the bosses aren't the problem, the problem is the amount of product
i like most rock from the mid 60s to present day. there are so many good bands to listen to that its impossible to buy it all on CD. too expensive.
recorded music is your advertising and you should be making money on live performances from the real fans
This is quite right in my opinion. Roughly 2 years ago I read an article on the BBC's website where they interviewed Mick Jagger. He shocked them with what he had to say. This is not in any way, shape or form an accurate word for word account of what was said but my paraphrase covering the main points.
BBC: So what do you think of digital music such as MP3 files?
Jagger: It's not a problem for me. (note: The Stones were on iTunes long before the Beatles were and were serious about their web presence earlier too.)
BBC: (stunned) You don't think you're being ripped off by illegal downloads?
Jagger: Look. The truth is that for all of our years in the industry, for very few of them did we really make good money just from the music. There was a period of about 10 years from the 1980s into the 90s where we got paid a lot of money, but for most of my career the actual royalties from music sales have not really been all that good. We have always made the majority of our income from touring.
The music companies hate this because they don't make money from touring so they are still trying to make the old models work in a world that rejects them. Paul McCartney can't sell CDs any more like he used to but whenever he feels like playing a concert he regularly sells out 50,000 seat or larger stadiums throughout the world and I've not once heard him bemoaning the current state of the industry.
I am not claiming to personally be the greatest expert on Slashdot of the ex-USSR. However, I do speak Russian reasonably well and I have traveled in the ex-USSR so I do think it's fair to say that I'm more familiar with the CIS countries and the people that live there than most people. I admit to being a bit puzzled to read that Armenia jailed someone. Armenia is seemingly uninterested in joining NATO and the EU and as far as I know they get along pretty well with Mother Russia. Outside of the Baltic Countries (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia) who are fully integrated into the EU and NATO, laws are weak and corruption is high. I was wondering "Why would Armenia bother to prosecute this guy and jail him, given that in the past the entire CIS has basically never been interested in such?". There doesn't seem to be any political reason (ie. no sucking up to the EU or NATO) at work here. Surely this guy would have been smart enough to just bribe his way out of trouble. Then I noticed this in the article:
One of the attacks that Avanesov was found guilty of instrumenting took place on Oct. 1, 2010, and targeted a Russian telecommunication company called Macomnet.
Ah. He foolishly attacked Mother Russia. Now I understand why he was convicted.
US is a corporately own and run state, pretty much fascist at this point.
That's not fascist. Fascism is where the state dictates to private industry so that what they do serves the nation and in some cases takes over from private industry if it serves the national interest. I agree with you that US corporations are running the show in the USA, but that's not fascism.
While perhaps you deserved better than you got, this is one of those "If you have to ask how to do it, then you can't do it yourself" kind of things in life. However, you do deserve some criticism for not being honest enough to admit to your potential client that you were out of your league and for not trying to refer him to someone who actually could do the job for him. I really do not get why you seem unwilling to understand and accept your own limits.
Myspace? Seriously??? Everybody has given up on this. Even my nephew who a few years ago was basically addicted to it rarely visits it. I never used Myspace so I am not an expert but I do know that somehow my nephew used it to get copies of music files that, ahem, some might argue he was not entitled to have. My nephew is not my kid so it's easy for me to be a critic, but I can tell you that his parents have rarely disciplined him. I can't help but wonder if some of this is because your client has lost control over his own kids and is trying to use this as a substitute for real parenting by going to the kids whenever he finds something objectionable going on. If your client has to resort to technology to enforce household decisions he needs to make as a parent, I can tell you that the battle is already over and technology can't save the day.
As an IT professional with over 25 years of industry experience, I can tell you that if you outsource you need to be very explicit about what you expect them to do and what deadlines there are. VERY explicit. You can expect no thinking outside the box. I'm going to give you an example. Let's say that due to some mistake on your part that you asked them to build you a car that blows up and kills everyone inside when you turn on the ignition. You would hope that if you did that that the outsourcing party would contact you and say "Did you REALLY want us to build a car that blows up when you turn on the ignition and kills everybody inside? Because that is exactly what you asked for." They won't. They'll either shrug their shoulders and build your death car or they simply will assume that maybe you have a very good reason for asking for a death car and it's not their job to question it.
The quality of work you get from outsourcing is arguable. I work for a Fortune 300 company who I am unwilling to name, but I can tell you that we outsource some programming to our employees in India. We're pretty selective about what we give them, but they do good work. However, the vast majority of the workforce there is not given our most crucial tasks to implement and those continue to be done in our US office. I would say that easily less than 10% of the programmers we have who actually live in India are allowed to work on truly critical tasks for us. Finally, do note that if your software needs are proprietary and a competitor might pay to have access to your code, there is absolutely nothing you can do if someone in a common outsourcing county is willing to sell dumps of your code for cash. Laws are very weak in those countries and they are always in favor of the locals rather than "rich foreigners". In a worst case you'd actually have to outbribe the judges in the country to get any justice.
