landmass perhaps and isn't exactly a major player in terms of percent of population with internet access. It's a relatively small player for the most part, roughly 1/10th the population of China and 1/8th that of India, roughly half that of even Indonesia, and less than Brazil, Pakistan, and Nigeria even.
How long do you think a search engine takes to get up and running and in people's searching habits?
Do you really think it's quick enough to prevent an uproar about companies being caused implicitly by government to shut down search engines? Revolutions can happen in a matter of days, a policy u-turn is much smaller than a revolution.
It doesn't matter who owns it, or who is on the board, unless they're willing to do business the way China wants them to do business then they cannot do business in China, hence why it is effectively state controlled, and, when the staff on the ground are in China itself, and hence open to pressure from the Chinese authorities, what the board thinks they are doing, and what they are actually doing may well be two very different things. Google faced the same problem with it's internal leak in China, only it valued it's IP more than it valued profits, whilst for Baidu, theft of it's IP is a non-issue because no one's going to be able to do anything with it to compete with Baidu in China because they'd have to deal with the Chinese authorities anyway, and because Baidu has no interest outside of China.
The China / Baidu situation is still largely unique compared to the search engine market in the rest of the world.
Of course it didn't work in China because China has Baidu which owns the vast majority of the search market, and with Baidu basically being a government sponsored search engine. It's an independent company but you don't run a business that size in China without doing what the authorities want. Look at Rio Tinto, a massive multinational, but because they didn't play China's game some of their workers were sent to jail, that's really the choice of the matter in China- you do it the government's way, or face arbitrary detention, torture, and possibly even the death penalty.
Fortunately China is a fringe market in this case, few other markets have a home grown search engine that holds the majority of the market and is effectively government controlled, pointing it out as a reason it wouldn't work anywhere else in the world is stupid.
I do personally have a will for tablets, I want to use them around the house as a series of network devices I can use to play music in the room I'm in, or to view my calendar in the room I'm in or so forth. I would like one in the kitchen mounted to keep a shopping list on and so forth, but detachable if need be. Ideally they'd double up as TVs too.
The problem is they're not really designed for this right now, the iPad is too expensive and overspecced for such a task, cheaper Android devices are probably fairly well suited, but you'll need to spend a lot of time doing bespoke software development to get everything working, particularly in an integrated manner.
So I think tablets have a use, they have a place, just not what they're being designed and marketed for right now- right now it's just a less funtional laptop, or an oversized mobile phone and I'm still not sure what the fuck the point in that is when the afformentioned devices still do the job better, personally for the ADHD "I can't be away from the digital world for 5 seconds and so need a digital devices wherever I go" type of mindset I'd still take a Netbook because you can chat on IM, IRC, or type e-mails or forum posts without getting pissed off at a retarded touch screen keyboard.
I've seen a few people mention it already in previous articles but I'm actually beginning to wonder myself if this is an orchestrated FUD campaign against Samsung. The actors story was, well, a complete fucking non-story too.
Rogue Apple fanboy, or Apple PR getting a bit twitchy about Android and Samsung's Galaxy phones and tablet perhaps?
Will be interesting to see if this anti-Samsung FUD continues or if it's mere coincidence that two FUD stories have been posted about Samsung in such a short period.
"The thing about Java is, its very hard to make an app not cross platform. You have to do a lot of work to lock yourself into a platform using Java."
Yes, if you use the standard libraries which are drastically more limited than the.NET framework.
This is really the problem, the tradeoff. If you limit your.NET usage to a similar to degree that the Java libraries support from the outset then C# is equally as portable. If you extend Java library usage to be equivalent to.NET then Java becomes less portable. Some obvious examples are audio support, and support for lower level networking stuff such as ping and other ICMP related tools-.NET just does these things better and in a more portable manner straight out the box. There's really little difference between them when you do a like for like comparison of the features those libraries you have to limit yourself to or expand out to provide.
So it really comes to simplicity, if you want an application that only has a simplistic featureset then they'll really be just as portable from the outset. If you have one that has a more advanced featureset then C# will become less portable, but so will Java as you have to seek libraries that need to make use of the JNI or similar to achieve the same things.
