"Leaving plenty of space in front of you instead of riding someone's bumper (at a light or stopped in traffic) means you won't be as likely to end up in a sandwich."
I'm a firm believer in this two on single lane roads, but stupid drivers make it impractical on multi-lane roads.
The problem is, if you leave a safe gap on a multi-lane road, someone always squeezes into it forcing a dangerous gap between you and them. Your choice is to then slow and increase the gap, or drive as is being ultra-alert to the people in front of him so you can brake. The problem is if you take the first option, increase the gap, some other arsehole rinses and repeats. Effectively, the best you can do is the second option which really, really sucks because it puts you at fault should there be a crash and you end up running into his back end, but that's the option you get left with regardless.
Whilst I'm not saying it's your fault still, it's good practice to assume that people wont stop at stop signs even though they should.
In the UK we have lots of roundabouts, and I mean lots. The amount of people who incorrectly indicate on roundabouts is phenomenal. It's not always easy to tell if someone is exiting the roundabout or not, it should be easy to tell- they should just indicate and go off, but often they don't, sometimes they indicate to go off and then don't even. The point is, when pulling out onto a roundabout you can't rely on what they should do, you have to base your decision on their speed, the cars angle and so forth.
The same goes for stop signs, traffic lights and so on, if someone's approaching a stop sign fast enough that they don't appear as if they are going to stop then you have to prepare for that. Driving in the UK is a nightmare nowadays and our driving tests reflect this sort of thing, you shouldn't have to look left when turning right at traffic lights when your light is green, but you do because you must make sure no one is running the light.
So whilst you may not be at fault for an accident, it is still possible to avoid a lot of them. There are always circumstances where you cannot avoid them certainly- where you simply don't have enough visibility to see that someone is going so fast they aren't going to stop when they should for example. As such again, I'm not saying you could have helped it- perhaps this was your circumstance, there just wasn't the visibility to see her coming. What I'm saying is that even your scenario of someone running a stop sign in many cases could often still be avoided.
Avoiding accidents isn't just about who was technically at fault at the end of the day, and whilst the parent appears to take things a little too much to the paranoid and the extreme (i.e. not driving at all on certain days of the year) I think there is a little truth in what he says at least, in that some accidents can be avoided, even when you weren't the one at fault in said accident.
It's interesting that they're losing you with bugs and lack of features.
I've been a long time Firefox user, but with every version it's got slower and slower, the last version, 3.5 was at an all time low for speed and I saw 3.6 was out. Sure enough it mentioned speed improvements and I thought hey, maybe they've finally fixed the problems. I installed it, and much to my dismay it was the same old story- Firefox had gotten even slower again. Not only that but having left it open on Friday night, I came to my PC the next day in the afternoon and found the whole system running slow. I checked task manager and, well, the reason was pretty obvious- Firefox was using 1.8gb of RAM. Yes, you read that right, talk about memory leak.
Furthmore, Firefox actually crashed last night for the first time in over a year, and whilst it's got great error handling, the fact it crashed is interesting enough. In the crash report it wanted to send to Mozilla, the tab that crashed it was a session to 192.168.0.1 - my router. That page auto-refreshes every 5 seconds or so to show the current connection status, I guess again there's some memory leak there and having been auto-refreshing overnight, it just keeled over.
I tend to put these things down to plugins, but I've already disabled/removed everything including the.NET/Office plugins, Shockwave/Flash and Java to try and speed the browser up. My machine is in decent condition as it wasn't long ago I installed Windows 7- back in October or so, and as such is not full of crap or anything, it's a relatively minimal setup still right now. The hardware is a 2.83ghz quad core, with 8gb of RAM, a nVidia 280 and so on so spec wise there are no issues. Perhaps most telling is that other browser perform just fine.
The fact is, Firefox over the past year or two has got progressively worse, it's become less stable, more buggy, and much slower.
So here I am, using Chrome today, for the first time, because something has happened that I thought never would, Firefox has become slower than, and buggier than even Internet Explorer.
If Chrome doesn't play out well, I have to say I'm rather tempted to make Opera my primary browser. Either way, any Firefox update is going to require massive improvements to bring it back to the realm of being worth using still. It's gone from a clear first-place browser IMO, to being perhaps the worst pick of the mainstream browsers (well, it's still ahead of Safari for Windows at least).
The JVM is indeed a virtual machine, there's certainly nothing wrong with that name, as is the CLR.
To give you a better understanding of the meaning, you have to imagine a theoretical machine that can execute Java bytecode (or in the case of.NET, CIL bytecode) directly. The JVM and.NET CLR are both still virtual machines because they are simply software implementations of such a theoretical machine. In this respect you'll note that the concept is actually all that different to the idea of software like VMWare which is effectively just a Virtual Machine that runs x86 machine code.
I'm not aware of any examples off by heart, but I wouldn't be suprised if there is hardware out there that directly executes Java bytecode nowadays in fact, rather than it being a mere theoretical machine.
I guess the point is to realise that a machine doesn't necessarily have to be a piece of actual physical hardware though, but can be a theoretical concept like the Turing machine is. A virtual machine is just an implementation of such a concept, whether it's real or theoretical. The actual output of execution for example either a full blown operating environment as in VMWare, or a single app as in the JVM is really irrelevant, both are still virtual machines at the end of the day.
The only caveat is to remember that not all theoretical machines can be implemented, so although a theoretical machine can have a VM, not all theoretical machines could have virtual machine implementations. An example reason for this might be a theoretical machine that has memory bounds far beyond that of a real machine (i.e. infinite memory), and so which could never be implemented in software.
It could be that they've dropped a lot of the idiotic legacy crap that makes PHP such a mess, and so their new engine simply doesn't have a lot of this cruft in, which is fine for them if they've avoided the legacy stuff, but which would be useless in the mainstream version as people require backwards compatability.
It could alternatively just be optimised towards certain tasks at the expense of slow downs in others so not a one size fits all improvement.
