Core tools ========== - Genuine disadvantage: Reports all your personal details to the FSB offering great benefits. - Internet Exporter 7: Export your entire internet history to the FSB personal backup centre. - News Hunter: Seeks out the latest news sources in a killer way. - Polonium Anti-spyware: Works on even retired threats. - Policy editor: Push through policies on YOUR agenda, no questions asked. - Defragmenter: Crush those bad clusters that dare try and break away.
Games ===== - Roulette: Gun adapter included. By signing up to Genuing Disadvantage, if you fit the bill, this game comes with additional levels of difficulty. - South Ossetian Invaders: Take down those who dare try and take their territory back. - PutinOS chess: Enjoy the opportunity to beat Garry Kasparov. With a baton.
I actually wondered the same, but seeing a recent BPI (The UK version of the RIAA) representitive talking bollocks on the news and noticing he was quite young I'm sad to say the problem isn't to do with any generation gap.
It's to do with people in the music industry getting good money for so long by effectively screwing artists with the way they handle contracts to allow them into their music cartel that controls production and up until the internet, distribution they simply will do anything to maintain that status quo whatever their age. They've found a way to make money by screwing the workers (artists) and price fixing the cost of something that outside of their cartel environment would be much cheaper. Think about it, how cheap would songs be if you didn't have to pay for the production, distribution, chief execs, lawyers, other office staff etc. that the music industry employs? Artists publishing direct to the net and only having to pay for marketing could offer just that.
These people are now almost entirely all redundant, they're just fighting to prolong their end date for as many years as possible by creating jobs for themselves with court cases and such. What they should've done is what Apple, Amazon, Play and the likes did - create online music stores, then they'd have still had jobs with a future. They even had the resources to do so, they just didn't have the foresight to realise physical media wasn't going to remain the little price fixing gem it has been so far for them forever.
"FBI, being part of the Executive Branch are not (and ought not) to decide, what's "harmless" and what is not. If the Legislature has made something illegal, then it is the Executive's duty to enforce it. Now, given limited resources the can (and ought to) prioritize certain things up and down. But they should prioritize anything down to zero."
Why not? If they don't then again, more serious crimes have to go untouched which is wrong no matter what. The real point to be made is that if the FBI has to prioritise something to 0 and that something not being dealt with is a problem then you have a funding issue. Under no circumstances should harmless crimes be dealt with instead of the much more serious ones because otherwise you face the scenario I mentioned- violent crimes going unsolved in favour of arguably entirely harmless crimes that are only crimes in the first place because of ignorant political agendas and not because they make the people safer or the country better in anyway. I understand it's not the FBIs position to decide that, but it also just requires simple common sense that if you have rape/murder/organised crime/some other serious crime, it's a whole lot more of a priority than something that fits into the pointless law category. If people creating stupid laws want them enforced they either have to provide extra funding to enforce them as well or they have to decide that they're more important than the serious crimes to deal with. They can't make the FBI to prioritise themselves and complain when they apply common sense to doing so.
"Yes, actually, that was his point -- that "peaceful protesters" and "benign hackers" should be able to get away with it. He didn't say it outright, but was nevertheless quite explicit. I don't know, how anyone could've missed it..."
If he didn't say it outright, then no, he wasn't in any way explicit, if he was explicit he'd have said it outright. I think the misunderstanding here is that of quantification though, what he and I are saying is that it shouldn't be treated as a non-crime, it should still be treated as a crime because as you point out, that's how it is on the books but what we're saying is that although it's a crime, it's a crime that isn't high priority enough with the given resources to deserve any attention given to it whilst other more important cases go unsolved. If these pointless crimes need be investigated then again, the funding needs to be provided for the resources to exist for that to happen.
"1) Google was Obama's #1 campaign contributor and has already received a number of "special considerations" that embed them into the Obama administration."
Actually, I think the people were. But they're generally treated as a separate entity despite them having a shared interest in transparency. I'd argue single biggest contributor whilst sounding threatening isn't. If one person paid Obama £50million and was a nazi, I don't think we'd expert Obama to follow a nazi agenda if everyone else contributed £50billion for example. If Google's interests run counter to the vast majority of other business/people which it would if his administration was favouring one business over another it's not going to get him very far. Microsoft, Yahoo and such would be sure to cry foul. This is different to say the Bush administration who when it came to oil and health focussed on giving the whole industries help for their contributions rather than just individual companies in those industries. It's when things start going in favour of an entire industry you need to start worrying- the RIAA, Hollywood, Big oil, Medical, Finance and so on.
"2) Once you start using an email address it is with you forever unless you're willing to dump all of your contacts. Not to mention force of habit."
No, the article states that they should be contacted on that address, that doesn't mean they're going to start making address books on it and replying from there all the time. There's no reason e-mails couldn't be exported later on into the new system and have the old g-mail address setup to forward to their e-mail servers where auto-responders simply reply saying "This address is now obsolete, please e-mail ". That's a pretty quick easy way to move people to new accounts and the fact it was just an auto-responder rather than a forward means people would have to make the effort to actually send the e-mail again, if it was a forward they may keep using the old address, if it's an auto-responder they'd get used to using the new address pretty quick for conveniences sake.
