Interestingly enough, Slate leans a bit to the left... and most anti-vaxxers lean very much to the left, so why was the bile necessary?
I can't say I know a lot of anti-vaxxers, but the few I do know are very strongly right wing (wing nuts, to be blunt). They're also not very smart. The most anti-vaccine guy I know a few years was personally convinced that Uncle Sam was going to (by force if necessary) compel him to get a flu shot during that year when there was a shortage of the flu vaccine. He was also convinced that Uncle Sam was going to force his wife and teenage daughter to get vaccinated and he specifically mentioned that he was greatly concerned that his teenage daughter would get autism from the vaccine.
I do. I can explain why it's different here. Outside of really big US downtown areas, you will wait a long time for the taxi and even short trips are expensive. Also, US taxis often (maybe always - not sure as I don't use taxis much) have meters that run on time in the car, not only just for distance. So if you are sitting in the taxi at a long red light (some intersections can easily take over 2 minutes to change to green), your cost is going up all the time even though you aren't moving. This is part of why they are so expensive here.
While I'm not in favor at all of endlessly extending copyright, I feel that the Bono Act missed two very important points.
1. If people/companies can't be bothered to remember to file for an extension, tough. Tough tough tough. That's how it was in the past. The current situation where they just get extended automatically won't resolve the issue sometimes where certain old things (ie. photos) may be under copyright but nobody has any idea at all how to find anybody who actually owns the copyright to try to license it.
2. If these copyrights are so valuable then why on earth is the federal government giving extensions away for free? That makes no sense.
Here's my proposal. OK, if the current terms aren't enough (ie. perhaps Disney comes to mind here), then at expiration allow the copyright holder to apply for a 10 year extension. The price? $100,000. Then when that expires, let them apply for another 10 year extension at 10 times the price of the previous one. So the next extension is $1 million, then $10 million, then $100 million, then $1 billion, then $10 billion, and so on. Eventually even Disney won't pay for it anymore. Could Disney really justify to its stockholders paying $10 million to renew the copyright on the oldest version of Mickey Mouse for 10 more years? Maybe not. But I'm pretty sure that once it reaches $1 billion that nobody is going to want to do that. Exponentially rising costs allows the copyright holder the opportunity to renew if they are willing to pay for it, which I think is fair if these copyrights are so valuable that they just must be extended. Since few will agree to pay even $100,000 in my solution, stuff will at least finally enter the public domain. If it makes anybody feel better, the recent EU copyright extension was so contentious that I can't imagine there's any real political will in Europe to ever extend that beyond what it is now.
I respect Gene Roddenberry, but for all the good he did for Star Trek, everything he did wasn't always good or right. To be very blunt, The Next Generation got a lot better when his declining health limited his tinkering with the show. The seasons where he had the most influence on the show, seasons one and two, were the worst ones for the show. Gates McFadden has stated in recent years that she was fired outright at the end of season one over complaints about the sexism in the scripts. Even Patrick Stewart has stated that he thought the season one scripts were too sexist and that he and other cast members were shocked when she was fired. Some writer (don't remember his name) was behind the campaign to fire her. What exactly was Roddenberry's role in this? I don't know. But at the end it seemed like he was maybe still capable of a good idea (ie. the general concept of The Next Generation) but not so much the inner workings of that idea. I'm guessing that maybe there is one good idea buried in there somewhere that Rod Roddenberry can do something with but that's probably about it.
I can say that in America there was a really big isolationist movement that had a lot of support and there was the idea that we didn't want to have to fight another World War solving Europe's problems which seemed to never stop. Since most Americans surely didn't read of care about Mien Kampf, it's safe to assume that they knew little of its contents. And remember, Hitler invading Russia was Russia's problem at least or Europe's problem at most and not America's problem. Stalin became our best friend out of convenience ("the enemy of my enemy is my friend") when Hitler stabbed him in the back after they started carving up Europe between them. I don't recall reading about a whole of American anger, not even in Congress, when Finland and the Baltic States got invaded by the USSR.
I know much less of how things were in the UK but I know that Churchill was warning people in the 1930s about Hitler and he was originally dismissed as something like a crackpot. I also know that there were Nazi sympathizers in the British government and royal family (the former king and Duke of Windsor was such a Nazi sympathizer that he was forced to be the governor of Bermuda during the war just to keep him out of the way and out of influence). Rudolph Hess made his crazy one man journey to Britain during the war because he believed that the British government had enough Nazi sympathizers in it that he could broker a peace. That in and of itself is probably good evidence that there was some concern that some in the British government weren't fully committed to the war effort, but as far as why after the war started they would still be Nazi sympathizers is something I can't answer.
If you search YouTube you should be able to find an excerpt from the Robot Chicken show called "Little Hiter". Watch it. In about 2 minutes it will show you probably as good a summary as you could ever find as to why the US finally got interested in what was going on elsewhere in the beginning of World War II.
It's hard for me to tell what drove CBS/Paramount over the edge with this production. Tim Russ (Lt. Tuvok on Voyager) has made 2 crowd funded Star Trek movies that he and his company didn't get sued over. In fact, they recently (barely) raised enough money on a Kickstarter campaign to do 2 more episodes of Star Trek Renegades. Russ said that he had a meeting with CBS/Paramount and offered to produce Renegades for them as an online series. They turned him down but told him he could keep doing the series as long as he didn't turn a profit from it. It may be that Axanar has simply raised too much money and that has attracted the ire of CBS/Paramount. Depending on the source Axanar has raised between half a million and one million dollars and for comparison, Renegades took until one day before the campaign ended on Kickstarter to raise the $350,000 needed for 2 more episodes. It may be that CBS/Paramount suspects that someone is pocketing money from Axanar given its higher costs than Renegades (Axanar is budgeted at $250,000 per episode).
The standard AI solution for chess, for example, calls for the engineer to learn how to play chess, then turn his mind's eye inward to see the steps he uses to play chess, then codify those steps as a program. Most AI programs seem to develop that way.
Back in the 1950s, it was assumed that the only way possible to create a chess playing computer program that could beat the best humans was to do exactly what you said. And that approach did lead to some pretty good programs that could beat maybe 99% of players, but the top 1% still won almost all the time against the program. AI researchers assumed that to get good enough to beat humans, the program would have to learn to analyze and think something like humans do, which would lead to AK breakthroughs. It never happened. When the programs became good enough to beat everybody but the top 1%, the programmers realized that storage was relatively cheap and you could essentially cheat. You can program known openings into a database and simply have the program look up the best moves and play them. Then when you get away from known moves, the program can play at its programming best, using algorithms to determine what to do next in terms of cost-benefit analysis and poor fallible humans might simply overlook the fact that a piece is under attack and lose it carelessly. And then you can program a database of known endgames where one side can force a win and the computer can't lose if its on the correct side of the known ending. And computers can look further ahead and try out sequences of moves that most humans would have difficulty doing in their heads. Basically computers now win at chess not because they are better at anything that humans do in their heads, but because programmers figured out how to cheat and turn chess into an open book, open notepad test for the computers without giving humans the same advantages because letting humans do those things is "cheating" but it's OK for programs to do it because it's not visible to the opponent. So chess ultimately ended up being a dead end for AI research. IBM apparently got better at organizing data and doing searches as a result of this kind of "cheating" approach so I suppose there is some value in that, but it's not AI to do faster searches or database lookups to just find the best move to play next.