This is not to say that I believe C#/.NET is more portable in general though, obviously the JVM is on more platforms in more places than the CLR or equivalent, so that alone puts Java ahead in terms of portability.
The issue that arises though in the case of a company is what if a single individual or a small group of individuals commit the crime?
If the board of directors does something underhanded that nets them big bonuses and then whatever they did comes out and is deemed illegal, why should the receptionist on minimum wage go without her pay for a month because the courts decided to "arrest" the company for that period? Should she really be punished for not knowing what was really going on in the board room? When companies keep secrets up top how do you go out about finding a company to work for whilst remaining sure it'll never fall foul of such a law?
No, the reason we go for the CEO is precisely because the CEO should know exactly what is going on within their company and hence be able to stop it, and if they don't they're equally to blame for incompetence in not knowing what elements of their company are even doing. It doesn't harm the company which means it's doesn't harm innocent workers, which is surely a good thing unless you want people needlessly on benefits for having done nothing wrong.
"Erm performing upgrades on the site is quite different from performing upgrades on reactors."
Not when the reactors had to be shut down for over a year for that work. There would simply be no point doing that if the reactors were shortly due to be decomissioned, it would simply be far cheaper to just decomission early.
The closest I found was a quote saying they were at some point due to shut down in 2011 but had been granted an extension of 10 years on Wikipedia, but looking at the source it shows this is the case for only one reactor. Still, thanks for making me Google it, it let me confirm that I was right.
"It's nice listening to Tepco isn't it. So I ask you again what has changed?"
Yeah, other than the fact they're not going to abandon the plants early of course, which is, er, precisely what I said.
"Oooh look, nothing. They are still pumping water manually through units 1 2 and 3. Actually it looks like at this point they are pumping fresh water. Funny that, so they are pumping coolant which is LESS damaging to the reactor now that they've announced the reactors are beyond repair than the corrosive shit they pumped through before while they were (according to you and you alone) trying to salvage it."
You're still focussing entirely on individual components of the reactor and extrapolating that to this idea that if individual parts were broken- yes, even the reactor itself, then the whole site was unsalvagable anyway. Obviously that's completely fucking idiotic because all the rest of the plant and infrastructure remains intact. Salvaging the site may still mean replacing some components, I'm not sure why you'd find that concept hard to grasp, it's really not rocket science.
"Oh that's right you don't because while your workers are busy covering it cement the out of control reaction either melts through the floor or explodes into the sky."
This is funny, it's like you actually think a nuclear explosion is possible or something. I guess there's little point trying to explain things to you if you don't have even the slightest basic grasp of the science behind nuclear power. Still, enjoy basking in your ignorance, I'm sure despite the fact you're contradicting what Tepco has itself said you'll tell yourself you're right and couldn't possibly be wrong, even though as pointed out quite clearly above, you are.
Slashdot Mirror
"Next time you're looking down the barrel of a gun, or at a multi-billion dollar company out to crush you, tell me how brave you're going to be."
I wouldn't, the difference is I wouldn't say I'll put my arse on the line and take other people's money under that false premise either.
In fact, I'll be even more honest, if I was going to do something like this in the first place I'd not even be big headed enough to try and plaster my name all over it and would release it anonymously or under a pseudonym that I had taken care to protect.
I don't think anyone's faulting him for not standing up to a big company, I think people are faulting him for saying he would and taking their money under that premise. This is why love or hate The Pirate Bay guys, at least they put their arses on the line through it all- they deserve far more respect than this kid. The same goes for Assange, love or hate him, at least he had the balls to put his life on the line for what he believed.
All this said I wouldn't say I didn't see this coming- GeoHot did what he did by building on other's work and he wasn't particularly forthcoming in admitting that, it was all me me me and frankly he showed a high level of immaturity in general. I would never expect a kid like that to stand up to his ideals, whatever was on the line. The guy was just never mature enough in the first place to really be taken seriously as a defender of consumer rights, he's no doubt smart technically, but seemed utterly inept when it came to acting with some degree of maturity.
I think you should look up the scientology proctests they did across the globe, if anything it underscores how suprisingly many there.
I was somewhat amused to be watching Louis Theroux's latest documentary about the Phelps family the other day and noticed that some of the anti-protesters had anonymous masks and so forth on. It's not the first time I've seen them at random protests either.