Yes but they were going on history; an executive branch that was breathtaking in its brazen power-grabs.
Previous presidents have fought various battles against the other branches of government. It's not like George W. Bush. was the first. Lincoln tried to suspend the right of habeas corpus until the Supreme Court slapped him down for it. The thing that amazed me about the crazy liberals (not all liberals are crazy by the way) who believed that W was going to suspend the elections was that the Bush presidency never disobeyed any Supreme Court decisions, not even ones they didn't like. If the court said "You can't do X" then they stopped doing X. I think by the end of his 2nd term that W really wanted out of the job and he wanted the next guy to have to make the hard decisions he was unable and unwilling to do while still in office, such as deciding on when to leave Iraq and Afghanistan.
However, anonymous coward does have a point that Obama has done many things that 5+ years ago were considered Republican ideas. The Democrats had little to offer in the 2004 election except "We hate Bush" and they failed to win the presidency. The Republicans' current "We hate Obama" campaign will also fail as campaigns devoid of any real ideas always do when running for the presidency. You have to have more to offer than "I'm the anti-incumbent" to win. Ronald Reagan knew that. Bill Clinton knew that too.
I don't read a lot in my spare time, but one author I like is William Poundstone. I was going on an international trip and I wanted a book to take with me to read to kill time, so I bought his book _Fortune's Formula_. Essentially the book is about some Bell Labs geniuses who came up with mathematical models that allowed them first to make money at casinos and then to exploit weaknesses in the US stock market to make money. Scholes is featured in the book, but he's not a main character. I offer the following 2 quotes directly from the book which are on this very subject.
"LTCM was simply in the position of a gambler who goes to a casino where the pit boss gives him unlimited credit." (page 283) Note that LTCM was the fund that Scholes helped run. The book further goes on to state that in real life, nobody gets truly "unlimited credit". A casino will not loan more money than they can collect. But LTCM's business model depended on credit never running out to them.
"Warren Buffet marveled at how 'ten or 15 guys with an average IQ of maybe 170' could get themselves 'into a position where they can lose all their money.'" (page 291) It's a big simplification, but basically LTCM got burned by the Russian currency collapse which started a chain of events that killed them.
It's worth pointing out that all bets are off once the jury leaves to reach a decision. I last served on a jury in 2005 in the most populated county of a major metropolitan area in the USA. I mention that so you understand that I was not on some backwoods jury in some rural underpopulated area. Again - biggest county in one of the USA's major metropolitan areas. One morning while we waited in the jury room to go to court for the day's testimony, three guys on my jury got into what I will call a "stupid contest" where they argued with each other over who knew less about computers. Each of the three insisted that he was far stupider than the other two in this contest and cited examples of his own stupidity to support his claim. These are the kinds of people you get on juries. If even one person on the jury has the background to understand correctly the testimony at the trial, I will be amazed. And very likely nobody will listen to that person in the jury room anyway as the jurors with the loudest voices will carry the day with their half-baked understanding and assumptions of what they heard in the trial. What the jurors perceive to have been said in the trial and what was actually said are likely to be very different. I have no idea which way this will go, but I can assure you that the jury reaching the decision will have no grasp at all of what they are deciding and a coin flip would be about as thoughtful.
I really do not see any chance of the suggestions in this article happening. All it would take is one suicidal terrorist whose goal is simply to bring down a plane and kill all its passengers to scuttle it. I do not think the American public will view this is "acceptable", especially if it turns out that what brought down the plane in my mythical scenario was something that the current screening methods would likely have caught.
I really do not know what to think of the article's suggestions on liquids. I've read where various chemistry experts essentially say that terrorists cannot construct liquid bombs that will work at all without having to basically use chemistry equipment, ice baths, lengthy mixing sessions that no one could possibly ignore, etc. Yet here the former TSA head insists that there is a very real risk here. Who is right? Does the former TSA head know something that chemistry experts have somehow missed? Or is the former TSA head working on crap information? I sure don't know but that's one question I'd like resolved.
My experience has been that the people who bitch the most about screening are those who travel the least. I'm not saying that there aren't regular travelers who don't complain. Not at all. But in my circle of acquaintances, the people I know who just completely and utterly cannot talk about this subject without getting completely bent out of shape about it simply do not travel by plane. One of them hasn't been on a plane in more than 5 years. He's likely to travel by plane less than 5 more times in his lifetime. The other guy I know actually gets the most worked up about this. He hasn't been on a plane since before 9/11 and he is extremely unlikely to ever travel by plane again in his life, yet this whole subject of TSA screenings is some kind of hot button issue to him.