And maybe... just maybe... if the US loses 200 billion dollars a year in tourism income, our politicians will pull their heads out of their asses and start making some sane national security policies (but I wouldn't hold my breath).
As an American, I call tell you that that is not very likely. Few Americans directly benefit from foreign tourism. Americans in general are somewhat xenophobic and its not unusual for them to think that everybody on earth except maybe people in Canada lives in absolute third world squalor in their pitiful, sad country. Americans don't really care at all - not at all - if foreigners face severe restrictions on coming here. And doing "tit for tat" isn't going to change things because the majority of Americans have never been outside of North America. If you just look at the group of Americans who've been outside of North America and remove the ones who've only been to the UK or France and never anywhere else, then you're looking at a pretty small subset of people. Most Americans could not possibly care at all if they aren't allowed to visit foreign countries or if it becomes more difficult to do so because they weren't going to do that anyway.
There may or may not be a good reason why this family ran into problems, but we're unlikely to ever know what the real reason was. My guess is the UK family is Pakistani, which going forward is going to become more and more of a red flag to American DHS people, and they may be connected to a mosque that is under US scrutiny. Or it may just be a complete bunch of crap but either way we'll never know. Some of this may also be a complete overreaction to the recent San Bernardino shootings where the wife was Pakistani and DHS completely fell down on the job by failing to look into the fact that her husband had never actually met her in person before their marriage when he filed for the fiancee visa to bring her over here. All I can say is that over a decade ago I filed for a fiancee visa (we never got married as we broke up before the very final steps of the process, but I digress) as did a friend of mine. We both had girlfriends in Eastern Europe. It was really easy to prove my girlfriend and I had met as I had photos of us together and phone records and email that I submitted with the application to prove we had met in person. My application got preliminary approval and basically all we had to do was go through the final steps, including her personal interview, and she was going to get the visa. Proving that she and I met was incredibly easy since we actually had done so. In fact, at that time there was some government website you could go to where you could look up fiancee visa applications that were denied and the most common reason for denial was lack of proof of a personal meeting. Meeting in person before you apply for a fiancee visa is an absolute legal requirement. So it may suck, but I suspect even if there is no terrorism link that the family is Pakistani and they're suffering for the sins of others from Pakistan.
Wouldn't something like a relatively peaceful border between two nations that are nominally at-peace, be a lot more cost-effectively administered by slow moving airships, with only a handful of rapid-response aircraft used solely for interdiction purposes?
My first job after graduating college was working as a programmer for a branch of the US military that I don't want to name. I'm not forbidden to name it and I have a lot of respect for the men and women who are in it, but man, I saw a lot of dumb technology moves while I was there, which is why I'm being charitable in not naming them. Basically what happens is that some branch of the government, in this case DHS, gets some money and says "Wow! Drones are cool! Let's buy a bunch!" because some manager type (in the US military, this may be a high ranking officer not a civilian) gets a hard on for some new technology. Nobody ever stops to think if it's actually practical or makes sense or is economically reasonable. We saw a lot of wasted money thrown in the trash when I worked on that government job and we weren't really happy about it, but the whole system is setup in such a way that there's no real way to stop this kind of purchase. It's not just another "DHS is the suxor!" kind of thing as Slashdotters want to think. Any part of the US government could have done the same dumb pointless thing.
I'm not trying to be racist and claim that all Asians everywhere are bad drivers. I've spent a decent amount of time in Asia as a tourist in various places and except for China proper (meaning NOT Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan) I've never seen really crazy or dangerous driving. But man, does China ever have a lot of bad drivers. I remember 4 years ago taking a taxi from my hotel to the airport in Shanghai and it was maybe a 40 minute drive. I remember being on 6 lane roads and seeing other cars swerving back and forth between 2 lanes while their driver talked on a cell phone and lots of cars that simply couldn't maintain their lane at all. Even the taxi driver seemed frustrated, but he didn't speak English so I couldn't talk to him about it. The only saving grace was that there weren't a lot of other cars on the road at the time so it wasn't all that difficult to avoid the crazy drivers. A couple of years ago I spent a few weeks in Guangdong Province and the drivers were pretty bad there too in general. I remember being horrified in one town at the number of intersections with no stop signs or traffic lights and drivers just pretty much doing whatever they felt like. I also remember someone in Shanghai telling me that driver education was a complete joke there and people could get drivers licenses with almost training or experience at all.
So why try to save a few bucks outsourcing? I don't get it, the money saved is literally insignificant to them.
I can suggest some reasons why.
1) Disney's primary business is not IT related. We'll just say it's "other stuff". Sure, there is an IT component, but it's not the primary reason the company exists. I work for a Fortune 500 company who's entire business is IT. We're out of business or darn close to it without our IT component. My company actually treats its US based IT workers pretty well and while we do hire H1B people and do some outsourcing of work to India, neither is what I would call a primary chunk of our business. My experience as a career IT worker is that a lot of companies don't really value IT work at all and they always look at it as something anybody can do and it can be as well for cheap by using foreigners. So I think that Disney has never really valued their IT work very much and they look at it as costing too much because they have a bunch of benefit sucking Americans doing it.
2) The workers were all in Orlando if I remember correctly and I'll just simply say that Disney has always treated its Orlando employees as being superfluous. IT employees in California may at this time be under no danger at all, so there is some component of it being in Florida because they are far away from where the big shots are in California who made this decision.
3) Nobody at Disney wants to admit this, but ESPN's revenues are going down. To keep or get sports content, ESPN (which Disney owns) had to pay astronomical prices. In order to keep gouging the TV providers and charge them for carrying ESPN and its related channels, Disney had to agree to lower the number of customers who get their channels to keep the price they get per customer the same. This agreement shocked many industry watchers as they thought Disney would never agree to this. So the reality is that ESPN is going to be spending more and bringing home less. Shaving dollars off IT costs is one way to deal with that reality. Maybe it's a stupid way but again, many or most businesses don't value IT work, so to them it's an easy thing to cut. And note that ESPN recently had some fairly brutal job cuts related to this.
While I think that it probably wasn't the DPRK, your reason isn't good enough as to why it's not. You might be interested in reading the book _The Impossible State_ by Victor Cha, a man who worked for the George W. Bush administration and has been to North Korea. Basically even if North Koreans knew about the Streisand Effect, and I'm not sure they would have known about it, if somebody high up enough orders you to do something, you don't question it - you do it. You risk death or being sent to a labor camp (with a high probability of death anyway) to do otherwise. And as a deterrent, if you get in trouble with the government, your family does too. The book reports people being imprisoned for "crimes" a long dead grandparent or great-grandparent did before WWII even started, so there's not really any sense of people arguing against orders. They're just hoping the state leaves them alone.
In North Korea they don't see the world the same way that you do. Fanatical devotion to the Kim family is widespread. In fact, even defectors who now live in South Korea rarely have anything at all negative to say about whichever Kim family member is currently in charge even years later and they tend to be kind of like the Russians in thinking that the guy running the show is actually a really good person and any bad things are being caused by everybody else and if only the top guy knew the real truth, he'd fix the problems. I don't buy the US government's investigation into the hack and my guess is that the investigation may be a lie (ie. They know North Korea didn't do it, but they want a reason to go after them anyway) or the people who did the investigation are just not all that good at their jobs.