I have to admit I've not really come across heat pumps before. How do they work? Temperatures can get as low as -8C here and the over-winter temperatures I need to reach are around a minimum of 10C to 15C mark over night. I also need to make sure humidity is kept low, as many plants are desert plants, those that aren't I have seperate units for (not hydroponic as such, just closed containers with a gravel/water base).
I already lower the greenhouse volume over winter when the heaters need to be on by running a thermal blanket along the eaves to cut the amount of vertical height over night and also use a bubble wrap covering for insulation all over. During the day, the sun does a good job of heating it up with the somewhat transparent bubble wrap coating and the thermal blanket pulled back and continues to allow light in so it's a fairly decent setup. I think I'd struggle to improve things much more in that area at least, but any methods to cut heating costs further is certainly something I'd jump on as it already costs around £600 ($850 ish US) to heat between October through to March/April. That doesn't exactly break the bank, but it's a cost that I would gladly reduce if I could.
I do agree with you but just playing devils advocate on a particular technicality- regarding making a common cause with your enemies, I'd argue this effectively depends on how you define enemies.
One might quite reasonably argue that Halliburton for example is an enemy of the state due to the very fact that they've been responsible for getting many American's killed on jobs that these workers were sent on for no reason other than to increase Halliburton's ability to charge- that is, take, US tax payers money. Their execs also moved or were going to move abroad, to one of the arab states (Dubai?), the reason for which many argued was to avoid US prosecution. There are other situations where Bush has arguably helped who are fairly clearly defined as the enemy although this is primarily through incompetence than malice. An example is vastly strengthening Iran and Syria by weakening Iraq.
I can see why some would certainly argue he is guilty of treason and I don't think their view is entirely without merit. I do think it's just a little too much of a stretch though realistically to be a valid path to pursue.
I find the iPod's wheel is often described as a revolutionary peice of design and used as an example of the amazing things Apple does.
Unfortunately, the Creative Zen had a side scroll wheel years earlier that you'd scroll up and down to scroll through songs and click in to select etc. etc. The wheel on the iPod is different only in that you move your finger round the wheel straight on rather than having a physical wheel you scroll up and down- the concept is identical, only the implementation is different.
If anyone truly believes Apple is some great innovator and that there ideas didn't stem from existing ideas then they're pretty oblivious to how just about all businesses work. Apple did what Apple do well, they made the idea popular, making it popular doesn't necessarily mean they innovated and invented in the first place though.
The usual hypocritical response by what I can only call the extremist element of the set of all Mac fans would probably be "the wheel is different because it's used front on therefore it's innovation" but to take that stance the hypocrisy is that one could equally argue that the Windows 7 sidebar is different enough to be classed as innovation rather than immitation then also, which you can be sure the most extreme of Mac fans simply would not accept. When they're forced into a corner of applying the same principles to Microsoft as to Apple or choosing hypocrisy, they choose hypocrisy.
I don't hate Apple, I don't hate people who love Apple, I hate people who can't be objective and realise things for what they are.
So you're saying it's okay for them to regulate price, but not to regulate the ability to sell at all?
Regulating the price to that extreme would mean nowhere would stock them anyway so you still wouldn't get hold of them. The net effect would be the same - removal from sale, so what's the problem exactly?
Your outburst just sounds like an excuse to rant at environmentalists. What's wrong, are you mad at them because they're making you pay the actual price of your polluting products (i.e. the cost of the item AND the cost of the damage caused by the pollutants from using it)? Tough shit, everyone else has to live on the planet too. Your right to pollute isn't anymore important than anyone elses right to live on a clean, healthy planet. If you want to pollute, you can pay the cost to clean that up too rather than expect everyone else to clean up after you.
If there was one change I could make to the regulation of the media I'd say it should be to make them more accountable for what they write.
One example I recall is that the BBC and many other media outlets reported that in the killing of Stephen Pakeerah, a copy of Manhunt was found in the killers belongings and hence there was an inference that it was partly to blame for the fact the kid killed him by beating him to death with a hammer. The police however came forward and corrected the media saying actually, the copy of Manhunt was found as part of the victims belongings completely and utterly destroying the attempt to link Manhunt to a murder by the press.
Unfortunately, not a single media outlet posted this correction. If I had my way I'd make sure the media had to post corrections like this on the front or the back page of the paper where it's clearly visible. Also, I think it's only reasonable they should have had to pay compensation to Rockstar the game's publisher for possible loss of sales or damage to their reputation.
Instead though, they did exactly as you say, they posted what were outright lies and when the truth came forward they just ignored it so that the majority of the public were simply left believing the original, outright false story. What makes it worse for me, is when the BBC reprinted the lie that Manhunt was to blame I sent a formal complaint in. I never heard anything back, but instead saw the same lie repeated a further 2 times in later articles.
The media seems to think it's above the law and in all but a few (i.e. Max Mosley) cases, that seems to be sadly somewhat true. I still don't understand why it's okay for the press to follow someone around, possibly even tresspass to take photos of someone wherever they go yet if your average joe does it it's stalking- how is what the press does in any way not stalking? What they do fits the exact definition perfectly.
Because not all products offer cheaper alternatives. You'd effectively be raising the price 25% on things where there is no other option.
One example is that I have a heated greenhouse here in the UK, it's heated because I grow exotic plants, including cultivation of species that are critically endangered in the wild which I sell on cheaply to help discourage sales of habitat collected plants which I can undercut because the risk of smuggling carries a higher price than the price I can charge growing in bulk and transferring legally (well, at least in Europe, stupid CITES regulation does more harm than good outside Europe in this respect).
