Officially years in Japan start with 1 and the coronation of the new emperor. Now it seems that the year in Japan is Heisei 30, which means it's the 30th year since the Heisei emperor (Akihito) took the throne. This would be something like in the US calling 2016 as Obama 8 or 2018 by the term Trump 2. The real problem here isn't that computers are going to shut down in Japan when the current emperor abdicates next year as planned. This isn't really a Y2K problem. The Guardian usually does good work but to say this is similar to Y2K is just not correct. The article even admits that some older computers have actually never updated the year from the Showa era (when Hiirohito was emperor) so they think this year is Showa 93. Those computers will have a problem in 2025 as their calendars were never designed to hold 3 digit years, which would make 2025 be Showa 100. The real problem with the abdication is that the next era for the upcoming emperor has not yet been named. OK, so why is that a problem? Well, Japan has a history of creating a brand new character for the era when it change and Unicode has a major release scheduled for right before the abdication is scheduled to happen. The brand new character is the problem because the next release of Unicode won't support it because nobody knows what it will be yet. They have the ability to guess, but nobody wants to guess because they could be wrong. So all this hubbub is that next year's major Unicode release will require a patch shortly after release with the patch including the new character for the new era. Do keep in mind that Akihito could die of natural causes before the abdication and this problem will happen immediately upon his death. And this problem will happen every time a new emperor takes over. I'm not convinced that this is really a major problem. Computers could easily just show Heisei 31 and so on until the Unicode fix is in place. I guess it's just fun on a slow news day to blow things out of proportion.
Downside to Toronto? Nearly 75% of the 1/3 of the population of Canada(Windsor to Ottawa) lives in the area.
Your post was good, but I have to laugh at this. It reminds me quite a bit of some of the shell and perl I inherited on my job from past employees who are now gone. 75% of 1/3 is 24.75%, or by rounding up, 25%. But I guess it's more fun to say "75% of 1/3 of Canada's population" than "25% of Canada's population".
I always wonder with these big scams, do the people creating them know that they're likely to get caught and spend decades in prison, or do they think they'll actually get away with it?
I'm pretty sure they think that they can't get caught because they are smarter than those dumb guys who got caught. Also, in some places you may simply be able to bribe your way out of trouble because the government doesn't prosecute people who take bribes. There's probably some thought that once they get rich, they can stop the scamming because they won't need to do it any more, but that target value of what exactly is "rich" continues to move beyond them. And it probably doesn't help when we read stories about that criminal group who keeps robbing banks of millions of dollars and apparently no government anywhere has any idea who these people are because they keep doing it and there are no arrests. So I can see how some smaller time crooks will conclude that if the really big thieves can't be stopped, they can get away with it too.
I work for Atos. My company was also acquired by them. It has been nothing short of horrible, and this is years into the takeover. You will face extreme layoffs, budget reductions, no raises, and just a general feeling of incompetence and wonder for a company with so much money. Syntel employees: run. Iâ(TM)m not kidding. Get out now.
I worked for a French company too on a previous job here in the USA. I refuse to name them because few of heard of them and even years later I've still got grudges against them. Best thing I can do to them is to never mention their name so people in the USA continue to never hear of them.
I do like the French people in general and I would say that the company probably had the best benefits I've ever had in the industry. On the downside, the French are control freaks like you can't even imagine. No matter what Syntel is doing, it's only a matter of time before French management decides to do things differently. Even if it makes no sense, it won't matter because I can assure Syntel employees that nobody in Atos will respect them or what they have done and will believe that once Atos starts taking a bigger role in day to day activities, things will only get better. Additionally they don't like American employees because they don't get paid slave wages, so look for Atos to either try to ramp up H1B hiring big time (if they can - not sure under the current administration how effective that plan is) or start moving jobs off shore to cheaper locations who also speak English. If you read this and you work for Syntel, you need to get your resume ready. You may need it. If you can speak French fluently, it can buy you some time, but even a completely fluent speaker I worked with (she was American, but born in the USA to immigrant French parents who taught her the language) got laid off about 3 years after they came for me and my department. If Syntel has any French citizens there, they'll do OK. The French do look out for their own. And in my former company they pretty much kept everybody who wasn't born in the USA, even if they weren't French citizens. So look forward to a lot of unspoken anti-American prejudice towards those of you who try to stay who actually are Americans. Once the layoffs start, you'll need to be prepared to hit the ground pretty quickly. Most of the people laid off where I worked got zero notice.
I rarely buy comics, but a few months ago a special issue came out that I did actually want to buy. It had 3 variant covers and I wanted them all. So I went to 2 different comics shops in my part of town. Keep in mind that I live in the suburbs of one of the larger metropolitan areas in the USA, so you can imagine how much worse things are if you live in a small town.
The reality is that to protect comic book shops, publishers don't sell individual titles or subscriptions to some comics. Yes, I'm sure that there are exceptions to this, but it was true for the specific comic I wanted, which was by Marvel. So I go to comic book shop number one. They are actually a used book store who sells a few comics on the side. They get only the very biggest sellers, which meant that they never even had a copy of the comic I wanted. So I go to shop number 2, which is a true comic book shop. That is what they sell to stay in business. I talked to the owner. The owner said she thought she got in one or two copies of the comic and they were sold and she won't be getting any more. Since I was already there, I asked her did she get any of the Disney comics that were revived a year or two ago. She said that she carried a few when they first came out but didn't sell them, so she didn't carry them any more. And the publisher of Disney comics in the USA does not do subscriptions and with very few exceptions does not sell individual issues themselves.
At this point, I gave up because it seemed like trying to go to more comic shops was just going to waste more of my time. In the end, I bought all 3 copies of the comic I wanted on Ebay from a seller who apparently had access to a comic book shop that could get all variant covers. I had to pay about double face price plus shipping, but I got them all. I almost forgot to mention that I looked online to see if any of the big online comic book retailers could sell me the comic I wanted with the variant covers. Nobody could sell me anything but the main cover version. Amazon didn't have this comic for sale either except in the main cover variant.