But all this said, I'm not convinced it's ISIS either. If it was ISIS why now, why against Russia when British and American tourists could presumably have been just as easily targeted at the exact same airport all this time and ISIS hates the British and Americans as much as the Russians?
Well, I don't know exactly how many American and British tourists there really are in Egypt. If you're American and you go, if you don't know the risks, which have been around for more than a decade now (cough cough - ask Mexico about that if you need to), I really don't know what to say. The Russian plane was something like a regularly scheduled charter flight. Egypt either has no visa requirement for citizens of the countries that used to be in the USSR or they are something like "get one on arrival". Too lazy to see which. I know that lots of Russians like to go there for vacations because it's one of the rare places that's warm and not very sucky that they can get into without a lot of effort and trouble.
Personally, I'm not ruling out a shoddy repair job as others have speculated on. It's been known since the very late 1990s that Russian airlines outside of Aeroflot don't generally meet American and European standards in terms of safety and repair. My default reaction to any Russian airline disaster on a non-Aeroflot flight is to assume mechanical failure as that's almost always it. Or the pilot let his teenage kid accidentally fly the plane into the ground, killing everybody. Yeah, that really happened once on an infamous flight inside Russia. If you fly anywhere in the world on an airline based in Russia whose name is not Aeroflot, you assume a lot of risk.
The story about the trip to Japan 25 years ago made me think of something. Approximately around 1970, Soviet film director Andrei Tarkovsky and Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa became friends and Soviet authorities allowed Tarkovsky to go to Japan to visit his friend under the official guise of doing a small amount of location filming for his upcoming film, "Solaris". Tarkovsky brought a very small film crew with him and they shot some footage from inside a car of just driving around the major highways and tunnels of Tokyo. There's a 10-15 minute segment of the film that uses the footage and the segment is known as "The city of tomorrow" segment. Even after all these years I have to admit it still looks somewhat futuristic.
As far as backwards banking systems go, Ukraine's was pretty bad in the previous decade. I assume it's better now, but I was last there about 9 years ago. I never used an ATM there - ever. I always brought enough cash with me to cover to my expenses during my stay. I read too many first hand accounts of travelers who used ATMs that actually were run by the mafia and they simply collected your bank and pin info and used that to try to drain your account. The authorities could not be bothered to do anything about this. And this was in major cities like Kiev and Odessa. If you went to any place other than the very largest cities, the stories were that if you ever found an ATM it probably wasn't going to be connected to any international banking network, but at least you didn't have to worry about the mafia running it to try to steal your money.
Well a lot of their biggest companies are in real trouble (ex Sony).
Well, my opinion on why Sony is in real trouble is that the company is actually in effect run by the Americans who dominate the entertainment (music, movies and TV) side of Sony who view all of humanity as thieves looking to steal Sony's entertainment property and who have consumed so many resources and effort to stop the "thieves" that the rest of the business that used to actually be good can no longer be good any more. Sony is no longer interested in making useful products so much as they are completely and utterly obsessed with stopping you, dirty thieving human, from getting their music, movies and TV shows without paying for them.
Don't advertise as unlimited if uploading 70TB of data is too much. It's called false advertising and is against the law in European countries. Sadly, the US doesn't have good consumer protection laws.
Actually the US generally does have good consumer protection laws, but it's not that simple here. First, someone would have sue and it would have to be someone who actually got impacted by the change. US courts don't like it at all when you sue and you're not someone who's been victimized, so you can't sue just because you don't like the changes if you weren't a user who "abused" the old lack of limits. Then literally anything at all can happen when it goes to court. If you get a jury trial all bets are off. Juries typically don't understand technical lawsuits very well so what they will use to decide the case may not really make a lot of sense. Judges aren't necessarily any better. Judges have their own set of prejudices that influence their rulings. Then if you actually beat Microsoft, they'd just appeal and you'd be facing higher costs to fight that appeal where, again, you'll go before judges and anything can happen. You can bet that Microsoft will keep appealing until they win. We don't have a "loser pays" system here and it's almost impossible for a variety of reasons to get your legal costs paid by the loser, so you can get destroyed financially by having a deep pockets loser who just keeps footing the bill for appeal after appeal. Maybe all that stuff doesn't apply in the EU, but it's the reality we face here.
Actually its creator wasn't that great. TNG seasons 1 and 2 were kinda bad, and those were the only two seasons that he had a heavy influence. After that, the writers started breaking some of the rules that Roddenberry had established for the series.
You have really spoken the truth here. It was only as Roddenberry's health went downhill and he was unable to do much to the show that it got better. Gates McFadden was fired after the first season (it's only been in recent years as far as I know that she anybody else connected to the show was willing to admit it) because she - gasp! - had the temerity to complain about the sexist scripts they were given. Roddenberry certainly did her no favors by letting the writer who demanded her exit have his way. Then he replaced her with the very unpopular Diana Muldaur, who was really in a no-win situation on the show. Finally between Michael Piller and Rick Berman somebody brought back McFadden and the stories were getting consistently strong, except for the final season where Piller's attention was elsewhere. Roddenberry made the decision to have a kid (Wil Wheaton) on the show and while now everybody loves Wheaton, I've always wondered if he left the show because he was tired of all the very negative comments his character consistently got while the show was on. Roddenberry was notorious for demanding re-writes on everything even back to The Original Series, not always for the better. I respect Roddenberry for the general vision and ideas but no more.
People in the west don't understand that for most Chinese, the one child policy doesn't have effect. Because there are so many exceptions.
1) If you and your partner were single kids, you can have two kids.
2) Ethnic minorities have higher limits, and foreigners, including Hong Kong and Taiwan can have unlimited
3) Rich people just pay the tax and have another child, because they are so rich from corruption money is nothing for them.
4) Some provinces had already lifted the ban, or lessened it greatly.
5) Children born outside China, including HK and Taiwan, don't count. Hence the large amount of birth tourism.
So this is pretty much a symbolic act, but at least it's the communists admitting they can't control everything. I wonder how this will be spun off in China, since there the communists are still treated as nearly perfect, the thing everyone should aspire to be.
1) If this were true, then just about everybody could have multiple kids in the past.
2) As pointed out by others, despite you apparently believing PRC propaganda, no part of Taiwan ruled territory has ever been under PRC control. So PRC rules/laws don't apply there. Hong Kong and Macau operate under their own laws under the SAR agreements.
3) Famous directory Zhang Yimou and his wife tried this and got into a lot of trouble. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it may be as easy as you think.
4) This is actually true and the further you were from Beijing, the more likely it was to be the case.
5) I know of no birth tourism to Taiwan. I keep up with Taiwan and my understanding is that it's very difficult for individual PRC citizens to get individual visas to go to Taiwan. They keep them in tour groups. This is because the PRC wants to control its citizens' access to Taiwan and their "dangerous" ideas.
Additionally, families that had a girl for their first child were allowed to have another child. My ex-girlfriend is from Guangdong province and she has a younger sister for this reason. Her sister is married and has a daughter and before this change the sister and her husband were talking about having another child.
1) Hollywood producers want to make new Buck Rogers movie based on his very first book appearance. Announce it at Comic Con.