I already use an electric heater, I already use solar power where possible but the only alternative is to simply fall back to mains throughout October - March. There really is no cheaper alternative, natural gas is more expensive due to the fact you have to leave a gas burner on all the time, whilst electric heaters only need to come on when the temperature drops below a set level so electricity is the cheapest, most efficient option.
What you're proposing would act as a 25% increase in cost for something I'm doing that is already about as environmentally friendly as you can get. It would have the side effect of ultimately forcing me to raise prices due to the increased cost of electricity and then lowering the attractiveness of my plants over those that are collected from habitat for species that are on the very verge of extinction. I do not make a profit from this hobby, it's not as if I can cut that.
As well as casualties, some wars are simply more brutal too. Even dividing World War II up, I'd certainly have rather fought on the Western front than I would the Russian front or the pacific, certainly the Japanese fighting style was far more viscious and brutal.
No one can suggest for example, the first gulf war was on the same level of brutality as Vietnam. Similarly the kind of ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses that occured in Yugoslavia was far more horrific than anything like the Falklands war.
One thing that does stand out though, ironically, the more civilians are involved as part of the fighting force (although I suppose they're not then by definition, civilians), the more brutal it becomes. Military vs. military often seems to result in much less brutal wars than military vs. what I suppose would be called rebels or insurgents.
But if said crimes are actually harmless like those the parent cited then what's the problem with them being more commonplace exactly when more harmful crimes are being dealt with instead?
The parents point isn't that people should be able to break the law and get away with it, it's that police time is wasted with laws that are ultimately pointless for the aim of furthering political agendas and such.
You're effectively saying we should ignore say, a few rape cases, because little Billy being allowed to get away with downloading some MP3s might cause it to become more widespread. So fucking what? Catch the bloody rapists instead please.
You're confusing QWTF with TFC, I never said TF2 was worse than TFC, I agree it is light years ahead, TFC was by far the lowest point in TF's history.
What I'm saying is TF2 is much more faithful to QWTF (the original for Quake 1 that came before TFC) which is a good thing, because TFC wasn't faithful to it and was a horrible game as a result. TF2 is much more faithful, but the fact it's not truly faithful is where I'm saying it could be even better.
My point was that Valve realised TFC was a poor port of QWTF and simply not as fun and so made sure with TF2 they were much closer to the original, the problem is it took them nearly a decade to realise this and they still haven't quite got there yet, their comments suggest they're at a crossroads- do they become less true to the original and create new classes, do they become more true and bring in like hunted or do they do all.
My suggestion is they just become more true to the original- that path clearly made TF2 better than TFC so why not continue down that path and make it better again rather than do something that will very likely make it worse?
You do realise that if you think that's what I mean by grenades then you don't know what I'm referring to?
In QWTF, on top of standard weapons every class had normal hand grenades which could be cooked and a special grenade type- engineer had EMP grenade, scout had concussion, soldier had nail grenade etc.
I'm not looking for realism and can only assume by your comments you never played the original TF but instead only played TFC.
The original TF was well balanced and sparring was still perfectly possible, but grenades were an added tool in that on top. Grenades also added a whole new level of tactics through grenade jumps that are clearly missing from TF2 without them.
I didn't say it sucks either, I said it's simply not what it could have been if they'd stayed true to the original. QWTF had everything TF2 has and then some more without sacrificing balance or fun in any way at all. The entity system allowed for so much flexibility that we could have maps like hunted without needing it to be patched in as a new game mode also for example.
The fact you add in a note (and many complain) about playing a demoman allowing you to spam grenades annoyingly causing problems is demonstration in itself that TF2 is not as balanced as QWTF was. The fact Valve says the scout is due for some improvements and people complain about the weakness of the pyro is again, also evidence of this.
If you'd played QWTF you'd know that other than the obvious improvements in graphical detail, TF2 is less than that.
Because you're dealing with idiots. It's not a fault of.NET, applications can be put together in no time.
Despite what the parent says,.NET really is far quicker than QT, his comments clearly demonstrate he's not used it but that like you, because he's encountered bad developers who use it he assumes it's.NET that's the problem. This is absolutely not the case.
I know it's popular here to hate Microsoft, but.NET is an example of one of the things they've done right. It's a solid development platform, the.NET framework offers one of the best and most consistent and comprehensive sets of libraries around. Coupled with Visual Studio, another of Microsoft's few success stories you have arguably the best overall development environment going. It really is as has been said above, an absolute pleasure to develop with.
Perhaps the only valid criticism is that it's not cross-platform out the box. Slowness of development is certainly not a valid criticism of the environment but of the developer.
I used to love the original QWTF, I thought it was fantastic, perhaps the game I spent more time on than any other, despite having to pay dialup costs per minute back then.
I followed TF ever since it came out, and when TF2 was originally announce as a mod for Quake II I was excited, I was equally excited when it was slated as a massive combat game with commanders and people dropping down out of helicopters as the screenshots showed for Half-Life and then it's own game. After around 5 years I got bored of waiting then something like 9 years on it finally arrived.
Yet, when it arrived, everything new had been dropped and it turned out to be some copy of the original TV, minus some pretty damn important features like grenades and coupled in with some horrible graphical style. Now they talk of some of the classic maps and game modes, perhaps they'll even bring grenades back.