If anything real life protests have done them a world of good in illustrating how big and how global anonymous actually is, it's completely dispelled the myth that there's literally only just a very small group behind it. Plenty have turned out for public protest, and many times more are likely to be involved yet prefer to stick to the digital world.
Yeah, it could be as awesome as iTunes.
Oh wait.
To be fair it's not even really anything to do with technical literacy. This is exactly the same type of tripe The Register kicks out all the time about companies like Google and that's supposed to be a technical news site.
Really, it's just the way Britain's version of the "right wing" press works, which both the Daily Mail and The Register sit firmly in, they pick a popular target, write shit about it, in other words, they basically troll it, then watch as people come flocking to read it because they're angry enough about the flamebait headline to actually care and read it.
You see it on Slashdot sometimes- how many times have articles here been blatant flamebait posted knowing full well it'd rile up hits and discussion? That's basically The Daily Mail, The Register and so forth's modus operandi, they're based entirely off doing just that in almost every article, which again gives them a readership of ignorant zealots, and people who are not so stupid, but who care enough about a topic that their anger gets the better of them and they read it.
I'll admit I've done it myself before, just this weekend I was at my parents who had a copy of the Daily Mail and there was some article in there entitled something like "Gays blamed for the fall of Rome", which sounded so utterly absurd, that I just had to read it. More fool me, I think my IQ halved reading it.
Or for those with a short attention span, to cut a long story short, most of the British press is made up of untalented blatant trolls.
I'd say it's not even simply a question of who is doing the educating, but how much time is granted to it too.
To anyone on Slashdot they could pick up the technical intricacies of the case in fairly short time but only because they have a few years or more experience in understanding computing in general. If this judge doesn't have that prerequisite knowledge and they're trying to teach him the technical details without having time to either teach him them fully, or to teach him the background, then we risk seeing a rulling made based on a half-assed understanding of the subject.
Frankly I'm not convinced a judge should be ruling on these sorts of things without at least having gone through and succesfully completed at least a first year of a computer science degree and any prereqs he needs to reach that level. As you say, if no judge is available, then it should be postponed until one is and has gone through the required prerequisites.
There is nothing more scary than a judge ruling on something fundamental to the future of the industry with only an outline half arsed grasp of the topic at hand.
Have you ever studied set theory or relational algebra? I'm sure if you had you'd understand why SQL is the way it is.
It's based on the relational model which provides a mathematical foundation which maybe used to provide mathematically correct models that prove the outcome of an operation. This is important if you want a solid guarantee that your software will do what you think it should do as you have the means to prove that.
I'm not sure what your problem with joins are, could you expand?
It sounds like your issue is that your SQL skills and general database knowledge isn't very strong, and that you simply dislike it because you don't really understand why it is the way it is- when you understand that justification you realise that for the most part, it is the way it is for damn good reason.
They did the same with Call of Duty: World at War, I don't have too much of a problem with Minecraft being released on that date as it's really unrelated to war, but I felt the CoD: WaW stunt was a bit tasteless, 11/11 isn't something that should be trivialised as a marketing stunt for a game about war as it's frankly disrespectful.
"The "war" has lasted a week, with a grand total of 160 military and 60 civilian deaths on Georgian side (and about 1000 wounded). The amount of damage from that was very limited on both sides of the conflict - and that was more than 2 years ago by now."
Yes, and the US stormed through most of Afghanistan in a similar period, and Gaddafi's airforce was completely disabled in a day or two recently, what's your point? Modern armies are fast and efficient, in that short week Russia went from Georgia's borders to within short distance of it's capital city. I think you completely misunderestimate the amount of damage to infrastructure that occurs in such a short period in such modern wars involving super power militaries.
Those 2 years since the war have been years in which even the richest nations on the planet are struggling to pay for the upkeep of their non-war damaged infrastructure. Christ, it's taken a couple of months for our local council to find the resources to even fill in a handful of large potholes in our local area here in the UK.
You're failing to understand my comment because you don't seem to be able to grasp the simple fact that scavenging is not theft.
In plenty of countries across the globe, collecting and taking abandon materials is not illegal, it is not theft, it is scavenging.