2) Trust that says it owns the character threatens to sue producers.
3) Producers try to reach deal. Trust apparently refuses to reach a deal. They simply don't want the film made.
4) Producers are now going to try an argument that Buck Rogers is actually already in the public domain, so screw the trust as they don't need their permission anyway.
It does because you don't understand how Russia works. Are you aware that Russia requires almost all foreign citizens to have visas to travel there? Nothing so unusual in that. More developed countries do that all the time. Australia's rules for travel there are possibly even stricter than the ones the USA has. But do you know why Russia requires visas? It's because that's how it always was. Back in the days of the tsar, he had to personally approve foreigners getting legal permission to visit Russia. The USSR continued the practice of requiring visas for foreigners (well, I can't speak to what requirements were for Eastern Block citizens but people in the West needed them) to limit access because foreigners have "dangerous" ideas. Russia still requires visas today for almost everybody even though outside of some of the ex-USSR, few foreigners actually want to stay illegally in Russia today. And until a few years ago you would not believe what foreign "guests" had to do in terms of getting visas registered each time they stayed in a city more than 3 working days. They did get rid of that requirement at least. I've read accounts of it taking many hours of waiting at a local police station just to get them to register your visa. The penalty for failure to register was a possible large fine that had to be paid in cash on departure (I think it was $1000 US or so) and the possibility to have future visa applications automatically denied. This is all about control and "It's how we've always done it" more than anything else.
Have you ever talked to Russian people? I mean those who live there. You might be surprised that there's a really common belief that goes back to the days of the tsar that the guy in charge is benevolent and kind and caring and all those who work under him are responsible for the evil that gets done in his name and if only the top guy knew what they were doing, he'd stop it. This is part of why a surprising large percentage of Russians still believe that Stalin was a great guy even though Khrushchev gave a famous speech repudiating Stalin and his evil deeds and his "cult of personalty". Khrushchev's time in power was probably the high water mark of the USSR in terms of achievements and quality of life and he was forced from power and I suspect today viewed very negatively by the same people who believe that homicidal maniac Stalin was the greatest leader they ever had.
The reason Putin wants control over the internet within Russia is the same reason that China controls it. They fear that power of it to link protesters who might overthrow them. Their fears are different (ie. Russia has no problem with Facebook while China fears it) but both control it to keep the status quo in power. The big difference is that Russians unfortunately grow up believing that everything their government tells them is true, especially if the guy at the top says it. In China, few educated people believe anything their government tells them, but as long as the government mostly leaves them alone, they accept the reality of living under what in effect is an illegal dictatorship.
I have no idea how things are at Zappos, but my previous employer was definitely the anti-Zappos, that's for sure. I worked in the US office of a European telecom I don't want to name. They don't deserve the publicity even a bad mention would bring them. Few Americans have even heard of them or their parent company. My former employer tried laying off American employees but keeping their managers, apparently under the belief that if all those pesky benefit sucking employees left, real work could get done by the managers. I've never seen or heard of anything like it. Offices would be gutted and the managers would keep their jobs, even if they had no direct reports any more. My manager had at one time perhaps 12 direct reports and he ended up with 2, both of which were told that they were only sticking around long enough to shut down and box up some servers in our small local computer room. I lost track of my manager but the last I heard he still was employed there. Exactly what these "valuable" managers were doing to stay employed is a complete mystery to me. We outsourced a lot of jobs, including the ones my group did, to various 3rd world countries where we had offices and those people all had local managers who reported one way or another to our HQ in Europe so all these American managers weren't being used to manage overseas employees. The only other thing I can tell you is that my former employer has continued to gut its American workforce since I left so that didn't seem to indicate that going to a "managers only" approach was working very well in the USA. Our sales were truly terrible in North America when I left and it seems that they got worse afterward. What a shock.
Furthermore, should something like this be omitted simply because Linus doesn't like it? Is his opinion the only one that counts? Among other things, securelevel is used to implement "jails" but the functionality can be completely disabled (securelevel = -1) -- so Linus can turn it off if he wants.
I'm not claiming to be a kernel developer nor do I claim to know enough about the subject at hand to judge who is right and who is wrong. But I can definitely guarantee you that Linus is not someone who makes decisions for random reasons and there is a reason why he doesn't want securelevel in the kernel. Some of you may not agree with it and he is not perfect so he might actually be wrong, but I think it's very misleading for many of you to imply or act like he doesn't want it in there just to show off his power. There is a reason for what he does. Now if you some of you who care about this want to find out what that reason is and debate it, I'd be interested, but he's not being a jerk just for the sake of being a jerk. That's a lot closer to how Theo de Raadt works and that's a misleading and unfair statement to make of him, even if (in my opinion) it's a lot more accurate than to say that of Linus.
If it worked as intended it would have been a good deal.
I'm sure that's true.
It was a sound plan, and I'm sure virgin would very much like to be making a ton of money as well but the part that failed was the fact that they didn't have more protections for the county in the event that say.. a rocket exploded and the business plan was put on hold for 10 years.
I'm not sure I'd go as far as to call it a "sound plan". I'm sure it's exactly like how in the USA teams get local municipalities to pay for new sports stadiums. They paint a rosy picture about how much money the stadium can make and while it is possible, what they downplay or don't say at all is that every game will have to sell out for that to happen. Every game doesn't sell out and the local municipality ends up paying greater costs than expected because the team shifted the financial burden to them and the municipality never considered the possibility that the best case scenario was actually unlikely to happen. I'd guess that the local government of Truth or Consequences failed to realize that there was always some risk (ie. few people really would buy tickets, a rocket explosion could derail the whole thing, etc.) and they considered it a sure thing that they could only make money on it.
I'll say something that gets said every time: They probably weren't clueless. They were probably hoping they were close enough to the ground floor of the scheme to cash in.
Nah. They were clueless. It happens all the time, especially with people who come from countries without a long history of capitalism. My ex-girlfriend was born and raised in China and when we started dating she had only lived in the US a few years. She knew I had some stocks and used to ask me questions and she basically had the idea that it was impossible to lose money in the stock market and that I was stupid for not putting every cent I had into it because I was just passing up free money. I'd love to know what her reaction was to the recent Chinese stock market crash. A guy in my office who fled the USSR in the last years of its existence and has lived in the US since then is convinced that he is going to be a multi-millionaire by one day playing the futures markets. He's bought this insanely expensive piece of investing software that promises it simply can't fail to help you make money. So yes, I really do believe that people honestly thought that they could get this kind of return and it was on the level. Heck, that guy in my office has a bs detector so broken that the bigger the scam, the more he believes it's true and the more on the level it is, the less he believes it. You would not believe the gizmos he's thrown away money at, like the fat burning machine that used vibration through the air to excite your fat molecules and cause you to burn away the pounds! He did not burn away the pounds.
He's lived in the US for over 20 years and he and his family are complete rubes when it comes to everything. He tells me about his parents and they're as bad as he is. I told someone at work that it would not surprise me at all if he's ever given money to a Nigerian scam artist because all you have to do is promise this guy the moon and stars and he's ready to cut you a check.
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Interestingly enough, Slate leans a bit to the left... and most anti-vaxxers lean very much to the left, so why was the bile necessary?