But my point is this, whilst TF2 is great, people obviously want more. It's taken them 9 or 10 years to end up back where they started, mimicking QWTF and even then not quite (again no grenades, lack of old favourite maps). Surely the lesson to be learned by now is that if they want to immitate the success of the original then all they needed to do all along is simply immitate the original albeit with updated graphics (minus the cartoony theme change).
Yes, I very much miss the QWTF days, but it does really seem Valve is only just in recent years beginning to realise what the old QWTF fans said all along- just stay true to the original. They've had a decade to figure this out.
Whilst I'm a fan of PHP myself, I have to say the new ASP.NET MVC framework is rather good.
It really does beat hands down anything in the PHP world in terms of how quickly you can get something up whilst maintaining quality. I'd argue partly this is because of the Visual Studio integration and the power of Visual Studio to start with.
I wouldn't ever build a live app. in web forms, but I could be pretty tempted with the new MVC framework I have to admit. The various PHP frameworks out there that perform a similar task such as CakePHP could learn a lot from it in terms of how quickly you can build with it without the usual sacrifice of quality of software you get with Microsoft's tools (again, web forms for example).
Of course, the thing is as well, the Microsoft platform is slowly getting better, Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 really aren't that bad, performance isn't too much different to Apache/PHP now and security since.NET is much improved. Of course, Apache was always pretty good so to say IIS is improving doesn't mean much in that context but certainly combined with.NET MVC I think the whole LAMP platform needs to watch out. The various PHP frameworks like Cake could do things such as dropping the stupid cake bake crap that fails half the time on Windows and is pretty much undocumented (It has one page in the docs that don't explain much beyond what it's for). In contrast Symfony is absolutely fantastic on documentation and so is Zend, but it's still much more hassle, and there's still many more security pitfalls you have to keep an eye on vs. ASP.NET MVC.
I'd probably like Java, but I've never used it professionally, only academically so can't compare with that. At the end of the day though, my point is that with ASP.NET MVC I can build a high quality site much more quickly and with much greater confidence than I can with any PHP framework right now.
I'm not sure what you mean by showing a "profit at their job".
Engineers engineer for example, they don't deal with the day today business decisions, they don't hire and fire, they just need to be able to engineer. That's a completely different mindset to a CEO who has to maintain control of the business and people under him.
I'm not saying it has to mean throwing away your morals, I'm just saying it requires a mindset where you're much less likely to have many morals at all, hence how they did so well in the first place- they didn't let things stand in their way.
How well do you think someone would do at moving in to a position as CEO of a mining firm if they had a moral objection to destroying countryside to build mines for example? To be a CEO of such a firm you can't let things like that stand in your way. Similar situations exist in all lines of business at the top level albeit not necessarily in such an obvious manner.
That's because synergy will have been running in user mode.
Unfortunately, trojans et al. are a little less respectful of privileges and memory boundaries.
I'm not sure how this really relates to the original idea here though unless you're suggesting the keyboard and mouse threads always run in this mode but interacts with the desktop that remains running at reduced privileges? I can imagine that would only make things worse.
You're working on the assumption all humans have the same psychology and that people in certain jobs don't get into those jobs because they have traits that are rather self-serving as opposed to being charitable and helpful.
As someone who worked in British public sector, a nation that is also very powerful in the world and that arguably has better social safety than the US (free healtcare for one) I can assure you it's nothing to do with hard work in public sector.
Speaking to people from the US and in many other countries about it when I have I get the impression public sector is pretty much the same in large parts of the world.
The reason it does it's job is because it has vast amounts of money thrown at it and 3 people to every job that's actually required. When you throw that much money and that many staff at a problem there's a chance someone's at least going to manage to achieve something, and that's effectively how it works.
If public sector was full of good people like you seem to infer, it could be done with half the budget and quarter of the staff.
The reason I left for private sector was because I and a select few others there who also worked hard got sick of carrying everyone else in the department. Since we all left, the department has been outsourced as it was simply deemed to be failing for a while after we went. Unfortunately, the people that worked in our department weren't sacked, no, they were given equally cushy jobs in other departments. A friend who still works elsewhere in public sector has given up working hard, works at home 2 days a week and classes these as days off, does little when he's there and still gets paid a decent amount- he realised this is the best way to get by in public sector because if you dare work hard or try and improve things you get shot down and made to feel like crap.
So yes, it is a cushy job, because you really don't have to work hard when there's 3 other people doing the same job as you when it only needs one of you. The pay is good and because of unions there's no risk of losing your job no matter how incompetent you are.
Public sector departments run because of quantity not quality. Unfortunately, quantity is horribly inefficient and costly, but no government is going to deal with it because hey, what better way than to create thousands of unneeded jobs to keep unemployment figures down and make your country look great?
Yeah there are good people in public sector, I don't deny that, but they're few and far between, suggesting public sector as a whole is full of good hard working people is completely and utterly ignorant of the reality, and again yes, it seems to be the same in large parts of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
New in version 1.0:
Core tools
==========
- Genuine disadvantage: Reports all your personal details to the FSB offering great benefits.
- Internet Exporter 7: Export your entire internet history to the FSB personal backup centre.
- News Hunter: Seeks out the latest news sources in a killer way.