"The real reason why books from Apple are likely to be more expensive (as are those from Sony today) is that Apple is a small retailer relative to Amazon. Amazon has much more negotiating strength. The same things that Apple can and does do in negotiations with record labels Amazon does with publishers."
So why, despite Apple having the largest online music store, are they also the most expensive?
I don't think Apple's pricing has anything to do with purchasing power, because even when they do have purchasing power as with iTunes, they're still the most expensive option.
I think the issue is that these things don't increase in a straight line, you get peaks and troughs, whilst modern Britain is clearly better than medieval Britain for example, I would argue at least that in Britain we are certanly much less free, and there is a lower standard of ethics and morals now than we had back in the 90s.
The tide does seem to be turning though now, as people in the UK finally get tired of Labour's authoritarianism, and as the European Court of Human Rights rules more and more of Labour's laws as illegal.
I would argue that the last decade has been quite bad for liberty, ethics, and morals, due to a cominbation of post 9/11 scaremongering, war, and counter-terrorism laws and companies being a little too unregulated. Certainly in the UK, I feel that the culmination of the financial crisis, too many steps too far in different areas by the government, and the MPs expenses scandal here represented a local minimum, and that we are now, hopefully, on a path to improvement with elections looming, people finally being tired of authoritarian Labour, and banks being so unethical they ended up shooting itself in the foot.
So I agree, the idea that things are worse in general now than they ever have been simply isn't true- things have been much worse, however I also agree that things have gotten markedly worse this last decade than the decade before, but I do not believe the decline is terminal- only a trough in some theoretical graph that could measure these things.
You're right that Firefox core has the advantage of public vulnerabilities, but the issue is that Firefox allows for non-sandboxed extensions, which are often proprietary (i.e. Flash) and so effectively leaves Firefox with the same issue.
Firefox certainly isn't as safe as any browser can be, simply because of the fact extensions are vulnerable in this manner.
I think what the UK gov is getting at is quite valid- not that IE has the same or less security flaws per-se, I think they probably accept that it does, but that no other browser really is built with a truly secure architecture either, such that even if you switch away from IE, whilst Firefox itself may be secure, many users will end up with extensions that aren't and so will remain vulnerable to something or other regardless.
To be fair on Google, this story could actually just be sensationalist crap.
On Android phones for example, applications that use location data can either use GPS if available, or use your rough network location based on the cell tower you're communicating with- but obviously that's very rough.
This patent sounds like they're just trying to improve the usefulness of location data to make location based apps more useful when you don't have a GPS signal, have GPS disabled on low battery, or just don't have GPS in your phone.
This is one of those cases where the sensationalism is likely just paranoid stupidity, because the solution to avoid it would simply be to not use location based apps, or if you do, tick the box that stops the app sending your location data to Google. It just seems to be a better way of doing something that's already done and where the privacy argument has already been had and the safeguards have already been put in place.
I assume from what you say then it explicitly states to read all other instructions before doing anything? As the parent says, if it's merely as the person he was responding to phrased it then it's ambiguous as telling students to read ahead by itself doesn't inherently mean not carrying out the instructions as you do.
Because UAVs can be taken out in a relatively trivial manner by countries like Russia using ASAT technologies to take down entirely defenceless satellites that are required to relay command and control to UAVs.
Manned aircraft are still required to protect against that scenario.
I wouldn't be suprised if that's why they cashed in- so that they can do a u-turn without losing face themselves, they can simply say the investors decided for them and it was out of their hand. Still, I could be wrong, we may be pleasantly suprised.
That said, he definitely seems to be the good guy at Google- he certainly seems worlds apart from Schmidt who actually seems to believe in the surveillance state.
Hehe, I just read the quote from Apple from that article:
"...Right now, from our point of view, the products in there are principally based on hardware that's much less powerful than we think customers want, software technology that is not good, cramped keyboards, small displays. Et cetera. We don't think that people are going to be pleased with those type of products. But we'll see."
It's quite an ironic quote in the context of the iPad- the iPad is even less powerful than most netbooks, has a more limited OS than most netbooks, has an even more cramped keyboard that is also on-screen, and has an equally sized display.
So basically, what Apple are saying with the iPad is "We've taken all the negative traits we thought about netbooks, made them worse, added more, and doubled the price".
I agree Apple seem to want to move in a direction involving greater control for them and even less openness, but I'm not sure money made by the app store is the reason. See here:
I'm not pretending it wouldn't be easy to do the conversion, what I'm saying is that, for some reason or another, all other digital content stores that use real world currencies end up with much larger pricing disparities than Microsoft have managed to maintain under their points system. Yes it would be nice to have a real currency system, if there was some guarantee I wouldn't get ripped off.
To illustrate my point, although it fluctuates with the exchange rate, the UK gets charged roughly 111% of what the US does in terms of Microsoft points, however you must bear in mind that 17.5% of that is tax, so pre-tax we're currently getting a decent deal- less than the US. If the exchange rate improves though back up to $2 ever again, then we'd be paying at most 130% of US price, or 113% or so pre-tax of US price. In contrast Steam and iTunes have quite often sold items with a $1 = £1 conversion factor so again, when the pound was at $2 to £1, their rate was in contrast, around 200%. Under the points system Microsoft for whatever reason has been able to maintain around a 70% lower disparity in cost conversions than other online distribution channels.
You'll probably be interested to know that Microsoft, for it's games on demand service that lets you download retail games, they have actually dropped the MS points mechanism and charge actual currency, but guess what? £19.99 = $19.99, £29.99 = $29.99.
So in every single case of real currency stores, I'm faced with a $1 = £1 exchange rate or close to, and yet in Microsoft points, it's much closer to the real exchange rate.
You're right that it's easy to do, and whilst logically I have to agree that MS points would seem to be about screwing the consumer, practically that idea just simply does not hold. I'd love to know the reason for it, and I'd love to know why companies feel the need to rip people off more when using currency than Microsoft do with MS points, but the reason evades me. Regardless, I hope this makes it more clear now as to why I actually prefer the MS points system- because perhaps rather ironically, I get a far better deal than I ever get just being billed in real currency.