I can't say I know a lot of anti-vaxxers, but the few I do know are very strongly right wing (wing nuts, to be blunt). They're also not very smart. The most anti-vaccine guy I know a few years was personally convinced that Uncle Sam was going to (by force if necessary) compel him to get a flu shot during that year when there was a shortage of the flu vaccine. He was also convinced that Uncle Sam was going to force his wife and teenage daughter to get vaccinated and he specifically mentioned that he was greatly concerned that his teenage daughter would get autism from the vaccine.
I don't know the situation in the USA,
I do. I can explain why it's different here. Outside of really big US downtown areas, you will wait a long time for the taxi and even short trips are expensive. Also, US taxis often (maybe always - not sure as I don't use taxis much) have meters that run on time in the car, not only just for distance. So if you are sitting in the taxi at a long red light (some intersections can easily take over 2 minutes to change to green), your cost is going up all the time even though you aren't moving. This is part of why they are so expensive here.
While I'm not in favor at all of endlessly extending copyright, I feel that the Bono Act missed two very important points.
1. If people/companies can't be bothered to remember to file for an extension, tough. Tough tough tough. That's how it was in the past. The current situation where they just get extended automatically won't resolve the issue sometimes where certain old things (ie. photos) may be under copyright but nobody has any idea at all how to find anybody who actually owns the copyright to try to license it.
2. If these copyrights are so valuable then why on earth is the federal government giving extensions away for free? That makes no sense.
Here's my proposal. OK, if the current terms aren't enough (ie. perhaps Disney comes to mind here), then at expiration allow the copyright holder to apply for a 10 year extension. The price? $100,000. Then when that expires, let them apply for another 10 year extension at 10 times the price of the previous one. So the next extension is $1 million, then $10 million, then $100 million, then $1 billion, then $10 billion, and so on. Eventually even Disney won't pay for it anymore. Could Disney really justify to its stockholders paying $10 million to renew the copyright on the oldest version of Mickey Mouse for 10 more years? Maybe not. But I'm pretty sure that once it reaches $1 billion that nobody is going to want to do that. Exponentially rising costs allows the copyright holder the opportunity to renew if they are willing to pay for it, which I think is fair if these copyrights are so valuable that they just must be extended. Since few will agree to pay even $100,000 in my solution, stuff will at least finally enter the public domain. If it makes anybody feel better, the recent EU copyright extension was so contentious that I can't imagine there's any real political will in Europe to ever extend that beyond what it is now.
I respect Gene Roddenberry, but for all the good he did for Star Trek, everything he did wasn't always good or right. To be very blunt, The Next Generation got a lot better when his declining health limited his tinkering with the show. The seasons where he had the most influence on the show, seasons one and two, were the worst ones for the show. Gates McFadden has stated in recent years that she was fired outright at the end of season one over complaints about the sexism in the scripts. Even Patrick Stewart has stated that he thought the season one scripts were too sexist and that he and other cast members were shocked when she was fired. Some writer (don't remember his name) was behind the campaign to fire her. What exactly was Roddenberry's role in this? I don't know. But at the end it seemed like he was maybe still capable of a good idea (ie. the general concept of The Next Generation) but not so much the inner workings of that idea. I'm guessing that maybe there is one good idea buried in there somewhere that Rod Roddenberry can do something with but that's probably about it.
I can say that in America there was a really big isolationist movement that had a lot of support and there was the idea that we didn't want to have to fight another World War solving Europe's problems which seemed to never stop. Since most Americans surely didn't read of care about Mien Kampf, it's safe to assume that they knew little of its contents. And remember, Hitler invading Russia was Russia's problem at least or Europe's problem at most and not America's problem. Stalin became our best friend out of convenience ("the enemy of my enemy is my friend") when Hitler stabbed him in the back after they started carving up Europe between them. I don't recall reading about a whole of American anger, not even in Congress, when Finland and the Baltic States got invaded by the USSR.
I know much less of how things were in the UK but I know that Churchill was warning people in the 1930s about Hitler and he was originally dismissed as something like a crackpot. I also know that there were Nazi sympathizers in the British government and royal family (the former king and Duke of Windsor was such a Nazi sympathizer that he was forced to be the governor of Bermuda during the war just to keep him out of the way and out of influence). Rudolph Hess made his crazy one man journey to Britain during the war because he believed that the British government had enough Nazi sympathizers in it that he could broker a peace. That in and of itself is probably good evidence that there was some concern that some in the British government weren't fully committed to the war effort, but as far as why after the war started they would still be Nazi sympathizers is something I can't answer.
If you search YouTube you should be able to find an excerpt from the Robot Chicken show called "Little Hiter". Watch it. In about 2 minutes it will show you probably as good a summary as you could ever find as to why the US finally got interested in what was going on elsewhere in the beginning of World War II.
It's hard for me to tell what drove CBS/Paramount over the edge with this production. Tim Russ (Lt. Tuvok on Voyager) has made 2 crowd funded Star Trek movies that he and his company didn't get sued over. In fact, they recently (barely) raised enough money on a Kickstarter campaign to do 2 more episodes of Star Trek Renegades. Russ said that he had a meeting with CBS/Paramount and offered to produce Renegades for them as an online series. They turned him down but told him he could keep doing the series as long as he didn't turn a profit from it. It may be that Axanar has simply raised too much money and that has attracted the ire of CBS/Paramount. Depending on the source Axanar has raised between half a million and one million dollars and for comparison, Renegades took until one day before the campaign ended on Kickstarter to raise the $350,000 needed for 2 more episodes. It may be that CBS/Paramount suspects that someone is pocketing money from Axanar given its higher costs than Renegades (Axanar is budgeted at $250,000 per episode).
The standard AI solution for chess, for example, calls for the engineer to learn how to play chess, then turn his mind's eye inward to see the steps he uses to play chess, then codify those steps as a program. Most AI programs seem to develop that way.
Back in the 1950s, it was assumed that the only way possible to create a chess playing computer program that could beat the best humans was to do exactly what you said. And that approach did lead to some pretty good programs that could beat maybe 99% of players, but the top 1% still won almost all the time against the program. AI researchers assumed that to get good enough to beat humans, the program would have to learn to analyze and think something like humans do, which would lead to AK breakthroughs. It never happened. When the programs became good enough to beat everybody but the top 1%, the programmers realized that storage was relatively cheap and you could essentially cheat. You can program known openings into a database and simply have the program look up the best moves and play them. Then when you get away from known moves, the program can play at its programming best, using algorithms to determine what to do next in terms of cost-benefit analysis and poor fallible humans might simply overlook the fact that a piece is under attack and lose it carelessly. And then you can program a database of known endgames where one side can force a win and the computer can't lose if its on the correct side of the known ending. And computers can look further ahead and try out sequences of moves that most humans would have difficulty doing in their heads. Basically computers now win at chess not because they are better at anything that humans do in their heads, but because programmers figured out how to cheat and turn chess into an open book, open notepad test for the computers without giving humans the same advantages because letting humans do those things is "cheating" but it's OK for programs to do it because it's not visible to the opponent. So chess ultimately ended up being a dead end for AI research. IBM apparently got better at organizing data and doing searches as a result of this kind of "cheating" approach so I suppose there is some value in that, but it's not AI to do faster searches or database lookups to just find the best move to play next.
The Corrections Department is now trying to track down released inmates to make some of them finish their terms.