- Polonium Anti-spyware: Works on even retired threats.
- Policy editor: Push through policies on YOUR agenda, no questions asked.
- Defragmenter: Crush those bad clusters that dare try and break away.
Games
=====
- Roulette: Gun adapter included. By signing up to Genuing Disadvantage, if you fit the bill, this game comes with additional levels of difficulty.
- South Ossetian Invaders: Take down those who dare try and take their territory back.
- PutinOS chess: Enjoy the opportunity to beat Garry Kasparov. With a baton.
Really, I can't wait.
I actually wondered the same, but seeing a recent BPI (The UK version of the RIAA) representitive talking bollocks on the news and noticing he was quite young I'm sad to say the problem isn't to do with any generation gap.
It's to do with people in the music industry getting good money for so long by effectively screwing artists with the way they handle contracts to allow them into their music cartel that controls production and up until the internet, distribution they simply will do anything to maintain that status quo whatever their age. They've found a way to make money by screwing the workers (artists) and price fixing the cost of something that outside of their cartel environment would be much cheaper. Think about it, how cheap would songs be if you didn't have to pay for the production, distribution, chief execs, lawyers, other office staff etc. that the music industry employs? Artists publishing direct to the net and only having to pay for marketing could offer just that.
These people are now almost entirely all redundant, they're just fighting to prolong their end date for as many years as possible by creating jobs for themselves with court cases and such. What they should've done is what Apple, Amazon, Play and the likes did - create online music stores, then they'd have still had jobs with a future. They even had the resources to do so, they just didn't have the foresight to realise physical media wasn't going to remain the little price fixing gem it has been so far for them forever.
"FBI, being part of the Executive Branch are not (and ought not) to decide, what's "harmless" and what is not. If the Legislature has made something illegal, then it is the Executive's duty to enforce it. Now, given limited resources the can (and ought to) prioritize certain things up and down. But they should prioritize anything down to zero."
Why not? If they don't then again, more serious crimes have to go untouched which is wrong no matter what. The real point to be made is that if the FBI has to prioritise something to 0 and that something not being dealt with is a problem then you have a funding issue. Under no circumstances should harmless crimes be dealt with instead of the much more serious ones because otherwise you face the scenario I mentioned- violent crimes going unsolved in favour of arguably entirely harmless crimes that are only crimes in the first place because of ignorant political agendas and not because they make the people safer or the country better in anyway. I understand it's not the FBIs position to decide that, but it also just requires simple common sense that if you have rape/murder/organised crime/some other serious crime, it's a whole lot more of a priority than something that fits into the pointless law category. If people creating stupid laws want them enforced they either have to provide extra funding to enforce them as well or they have to decide that they're more important than the serious crimes to deal with. They can't make the FBI to prioritise themselves and complain when they apply common sense to doing so.
"Yes, actually, that was his point -- that "peaceful protesters" and "benign hackers" should be able to get away with it. He didn't say it outright, but was nevertheless quite explicit. I don't know, how anyone could've missed it..."
If he didn't say it outright, then no, he wasn't in any way explicit, if he was explicit he'd have said it outright. I think the misunderstanding here is that of quantification though, what he and I are saying is that it shouldn't be treated as a non-crime, it should still be treated as a crime because as you point out, that's how it is on the books but what we're saying is that although it's a crime, it's a crime that isn't high priority enough with the given resources to deserve any attention given to it whilst other more important cases go unsolved. If these pointless crimes need be investigated then again, the funding needs to be provided for the resources to exist for that to happen.
"1) Google was Obama's #1 campaign contributor and has already received a number of "special considerations" that embed them into the Obama administration."
Actually, I think the people were. But they're generally treated as a separate entity despite them having a shared interest in transparency. I'd argue single biggest contributor whilst sounding threatening isn't. If one person paid Obama £50million and was a nazi, I don't think we'd expert Obama to follow a nazi agenda if everyone else contributed £50billion for example. If Google's interests run counter to the vast majority of other business/people which it would if his administration was favouring one business over another it's not going to get him very far. Microsoft, Yahoo and such would be sure to cry foul. This is different to say the Bush administration who when it came to oil and health focussed on giving the whole industries help for their contributions rather than just individual companies in those industries. It's when things start going in favour of an entire industry you need to start worrying- the RIAA, Hollywood, Big oil, Medical, Finance and so on.
"2) Once you start using an email address it is with you forever unless you're willing to dump all of your contacts. Not to mention force of habit."
No, the article states that they should be contacted on that address, that doesn't mean they're going to start making address books on it and replying from there all the time. There's no reason e-mails couldn't be exported later on into the new system and have the old g-mail address setup to forward to their e-mail servers where auto-responders simply reply saying "This address is now obsolete, please e-mail ". That's a pretty quick easy way to move people to new accounts and the fact it was just an auto-responder rather than a forward means people would have to make the effort to actually send the e-mail again, if it was a forward they may keep using the old address, if it's an auto-responder they'd get used to using the new address pretty quick for conveniences sake.
I have to admit I've not really come across heat pumps before. How do they work? Temperatures can get as low as -8C here and the over-winter temperatures I need to reach are around a minimum of 10C to 15C mark over night. I also need to make sure humidity is kept low, as many plants are desert plants, those that aren't I have seperate units for (not hydroponic as such, just closed containers with a gravel/water base).