Once you've got that concept in your mind- when you've managed to understand the distinction between the two, and that once again, what is illegal in your country and illegal under your moral standards is not illegal under everyone's and is common place in other countries, then you can begin to understand further the point that if such scavenging is indeed legal in Georgia, and if this woman was indeed simply scavenging, then it is wrong to call her a thief.
In every country in the world some degree of scavenging is acceptable, there are few countries where taking berries from naturally occuring plants for example is not illegal, the boundary is usually drawn at either human produced items, or clearly non-abandoned human produced items.
I'm amazed so many people think their moral standards are shared identically across the globe, it's almost as if you think your view of the world is the One True View (tm) and that anyone else with a different opinion of moral standards is automatically wrong because they are different to you.
So on the contrary to your last sentence, scavenging is actually tolerated or even legal in many poor countries because the governments there recognise it's much better to let the poor make use of abandoned resources and survive off them, than it is for them to expect welfare, or to commit real actual crime to survive instead. To illustrate how stupid your last comment is, here in the UK we've had contractors from large wealthy corporations accidently cut through fibre before, across the globe ships anchors regularly tear through fibre pipes (as regularly as 3 times a week on average believe it or not)- obviously it's something that actually happens far more as a result of large wealthy corporations and not as a result of "poor" people.
But as I say, you wont be able to comprehend this latter point until you grasp the rather simplistic point that scavenging and theft are two different things, and until you realise that not every part of the world is the same as your little part of the world.
But we're not talking about a rich western nation are we? We're talking about a country which has in recent years been at war with a super power- Russia, which also makes life as hard as possible for the nation economically such that it's poor- all this in the middle of a recession which Georgia was not immune to, and hence has plenty of decaying infrastructure. Whether it's areas abandoned as a result of war, whether it's leftovers of the destruction of that, or whether it's simple decay due to economic decline, we're not talking about a country that has the funds to make sure it's infrastructure is up and running, and has the money to pay people to go clean up in deprived areas. It's perfectly possible that in poor areas of countries such as this that there are resources merely lying around that would otherwise just be left to decay over time because the money just isn't there to invest in cleaning up the area and solving the area's problems.
"And of course, the French people get a valuable lesson in why they should care about who can access their accounts. Let the French people decide whether this is a good idea or not at the next election!"
The same French people that have given a neo-Nazi party (France's National Front) a massive share of the vote each time they've had chance the last few years?
I wont hold up my hopes then, I'm pretty sure my grandad didn't help liberate their country only for them to try and vote the nazis back in themselves 60 years on.
Yes, because your set of moral standards are accepted globally to be the One True Set of Moral Standards (tm).
Sorry no, I suppose you think the poor Nigerians scavenging in the massive rubbish tips sailed over to their country by the West simply to find what they need to survive at thieves too?
Fringe cases like this which are theft in your country, are accepted, legal and essential to survival for some people in other countries. Don't try and apply your moral view of the world in your no doubt cushy western lifestyle to the rest of the world, it makes you sound ignorant. Some countries have such a problem with poverty that they recognise that letting the poor scavenge abandoned stuff to reuse for their survival is actually essential to help these people survive.
It may be that you're right, and the wrong light has been shone on this woman and she really is a theif stealing that which has not been abandoned, but your comment makes it sound very much like you're suggesting scavenging is always theft. It's not.
"Well done, mr Branson! One of the few who dare, nowadays."
Oh I think there's plenty who dare.
Just not many who have enough money and dare. He's unique in that he has money and dares ;)
Being too general is only a handicap if you're one of those people who thinks "Right, my degree is done, I don't have to learn anything ever again now", for those who keep learning however it's perhaps the single best starting point in life.
Something like accounting is trivial for a math graduate to pick up and in the UK you either have to do a starter course which takes a couple of years, or have a degree to do a chartered accountancy course anyway, so why not do the degree and do maths? At least then retraining to engineering or something later in life is much easier if you choose to. Contrast that to following a purely accounting or business course and you're stuck with them for life unless you put a much bigger investment into retraining. Even if you do something like physics then you'll find moving into something like say, financial mathematics trivial because of your experience of calculus that physics relies heavily on.