Wow... How fucking maliciously vindictive and petty can Uncle Sam get?
"Yeah, good job getting your life back together, congrats on landing that new job - Now get back in the goddamned cage."
I don't know if you're American, but if you're not, this kind of thing happens all the time here.
And maybe... just maybe... if the US loses 200 billion dollars a year in tourism income, our politicians will pull their heads out of their asses and start making some sane national security policies (but I wouldn't hold my breath).
As an American, I call tell you that that is not very likely. Few Americans directly benefit from foreign tourism. Americans in general are somewhat xenophobic and its not unusual for them to think that everybody on earth except maybe people in Canada lives in absolute third world squalor in their pitiful, sad country. Americans don't really care at all - not at all - if foreigners face severe restrictions on coming here. And doing "tit for tat" isn't going to change things because the majority of Americans have never been outside of North America. If you just look at the group of Americans who've been outside of North America and remove the ones who've only been to the UK or France and never anywhere else, then you're looking at a pretty small subset of people. Most Americans could not possibly care at all if they aren't allowed to visit foreign countries or if it becomes more difficult to do so because they weren't going to do that anyway.
There may or may not be a good reason why this family ran into problems, but we're unlikely to ever know what the real reason was. My guess is the UK family is Pakistani, which going forward is going to become more and more of a red flag to American DHS people, and they may be connected to a mosque that is under US scrutiny. Or it may just be a complete bunch of crap but either way we'll never know. Some of this may also be a complete overreaction to the recent San Bernardino shootings where the wife was Pakistani and DHS completely fell down on the job by failing to look into the fact that her husband had never actually met her in person before their marriage when he filed for the fiancee visa to bring her over here. All I can say is that over a decade ago I filed for a fiancee visa (we never got married as we broke up before the very final steps of the process, but I digress) as did a friend of mine. We both had girlfriends in Eastern Europe. It was really easy to prove my girlfriend and I had met as I had photos of us together and phone records and email that I submitted with the application to prove we had met in person. My application got preliminary approval and basically all we had to do was go through the final steps, including her personal interview, and she was going to get the visa. Proving that she and I met was incredibly easy since we actually had done so. In fact, at that time there was some government website you could go to where you could look up fiancee visa applications that were denied and the most common reason for denial was lack of proof of a personal meeting. Meeting in person before you apply for a fiancee visa is an absolute legal requirement. So it may suck, but I suspect even if there is no terrorism link that the family is Pakistani and they're suffering for the sins of others from Pakistan.
Wouldn't something like a relatively peaceful border between two nations that are nominally at-peace, be a lot more cost-effectively administered by slow moving airships, with only a handful of rapid-response aircraft used solely for interdiction purposes?
My first job after graduating college was working as a programmer for a branch of the US military that I don't want to name. I'm not forbidden to name it and I have a lot of respect for the men and women who are in it, but man, I saw a lot of dumb technology moves while I was there, which is why I'm being charitable in not naming them. Basically what happens is that some branch of the government, in this case DHS, gets some money and says "Wow! Drones are cool! Let's buy a bunch!" because some manager type (in the US military, this may be a high ranking officer not a civilian) gets a hard on for some new technology. Nobody ever stops to think if it's actually practical or makes sense or is economically reasonable. We saw a lot of wasted money thrown in the trash when I worked on that government job and we weren't really happy about it, but the whole system is setup in such a way that there's no real way to stop this kind of purchase. It's not just another "DHS is the suxor!" kind of thing as Slashdotters want to think. Any part of the US government could have done the same dumb pointless thing.
I'm not trying to be racist and claim that all Asians everywhere are bad drivers. I've spent a decent amount of time in Asia as a tourist in various places and except for China proper (meaning NOT Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan) I've never seen really crazy or dangerous driving. But man, does China ever have a lot of bad drivers. I remember 4 years ago taking a taxi from my hotel to the airport in Shanghai and it was maybe a 40 minute drive. I remember being on 6 lane roads and seeing other cars swerving back and forth between 2 lanes while their driver talked on a cell phone and lots of cars that simply couldn't maintain their lane at all. Even the taxi driver seemed frustrated, but he didn't speak English so I couldn't talk to him about it. The only saving grace was that there weren't a lot of other cars on the road at the time so it wasn't all that difficult to avoid the crazy drivers. A couple of years ago I spent a few weeks in Guangdong Province and the drivers were pretty bad there too in general. I remember being horrified in one town at the number of intersections with no stop signs or traffic lights and drivers just pretty much doing whatever they felt like. I also remember someone in Shanghai telling me that driver education was a complete joke there and people could get drivers licenses with almost training or experience at all.
So why try to save a few bucks outsourcing? I don't get it, the money saved is literally insignificant to them.
I can suggest some reasons why.
1) Disney's primary business is not IT related. We'll just say it's "other stuff". Sure, there is an IT component, but it's not the primary reason the company exists. I work for a Fortune 500 company who's entire business is IT. We're out of business or darn close to it without our IT component. My company actually treats its US based IT workers pretty well and while we do hire H1B people and do some outsourcing of work to India, neither is what I would call a primary chunk of our business. My experience as a career IT worker is that a lot of companies don't really value IT work at all and they always look at it as something anybody can do and it can be as well for cheap by using foreigners. So I think that Disney has never really valued their IT work very much and they look at it as costing too much because they have a bunch of benefit sucking Americans doing it.
2) The workers were all in Orlando if I remember correctly and I'll just simply say that Disney has always treated its Orlando employees as being superfluous. IT employees in California may at this time be under no danger at all, so there is some component of it being in Florida because they are far away from where the big shots are in California who made this decision.
3) Nobody at Disney wants to admit this, but ESPN's revenues are going down. To keep or get sports content, ESPN (which Disney owns) had to pay astronomical prices. In order to keep gouging the TV providers and charge them for carrying ESPN and its related channels, Disney had to agree to lower the number of customers who get their channels to keep the price they get per customer the same. This agreement shocked many industry watchers as they thought Disney would never agree to this. So the reality is that ESPN is going to be spending more and bringing home less. Shaving dollars off IT costs is one way to deal with that reality. Maybe it's a stupid way but again, many or most businesses don't value IT work, so to them it's an easy thing to cut. And note that ESPN recently had some fairly brutal job cuts related to this.
While I think that it probably wasn't the DPRK, your reason isn't good enough as to why it's not. You might be interested in reading the book _The Impossible State_ by Victor Cha, a man who worked for the George W. Bush administration and has been to North Korea. Basically even if North Koreans knew about the Streisand Effect, and I'm not sure they would have known about it, if somebody high up enough orders you to do something, you don't question it - you do it. You risk death or being sent to a labor camp (with a high probability of death anyway) to do otherwise. And as a deterrent, if you get in trouble with the government, your family does too. The book reports people being imprisoned for "crimes" a long dead grandparent or great-grandparent did before WWII even started, so there's not really any sense of people arguing against orders. They're just hoping the state leaves them alone.