"Mistakes happen and when they do they must be rectified."
Indeed.
"As someone who writes software for a living and manages a corporate network as well I can think of dozens of technical issues that could cause a loss or prevention of service. In each case MS would be responsible for rectifying the issue."
I'm intrigued to know what sort of errors would arise that would prevent a small number of users downloading files? If the download servers are working for everyone else, that means that the servers are up, that people are being routed to the content. When we're talking about errors for such a small number of users the problem is almost certainly going to be to do with routing to Microsoft's servers from outside of Microsoft's network, a faulty router on the users side, or something similar. Microsoft is most certainly not responsible for rectifying errors outside of it's network.
"Unless you have some other source of information other than TFA you have absolutely no way of judging this issue."
On the contrary, the fact that there is no other source speaks volumes. If this was really an issue then we'd have heard about it from sources other than this guy. The fact it's not suggests one of two scenarios:
1) The guy is filing a fraudulent case
2) The problems the guy had were at his end
Has the guy provided any evidence whatsoever himself that this actually happened? All I see listed are hollow claims, something he apparently has a history of against large companies.
In around 1000 pieces of content downloaded by myself from Xbox live, big and small, only one has failed because of Microsoft's servers and that was the free DLC for The Saboteur, however I would guess it's because the game arrived a day early for me and the content wasn't up until release day, the next day, when it worked.
I have had a few fail because my connection has dropped, but it still doesn't matter, because it doesn't outright fail, it supports resuming and carries on where it left off.
In one way, you're right that the "ethically bad" parts aren't the intentions or the desire, because disagreeing with the use of the term ethically bad means not supporting the ideas of freedom of speech and freedom of thought respectively.
However, the parent was correct in that extremism does include ideologies in it's definition. One can be a religious extremist if they have religious beliefs that are far outside the norm but do not carry them out.
I would also disagree with the extent Scientology goes to, whilst it does not carry out bombings and so forth, it most certainly does attack people psychologically, and arguably from various bits of evidence, physically as well. It does cause financial damage to people, and it does get involved in trying to illegitimately influence poltical opinion and action. So sure, the bombs aren't there, but the effects and intentions most certainly are.
Sure you can argue as you have that because the evil things Scientology has done have been done relatively rarely that they can't be held against the organisation as a whole, but then, Scientology is actually a relatively small organisation, so continuing the theme of "relatively", the number of evil actions in relation to the size of the organisation is still well above the norm for a similar sized group of people. They still stand out as being, on average, particularly more evil than most groups.
"Venezuela is a threat to the peace? You mean through their funding of FARC?"
Absolutely, what Chavez is doing in Venezuela is turning a democracy into a dictatorship. One run by a leader who has maassively increased his nation's military expendature and has outright threatened war with neighbouring Colombia, as well as as you mention, providing a safe haven for the likes of FARC, effectively using them as a tool to perform war by proxy. Chavez is certainly damaging the Venezuelan economy but hasn't tanked it so far that he can't afford to keep spending on military equipment- largely because of US trading. If the US had a similar block on Venezuela as it did on Syria and Iran than Venezuela would've not been able to increase it's military expendature as it has. The reason this hasn't happened is because it would mean the price of oil would go up for the US and it simply does not want to pay that price.
"Surely there are happy people in Cuba, but they are not free. I think we can both agree that freedom is a good thing."
I think we agree freedom is a good thing, because it is a mindset shared by most people here. Unfortunately a lot of people do not put much value in freedom- this is why as a citizen of the UK I find myself feeling less and less comfy in my own country, because the majority of the population has no real interest in freedom and supports increased anti-terrorism legislation whatever the cost in freedom. Similarly, there are millions, arguably hundreds of millions of people in China who are happy with the government, despite their oppression. So whilst I'd like to see these people have more freedom because I think they'd appreciate it if they had it, I also realise that it's not their priority- they would much prefer to be able to move out of poverty than have freedom. Whilst I could be wrong, I have hope that freedom would follow on from that anyway.
"If the only reason Cuba is poor is because it can't trade with the US, that doesn't say much for communism, does it?"
I'm not sure it says anything about communism at all- many capitalist, democratic countries would fall into poverty equally quickly if they were put in a position that isolated them from the trading partners that are an ideal match to what they can produce and provide. There are similarly many poor democracies around. I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with communism if it were the case that a good fair leader could be found to implement it, but the issue is that communist regimes are usually installed under a power hungry elite who are then further corrupted by the power. Effectively it is the leadership that corrupts a regime rather than a fundamental flaw in the system itself- Iran for example is a democracy, and contrary to popular belief even the supreme leader is accountable to the elected assembly of experts such that the whole system is democratically accountable to the very top, and yet the country has still had it's political system hijacked and corrupted by bad leadership.
"The US has good goals with Cuba: to end communism and make the people free. The mechanisms used to reach this goal haven't always been the best, but the goal is a good one."
I don't disagree it's a good goal, my issue is the fact that the US is in many ways keeping it artificially poorer than it need be. I believe that if they allowed trade with them and allowed the poverty issue to be relaxed somewhat that as the people there were able to receive a better funded education system, were given access to much modern technology, that they would find freedom in their own time.
Again, look at Iran, it is after all the educated, better off people that have been fighting for freedom and true democracy, whilst it is the poor that have been upholding Ahmadinejad and Khamenei's dictatorship.
I firmly believe freedom comes with good education, and good education needs to be financed. I would not be suprised if had the US had lifted the embargo 20 to 30 years ago if Cuba had not already by now have massively changed to be much more free and much more westernised much like many of the ex-USSR Eastern European nations have within that same time frame.
I'd actually be quite sad if they did away with the points system. It ensures costings are roughly fair across all regions as it's effectively a global currency, bought for fairly balanced local prices.