I already lower the greenhouse volume over winter when the heaters need to be on by running a thermal blanket along the eaves to cut the amount of vertical height over night and also use a bubble wrap covering for insulation all over. During the day, the sun does a good job of heating it up with the somewhat transparent bubble wrap coating and the thermal blanket pulled back and continues to allow light in so it's a fairly decent setup. I think I'd struggle to improve things much more in that area at least, but any methods to cut heating costs further is certainly something I'd jump on as it already costs around £600 ($850 ish US) to heat between October through to March/April. That doesn't exactly break the bank, but it's a cost that I would gladly reduce if I could.
I do agree with you but just playing devils advocate on a particular technicality- regarding making a common cause with your enemies, I'd argue this effectively depends on how you define enemies.
One might quite reasonably argue that Halliburton for example is an enemy of the state due to the very fact that they've been responsible for getting many American's killed on jobs that these workers were sent on for no reason other than to increase Halliburton's ability to charge- that is, take, US tax payers money. Their execs also moved or were going to move abroad, to one of the arab states (Dubai?), the reason for which many argued was to avoid US prosecution. There are other situations where Bush has arguably helped who are fairly clearly defined as the enemy although this is primarily through incompetence than malice. An example is vastly strengthening Iran and Syria by weakening Iraq.
I can see why some would certainly argue he is guilty of treason and I don't think their view is entirely without merit. I do think it's just a little too much of a stretch though realistically to be a valid path to pursue.
It's funny because it's true.
I find the iPod's wheel is often described as a revolutionary peice of design and used as an example of the amazing things Apple does.
Unfortunately, the Creative Zen had a side scroll wheel years earlier that you'd scroll up and down to scroll through songs and click in to select etc. etc. The wheel on the iPod is different only in that you move your finger round the wheel straight on rather than having a physical wheel you scroll up and down- the concept is identical, only the implementation is different.
If anyone truly believes Apple is some great innovator and that there ideas didn't stem from existing ideas then they're pretty oblivious to how just about all businesses work. Apple did what Apple do well, they made the idea popular, making it popular doesn't necessarily mean they innovated and invented in the first place though.
The usual hypocritical response by what I can only call the extremist element of the set of all Mac fans would probably be "the wheel is different because it's used front on therefore it's innovation" but to take that stance the hypocrisy is that one could equally argue that the Windows 7 sidebar is different enough to be classed as innovation rather than immitation then also, which you can be sure the most extreme of Mac fans simply would not accept. When they're forced into a corner of applying the same principles to Microsoft as to Apple or choosing hypocrisy, they choose hypocrisy.
I don't hate Apple, I don't hate people who love Apple, I hate people who can't be objective and realise things for what they are.
So you're saying it's okay for them to regulate price, but not to regulate the ability to sell at all?
Regulating the price to that extreme would mean nowhere would stock them anyway so you still wouldn't get hold of them. The net effect would be the same - removal from sale, so what's the problem exactly?
Your outburst just sounds like an excuse to rant at environmentalists. What's wrong, are you mad at them because they're making you pay the actual price of your polluting products (i.e. the cost of the item AND the cost of the damage caused by the pollutants from using it)? Tough shit, everyone else has to live on the planet too. Your right to pollute isn't anymore important than anyone elses right to live on a clean, healthy planet. If you want to pollute, you can pay the cost to clean that up too rather than expect everyone else to clean up after you.
As a British citizen I have to agree.
If there was one change I could make to the regulation of the media I'd say it should be to make them more accountable for what they write.
One example I recall is that the BBC and many other media outlets reported that in the killing of Stephen Pakeerah, a copy of Manhunt was found in the killers belongings and hence there was an inference that it was partly to blame for the fact the kid killed him by beating him to death with a hammer. The police however came forward and corrected the media saying actually, the copy of Manhunt was found as part of the victims belongings completely and utterly destroying the attempt to link Manhunt to a murder by the press.
Unfortunately, not a single media outlet posted this correction. If I had my way I'd make sure the media had to post corrections like this on the front or the back page of the paper where it's clearly visible. Also, I think it's only reasonable they should have had to pay compensation to Rockstar the game's publisher for possible loss of sales or damage to their reputation.
Instead though, they did exactly as you say, they posted what were outright lies and when the truth came forward they just ignored it so that the majority of the public were simply left believing the original, outright false story. What makes it worse for me, is when the BBC reprinted the lie that Manhunt was to blame I sent a formal complaint in. I never heard anything back, but instead saw the same lie repeated a further 2 times in later articles.
The media seems to think it's above the law and in all but a few (i.e. Max Mosley) cases, that seems to be sadly somewhat true. I still don't understand why it's okay for the press to follow someone around, possibly even tresspass to take photos of someone wherever they go yet if your average joe does it it's stalking- how is what the press does in any way not stalking? What they do fits the exact definition perfectly.
Because not all products offer cheaper alternatives. You'd effectively be raising the price 25% on things where there is no other option.
One example is that I have a heated greenhouse here in the UK, it's heated because I grow exotic plants, including cultivation of species that are critically endangered in the wild which I sell on cheaply to help discourage sales of habitat collected plants which I can undercut because the risk of smuggling carries a higher price than the price I can charge growing in bulk and transferring legally (well, at least in Europe, stupid CITES regulation does more harm than good outside Europe in this respect).