Contrast these scenarios:
- A graduate in say Physics or Maths goes on to become a chartered accountant, they work the role for 10 years but want something more for life, their accountancy skills make them well founded for financial mathematics and their degree means they find the subject easy and can excel in it.
- Someone who went straight into accountancy or became a chartered accountant following a business degree similarly works the role for 10 years and looks to go further, they'd like to go into financial mathematics but it will require a massive investment in learning the underlying maths, and will take them years to become competent enough at the subject to really thrive in such a role
Even for the likes of accountants mathematics makes the world of difference.
Possibly, but there's also some truth to the idea that Physics follows Maths, Chemistry follows Physics, Biology follows Chemistry, then things like Anthropology follows Biology and so on, with the point being that the further you move away from maths, the more specialised and less generically applicable your skills become.
So because of this there may well be some truth in what she says- those trained in Biology may well indeed find it harder to find work if they can't work specifically in their chosen field, whilst those who did a degree in say Maths can go find a job in finance, computing, engineering, or any number of other fields because their skillset is just that much more applicable to so many different fields.
I'm not sure this means we should really feel sorry for the biologists though- it's the choice you make. I did maths and found it quite hard going, and have in recent years taken up biology courses in my spare time with a focus on plants and I find it far easier to learn than I ever found maths, and certainly than I ever found physics or chemistry. I'd argue the reduced employment prospects are simply the price you pay in taking the slightly easier, and hence possibly often less stressful and more enjoyable subject. Of course that's just my personal experience, others may vary, but there you go.
I should note that I don't mean this to be taken out of context by the biologists out there- I'm not saying biology is easy easy, it's still a STEM subject and IMHO they are inherently much more tricky subjects than pretty much all non-STEM subjects, but of the STEM subjects I certainly believe that biology is one of the easier choices - take it and you'll still have much more work and have to be much smarter than many of the non-STEM subjects require, but you'll still be getting it easier than say, the physicists, and mathematicians for example. You've still got to be smarter than what, 80% of people who do the non-STEM degrees, so I'm certainly not saying biologists aren't smart people or any such thing. Interestingly though a pattern I notice with many top biologists is that they're often quite adept in subjects like maths anyway, which is probably what gives them the edge in the first place.
"... foreign courts are being used for foreign nations to extort money from business they did not produce and had little connection to its success.."
I agree this judgement is stupid and unacceptable, but I don't think this si really a fair argument. The fact is Google does business in Italy by providing services too it and takes money from Italy businesses, as such it must ensure it or it's business interests (i.e. subsidiaries) in Italy play by Italian law. This doesn't mean they have to adhere to the courts rulings on Google.com, Google.co.uk or any other subsidiary, just that Google.it are bound by it, and if they refuse to honour it then Italy is within it's rights to fine Google and even seize Google's Italian assets on non-payment.
Yes, the Italian courts are being completely retarded, but I don't think it's wrong that Italy should be able to judge against and fine if need be foreign companies operating on Italian soil an taking Italian money in the Italian market.
Really, it's down to Google to decide if they think the Italian market is worth it or not, but we can't criticise Italy for applying it's laws to a company that does decide it's market is worth it. That is, we can criticise those rulings for being fucking braindead, but we can't criticise Italy's right to make those rulings on a company making the concious decision to play in Italy's garden.
"If we look to the filesharing scene, there's an unambiguous answer: if/when a file/music/torrent search engine falls off the face of the earth, which happens quite regularly, people move on to another rather quickly. People are remarkably resilient that way. They basically adapt and use what's available."
But it's completely different, in the file sharing scene such sites are basically available as FOSS downloads in their most advanced formats, in contrast FOSS search engine offerings are a joke compared to the big boys. If it doesn't offer the same level of benefits as the players that have just had to leave the market then there's still going to be a lot of unhappy voices airing their complaints, and we're not just talking about end users- we're talking about influential CEO's who have had it up to their neck with their departments claiming the governments decision leading to closure of search engines has made their jobs a nightmare.
If you're working from a clean slate then you're right, people wont know any better if they're lumped with an inferior offering, but if they're used to something superior and lumped with something inferior they absolutely will not be happy and pacified by it.
"I don't think people would revolt if Google (say) voluntarily shut down tomorrow. Not even close."