It's much easier for them to set a global price in terms of MS points and sell the points depending on local currency than to constantly try and update the price of every piece of content. You'd end up with a situation like with Steam where people in the UK can be charged as much as 200% of elsewhere. Right now it isn't perfect with MS points, but it is much more fair than most other systems from iTunes to Steam in terms of pricing.
Yeah, except it's basically just a load of complete and utter bollocks from a serial ambulance chaser:
"As for Lassoff, he's no stranger to suing big tech companies and other organizations. Records show he sued Google in 2006, claiming the search ads he placed fell victim to click fraud. He also sued Bally's Casino in Atlantic City in 2005, claiming he was attacked by a drunken patron while sitting at a poker table."
The problem with his argument is that you can redownload content whenever you want to, so even if the download servers did fail for a couple of days, you'd still be able to download it after that. Despite having spent a small fortune on XBox Live, I've never had any problems accessing content I've bought. The issue is that his argument doesn't even really make sense- Microsoft would have nothing to gain by preventing users downloading content they've bought because it would mean those users wouldn't go on to buy any more content afterwards. It's not like DLC really costs them anything much to provide, it's not too far off being just pure profit, they're not just going to risk turning that away. Even if you do run into problems it's not like Microsoft support wont help either, when my original XBox 360 died through RROD they gave me 4200 points when I complained about my DLC not being tied to my replacement console anymore and then tied my content to my new console for me.
This story is about as stupid as the Visual Studio tabs one from the other day. Really, has it come to this? Slashdot is so desperate for anti-MS stories now that it really has resorted to just scraping the bottom of the barrel?
"The reason for the US antipathy against Syria is because of Lebanon and Israel, but especially Lebanon. I don't think Syria has any real interest in attacking Israel (despite their words indicating otherwise; sometimes it is good for a dictator to maintain an enemy), but they have been known to cause serious problems in Lebanon and assassinate their politicians."
To be fair I don't disagree so much with the position on Syria as Syria absolutely does fund and arm Hezbollah and Hamas. My point with regards to Syria is that the position is somewhat hypocritical- Venezuela is more of a threat to peace than Syria overall, but Venezuela provides more oil to the US. Similarly it's also not as if the US itself hasn't funded terrorist groups in the past, either directly- i.e. arming the same Afghans they're fighting now against Russia, or indirectly- i.e. allowing US soil to be used as a fundraising and training ground for IRA terrorists who would attack it's ally, Britain, all to avoid angering the larger Irish community in the US and hence losing votes.
"If you want to understand why the US keeps the embargo on Cuba, you have to realize that a large number of Cubans have risked their lives to escape the Castro regime, coming by boat across the Gulf of Mexico (have you ever wondered what it is in Cuba that they want to escape?)."
This is the US argument certainly, and it's kept afloat in the US by the fact that very few Americans ever can visit because of the embargo. but in reality many Europeans and Canadians visit every year and see quite a different picture. Sure some are unhappy, but there are so many that were poor, but happy. I spent a fair bit of time off resort, because I was searching for some specific species of cactus (Melocactus harlowii and Melocactus matanzanus) and I found the locals both friendly and helpful. One guy, despite my horribly broken Spanish, took me around 2 miles to a population of Melocactus matanzanus- precisely what I was looking for! I'll admit I was a little scared being dragged off into the wilderness for so long by a random Cuban, but my fears were completely and utterly unfounded.
For the vast majority it's not political, it's because their country is so poor and there's is a better life in the US for them- it's no different to the reason many Mexicans similarly risk their lives to leave Mexico for the US in this respect. What makes it worse in this case though is that Cuba is so poor precisely because of the US embargo. If Cuba could trade with the US, it would be a thriving nation being right next door to you and having lots of fertile land. This alone would greatly improve the lives of Cubans. Sure some people that leave do hate Castro, and sure Cuba has some human rights violations- but more so than places like Venezuela, or ironically, even major US trading partners like Russia and China? Certainly not- at least Cuba just jails journalists it doesn't like, the Russian and Chinese governments have them outright assassinated.
The problem the US faces with Cuba now is that it's told itself and everyone else for so long that the embargo is there to try and pressure Cuba into regime change, which has clearly not worked, but they do not seem to want to lose faith. Lifting the embargo would be by far the best option, because it's almost certain that with increased wealth and hence and increasingly educated population, that things would change anyway. In fact, if American companies were allowed to operate there, this alone would help push change. Even more rediculous that Cuba was first to offer help after hurricane Katrina- a country well placed to help and with perhaps more experience than any other nation in dealing with hurricanes. The US turned down the offer, refusing to accept help from Cuba- yes, the US position on Cuba is so illogical that they'll even rather let their own citizens die than accept help from them.
At the end of the day, Cuba was the one nation in the Americas that the US failed to strong arm in the cold war, and America refuses to
It's not so much about being able to fire or quit on the spot, it's about giving both the employer and the employee time to make alternative arrangements.
It means that the company has a month or whatever your leave period is to find a replacement so that they're not inconvenienced and hence don't have their business dealings interrupted and it's about ensuring the employee has time to find another job, so that they're not a drain on the state either because they end up claiming unemployment benefits, or because they have no money and end up resorting to crime, or simply end up losing their house and end up on the street.
I should note that you can still just walk out of your job here tommorrow if you choose, you don't have to work your notice period, however if you do then you just wont get paid any remaining holiday leave you haven't used up and are owed for example that's all. Similarly companies can just sack you tommorrow if they want too, but they have to have justification to do it without giving you a bit of notice and hence time to find another job.
Effectively, we have the same freedoms in terms of firing and quitting, just that we have additional safeguards to ensure it's done in a way that minimises problems for both the employee and the employer and makes the transition between employees and jobs as smooth as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
"Leaving plenty of space in front of you instead of riding someone's bumper (at a light or stopped in traffic) means you won't be as likely to end up in a sandwich."
I'm a firm believer in this two on single lane roads, but stupid drivers make it impractical on multi-lane roads.