I already use an electric heater, I already use solar power where possible but the only alternative is to simply fall back to mains throughout October - March. There really is no cheaper alternative, natural gas is more expensive due to the fact you have to leave a gas burner on all the time, whilst electric heaters only need to come on when the temperature drops below a set level so electricity is the cheapest, most efficient option.
What you're proposing would act as a 25% increase in cost for something I'm doing that is already about as environmentally friendly as you can get. It would have the side effect of ultimately forcing me to raise prices due to the increased cost of electricity and then lowering the attractiveness of my plants over those that are collected from habitat for species that are on the very verge of extinction. I do not make a profit from this hobby, it's not as if I can cut that.
As well as casualties, some wars are simply more brutal too. Even dividing World War II up, I'd certainly have rather fought on the Western front than I would the Russian front or the pacific, certainly the Japanese fighting style was far more viscious and brutal.
No one can suggest for example, the first gulf war was on the same level of brutality as Vietnam. Similarly the kind of ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses that occured in Yugoslavia was far more horrific than anything like the Falklands war.
One thing that does stand out though, ironically, the more civilians are involved as part of the fighting force (although I suppose they're not then by definition, civilians), the more brutal it becomes. Military vs. military often seems to result in much less brutal wars than military vs. what I suppose would be called rebels or insurgents.
But if said crimes are actually harmless like those the parent cited then what's the problem with them being more commonplace exactly when more harmful crimes are being dealt with instead?
The parents point isn't that people should be able to break the law and get away with it, it's that police time is wasted with laws that are ultimately pointless for the aim of furthering political agendas and such.
You're effectively saying we should ignore say, a few rape cases, because little Billy being allowed to get away with downloading some MP3s might cause it to become more widespread. So fucking what? Catch the bloody rapists instead please.
You're confusing QWTF with TFC, I never said TF2 was worse than TFC, I agree it is light years ahead, TFC was by far the lowest point in TF's history.
What I'm saying is TF2 is much more faithful to QWTF (the original for Quake 1 that came before TFC) which is a good thing, because TFC wasn't faithful to it and was a horrible game as a result. TF2 is much more faithful, but the fact it's not truly faithful is where I'm saying it could be even better.
My point was that Valve realised TFC was a poor port of QWTF and simply not as fun and so made sure with TF2 they were much closer to the original, the problem is it took them nearly a decade to realise this and they still haven't quite got there yet, their comments suggest they're at a crossroads- do they become less true to the original and create new classes, do they become more true and bring in like hunted or do they do all.
My suggestion is they just become more true to the original- that path clearly made TF2 better than TFC so why not continue down that path and make it better again rather than do something that will very likely make it worse?
You do realise that if you think that's what I mean by grenades then you don't know what I'm referring to?
In QWTF, on top of standard weapons every class had normal hand grenades which could be cooked and a special grenade type- engineer had EMP grenade, scout had concussion, soldier had nail grenade etc.
...who said anything about headshotting humans? It could just as well be the head of an animal or even a cardboard target.
It sounds like you made an assumption and took offence at that assumption.
I'm not looking for realism and can only assume by your comments you never played the original TF but instead only played TFC.
The original TF was well balanced and sparring was still perfectly possible, but grenades were an added tool in that on top. Grenades also added a whole new level of tactics through grenade jumps that are clearly missing from TF2 without them.
I didn't say it sucks either, I said it's simply not what it could have been if they'd stayed true to the original. QWTF had everything TF2 has and then some more without sacrificing balance or fun in any way at all. The entity system allowed for so much flexibility that we could have maps like hunted without needing it to be patched in as a new game mode also for example.
The fact you add in a note (and many complain) about playing a demoman allowing you to spam grenades annoyingly causing problems is demonstration in itself that TF2 is not as balanced as QWTF was. The fact Valve says the scout is due for some improvements and people complain about the weakness of the pyro is again, also evidence of this.
If you'd played QWTF you'd know that other than the obvious improvements in graphical detail, TF2 is less than that.
Because you're dealing with idiots. It's not a fault of .NET, applications can be put together in no time.
Despite what the parent says, .NET really is far quicker than QT, his comments clearly demonstrate he's not used it but that like you, because he's encountered bad developers who use it he assumes it's .NET that's the problem. This is absolutely not the case.
I know it's popular here to hate Microsoft, but .NET is an example of one of the things they've done right. It's a solid development platform, the .NET framework offers one of the best and most consistent and comprehensive sets of libraries around. Coupled with Visual Studio, another of Microsoft's few success stories you have arguably the best overall development environment going. It really is as has been said above, an absolute pleasure to develop with.
Perhaps the only valid criticism is that it's not cross-platform out the box. Slowness of development is certainly not a valid criticism of the environment but of the developer.
I used to love the original QWTF, I thought it was fantastic, perhaps the game I spent more time on than any other, despite having to pay dialup costs per minute back then.
I followed TF ever since it came out, and when TF2 was originally announce as a mod for Quake II I was excited, I was equally excited when it was slated as a massive combat game with commanders and people dropping down out of helicopters as the screenshots showed for Half-Life and then it's own game. After around 5 years I got bored of waiting then something like 9 years on it finally arrived.