So in the end, I learned that the following insanity is how the comic book publishing business is run today.
1) To protect comic book shops, publishers mostly refuse to sell directly to individuals, forcing you to go to comic books shops.
2) If your local comic book shop sells out of something you want, too bad. They probably can't get more of it.
3) If there's a variant cover and you want it, your local shop may not carry it. And online retailers definitely won't. Apparently publishers only send variant covers to selected comic shops.
4) You may be forced to turn to Ebay to buy something if you can't get it in a shop.
5) Even Amazon can't stop this insanity. They may be able to sell a specific issue to you if you want it, but they don't get variant cover issues to sell.
So am I surprised that this unwillingness to sell comics to people who actually want to buy them has blown up in their faces? No I am not.
Tastes of fruit and vege have changed a lot over the decades. Thing is: consumers don't buy based on taste, they buy based on appearance and consistency. Hence rather than cool new fruit with mind-boggling flavours we get amazing looking tomatoes that bounce without bruising and taste like compressed cardboard and disappointment.
That is not true for everything. I'm American and I have always lived in places that didn't have much of an apple industry. As a kid, there were 3 types of apples that could be bought in grocery stores where I lived.
1) Red Delicious - which is never delicious but it is certainly red. It's awful all the time. It looks great and it always tastes like a mush.
2) Yellow Delicious - which is marginally better than Red Delicious in that it might actually be possible to find some that don't taste like mush, but most will taste like mush.
3) Granny Smith - these are almost always good and rarely have problems.
That was it. I never understood as a kid why people liked apples because other than Granny Smith, they were pretty bad all the time. And most people who said they liked apples ate those awful crimes against nature, Red Delicious.
So finally the US supermarkets starting carrying Gala and Fuji. Some were convinced that US customers would never buy them because they weren't of uniform color, but those guys are pretty good pretty much all the time and people did buy them. During apple season, I can go to Whole Foods and they'll have the 5 types I mentioned plus a few others like maybe Pink Lady. US consumers have shown that they will now buy apples based on taste and not just appearance, but it took a long time to get there. Even my local chain supermarket is now carrying heirloom tomatoes regularly so there is hope there too. Honestly, I hated tomatoes for most of my life because they were (and sometimes still are) awful tasting even though they look great. I tried a tomato in Eastern Europe over a decade ago and I was amazed at how flavorful it was so then I realized that tomatoes were like apples. It certainly was possible to grow really tasty ones but the supermarkets were only carrying the ones that shipped well and looked good regardless of taste. By the way, even in the US, cherry and grape tomatoes are really good everywhere and are safe bets if you want a tomato but don't want to gamble on a normal sized supermarket one.
Re 'What I don't see is why Russia would let others keep half?"
To not be Spain. Better to get something on good terms than go full Spain in a court over a transfer of the treasure.
Any salvage company, other nations will then be happy to work with Russian on any new project in the future.
Should Russian need something around the other side of the world in the future a skilled salvage company will remember events like this.
No. That is definitely not the reason. You are making the classic mistake of applying western reasoning to a government that does not view the world in those terms. I can assure you that Putin and his government have no real long term vision beyond maybe a couple of years, so that's definitely not it.
Much more likely reasons are:
1) Russia knows the odds are really good that the gold isn't there any more (it may have been secretly salvaged by somebody a long time ago) or maybe never was, so they don't want to waste time looking for nothing. But appearing to cooperate allows them to get great positive publicity at what might be literally zero cost to them.
2) The gold exists and they have decided that the railroad project offers them so much benefit that their real motivation is to get the railroad project done at little or not real cost to them. Shipping goods from South Korea via railroad into Russia instead of by ship might be useful to Russia.
``I'm guessing that a 1% change in ticket prices won't make much of a difference.''
Something tells me that they'd never even bother to ask the passengers whether 1% would put them off flying.
I'm pretty sure in the USA and probably Europe (and maybe everywhere) that customers won't agree to that. There's no need to ask. American customers have made it clear that EVERYTHING is negotiable about flying except the cost and they will put up with ANYTHING to get a cheaper price. Every US based airline that has tried to offer a higher quality but more expensive service has seen it lose business to cheaper competitors. Southwest makes so much money here in the US because it is so cheap and passengers are wiling to risk being bumped off flights to save money. I've never flown them, but Ryan Air has no shortage of posts online talking about how truly awful it is and yet Europeans won't stay away from them just to save money. So I don't know what to say except to tell you that passengers have shown that they'll put up with anything to save money. They'll never agree to pay more to get more or better pilots.
Why wouldn't they tell everyone? "Don't try to attack us, we have advanced defence systems that can detect your decoy missiles and track the real ones."
Russia did the same with its announcement that it has hypersonic long range missiles and drone sub nukes that can't be stopped by any existing system. Both China and the US demonstrated their ability to shoot down satellites.
That's not exactly why Russia did that. First of all, they lie so much that you really can't take anything they say at face value. The hypersonic missile stuff could be true, but you and I aren't in a position to know for sure. They are, however, convinced that the West in general or the US specifically are looking for a way to nuke them and kill them all without any retaliation, so lying about hypersonic missiles could just be an attempt to keep the US from killing them as soon as it can do so. Now I don't believe for a minute that the US really wants to nuke Russia and kill them all, but I definitely do think that Putin and his cronies think they do want just that. And honestly, if Russia had hypersonic missiles for real, I'm not convinced that they wouldn't use them to attack the US first to "stop" the US from this mythical attack they fear.
As Spock said, military secrets are the most fleeting of all. I'm sure that today's stealth planes will eventually be able to be seen by some kind of radar. The Chinese might really have it. If not now, they probably will soon enough. And then they may be enhances to break that radar and then counter-enhancements to fix the break and so on.
By Arthur C Clarke. Except a lot more detail on the transformation, why and relationship to monolith.