The problem is, if you leave a safe gap on a multi-lane road, someone always squeezes into it forcing a dangerous gap between you and them. Your choice is to then slow and increase the gap, or drive as is being ultra-alert to the people in front of him so you can brake. The problem is if you take the first option, increase the gap, some other arsehole rinses and repeats. Effectively, the best you can do is the second option which really, really sucks because it puts you at fault should there be a crash and you end up running into his back end, but that's the option you get left with regardless.
Whilst I'm not saying it's your fault still, it's good practice to assume that people wont stop at stop signs even though they should.
In the UK we have lots of roundabouts, and I mean lots. The amount of people who incorrectly indicate on roundabouts is phenomenal. It's not always easy to tell if someone is exiting the roundabout or not, it should be easy to tell- they should just indicate and go off, but often they don't, sometimes they indicate to go off and then don't even. The point is, when pulling out onto a roundabout you can't rely on what they should do, you have to base your decision on their speed, the cars angle and so forth.
The same goes for stop signs, traffic lights and so on, if someone's approaching a stop sign fast enough that they don't appear as if they are going to stop then you have to prepare for that. Driving in the UK is a nightmare nowadays and our driving tests reflect this sort of thing, you shouldn't have to look left when turning right at traffic lights when your light is green, but you do because you must make sure no one is running the light.
So whilst you may not be at fault for an accident, it is still possible to avoid a lot of them. There are always circumstances where you cannot avoid them certainly- where you simply don't have enough visibility to see that someone is going so fast they aren't going to stop when they should for example. As such again, I'm not saying you could have helped it- perhaps this was your circumstance, there just wasn't the visibility to see her coming. What I'm saying is that even your scenario of someone running a stop sign in many cases could often still be avoided.
Avoiding accidents isn't just about who was technically at fault at the end of the day, and whilst the parent appears to take things a little too much to the paranoid and the extreme (i.e. not driving at all on certain days of the year) I think there is a little truth in what he says at least, in that some accidents can be avoided, even when you weren't the one at fault in said accident.
It's interesting that they're losing you with bugs and lack of features.
I've been a long time Firefox user, but with every version it's got slower and slower, the last version, 3.5 was at an all time low for speed and I saw 3.6 was out. Sure enough it mentioned speed improvements and I thought hey, maybe they've finally fixed the problems. I installed it, and much to my dismay it was the same old story- Firefox had gotten even slower again. Not only that but having left it open on Friday night, I came to my PC the next day in the afternoon and found the whole system running slow. I checked task manager and, well, the reason was pretty obvious- Firefox was using 1.8gb of RAM. Yes, you read that right, talk about memory leak.
Furthmore, Firefox actually crashed last night for the first time in over a year, and whilst it's got great error handling, the fact it crashed is interesting enough. In the crash report it wanted to send to Mozilla, the tab that crashed it was a session to 192.168.0.1 - my router. That page auto-refreshes every 5 seconds or so to show the current connection status, I guess again there's some memory leak there and having been auto-refreshing overnight, it just keeled over.
I tend to put these things down to plugins, but I've already disabled/removed everything including the .NET/Office plugins, Shockwave/Flash and Java to try and speed the browser up. My machine is in decent condition as it wasn't long ago I installed Windows 7- back in October or so, and as such is not full of crap or anything, it's a relatively minimal setup still right now. The hardware is a 2.83ghz quad core, with 8gb of RAM, a nVidia 280 and so on so spec wise there are no issues. Perhaps most telling is that other browser perform just fine.
The fact is, Firefox over the past year or two has got progressively worse, it's become less stable, more buggy, and much slower.
So here I am, using Chrome today, for the first time, because something has happened that I thought never would, Firefox has become slower than, and buggier than even Internet Explorer.
If Chrome doesn't play out well, I have to say I'm rather tempted to make Opera my primary browser. Either way, any Firefox update is going to require massive improvements to bring it back to the realm of being worth using still. It's gone from a clear first-place browser IMO, to being perhaps the worst pick of the mainstream browsers (well, it's still ahead of Safari for Windows at least).
The JVM is indeed a virtual machine, there's certainly nothing wrong with that name, as is the CLR.
To give you a better understanding of the meaning, you have to imagine a theoretical machine that can execute Java bytecode (or in the case of .NET, CIL bytecode) directly. The JVM and .NET CLR are both still virtual machines because they are simply software implementations of such a theoretical machine. In this respect you'll note that the concept is actually all that different to the idea of software like VMWare which is effectively just a Virtual Machine that runs x86 machine code.
I'm not aware of any examples off by heart, but I wouldn't be suprised if there is hardware out there that directly executes Java bytecode nowadays in fact, rather than it being a mere theoretical machine.
I guess the point is to realise that a machine doesn't necessarily have to be a piece of actual physical hardware though, but can be a theoretical concept like the Turing machine is. A virtual machine is just an implementation of such a concept, whether it's real or theoretical. The actual output of execution for example either a full blown operating environment as in VMWare, or a single app as in the JVM is really irrelevant, both are still virtual machines at the end of the day.
The only caveat is to remember that not all theoretical machines can be implemented, so although a theoretical machine can have a VM, not all theoretical machines could have virtual machine implementations. An example reason for this might be a theoretical machine that has memory bounds far beyond that of a real machine (i.e. infinite memory), and so which could never be implemented in software.
It depends how they've handled it.
It could be that they've dropped a lot of the idiotic legacy crap that makes PHP such a mess, and so their new engine simply doesn't have a lot of this cruft in, which is fine for them if they've avoided the legacy stuff, but which would be useless in the mainstream version as people require backwards compatability.
It could alternatively just be optimised towards certain tasks at the expense of slow downs in others so not a one size fits all improvement.
"The real reason why books from Apple are likely to be more expensive (as are those from Sony today) is that Apple is a small retailer relative to Amazon. Amazon has much more negotiating strength. The same things that Apple can and does do in negotiations with record labels Amazon does with publishers."