In North Korea they don't see the world the same way that you do. Fanatical devotion to the Kim family is widespread. In fact, even defectors who now live in South Korea rarely have anything at all negative to say about whichever Kim family member is currently in charge even years later and they tend to be kind of like the Russians in thinking that the guy running the show is actually a really good person and any bad things are being caused by everybody else and if only the top guy knew the real truth, he'd fix the problems. I don't buy the US government's investigation into the hack and my guess is that the investigation may be a lie (ie. They know North Korea didn't do it, but they want a reason to go after them anyway) or the people who did the investigation are just not all that good at their jobs.
But all this said, I'm not convinced it's ISIS either. If it was ISIS why now, why against Russia when British and American tourists could presumably have been just as easily targeted at the exact same airport all this time and ISIS hates the British and Americans as much as the Russians?
Well, I don't know exactly how many American and British tourists there really are in Egypt. If you're American and you go, if you don't know the risks, which have been around for more than a decade now (cough cough - ask Mexico about that if you need to), I really don't know what to say. The Russian plane was something like a regularly scheduled charter flight. Egypt either has no visa requirement for citizens of the countries that used to be in the USSR or they are something like "get one on arrival". Too lazy to see which. I know that lots of Russians like to go there for vacations because it's one of the rare places that's warm and not very sucky that they can get into without a lot of effort and trouble.
Personally, I'm not ruling out a shoddy repair job as others have speculated on. It's been known since the very late 1990s that Russian airlines outside of Aeroflot don't generally meet American and European standards in terms of safety and repair. My default reaction to any Russian airline disaster on a non-Aeroflot flight is to assume mechanical failure as that's almost always it. Or the pilot let his teenage kid accidentally fly the plane into the ground, killing everybody. Yeah, that really happened once on an infamous flight inside Russia. If you fly anywhere in the world on an airline based in Russia whose name is not Aeroflot, you assume a lot of risk.
The story about the trip to Japan 25 years ago made me think of something. Approximately around 1970, Soviet film director Andrei Tarkovsky and Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa became friends and Soviet authorities allowed Tarkovsky to go to Japan to visit his friend under the official guise of doing a small amount of location filming for his upcoming film, "Solaris". Tarkovsky brought a very small film crew with him and they shot some footage from inside a car of just driving around the major highways and tunnels of Tokyo. There's a 10-15 minute segment of the film that uses the footage and the segment is known as "The city of tomorrow" segment. Even after all these years I have to admit it still looks somewhat futuristic.
As far as backwards banking systems go, Ukraine's was pretty bad in the previous decade. I assume it's better now, but I was last there about 9 years ago. I never used an ATM there - ever. I always brought enough cash with me to cover to my expenses during my stay. I read too many first hand accounts of travelers who used ATMs that actually were run by the mafia and they simply collected your bank and pin info and used that to try to drain your account. The authorities could not be bothered to do anything about this. And this was in major cities like Kiev and Odessa. If you went to any place other than the very largest cities, the stories were that if you ever found an ATM it probably wasn't going to be connected to any international banking network, but at least you didn't have to worry about the mafia running it to try to steal your money.
Well a lot of their biggest companies are in real trouble (ex Sony).
Well, my opinion on why Sony is in real trouble is that the company is actually in effect run by the Americans who dominate the entertainment (music, movies and TV) side of Sony who view all of humanity as thieves looking to steal Sony's entertainment property and who have consumed so many resources and effort to stop the "thieves" that the rest of the business that used to actually be good can no longer be good any more. Sony is no longer interested in making useful products so much as they are completely and utterly obsessed with stopping you, dirty thieving human, from getting their music, movies and TV shows without paying for them.
Don't advertise as unlimited if uploading 70TB of data is too much. It's called false advertising and is against the law in European countries. Sadly, the US doesn't have good consumer protection laws.
Actually the US generally does have good consumer protection laws, but it's not that simple here. First, someone would have sue and it would have to be someone who actually got impacted by the change. US courts don't like it at all when you sue and you're not someone who's been victimized, so you can't sue just because you don't like the changes if you weren't a user who "abused" the old lack of limits. Then literally anything at all can happen when it goes to court. If you get a jury trial all bets are off. Juries typically don't understand technical lawsuits very well so what they will use to decide the case may not really make a lot of sense. Judges aren't necessarily any better. Judges have their own set of prejudices that influence their rulings. Then if you actually beat Microsoft, they'd just appeal and you'd be facing higher costs to fight that appeal where, again, you'll go before judges and anything can happen. You can bet that Microsoft will keep appealing until they win. We don't have a "loser pays" system here and it's almost impossible for a variety of reasons to get your legal costs paid by the loser, so you can get destroyed financially by having a deep pockets loser who just keeps footing the bill for appeal after appeal. Maybe all that stuff doesn't apply in the EU, but it's the reality we face here.
Actually its creator wasn't that great. TNG seasons 1 and 2 were kinda bad, and those were the only two seasons that he had a heavy influence. After that, the writers started breaking some of the rules that Roddenberry had established for the series.
You have really spoken the truth here. It was only as Roddenberry's health went downhill and he was unable to do much to the show that it got better. Gates McFadden was fired after the first season (it's only been in recent years as far as I know that she anybody else connected to the show was willing to admit it) because she - gasp! - had the temerity to complain about the sexist scripts they were given. Roddenberry certainly did her no favors by letting the writer who demanded her exit have his way. Then he replaced her with the very unpopular Diana Muldaur, who was really in a no-win situation on the show. Finally between Michael Piller and Rick Berman somebody brought back McFadden and the stories were getting consistently strong, except for the final season where Piller's attention was elsewhere. Roddenberry made the decision to have a kid (Wil Wheaton) on the show and while now everybody loves Wheaton, I've always wondered if he left the show because he was tired of all the very negative comments his character consistently got while the show was on. Roddenberry was notorious for demanding re-writes on everything even back to The Original Series, not always for the better. I respect Roddenberry for the general vision and ideas but no more.
People in the west don't understand that for most Chinese, the one child policy doesn't have effect. Because there are so many exceptions.
1) If you and your partner were single kids, you can have two kids.
2) Ethnic minorities have higher limits, and foreigners, including Hong Kong and Taiwan can have unlimited
3) Rich people just pay the tax and have another child, because they are so rich from corruption money is nothing for them.
4) Some provinces had already lifted the ban, or lessened it greatly.
5) Children born outside China, including HK and Taiwan, don't count. Hence the large amount of birth tourism.
So this is pretty much a symbolic act, but at least it's the communists admitting they can't control everything. I wonder how this will be spun off in China, since there the communists are still treated as nearly perfect, the thing everyone should aspire to be.
1) If this were true, then just about everybody could have multiple kids in the past.
2) As pointed out by others, despite you apparently believing PRC propaganda, no part of Taiwan ruled territory has ever been under PRC control. So PRC rules/laws don't apply there. Hong Kong and Macau operate under their own laws under the SAR agreements.
3) Famous directory Zhang Yimou and his wife tried this and got into a lot of trouble. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it may be as easy as you think.
4) This is actually true and the further you were from Beijing, the more likely it was to be the case.
5) I know of no birth tourism to Taiwan. I keep up with Taiwan and my understanding is that it's very difficult for individual PRC citizens to get individual visas to go to Taiwan. They keep them in tour groups. This is because the PRC wants to control its citizens' access to Taiwan and their "dangerous" ideas.
Additionally, families that had a girl for their first child were allowed to have another child. My ex-girlfriend is from Guangdong province and she has a younger sister for this reason. Her sister is married and has a daughter and before this change the sister and her husband were talking about having another child.