Yet, when it arrived, everything new had been dropped and it turned out to be some copy of the original TV, minus some pretty damn important features like grenades and coupled in with some horrible graphical style. Now they talk of some of the classic maps and game modes, perhaps they'll even bring grenades back.
But my point is this, whilst TF2 is great, people obviously want more. It's taken them 9 or 10 years to end up back where they started, mimicking QWTF and even then not quite (again no grenades, lack of old favourite maps). Surely the lesson to be learned by now is that if they want to immitate the success of the original then all they needed to do all along is simply immitate the original albeit with updated graphics (minus the cartoony theme change).
Yes, I very much miss the QWTF days, but it does really seem Valve is only just in recent years beginning to realise what the old QWTF fans said all along- just stay true to the original. They've had a decade to figure this out.
Whilst I'm a fan of PHP myself, I have to say the new ASP.NET MVC framework is rather good.
It really does beat hands down anything in the PHP world in terms of how quickly you can get something up whilst maintaining quality. I'd argue partly this is because of the Visual Studio integration and the power of Visual Studio to start with.
I wouldn't ever build a live app. in web forms, but I could be pretty tempted with the new MVC framework I have to admit. The various PHP frameworks out there that perform a similar task such as CakePHP could learn a lot from it in terms of how quickly you can build with it without the usual sacrifice of quality of software you get with Microsoft's tools (again, web forms for example).
Of course, the thing is as well, the Microsoft platform is slowly getting better, Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 really aren't that bad, performance isn't too much different to Apache/PHP now and security since .NET is much improved. Of course, Apache was always pretty good so to say IIS is improving doesn't mean much in that context but certainly combined with .NET MVC I think the whole LAMP platform needs to watch out. The various PHP frameworks like Cake could do things such as dropping the stupid cake bake crap that fails half the time on Windows and is pretty much undocumented (It has one page in the docs that don't explain much beyond what it's for). In contrast Symfony is absolutely fantastic on documentation and so is Zend, but it's still much more hassle, and there's still many more security pitfalls you have to keep an eye on vs. ASP.NET MVC.
I'd probably like Java, but I've never used it professionally, only academically so can't compare with that. At the end of the day though, my point is that with ASP.NET MVC I can build a high quality site much more quickly and with much greater confidence than I can with any PHP framework right now.
I'm not sure what you mean by showing a "profit at their job".
Engineers engineer for example, they don't deal with the day today business decisions, they don't hire and fire, they just need to be able to engineer. That's a completely different mindset to a CEO who has to maintain control of the business and people under him.
I'm not saying it has to mean throwing away your morals, I'm just saying it requires a mindset where you're much less likely to have many morals at all, hence how they did so well in the first place- they didn't let things stand in their way.
How well do you think someone would do at moving in to a position as CEO of a mining firm if they had a moral objection to destroying countryside to build mines for example? To be a CEO of such a firm you can't let things like that stand in your way. Similar situations exist in all lines of business at the top level albeit not necessarily in such an obvious manner.
That's because synergy will have been running in user mode.
Unfortunately, trojans et al. are a little less respectful of privileges and memory boundaries.
I'm not sure how this really relates to the original idea here though unless you're suggesting the keyboard and mouse threads always run in this mode but interacts with the desktop that remains running at reduced privileges? I can imagine that would only make things worse.
You're working on the assumption all humans have the same psychology and that people in certain jobs don't get into those jobs because they have traits that are rather self-serving as opposed to being charitable and helpful.
It'd be trivial for trojan developers to just emulate a move of the mouse, or a press of the keyboard or a button.
"The police need to do something to help us."
Help you? Hah, who do you think your are the RIAA? We all know the police's priorities are the content industry and kiddie porn.
As someone who worked in British public sector, a nation that is also very powerful in the world and that arguably has better social safety than the US (free healtcare for one) I can assure you it's nothing to do with hard work in public sector.
Speaking to people from the US and in many other countries about it when I have I get the impression public sector is pretty much the same in large parts of the world.
The reason it does it's job is because it has vast amounts of money thrown at it and 3 people to every job that's actually required. When you throw that much money and that many staff at a problem there's a chance someone's at least going to manage to achieve something, and that's effectively how it works.
If public sector was full of good people like you seem to infer, it could be done with half the budget and quarter of the staff.
The reason I left for private sector was because I and a select few others there who also worked hard got sick of carrying everyone else in the department. Since we all left, the department has been outsourced as it was simply deemed to be failing for a while after we went. Unfortunately, the people that worked in our department weren't sacked, no, they were given equally cushy jobs in other departments. A friend who still works elsewhere in public sector has given up working hard, works at home 2 days a week and classes these as days off, does little when he's there and still gets paid a decent amount- he realised this is the best way to get by in public sector because if you dare work hard or try and improve things you get shot down and made to feel like crap.
So yes, it is a cushy job, because you really don't have to work hard when there's 3 other people doing the same job as you when it only needs one of you. The pay is good and because of unions there's no risk of losing your job no matter how incompetent you are.
Public sector departments run because of quantity not quality. Unfortunately, quantity is horribly inefficient and costly, but no government is going to deal with it because hey, what better way than to create thousands of unneeded jobs to keep unemployment figures down and make your country look great?
Yeah there are good people in public sector, I don't deny that, but they're few and far between, suggesting public sector as a whole is full of good hard working people is completely and utterly ignorant of the reality, and again yes, it seems to be the same in large parts of the world.