Why is this a new revelation? Kubrick and Clarke worked closely together on 2001 resulting in arguable best film/book combo ever.
It's a revelation because few people who have seen the movie have read the book. Sure, here on Slashdot that won't be true, but ask some random guy at work in a non-IT department and you'll find that he saw the film but didn't read the book. I read the book in my 20s because the film intrigued me, but I didn't really understand it and I was hoping the book might explain what I had seen. Note that the book is not an exact copy of the film and there are some differences as Clarke points out in his introductory comments.
You are showing a North American bias. Europe and Asia both for a while used true copy protection where common rippers like iTunes couldn't rip the CD at all. Not all CDs had this, but some did. I've got a Spanish CD of the old group Ketama that had a really difficult to crack version of this copy protection and even Exact Audio Copy couldn't fully break it. I had to resort to doing an analog copy of the first track using a mini disc recorder if I remember correctly but I was able to rip the rest of the CD to my PC. I remember this one being really nasty because the ripped files had several songs lumped together into one large file and I had to use an audio editor to separate the tracks. However, those copy protection mechanisms didn't download anything to your PC to stop you. I vaguely remember the copy protection had some kind of data placed after the audio part of the CD (this meant that you couldn't fill up the CD with audio if you were going to copy protect it - every example I saw was under 70 minutes long) in such a way that a CD player would never attempt to read it but a PC would find it first and the ripper would have no idea what to do with it because it wasn't CD audio.
I still buy CD's regularly. Luckily, I've got quite a few local retailers that sell an awesome variety of CD's, at much better prices than Best Buy.
I also still buy CDs somewhat regularly and although I live in a large metropolitan region of the USA, no local retailers sell any that I'm interested in. It's long been a case of any retailers that still have them for sale only carrying the top 40 and greatest hits. Amazon is my friend as they sell just about every CD I want to buy and for the odd ones they don't carry because they are somewhat obscure, I have other online sources for those.
Dying at 84 in your sleep seems like an absolute win in my book. Now one can only hope that his life was a happy one.
Maybe. Then again, here's one of my favorite jokes, which I read somewhere more than a decade ago:
"I hope I die in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming like the passengers in his car."
Gerrymandering has just been legalized. The SCOTUS is about to shift even further to the right and for a longer time frame.
It will shift more to the right without Kennedy, but not as much as you might think. Kennedy usually voted for the conservative position on most cases, but he was capable of every now and then swinging the other way. He was basically the least conservative of the 5 judges considered to be conservative but he was still fairly conservative. Roberts will take his place as the swing vote, being a guy who usually votes conservative but every now and then makes a vote with the 4 liberals that nobody expected. So I'm not seeing a court without Kennedy as being much different than now. Maybe 5-10% more conservative, but probably not more than that.
What the hell is wrong with people? "Someone's wrong on the internet / in life and it's my duty / job / addiction to permanently correct them? Get over yourself and come up with a better argument. Make them come over to your side instead.
Hell, maybe you'll even learn something yourself.
Scott Adams has theorized that you simply can't reason with any human being and get them to change their mind on anything because all decisions are made on emotions, not facts. While I don't agree with him and have a differing theory, I can't at this time disprove his theory.
I have a different theory that I'm not sure I want to fully go into here, but I'll summarize. I suspect that about 10% of the population sees everything in black and white terms. According to my theory, you simply can't reason with such people because they don't see anything in terms of gray and even worse, they don't understand that the way they see the world isn't how the vast majority of humans see it. So when you try to reason with them on anything they have a different opinion on, they think you are crazy because they think you have access to the exact same information they do and see the universe in the exact same way they do so thus you are stubbornly refusing to go along with reality by having a different point of view. They are truly incapable of understanding a different point of view on a subject.
It could also simply be that the killer is mentally ill and none of the above applies. And in reply to another comment elsewhere, all I can say is killing someone you disagree with and then turning yourself in to the police and is a very Asian and in particular a very Japanese thing to do.
IBM has a far better record of destroying anything it partners with or acquires.
For the old timers think of Timeplex, Taligent, Pink, OS/2.
You could add Sequent to that sad list. I used to work for a company that used Sequent computers for a specific application we developed. I remember I talked to a few contacts I had at Sequent at the time of the purchase and they were trying to put a positive spin on it, saying that IBM said they would incorporate some of Sequent's technology into either AIX or Linux. I remember vaguely that IBM sort of tried to do that for a few months, then they decided that it was "hard" to do that, so they just shut down Sequent all together.
The US is facing a bill to extend copyright another 70 years. And to prevent much 'old' content from going into the public domain.
There's a way both to allow copyrights to potentially be extended and to get stuff into the public domain at the same time. I've posted before on this. The problem is that if these copyrights are so valuable that they simply must be extended, then why is Congress doing so for free or a mere pittance? Allow for renewals once the initial copyright expires but limit those to renewal to a much shorter period, say, 10 years. Charge $1 million for the first renewal. I mean, if these copyrights are valuable, they should require a fee. Uncle Sam keeps the money. The 2nd renewal is also for 10 years but it goes up by a factor of 10 to $10 million. 3rd renewal costs $100 million. 4th renewal costs $1 billion. At some point, probably at the $10 million mark, almost everybody will drop out and things will enter the public domain. Disney, for example, is a publicly traded company and I don't think their shareholders will view $1 billion a good price to pay to renew the copyright on 1920s Mickey Mouse when the following renewal will cost $10 billion.
They want to take away the ONE THING I love about flying? Seeing the world from above the clouds is beautiful and helps make the hellish experience of commercial airline travel bearable.
What the hell is wrong with these airlines?