1) Hollywood producers want to make new Buck Rogers movie based on his very first book appearance. Announce it at Comic Con.
2) Trust that says it owns the character threatens to sue producers.
3) Producers try to reach deal. Trust apparently refuses to reach a deal. They simply don't want the film made.
4) Producers are now going to try an argument that Buck Rogers is actually already in the public domain, so screw the trust as they don't need their permission anyway.
But this reads purely as propaganda.
It does because you don't understand how Russia works. Are you aware that Russia requires almost all foreign citizens to have visas to travel there? Nothing so unusual in that. More developed countries do that all the time. Australia's rules for travel there are possibly even stricter than the ones the USA has. But do you know why Russia requires visas? It's because that's how it always was. Back in the days of the tsar, he had to personally approve foreigners getting legal permission to visit Russia. The USSR continued the practice of requiring visas for foreigners (well, I can't speak to what requirements were for Eastern Block citizens but people in the West needed them) to limit access because foreigners have "dangerous" ideas. Russia still requires visas today for almost everybody even though outside of some of the ex-USSR, few foreigners actually want to stay illegally in Russia today. And until a few years ago you would not believe what foreign "guests" had to do in terms of getting visas registered each time they stayed in a city more than 3 working days. They did get rid of that requirement at least. I've read accounts of it taking many hours of waiting at a local police station just to get them to register your visa. The penalty for failure to register was a possible large fine that had to be paid in cash on departure (I think it was $1000 US or so) and the possibility to have future visa applications automatically denied. This is all about control and "It's how we've always done it" more than anything else.
Have you ever talked to Russian people? I mean those who live there. You might be surprised that there's a really common belief that goes back to the days of the tsar that the guy in charge is benevolent and kind and caring and all those who work under him are responsible for the evil that gets done in his name and if only the top guy knew what they were doing, he'd stop it. This is part of why a surprising large percentage of Russians still believe that Stalin was a great guy even though Khrushchev gave a famous speech repudiating Stalin and his evil deeds and his "cult of personalty". Khrushchev's time in power was probably the high water mark of the USSR in terms of achievements and quality of life and he was forced from power and I suspect today viewed very negatively by the same people who believe that homicidal maniac Stalin was the greatest leader they ever had.
The reason Putin wants control over the internet within Russia is the same reason that China controls it. They fear that power of it to link protesters who might overthrow them. Their fears are different (ie. Russia has no problem with Facebook while China fears it) but both control it to keep the status quo in power. The big difference is that Russians unfortunately grow up believing that everything their government tells them is true, especially if the guy at the top says it. In China, few educated people believe anything their government tells them, but as long as the government mostly leaves them alone, they accept the reality of living under what in effect is an illegal dictatorship.
I have no idea how things are at Zappos, but my previous employer was definitely the anti-Zappos, that's for sure. I worked in the US office of a European telecom I don't want to name. They don't deserve the publicity even a bad mention would bring them. Few Americans have even heard of them or their parent company. My former employer tried laying off American employees but keeping their managers, apparently under the belief that if all those pesky benefit sucking employees left, real work could get done by the managers. I've never seen or heard of anything like it. Offices would be gutted and the managers would keep their jobs, even if they had no direct reports any more. My manager had at one time perhaps 12 direct reports and he ended up with 2, both of which were told that they were only sticking around long enough to shut down and box up some servers in our small local computer room. I lost track of my manager but the last I heard he still was employed there. Exactly what these "valuable" managers were doing to stay employed is a complete mystery to me. We outsourced a lot of jobs, including the ones my group did, to various 3rd world countries where we had offices and those people all had local managers who reported one way or another to our HQ in Europe so all these American managers weren't being used to manage overseas employees. The only other thing I can tell you is that my former employer has continued to gut its American workforce since I left so that didn't seem to indicate that going to a "managers only" approach was working very well in the USA. Our sales were truly terrible in North America when I left and it seems that they got worse afterward. What a shock.
Furthermore, should something like this be omitted simply because Linus doesn't like it? Is his opinion the only one that counts? Among other things, securelevel is used to implement "jails" but the functionality can be completely disabled (securelevel = -1) -- so Linus can turn it off if he wants.
I'm not claiming to be a kernel developer nor do I claim to know enough about the subject at hand to judge who is right and who is wrong. But I can definitely guarantee you that Linus is not someone who makes decisions for random reasons and there is a reason why he doesn't want securelevel in the kernel. Some of you may not agree with it and he is not perfect so he might actually be wrong, but I think it's very misleading for many of you to imply or act like he doesn't want it in there just to show off his power. There is a reason for what he does. Now if you some of you who care about this want to find out what that reason is and debate it, I'd be interested, but he's not being a jerk just for the sake of being a jerk. That's a lot closer to how Theo de Raadt works and that's a misleading and unfair statement to make of him, even if (in my opinion) it's a lot more accurate than to say that of Linus.
If it worked as intended it would have been a good deal.
I'm sure that's true.
It was a sound plan, and I'm sure virgin would very much like to be making a ton of money as well but the part that failed was the fact that they didn't have more protections for the county in the event that say.. a rocket exploded and the business plan was put on hold for 10 years.
I'm not sure I'd go as far as to call it a "sound plan". I'm sure it's exactly like how in the USA teams get local municipalities to pay for new sports stadiums. They paint a rosy picture about how much money the stadium can make and while it is possible, what they downplay or don't say at all is that every game will have to sell out for that to happen. Every game doesn't sell out and the local municipality ends up paying greater costs than expected because the team shifted the financial burden to them and the municipality never considered the possibility that the best case scenario was actually unlikely to happen. I'd guess that the local government of Truth or Consequences failed to realize that there was always some risk (ie. few people really would buy tickets, a rocket explosion could derail the whole thing, etc.) and they considered it a sure thing that they could only make money on it.
I'll say something that gets said every time: They probably weren't clueless. They were probably hoping they were close enough to the ground floor of the scheme to cash in.
Nah. They were clueless. It happens all the time, especially with people who come from countries without a long history of capitalism. My ex-girlfriend was born and raised in China and when we started dating she had only lived in the US a few years. She knew I had some stocks and used to ask me questions and she basically had the idea that it was impossible to lose money in the stock market and that I was stupid for not putting every cent I had into it because I was just passing up free money. I'd love to know what her reaction was to the recent Chinese stock market crash. A guy in my office who fled the USSR in the last years of its existence and has lived in the US since then is convinced that he is going to be a multi-millionaire by one day playing the futures markets. He's bought this insanely expensive piece of investing software that promises it simply can't fail to help you make money. So yes, I really do believe that people honestly thought that they could get this kind of return and it was on the level. Heck, that guy in my office has a bs detector so broken that the bigger the scam, the more he believes it's true and the more on the level it is, the less he believes it. You would not believe the gizmos he's thrown away money at, like the fat burning machine that used vibration through the air to excite your fat molecules and cause you to burn away the pounds! He did not burn away the pounds. He's lived in the US for over 20 years and he and his family are complete rubes when it comes to everything. He tells me about his parents and they're as bad as he is. I told someone at work that it would not surprise me at all if he's ever given money to a Nigerian scam artist because all you have to do is promise this guy the moon and stars and he's ready to cut you a check.