So why, despite Apple having the largest online music store, are they also the most expensive?
I don't think Apple's pricing has anything to do with purchasing power, because even when they do have purchasing power as with iTunes, they're still the most expensive option.
I think the issue is that these things don't increase in a straight line, you get peaks and troughs, whilst modern Britain is clearly better than medieval Britain for example, I would argue at least that in Britain we are certanly much less free, and there is a lower standard of ethics and morals now than we had back in the 90s.
The tide does seem to be turning though now, as people in the UK finally get tired of Labour's authoritarianism, and as the European Court of Human Rights rules more and more of Labour's laws as illegal.
I would argue that the last decade has been quite bad for liberty, ethics, and morals, due to a cominbation of post 9/11 scaremongering, war, and counter-terrorism laws and companies being a little too unregulated. Certainly in the UK, I feel that the culmination of the financial crisis, too many steps too far in different areas by the government, and the MPs expenses scandal here represented a local minimum, and that we are now, hopefully, on a path to improvement with elections looming, people finally being tired of authoritarian Labour, and banks being so unethical they ended up shooting itself in the foot.
So I agree, the idea that things are worse in general now than they ever have been simply isn't true- things have been much worse, however I also agree that things have gotten markedly worse this last decade than the decade before, but I do not believe the decline is terminal- only a trough in some theoretical graph that could measure these things.
To be fair I think his point was partially valid.
You're right that Firefox core has the advantage of public vulnerabilities, but the issue is that Firefox allows for non-sandboxed extensions, which are often proprietary (i.e. Flash) and so effectively leaves Firefox with the same issue.
Firefox certainly isn't as safe as any browser can be, simply because of the fact extensions are vulnerable in this manner.
I think what the UK gov is getting at is quite valid- not that IE has the same or less security flaws per-se, I think they probably accept that it does, but that no other browser really is built with a truly secure architecture either, such that even if you switch away from IE, whilst Firefox itself may be secure, many users will end up with extensions that aren't and so will remain vulnerable to something or other regardless.
To be fair on Google, this story could actually just be sensationalist crap.
On Android phones for example, applications that use location data can either use GPS if available, or use your rough network location based on the cell tower you're communicating with- but obviously that's very rough.
This patent sounds like they're just trying to improve the usefulness of location data to make location based apps more useful when you don't have a GPS signal, have GPS disabled on low battery, or just don't have GPS in your phone.
This is one of those cases where the sensationalism is likely just paranoid stupidity, because the solution to avoid it would simply be to not use location based apps, or if you do, tick the box that stops the app sending your location data to Google. It just seems to be a better way of doing something that's already done and where the privacy argument has already been had and the safeguards have already been put in place.
I assume from what you say then it explicitly states to read all other instructions before doing anything? As the parent says, if it's merely as the person he was responding to phrased it then it's ambiguous as telling students to read ahead by itself doesn't inherently mean not carrying out the instructions as you do.
Because UAVs can be taken out in a relatively trivial manner by countries like Russia using ASAT technologies to take down entirely defenceless satellites that are required to relay command and control to UAVs.
Manned aircraft are still required to protect against that scenario.
"Of course, I get the point of the test."
I don't, sure I can see the trick, but this is not something I've seen or heard of in the UK. What exactly is it intended to achieve?
The same way they managed to miss the need to pay various patent fees owed to Nokia and Kodak before releasing the iPhone I'd imagine.
Apple seems to think it's above the law.
I wouldn't be suprised if that's why they cashed in- so that they can do a u-turn without losing face themselves, they can simply say the investors decided for them and it was out of their hand. Still, I could be wrong, we may be pleasantly suprised.
That said, he definitely seems to be the good guy at Google- he certainly seems worlds apart from Schmidt who actually seems to believe in the surveillance state.
Hehe, I just read the quote from Apple from that article:
"...Right now, from our point of view, the products in there are principally based on hardware that's much less powerful than we think customers want, software technology that is not good, cramped keyboards, small displays. Et cetera. We don't think that people are going to be pleased with those type of products. But we'll see."
It's quite an ironic quote in the context of the iPad- the iPad is even less powerful than most netbooks, has a more limited OS than most netbooks, has an even more cramped keyboard that is also on-screen, and has an equally sized display.
So basically, what Apple are saying with the iPad is "We've taken all the negative traits we thought about netbooks, made them worse, added more, and doubled the price".
I agree Apple seem to want to move in a direction involving greater control for them and even less openness, but I'm not sure money made by the app store is the reason. See here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/26/app_store/
Apple seem to be suggesting themselves that iTunes and the App store don't really make them that much money.
I'm not pretending it wouldn't be easy to do the conversion, what I'm saying is that, for some reason or another, all other digital content stores that use real world currencies end up with much larger pricing disparities than Microsoft have managed to maintain under their points system. Yes it would be nice to have a real currency system, if there was some guarantee I wouldn't get ripped off.
To illustrate my point, although it fluctuates with the exchange rate, the UK gets charged roughly 111% of what the US does in terms of Microsoft points, however you must bear in mind that 17.5% of that is tax, so pre-tax we're currently getting a decent deal- less than the US. If the exchange rate improves though back up to $2 ever again, then we'd be paying at most 130% of US price, or 113% or so pre-tax of US price. In contrast Steam and iTunes have quite often sold items with a $1 = £1 conversion factor so again, when the pound was at $2 to £1, their rate was in contrast, around 200%. Under the points system Microsoft for whatever reason has been able to maintain around a 70% lower disparity in cost conversions than other online distribution channels.
You'll probably be interested to know that Microsoft, for it's games on demand service that lets you download retail games, they have actually dropped the MS points mechanism and charge actual currency, but guess what? £19.99 = $19.99, £29.99 = $29.99.
So in every single case of real currency stores, I'm faced with a $1 = £1 exchange rate or close to, and yet in Microsoft points, it's much closer to the real exchange rate.