Removing the windows makes the plane more structurally sound (maybe you heard of the Southwest fatality recently that involved a person sitting next to a window) and should improve fuel efficiency and possibly extend range. But yes, some people are going to complain bitterly about it. Do note that this is only Emirates considering this. Do you ever fly Emirates? I'm guessing you only fly within the USA. If so, don't worry. Your USA internal flying experience will only continue to degrade over time with seats that get smaller and smaller and charges go up for everything, but you're not likely to lose your precious windows because the sheeple would simply not put up with that,although they will put up with everything else. By the way, did you know that American Airlines new cabin design is so bad (they even stole space from business class to put in more seats) that their own CEO won't admit publicly to having ever flown on it? Good times. But American does have windows.
That Air France Flight 447 went down was not due to "poor training" or because of a lack of ability to detect a cyber-attack, but because the copilot in that airplane panicked and pulled when he should have pushed. (Frankly his mistake was a rookie mistake that student pilots are supposed to unlearn within the first 20 hours of training.)
This is a gross oversimplification of what happened. A US pilot and airline safety expert wrote a book on the crash and his conclusion was that the junior co-pilot in charge of the plane reacted exactly as he was trained but there were issues with the training. It's a really complex situation regarding the crash. The pilot would almost certainly not have made the mistake that crashed the plane but he got 1 hour of sleep the night before and took his break early due to being tired. Inexplicably he put the most junior of the 2 co-pilots in charge. There''s been some thought that the senior of the 2 co-pilots would have safely flown through the storm had he been placed in charge. Also, the faulty air speed indicators weren't replaced in Brazil, where I have no doubts that a competent replacement could have been done, because Air France wanted the plane flown to France to do the work there because the French are control freaks to the n-th degree and they don't trust anybody else to do technical work.
The crash was due to an amazing set of circumstances where EVERY decision made in a long chain of events was wrong starting with some instrument setting failures before the plane even took off. This all enabled the plane to get into alternate law mode, which neither of the 2 co-pilots realized in time had happened. The plane crashed because in alternate law mode the plane allows the pilot to do anything, including things that could crash the plane, and junior co-pilot put the plane into a stall due to failure of his training to account for the situation he actually found himself in. His thinking got screwed up and he pulled up on the stick to try to climb, which actually put the plane into a stall that nobody noticed. There were also some design issues with how Airbus designed the plane's control sticks and audio warnings and the 2 co-pilots failed to fully understand that the Airbus design decisions were odd and had to be accounted for.
"How can a movie that grossed $475 million on a $32 million budget not turn a profit? It comes down to Tinseltown accounting. As Planet Money explained in an interview with Edward Jay Epstein in 2010, studios typically set up a separate "corporation" for each movie they produce. Like any company, it calculates profits by subtracting expenses from revenues. Erase any possible profit, the studio charges this "movie corporation" a big fee that overshadows the film's revenue. For accounting purposes, the movie is a money "loser" and there are no profits to distribute.
Yep. The first knowledge the general public got of this was when Art Buchwald sued over "Coming To America". He had a deal that guaranteed him a share of the profits, but Hollywood accounting practices claimed that not only were there no profits, the film somehow lost money so they owed him nothing. What just continues to amaze me is that the US government seems cool with this. If you or I as average citizens tried to dodge paying taxes this way, we'd go to jail for sure. But let Hollywood and other businesses do that and everything is fine. This has caused me to wonder if Hollywood really has a secret deal with the IRS and US government where they do pay more realistic taxes and it doesn't get reported to the public. If not, then Hollywood must have amazing power over the government to continue to get away with this.
Similarly, Magnus Carlsen attributes his greatness to having access to more games than his role models, at least in part, owing to the games all being online.
I'm sure that's true, but he has also has access to greater computing power for analysis than his predecessors did. That's a huge difference maker. Computers can brute force a lot of chess problems and come up with interesting ways to play them that humans didn't think of before. I used to really keep up with chess years ago and don't so much these days, but I do see to recall that one example where computer analysis and some new approaches paid off was that they figured out a way for black to play the Benoni Defense against the 4 Pawns Attack and have a chance to win. Back when I used to play I would sometimes transpose into the Benoni, which I liked to play, once the white player could no longer play the 4PA because the 4PA was essentially a guaranteed win for white with correct play if the players were at approximately equal skill levels. The 4PA was so powerful for years that it pretty much killed interest in the Benoni Defense as black, which is one of the reasons I liked to play it - it often surprised opponents. If white didn't make moves that prevented playing the 4PA, I would just play the King's Indian Defense, which I also liked and could handle systems similar to the 4PA.
Me too...
In Venice it's forbidden to feed pigeons, as they shit everywhere and their excrements corrode the historical buildings.
While scooters (called vespas in Italy) are nowhere to be found, as they aren't watertight - you use gondolas to travel around.
I've actually been to Venice, Italy and there certainly are plenty of places where one could use a scooter if so inclined. I suspect the reason they aren't used is because Europeans aren't afraid to walk and the use of such in Venice, Italy would likely be impractical.
First, never sign up for a Comcast service online, ever. Always call or go to a store location.
Thanks for telling us how this worked in the previous century grandpa, always good to know that, but this is useless advice now. I know because I have tried to call Comcast and you can't. They only do new sales via a chat window on the internet. I've never seen a Comcast store location. They are not AT&T. They have a few of what I guess you could call Service Centers where existing customers can in theory go to - maybe - but I don't know if it's even possible to buy their service that way. Given their use of internet chats I wouldn't bet on it.
Trump does not have the authority to address the legal status of "Dreamers". Only Congress can do that....something which Trump has asked them to do.