That wasn't really the discussion though, the discussion was about a combined closure of search engines in the face of government meddling in the market as a whole- we're talking about the loss of most worthwhile competitors.
"3) Using the web is a low priority compared with the fundamentals, like working, having a house and a family,"
Of course, but what's that got to do with anything? No one said anything about the collapse of family life, it was merely a discussion about joint action by search engines to boycott a country that is really making life difficult for them to provide their service.
"4) The revolutions we've witnessed are about important things, like ending 20 years of dictatorship etc. Nobody is willing to get killed because their favourite search engine is 404'd."
Again where's that come from? I didn't say people would revolt or risk their lives over it, I merely made the point that if revolutions can help that quickly, then something like the loss of all worthwhile search engines could easily create a policy u-turn just as quickly. That of course has nothing to do with revolution in itself.
No offence, but you seem to be trying to mould the discussion to suit your argument rather than addressing the actual discussion at hand- you've jumped to some very odd irrelevant extremes in that last paragraph.
The simple fact is the discussion was whether search engines making a pact to pull out of a particular market altogether to try and persuade government to stop making things difficult for them would work, and frankly yes I think it would, because as I say:
a) The void created could not be filled quick and acceptably enough to prevent uproar
b) The effect on business and political standing of a leadership particularly in a democracy would be too much for a government to bear, and would be forced to u-turn
The discussion was nothing more than that, and my point was nothing more, or nothing less than that.
Russia- large geographically perhaps, it's not a particularly populous country relative to the landmass perhaps and isn't exactly a major player in terms of percent of population with internet access. It's a relatively small player for the most part, roughly 1/10th the population of China and 1/8th that of India, roughly half that of even Indonesia, and less than Brazil, Pakistan, and Nigeria even.
How long do you think a search engine takes to get up and running and in people's searching habits?
Do you really think it's quick enough to prevent an uproar about companies being caused implicitly by government to shut down search engines? Revolutions can happen in a matter of days, a policy u-turn is much smaller than a revolution.
I don't think you really got my point.
It doesn't matter who owns it, or who is on the board, unless they're willing to do business the way China wants them to do business then they cannot do business in China, hence why it is effectively state controlled, and, when the staff on the ground are in China itself, and hence open to pressure from the Chinese authorities, what the board thinks they are doing, and what they are actually doing may well be two very different things. Google faced the same problem with it's internal leak in China, only it valued it's IP more than it valued profits, whilst for Baidu, theft of it's IP is a non-issue because no one's going to be able to do anything with it to compete with Baidu in China because they'd have to deal with the Chinese authorities anyway, and because Baidu has no interest outside of China.
The China / Baidu situation is still largely unique compared to the search engine market in the rest of the world.
Of course it didn't work in China because China has Baidu which owns the vast majority of the search market, and with Baidu basically being a government sponsored search engine. It's an independent company but you don't run a business that size in China without doing what the authorities want. Look at Rio Tinto, a massive multinational, but because they didn't play China's game some of their workers were sent to jail, that's really the choice of the matter in China- you do it the government's way, or face arbitrary detention, torture, and possibly even the death penalty.
Fortunately China is a fringe market in this case, few other markets have a home grown search engine that holds the majority of the market and is effectively government controlled, pointing it out as a reason it wouldn't work anywhere else in the world is stupid.
I do personally have a will for tablets, I want to use them around the house as a series of network devices I can use to play music in the room I'm in, or to view my calendar in the room I'm in or so forth. I would like one in the kitchen mounted to keep a shopping list on and so forth, but detachable if need be. Ideally they'd double up as TVs too.
The problem is they're not really designed for this right now, the iPad is too expensive and overspecced for such a task, cheaper Android devices are probably fairly well suited, but you'll need to spend a lot of time doing bespoke software development to get everything working, particularly in an integrated manner.
So I think tablets have a use, they have a place, just not what they're being designed and marketed for right now- right now it's just a less funtional laptop, or an oversized mobile phone and I'm still not sure what the fuck the point in that is when the afformentioned devices still do the job better, personally for the ADHD "I can't be away from the digital world for 5 seconds and so need a digital devices wherever I go" type of mindset I'd still take a Netbook because you can chat on IM, IRC, or type e-mails or forum posts without getting pissed off at a retarded touch screen keyboard.