You're right that it's easy to do, and whilst logically I have to agree that MS points would seem to be about screwing the consumer, practically that idea just simply does not hold. I'd love to know the reason for it, and I'd love to know why companies feel the need to rip people off more when using currency than Microsoft do with MS points, but the reason evades me. Regardless, I hope this makes it more clear now as to why I actually prefer the MS points system- because perhaps rather ironically, I get a far better deal than I ever get just being billed in real currency.
"Mistakes happen and when they do they must be rectified."
Indeed.
"As someone who writes software for a living and manages a corporate network as well I can think of dozens of technical issues that could cause a loss or prevention of service. In each case MS would be responsible for rectifying the issue."
I'm intrigued to know what sort of errors would arise that would prevent a small number of users downloading files? If the download servers are working for everyone else, that means that the servers are up, that people are being routed to the content. When we're talking about errors for such a small number of users the problem is almost certainly going to be to do with routing to Microsoft's servers from outside of Microsoft's network, a faulty router on the users side, or something similar. Microsoft is most certainly not responsible for rectifying errors outside of it's network.
"Unless you have some other source of information other than TFA you have absolutely no way of judging this issue."
On the contrary, the fact that there is no other source speaks volumes. If this was really an issue then we'd have heard about it from sources other than this guy. The fact it's not suggests one of two scenarios:
1) The guy is filing a fraudulent case
2) The problems the guy had were at his end
Has the guy provided any evidence whatsoever himself that this actually happened? All I see listed are hollow claims, something he apparently has a history of against large companies.
I'll clarify for you.
In around 1000 pieces of content downloaded by myself from Xbox live, big and small, only one has failed because of Microsoft's servers and that was the free DLC for The Saboteur, however I would guess it's because the game arrived a day early for me and the content wasn't up until release day, the next day, when it worked.
I have had a few fail because my connection has dropped, but it still doesn't matter, because it doesn't outright fail, it supports resuming and carries on where it left off.
Your post is confusing.
In one way, you're right that the "ethically bad" parts aren't the intentions or the desire, because disagreeing with the use of the term ethically bad means not supporting the ideas of freedom of speech and freedom of thought respectively.
However, the parent was correct in that extremism does include ideologies in it's definition. One can be a religious extremist if they have religious beliefs that are far outside the norm but do not carry them out.
I would also disagree with the extent Scientology goes to, whilst it does not carry out bombings and so forth, it most certainly does attack people psychologically, and arguably from various bits of evidence, physically as well. It does cause financial damage to people, and it does get involved in trying to illegitimately influence poltical opinion and action. So sure, the bombs aren't there, but the effects and intentions most certainly are.
Sure you can argue as you have that because the evil things Scientology has done have been done relatively rarely that they can't be held against the organisation as a whole, but then, Scientology is actually a relatively small organisation, so continuing the theme of "relatively", the number of evil actions in relation to the size of the organisation is still well above the norm for a similar sized group of people. They still stand out as being, on average, particularly more evil than most groups.
"Venezuela is a threat to the peace? You mean through their funding of FARC?"
Absolutely, what Chavez is doing in Venezuela is turning a democracy into a dictatorship. One run by a leader who has maassively increased his nation's military expendature and has outright threatened war with neighbouring Colombia, as well as as you mention, providing a safe haven for the likes of FARC, effectively using them as a tool to perform war by proxy. Chavez is certainly damaging the Venezuelan economy but hasn't tanked it so far that he can't afford to keep spending on military equipment- largely because of US trading. If the US had a similar block on Venezuela as it did on Syria and Iran than Venezuela would've not been able to increase it's military expendature as it has. The reason this hasn't happened is because it would mean the price of oil would go up for the US and it simply does not want to pay that price.
"Surely there are happy people in Cuba, but they are not free. I think we can both agree that freedom is a good thing."
I think we agree freedom is a good thing, because it is a mindset shared by most people here. Unfortunately a lot of people do not put much value in freedom- this is why as a citizen of the UK I find myself feeling less and less comfy in my own country, because the majority of the population has no real interest in freedom and supports increased anti-terrorism legislation whatever the cost in freedom. Similarly, there are millions, arguably hundreds of millions of people in China who are happy with the government, despite their oppression. So whilst I'd like to see these people have more freedom because I think they'd appreciate it if they had it, I also realise that it's not their priority- they would much prefer to be able to move out of poverty than have freedom. Whilst I could be wrong, I have hope that freedom would follow on from that anyway.
"If the only reason Cuba is poor is because it can't trade with the US, that doesn't say much for communism, does it?"
I'm not sure it says anything about communism at all- many capitalist, democratic countries would fall into poverty equally quickly if they were put in a position that isolated them from the trading partners that are an ideal match to what they can produce and provide. There are similarly many poor democracies around. I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with communism if it were the case that a good fair leader could be found to implement it, but the issue is that communist regimes are usually installed under a power hungry elite who are then further corrupted by the power. Effectively it is the leadership that corrupts a regime rather than a fundamental flaw in the system itself- Iran for example is a democracy, and contrary to popular belief even the supreme leader is accountable to the elected assembly of experts such that the whole system is democratically accountable to the very top, and yet the country has still had it's political system hijacked and corrupted by bad leadership.
"The US has good goals with Cuba: to end communism and make the people free. The mechanisms used to reach this goal haven't always been the best, but the goal is a good one."
I don't disagree it's a good goal, my issue is the fact that the US is in many ways keeping it artificially poorer than it need be. I believe that if they allowed trade with them and allowed the poverty issue to be relaxed somewhat that as the people there were able to receive a better funded education system, were given access to much modern technology, that they would find freedom in their own time.
Again, look at Iran, it is after all the educated, better off people that have been fighting for freedom and true democracy, whilst it is the poor that have been upholding Ahmadinejad and Khamenei's dictatorship.
I firmly believe freedom comes with good education, and good education needs to be financed. I would not be suprised if had the US had lifted the embargo 20 to 30 years ago if Cuba had not already by now have massively changed to be much more free and much more westernised much like many of the ex-USSR Eastern European nations have within that same time frame.