This is quite true, but surely you know the reason why he's doing this. And it's not because it's the right thing to do or he loves the US Constitution or he respects separation of powers or whatever. He knows that Congress is so dysfunctional that it will simply never reach a deal and that Republican members of the House are running for re-election locally on racially charged anti-immigration platforms that play well in the small towns that Republican districts mostly contain and they'll quite simply never approve a deal. This enables Trump to claim it's not his problem to solve, and he is technically correct, but it's also so he can pin the blame on Congress if it becomes convenient for him to do so. He's definitely not doing this because he wants a solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Officially years in Japan start with 1 and the coronation of the new emperor. Now it seems that the year in Japan is Heisei 30, which means it's the 30th year since the Heisei emperor (Akihito) took the throne. This would be something like in the US calling 2016 as Obama 8 or 2018 by the term Trump 2. The real problem here isn't that computers are going to shut down in Japan when the current emperor abdicates next year as planned. This isn't really a Y2K problem. The Guardian usually does good work but to say this is similar to Y2K is just not correct. The article even admits that some older computers have actually never updated the year from the Showa era (when Hiirohito was emperor) so they think this year is Showa 93. Those computers will have a problem in 2025 as their calendars were never designed to hold 3 digit years, which would make 2025 be Showa 100. The real problem with the abdication is that the next era for the upcoming emperor has not yet been named. OK, so why is that a problem? Well, Japan has a history of creating a brand new character for the era when it change and Unicode has a major release scheduled for right before the abdication is scheduled to happen. The brand new character is the problem because the next release of Unicode won't support it because nobody knows what it will be yet. They have the ability to guess, but nobody wants to guess because they could be wrong. So all this hubbub is that next year's major Unicode release will require a patch shortly after release with the patch including the new character for the new era. Do keep in mind that Akihito could die of natural causes before the abdication and this problem will happen immediately upon his death. And this problem will happen every time a new emperor takes over. I'm not convinced that this is really a major problem. Computers could easily just show Heisei 31 and so on until the Unicode fix is in place. I guess it's just fun on a slow news day to blow things out of proportion.
Downside to Toronto? Nearly 75% of the 1/3 of the population of Canada(Windsor to Ottawa) lives in the area.
Your post was good, but I have to laugh at this. It reminds me quite a bit of some of the shell and perl I inherited on my job from past employees who are now gone. 75% of 1/3 is 24.75%, or by rounding up, 25%. But I guess it's more fun to say "75% of 1/3 of Canada's population" than "25% of Canada's population".
I always wonder with these big scams, do the people creating them know that they're likely to get caught and spend decades in prison, or do they think they'll actually get away with it?
I'm pretty sure they think that they can't get caught because they are smarter than those dumb guys who got caught. Also, in some places you may simply be able to bribe your way out of trouble because the government doesn't prosecute people who take bribes. There's probably some thought that once they get rich, they can stop the scamming because they won't need to do it any more, but that target value of what exactly is "rich" continues to move beyond them. And it probably doesn't help when we read stories about that criminal group who keeps robbing banks of millions of dollars and apparently no government anywhere has any idea who these people are because they keep doing it and there are no arrests. So I can see how some smaller time crooks will conclude that if the really big thieves can't be stopped, they can get away with it too.
I work for Atos. My company was also acquired by them. It has been nothing short of horrible, and this is years into the takeover. You will face extreme layoffs, budget reductions, no raises, and just a general feeling of incompetence and wonder for a company with so much money. Syntel employees: run. Iâ(TM)m not kidding. Get out now.
I worked for a French company too on a previous job here in the USA. I refuse to name them because few of heard of them and even years later I've still got grudges against them. Best thing I can do to them is to never mention their name so people in the USA continue to never hear of them.
I do like the French people in general and I would say that the company probably had the best benefits I've ever had in the industry. On the downside, the French are control freaks like you can't even imagine. No matter what Syntel is doing, it's only a matter of time before French management decides to do things differently. Even if it makes no sense, it won't matter because I can assure Syntel employees that nobody in Atos will respect them or what they have done and will believe that once Atos starts taking a bigger role in day to day activities, things will only get better. Additionally they don't like American employees because they don't get paid slave wages, so look for Atos to either try to ramp up H1B hiring big time (if they can - not sure under the current administration how effective that plan is) or start moving jobs off shore to cheaper locations who also speak English. If you read this and you work for Syntel, you need to get your resume ready. You may need it. If you can speak French fluently, it can buy you some time, but even a completely fluent speaker I worked with (she was American, but born in the USA to immigrant French parents who taught her the language) got laid off about 3 years after they came for me and my department. If Syntel has any French citizens there, they'll do OK. The French do look out for their own. And in my former company they pretty much kept everybody who wasn't born in the USA, even if they weren't French citizens. So look forward to a lot of unspoken anti-American prejudice towards those of you who try to stay who actually are Americans. Once the layoffs start, you'll need to be prepared to hit the ground pretty quickly. Most of the people laid off where I worked got zero notice.
I rarely buy comics, but a few months ago a special issue came out that I did actually want to buy. It had 3 variant covers and I wanted them all. So I went to 2 different comics shops in my part of town. Keep in mind that I live in the suburbs of one of the larger metropolitan areas in the USA, so you can imagine how much worse things are if you live in a small town.
The reality is that to protect comic book shops, publishers don't sell individual titles or subscriptions to some comics. Yes, I'm sure that there are exceptions to this, but it was true for the specific comic I wanted, which was by Marvel. So I go to comic book shop number one. They are actually a used book store who sells a few comics on the side. They get only the very biggest sellers, which meant that they never even had a copy of the comic I wanted. So I go to shop number 2, which is a true comic book shop. That is what they sell to stay in business. I talked to the owner. The owner said she thought she got in one or two copies of the comic and they were sold and she won't be getting any more. Since I was already there, I asked her did she get any of the Disney comics that were revived a year or two ago. She said that she carried a few when they first came out but didn't sell them, so she didn't carry them any more. And the publisher of Disney comics in the USA does not do subscriptions and with very few exceptions does not sell individual issues themselves.
At this point, I gave up because it seemed like trying to go to more comic shops was just going to waste more of my time. In the end, I bought all 3 copies of the comic I wanted on Ebay from a seller who apparently had access to a comic book shop that could get all variant covers. I had to pay about double face price plus shipping, but I got them all. I almost forgot to mention that I looked online to see if any of the big online comic book retailers could sell me the comic I wanted with the variant covers. Nobody could sell me anything but the main cover version. Amazon didn't have this comic for sale either except in the main cover variant.