I've seen a few people mention it already in previous articles but I'm actually beginning to wonder myself if this is an orchestrated FUD campaign against Samsung. The actors story was, well, a complete fucking non-story too.
Rogue Apple fanboy, or Apple PR getting a bit twitchy about Android and Samsung's Galaxy phones and tablet perhaps?
Will be interesting to see if this anti-Samsung FUD continues or if it's mere coincidence that two FUD stories have been posted about Samsung in such a short period.
"The thing about Java is, its very hard to make an app not cross platform. You have to do a lot of work to lock yourself into a platform using Java."
Yes, if you use the standard libraries which are drastically more limited than the .NET framework.
This is really the problem, the tradeoff. If you limit your .NET usage to a similar to degree that the Java libraries support from the outset then C# is equally as portable. If you extend Java library usage to be equivalent to .NET then Java becomes less portable. Some obvious examples are audio support, and support for lower level networking stuff such as ping and other ICMP related tools- .NET just does these things better and in a more portable manner straight out the box. There's really little difference between them when you do a like for like comparison of the features those libraries you have to limit yourself to or expand out to provide.
So it really comes to simplicity, if you want an application that only has a simplistic featureset then they'll really be just as portable from the outset. If you have one that has a more advanced featureset then C# will become less portable, but so will Java as you have to seek libraries that need to make use of the JNI or similar to achieve the same things.
This is not to say that I believe C#/.NET is more portable in general though, obviously the JVM is on more platforms in more places than the CLR or equivalent, so that alone puts Java ahead in terms of portability.
The issue that arises though in the case of a company is what if a single individual or a small group of individuals commit the crime?
If the board of directors does something underhanded that nets them big bonuses and then whatever they did comes out and is deemed illegal, why should the receptionist on minimum wage go without her pay for a month because the courts decided to "arrest" the company for that period? Should she really be punished for not knowing what was really going on in the board room? When companies keep secrets up top how do you go out about finding a company to work for whilst remaining sure it'll never fall foul of such a law?
No, the reason we go for the CEO is precisely because the CEO should know exactly what is going on within their company and hence be able to stop it, and if they don't they're equally to blame for incompetence in not knowing what elements of their company are even doing. It doesn't harm the company which means it's doesn't harm innocent workers, which is surely a good thing unless you want people needlessly on benefits for having done nothing wrong.
"Erm performing upgrades on the site is quite different from performing upgrades on reactors."
Not when the reactors had to be shut down for over a year for that work. There would simply be no point doing that if the reactors were shortly due to be decomissioned, it would simply be far cheaper to just decomission early.
The closest I found was a quote saying they were at some point due to shut down in 2011 but had been granted an extension of 10 years on Wikipedia, but looking at the source it shows this is the case for only one reactor. Still, thanks for making me Google it, it let me confirm that I was right.
"It's nice listening to Tepco isn't it. So I ask you again what has changed?"
Yeah, other than the fact they're not going to abandon the plants early of course, which is, er, precisely what I said.
"Oooh look, nothing. They are still pumping water manually through units 1 2 and 3. Actually it looks like at this point they are pumping fresh water. Funny that, so they are pumping coolant which is LESS damaging to the reactor now that they've announced the reactors are beyond repair than the corrosive shit they pumped through before while they were (according to you and you alone) trying to salvage it."
You're still focussing entirely on individual components of the reactor and extrapolating that to this idea that if individual parts were broken- yes, even the reactor itself, then the whole site was unsalvagable anyway. Obviously that's completely fucking idiotic because all the rest of the plant and infrastructure remains intact. Salvaging the site may still mean replacing some components, I'm not sure why you'd find that concept hard to grasp, it's really not rocket science.
"Oh that's right you don't because while your workers are busy covering it cement the out of control reaction either melts through the floor or explodes into the sky."
This is funny, it's like you actually think a nuclear explosion is possible or something. I guess there's little point trying to explain things to you if you don't have even the slightest basic grasp of the science behind nuclear power. Still, enjoy basking in your ignorance, I'm sure despite the fact you're contradicting what Tepco has itself said you'll tell yourself you're right and couldn't possibly be wrong, even though as pointed out quite clearly above, you are.