I'd actually be quite sad if they did away with the points system. It ensures costings are roughly fair across all regions as it's effectively a global currency, bought for fairly balanced local prices.
It's much easier for them to set a global price in terms of MS points and sell the points depending on local currency than to constantly try and update the price of every piece of content. You'd end up with a situation like with Steam where people in the UK can be charged as much as 200% of elsewhere. Right now it isn't perfect with MS points, but it is much more fair than most other systems from iTunes to Steam in terms of pricing.
Yeah, except it's basically just a load of complete and utter bollocks from a serial ambulance chaser:
"As for Lassoff, he's no stranger to suing big tech companies and other organizations. Records show he sued Google in 2006, claiming the search ads he placed fell victim to click fraud. He also sued Bally's Casino in Atlantic City in 2005, claiming he was attacked by a drunken patron while sitting at a poker table."
The problem with his argument is that you can redownload content whenever you want to, so even if the download servers did fail for a couple of days, you'd still be able to download it after that. Despite having spent a small fortune on XBox Live, I've never had any problems accessing content I've bought. The issue is that his argument doesn't even really make sense- Microsoft would have nothing to gain by preventing users downloading content they've bought because it would mean those users wouldn't go on to buy any more content afterwards. It's not like DLC really costs them anything much to provide, it's not too far off being just pure profit, they're not just going to risk turning that away. Even if you do run into problems it's not like Microsoft support wont help either, when my original XBox 360 died through RROD they gave me 4200 points when I complained about my DLC not being tied to my replacement console anymore and then tied my content to my new console for me.
This story is about as stupid as the Visual Studio tabs one from the other day. Really, has it come to this? Slashdot is so desperate for anti-MS stories now that it really has resorted to just scraping the bottom of the barrel?
"The reason for the US antipathy against Syria is because of Lebanon and Israel, but especially Lebanon. I don't think Syria has any real interest in attacking Israel (despite their words indicating otherwise; sometimes it is good for a dictator to maintain an enemy), but they have been known to cause serious problems in Lebanon and assassinate their politicians."
To be fair I don't disagree so much with the position on Syria as Syria absolutely does fund and arm Hezbollah and Hamas. My point with regards to Syria is that the position is somewhat hypocritical- Venezuela is more of a threat to peace than Syria overall, but Venezuela provides more oil to the US. Similarly it's also not as if the US itself hasn't funded terrorist groups in the past, either directly- i.e. arming the same Afghans they're fighting now against Russia, or indirectly- i.e. allowing US soil to be used as a fundraising and training ground for IRA terrorists who would attack it's ally, Britain, all to avoid angering the larger Irish community in the US and hence losing votes.
"If you want to understand why the US keeps the embargo on Cuba, you have to realize that a large number of Cubans have risked their lives to escape the Castro regime, coming by boat across the Gulf of Mexico (have you ever wondered what it is in Cuba that they want to escape?)."
This is the US argument certainly, and it's kept afloat in the US by the fact that very few Americans ever can visit because of the embargo. but in reality many Europeans and Canadians visit every year and see quite a different picture. Sure some are unhappy, but there are so many that were poor, but happy. I spent a fair bit of time off resort, because I was searching for some specific species of cactus (Melocactus harlowii and Melocactus matanzanus) and I found the locals both friendly and helpful. One guy, despite my horribly broken Spanish, took me around 2 miles to a population of Melocactus matanzanus- precisely what I was looking for! I'll admit I was a little scared being dragged off into the wilderness for so long by a random Cuban, but my fears were completely and utterly unfounded.
For the vast majority it's not political, it's because their country is so poor and there's is a better life in the US for them- it's no different to the reason many Mexicans similarly risk their lives to leave Mexico for the US in this respect. What makes it worse in this case though is that Cuba is so poor precisely because of the US embargo. If Cuba could trade with the US, it would be a thriving nation being right next door to you and having lots of fertile land. This alone would greatly improve the lives of Cubans. Sure some people that leave do hate Castro, and sure Cuba has some human rights violations- but more so than places like Venezuela, or ironically, even major US trading partners like Russia and China? Certainly not- at least Cuba just jails journalists it doesn't like, the Russian and Chinese governments have them outright assassinated.
The problem the US faces with Cuba now is that it's told itself and everyone else for so long that the embargo is there to try and pressure Cuba into regime change, which has clearly not worked, but they do not seem to want to lose faith. Lifting the embargo would be by far the best option, because it's almost certain that with increased wealth and hence and increasingly educated population, that things would change anyway. In fact, if American companies were allowed to operate there, this alone would help push change. Even more rediculous that Cuba was first to offer help after hurricane Katrina- a country well placed to help and with perhaps more experience than any other nation in dealing with hurricanes. The US turned down the offer, refusing to accept help from Cuba- yes, the US position on Cuba is so illogical that they'll even rather let their own citizens die than accept help from them.
At the end of the day, Cuba was the one nation in the Americas that the US failed to strong arm in the cold war, and America refuses to
It's not so much about being able to fire or quit on the spot, it's about giving both the employer and the employee time to make alternative arrangements.
It means that the company has a month or whatever your leave period is to find a replacement so that they're not inconvenienced and hence don't have their business dealings interrupted and it's about ensuring the employee has time to find another job, so that they're not a drain on the state either because they end up claiming unemployment benefits, or because they have no money and end up resorting to crime, or simply end up losing their house and end up on the street.
I should note that you can still just walk out of your job here tommorrow if you choose, you don't have to work your notice period, however if you do then you just wont get paid any remaining holiday leave you haven't used up and are owed for example that's all. Similarly companies can just sack you tommorrow if they want too, but they have to have justification to do it without giving you a bit of notice and hence time to find another job.
Effectively, we have the same freedoms in terms of firing and quitting, just that we have additional safeguards to ensure it's done in a way that minimises problems for both the employee and the employer and makes the transition between employees and jobs as smooth as possible.