So in the end, I learned that the following insanity is how the comic book publishing business is run today.
1) To protect comic book shops, publishers mostly refuse to sell directly to individuals, forcing you to go to comic books shops.
2) If your local comic book shop sells out of something you want, too bad. They probably can't get more of it.
3) If there's a variant cover and you want it, your local shop may not carry it. And online retailers definitely won't. Apparently publishers only send variant covers to selected comic shops.
4) You may be forced to turn to Ebay to buy something if you can't get it in a shop.
5) Even Amazon can't stop this insanity. They may be able to sell a specific issue to you if you want it, but they don't get variant cover issues to sell.
So am I surprised that this unwillingness to sell comics to people who actually want to buy them has blown up in their faces? No I am not.
Tastes of fruit and vege have changed a lot over the decades. Thing is: consumers don't buy based on taste, they buy based on appearance and consistency. Hence rather than cool new fruit with mind-boggling flavours we get amazing looking tomatoes that bounce without bruising and taste like compressed cardboard and disappointment.
That is not true for everything. I'm American and I have always lived in places that didn't have much of an apple industry. As a kid, there were 3 types of apples that could be bought in grocery stores where I lived.
1) Red Delicious - which is never delicious but it is certainly red. It's awful all the time. It looks great and it always tastes like a mush.
2) Yellow Delicious - which is marginally better than Red Delicious in that it might actually be possible to find some that don't taste like mush, but most will taste like mush.
3) Granny Smith - these are almost always good and rarely have problems.
That was it. I never understood as a kid why people liked apples because other than Granny Smith, they were pretty bad all the time. And most people who said they liked apples ate those awful crimes against nature, Red Delicious.
So finally the US supermarkets starting carrying Gala and Fuji. Some were convinced that US customers would never buy them because they weren't of uniform color, but those guys are pretty good pretty much all the time and people did buy them. During apple season, I can go to Whole Foods and they'll have the 5 types I mentioned plus a few others like maybe Pink Lady. US consumers have shown that they will now buy apples based on taste and not just appearance, but it took a long time to get there. Even my local chain supermarket is now carrying heirloom tomatoes regularly so there is hope there too. Honestly, I hated tomatoes for most of my life because they were (and sometimes still are) awful tasting even though they look great. I tried a tomato in Eastern Europe over a decade ago and I was amazed at how flavorful it was so then I realized that tomatoes were like apples. It certainly was possible to grow really tasty ones but the supermarkets were only carrying the ones that shipped well and looked good regardless of taste. By the way, even in the US, cherry and grape tomatoes are really good everywhere and are safe bets if you want a tomato but don't want to gamble on a normal sized supermarket one.
Re 'What I don't see is why Russia would let others keep half?"
To not be Spain. Better to get something on good terms than go full Spain in a court over a transfer of the treasure.
Any salvage company, other nations will then be happy to work with Russian on any new project in the future.
Should Russian need something around the other side of the world in the future a skilled salvage company will remember events like this.
No. That is definitely not the reason. You are making the classic mistake of applying western reasoning to a government that does not view the world in those terms. I can assure you that Putin and his government have no real long term vision beyond maybe a couple of years, so that's definitely not it.
Much more likely reasons are:
1) Russia knows the odds are really good that the gold isn't there any more (it may have been secretly salvaged by somebody a long time ago) or maybe never was, so they don't want to waste time looking for nothing. But appearing to cooperate allows them to get great positive publicity at what might be literally zero cost to them.
2) The gold exists and they have decided that the railroad project offers them so much benefit that their real motivation is to get the railroad project done at little or not real cost to them. Shipping goods from South Korea via railroad into Russia instead of by ship might be useful to Russia.
Something tells me that they'd never even bother to ask the passengers whether 1% would put them off flying.
I'm pretty sure in the USA and probably Europe (and maybe everywhere) that customers won't agree to that. There's no need to ask. American customers have made it clear that EVERYTHING is negotiable about flying except the cost and they will put up with ANYTHING to get a cheaper price. Every US based airline that has tried to offer a higher quality but more expensive service has seen it lose business to cheaper competitors. Southwest makes so much money here in the US because it is so cheap and passengers are wiling to risk being bumped off flights to save money. I've never flown them, but Ryan Air has no shortage of posts online talking about how truly awful it is and yet Europeans won't stay away from them just to save money. So I don't know what to say except to tell you that passengers have shown that they'll put up with anything to save money. They'll never agree to pay more to get more or better pilots.
Why wouldn't they tell everyone? "Don't try to attack us, we have advanced defence systems that can detect your decoy missiles and track the real ones."
Russia did the same with its announcement that it has hypersonic long range missiles and drone sub nukes that can't be stopped by any existing system. Both China and the US demonstrated their ability to shoot down satellites.
That's not exactly why Russia did that. First of all, they lie so much that you really can't take anything they say at face value. The hypersonic missile stuff could be true, but you and I aren't in a position to know for sure. They are, however, convinced that the West in general or the US specifically are looking for a way to nuke them and kill them all without any retaliation, so lying about hypersonic missiles could just be an attempt to keep the US from killing them as soon as it can do so. Now I don't believe for a minute that the US really wants to nuke Russia and kill them all, but I definitely do think that Putin and his cronies think they do want just that. And honestly, if Russia had hypersonic missiles for real, I'm not convinced that they wouldn't use them to attack the US first to "stop" the US from this mythical attack they fear.
As Spock said, military secrets are the most fleeting of all. I'm sure that today's stealth planes will eventually be able to be seen by some kind of radar. The Chinese might really have it. If not now, they probably will soon enough. And then they may be enhances to break that radar and then counter-enhancements to fix the break and so on.
By Arthur C Clarke. Except a lot more detail on the transformation, why and relationship to monolith.
Why is this a new revelation? Kubrick and Clarke worked closely together on 2001 resulting in arguable best film/book combo ever.
It's a revelation because few people who have seen the movie have read the book. Sure, here on Slashdot that won't be true, but ask some random guy at work in a non-IT department and you'll find that he saw the film but didn't read the book. I read the book in my 20s because the film intrigued me, but I didn't really understand it and I was hoping the book might explain what I had seen. Note that the book is not an exact copy of the film and there are some differences as Clarke points out in his introductory comments.
cd's do have DRM, but its very light.
it used to be SCMS (serial copy mgmt system) ....
You are showing a North American bias. Europe and Asia both for a while used true copy protection where common rippers like iTunes couldn't rip the CD at all. Not all CDs had this, but some did. I've got a Spanish CD of the old group Ketama that had a really difficult to crack version of this copy protection and even Exact Audio Copy couldn't fully break it. I had to resort to doing an analog copy of the first track using a mini disc recorder if I remember correctly but I was able to rip the rest of the CD to my PC. I remember this one being really nasty because the ripped files had several songs lumped together into one large file and I had to use an audio editor to separate the tracks. However, those copy protection mechanisms didn't download anything to your PC to stop you. I vaguely remember the copy protection had some kind of data placed after the audio part of the CD (this meant that you couldn't fill up the CD with audio if you were going to copy protect it - every example I saw was under 70 minutes long) in such a way that a CD player would never attempt to read it but a PC would find it first and the ripper would have no idea what to do with it because it wasn't CD audio.
I still buy CD's regularly. Luckily, I've got quite a few local retailers that sell an awesome variety of CD's, at much better prices than Best Buy.
I also still buy CDs somewhat regularly and although I live in a large metropolitan region of the USA, no local retailers sell any that I'm interested in. It's long been a case of any retailers that still have them for sale only carrying the top 40 and greatest hits. Amazon is my friend as they sell just about every CD I want to buy and for the odd ones they don't carry because they are somewhat obscure, I have other online sources for those.
Dying at 84 in your sleep seems like an absolute win in my book. Now one can only hope that his life was a happy one.
Maybe. Then again, here's one of my favorite jokes, which I read somewhere more than a decade ago:
"I hope I die in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming like the passengers in his car."
Gerrymandering has just been legalized. The SCOTUS is about to shift even further to the right and for a longer time frame.
It will shift more to the right without Kennedy, but not as much as you might think. Kennedy usually voted for the conservative position on most cases, but he was capable of every now and then swinging the other way. He was basically the least conservative of the 5 judges considered to be conservative but he was still fairly conservative. Roberts will take his place as the swing vote, being a guy who usually votes conservative but every now and then makes a vote with the 4 liberals that nobody expected. So I'm not seeing a court without Kennedy as being much different than now. Maybe 5-10% more conservative, but probably not more than that.
What the hell is wrong with people? "Someone's wrong on the internet / in life and it's my duty / job / addiction to permanently correct them? Get over yourself and come up with a better argument. Make them come over to your side instead. Hell, maybe you'll even learn something yourself.
Scott Adams has theorized that you simply can't reason with any human being and get them to change their mind on anything because all decisions are made on emotions, not facts. While I don't agree with him and have a differing theory, I can't at this time disprove his theory.
I have a different theory that I'm not sure I want to fully go into here, but I'll summarize. I suspect that about 10% of the population sees everything in black and white terms. According to my theory, you simply can't reason with such people because they don't see anything in terms of gray and even worse, they don't understand that the way they see the world isn't how the vast majority of humans see it. So when you try to reason with them on anything they have a different opinion on, they think you are crazy because they think you have access to the exact same information they do and see the universe in the exact same way they do so thus you are stubbornly refusing to go along with reality by having a different point of view. They are truly incapable of understanding a different point of view on a subject.
It could also simply be that the killer is mentally ill and none of the above applies. And in reply to another comment elsewhere, all I can say is killing someone you disagree with and then turning yourself in to the police and is a very Asian and in particular a very Japanese thing to do.
IBM has a far better record of destroying anything it partners with or acquires. For the old timers think of Timeplex, Taligent, Pink, OS/2.
You could add Sequent to that sad list. I used to work for a company that used Sequent computers for a specific application we developed. I remember I talked to a few contacts I had at Sequent at the time of the purchase and they were trying to put a positive spin on it, saying that IBM said they would incorporate some of Sequent's technology into either AIX or Linux. I remember vaguely that IBM sort of tried to do that for a few months, then they decided that it was "hard" to do that, so they just shut down Sequent all together.
The US is facing a bill to extend copyright another 70 years. And to prevent much 'old' content from going into the public domain.
There's a way both to allow copyrights to potentially be extended and to get stuff into the public domain at the same time. I've posted before on this. The problem is that if these copyrights are so valuable that they simply must be extended, then why is Congress doing so for free or a mere pittance? Allow for renewals once the initial copyright expires but limit those to renewal to a much shorter period, say, 10 years. Charge $1 million for the first renewal. I mean, if these copyrights are valuable, they should require a fee. Uncle Sam keeps the money. The 2nd renewal is also for 10 years but it goes up by a factor of 10 to $10 million. 3rd renewal costs $100 million. 4th renewal costs $1 billion. At some point, probably at the $10 million mark, almost everybody will drop out and things will enter the public domain. Disney, for example, is a publicly traded company and I don't think their shareholders will view $1 billion a good price to pay to renew the copyright on 1920s Mickey Mouse when the following renewal will cost $10 billion.
They want to take away the ONE THING I love about flying? Seeing the world from above the clouds is beautiful and helps make the hellish experience of commercial airline travel bearable.
What the hell is wrong with these airlines?
Removing the windows makes the plane more structurally sound (maybe you heard of the Southwest fatality recently that involved a person sitting next to a window) and should improve fuel efficiency and possibly extend range. But yes, some people are going to complain bitterly about it. Do note that this is only Emirates considering this. Do you ever fly Emirates? I'm guessing you only fly within the USA. If so, don't worry. Your USA internal flying experience will only continue to degrade over time with seats that get smaller and smaller and charges go up for everything, but you're not likely to lose your precious windows because the sheeple would simply not put up with that,although they will put up with everything else. By the way, did you know that American Airlines new cabin design is so bad (they even stole space from business class to put in more seats) that their own CEO won't admit publicly to having ever flown on it? Good times. But American does have windows.
That Air France Flight 447 went down was not due to "poor training" or because of a lack of ability to detect a cyber-attack, but because the copilot in that airplane panicked and pulled when he should have pushed. (Frankly his mistake was a rookie mistake that student pilots are supposed to unlearn within the first 20 hours of training.)
This is a gross oversimplification of what happened. A US pilot and airline safety expert wrote a book on the crash and his conclusion was that the junior co-pilot in charge of the plane reacted exactly as he was trained but there were issues with the training. It's a really complex situation regarding the crash. The pilot would almost certainly not have made the mistake that crashed the plane but he got 1 hour of sleep the night before and took his break early due to being tired. Inexplicably he put the most junior of the 2 co-pilots in charge. There''s been some thought that the senior of the 2 co-pilots would have safely flown through the storm had he been placed in charge. Also, the faulty air speed indicators weren't replaced in Brazil, where I have no doubts that a competent replacement could have been done, because Air France wanted the plane flown to France to do the work there because the French are control freaks to the n-th degree and they don't trust anybody else to do technical work.
The crash was due to an amazing set of circumstances where EVERY decision made in a long chain of events was wrong starting with some instrument setting failures before the plane even took off. This all enabled the plane to get into alternate law mode, which neither of the 2 co-pilots realized in time had happened. The plane crashed because in alternate law mode the plane allows the pilot to do anything, including things that could crash the plane, and junior co-pilot put the plane into a stall due to failure of his training to account for the situation he actually found himself in. His thinking got screwed up and he pulled up on the stick to try to climb, which actually put the plane into a stall that nobody noticed. There were also some design issues with how Airbus designed the plane's control sticks and audio warnings and the 2 co-pilots failed to fully understand that the Airbus design decisions were odd and had to be accounted for.
"How can a movie that grossed $475 million on a $32 million budget not turn a profit? It comes down to Tinseltown accounting. As Planet Money explained in an interview with Edward Jay Epstein in 2010, studios typically set up a separate "corporation" for each movie they produce. Like any company, it calculates profits by subtracting expenses from revenues. Erase any possible profit, the studio charges this "movie corporation" a big fee that overshadows the film's revenue. For accounting purposes, the movie is a money "loser" and there are no profits to distribute.
Yep. The first knowledge the general public got of this was when Art Buchwald sued over "Coming To America". He had a deal that guaranteed him a share of the profits, but Hollywood accounting practices claimed that not only were there no profits, the film somehow lost money so they owed him nothing. What just continues to amaze me is that the US government seems cool with this. If you or I as average citizens tried to dodge paying taxes this way, we'd go to jail for sure. But let Hollywood and other businesses do that and everything is fine. This has caused me to wonder if Hollywood really has a secret deal with the IRS and US government where they do pay more realistic taxes and it doesn't get reported to the public. If not, then Hollywood must have amazing power over the government to continue to get away with this.
Perhaps their server crashed mining bitcoins....
You have no idea how much I wish I had mod points to mod that comment up. Maybe someone else will.
Similarly, Magnus Carlsen attributes his greatness to having access to more games than his role models, at least in part, owing to the games all being online.
I'm sure that's true, but he has also has access to greater computing power for analysis than his predecessors did. That's a huge difference maker. Computers can brute force a lot of chess problems and come up with interesting ways to play them that humans didn't think of before. I used to really keep up with chess years ago and don't so much these days, but I do see to recall that one example where computer analysis and some new approaches paid off was that they figured out a way for black to play the Benoni Defense against the 4 Pawns Attack and have a chance to win. Back when I used to play I would sometimes transpose into the Benoni, which I liked to play, once the white player could no longer play the 4PA because the 4PA was essentially a guaranteed win for white with correct play if the players were at approximately equal skill levels. The 4PA was so powerful for years that it pretty much killed interest in the Benoni Defense as black, which is one of the reasons I liked to play it - it often surprised opponents. If white didn't make moves that prevented playing the 4PA, I would just play the King's Indian Defense, which I also liked and could handle systems similar to the 4PA.
Me too... In Venice it's forbidden to feed pigeons, as they shit everywhere and their excrements corrode the historical buildings. While scooters (called vespas in Italy) are nowhere to be found, as they aren't watertight - you use gondolas to travel around.
I've actually been to Venice, Italy and there certainly are plenty of places where one could use a scooter if so inclined. I suspect the reason they aren't used is because Europeans aren't afraid to walk and the use of such in Venice, Italy would likely be impractical.
First, never sign up for a Comcast service online, ever. Always call or go to a store location.
Thanks for telling us how this worked in the previous century grandpa, always good to know that, but this is useless advice now. I know because I have tried to call Comcast and you can't. They only do new sales via a chat window on the internet. I've never seen a Comcast store location. They are not AT&T. They have a few of what I guess you could call Service Centers where existing customers can in theory go to - maybe - but I don't know if it's even possible to buy their service that way. Given their use of internet chats I wouldn't bet on it.
Trump does not have the authority to address the legal status of "Dreamers". Only Congress can do that....something which Trump has asked them to do.
This is quite true, but surely you know the reason why he's doing this. And it's not because it's the right thing to do or he loves the US Constitution or he respects separation of powers or whatever. He knows that Congress is so dysfunctional that it will simply never reach a deal and that Republican members of the House are running for re-election locally on racially charged anti-immigration platforms that play well in the small towns that Republican districts mostly contain and they'll quite simply never approve a deal. This enables Trump to claim it's not his problem to solve, and he is technically correct, but it's also so he can pin the blame on Congress if it becomes convenient for him to do so. He's definitely not doing this because he wants a solution.