I've told this joke to some friends I know who live in China and they thinks it's hilarious. This is a joke from the Soviet Union, but of course it's translated into English.
An American man went on a tour of Moscow and he was talking to his Intourist guide.
American: I want you to know that in America, we have freedom of speech. Why, any time I feel like it, I can stand outside the White House and say that the American president is a very bad man and nobody will arrest me.
Guide: It is exactly the same here. Any time I want, I also can stand outside the Kremlin and say that the American president is a very bad man and nobody will arrest me.
I'm not saying that this is the number one problem, but the English speaking world - and I mean all of it (the USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the Caribbean) - needs to learn more about grammar. Here is but a sampling of the nonsense I see all the time from people from all of those countries:
1) There's a mistaken belief that "prolly" is a real word instead of "probably". I asked my nephew, a college student and a better than average student, why he keeps writing "prolly" on Facebook instead of "probably". He insisted that he had never seen "probably" in his life and that "prolly" was the only way he had even seen this "word" spelled. This is a big time education failure when a graduate doesn't know a real, common word and only knows a made up one.
2) Many people think that magically putting 's on the end of any word magically makes it a plural when in fact, the number of English plurals that truly can be made this way is extremely low. It's so low that when in doubt, you should leave it out as you'll probably be right not to use 's any more.
3) Many people conversely do not understand how to correctly express possession in English and just put s at the end of words instead of 's. For example, you might see someone write "Johns car is over there".
4) Many people do not understand contractions and confuse words like there, their and they're, it's and its, etc.
5) Question mark punctuation has completely gone off the rails in the past year or two. Now everybody, and I'm talking about people old enough to have learned better in school and not just recent graduates, puts ? at the end of anything that puzzles or surprises them. So now we have "questions" like this:
That was the biggest dog I ever saw?
I can't believe your mother won't let you go?
If you are under 30 and in the USA, believe me, I get it that the educational system failed you. I'm sorry about that, but I get it. However, I now see people over 40 who learned better in school are writing this way. I even seen foreigners who learned English as a 2nd language do it. That last one just amazes me as they really should know better.
I have talked to recent graduates of US high schools (this is what we call the final years of public school up to age 18) and they all tell me that their last grammar classes were around ages 13 or 14. I had my last grammar classes at age 16 and by then, I was old enough to understand it very well and those lessons got through and for the most part stuck with me. It seems to me that if we continue down this path of ignorance that in about 10 years it's going to be perfectly acceptable at the high school level and maybe even college to write sentences like this: "Mi nam iz Michael. I m 17 yrz uld. I lik 2 pla bezball n mi spar tim. I alzo lik 2 wach TV. Famulee Gi iz mi favrit sho on TV."
My gut feeling is that Win 8 is going to be a spectacular failure like Vista. People who buy PCs with Win 8 loaded are going to throw a fit and demand a downgrade to Win 7. Microsoft will survive because no matter how much they screw up, the competition can't really take their place. So it's not necessarily a bad gamble for Microsoft. It might work. I doubt it, but I could be wrong. If I'm right then after it fails and they get burned by the "not gonna buy it" and "I demand a downgrade from this crap" crowd, they'll quickly re-design WIn 9 to look like Win 7 with some added features and put that out.
Korea? The only reason action was taken in Korea was that the Soviets boycotted the session in question, avoiding a Security Council veto. The UNC structure and DMZ are still there, 60 years on. All of the allied nations have fled except the US. There's a rousing success story.
South Korea has about 49 million people living in it. Depending on how you count it, they have the 12th or 15th highest GDP in the world . I think 49 million people would argue that it is a rousing success story. Moron. However, I do agree with your general point that the UN is mostly a legacy of failure, but your cited example of South Korea is a big time fail.
Will the video distributors ever offer DRM-free files that you own?
It is the position of the movie industry that you are renting viewing rights with any movie purchase and nothing more. So no, they will never, ever offer files that consumers "own". Some people will actually take them up on this "offer" but it won't be very many.
As an American, I am not suggesting that our system of justice is perfect. But... if you do something "really bad" (ie. murder, rape, etc.) there's a pretty good chance you'll be locked away for a long time here. Maybe you will never get out or you'll get the death penalty. In a lot of countries they look at criminals as being the real victims because they lose their freedom. There are reasons why people like those failed London bomber idiots from some years ago fled to Italy and begged for a trial in Italian courts. In Brazil you could commit genocide and kill over a million people. Care to guess what your maximum possible sentence would be? 29 years. One of the problems in the US is that we criminalized drug use and if we had a more reasonable approach to this issue it would reduce the population somewhat. But America is a violent place and we hold people accountable for their violence instead of acting like the pussy countries I named who feel like we all need to feel sorry for criminals as they are the ones who truly suffer when they kill people.
It wasn't quite "allowing the banks to fail" in the sense that the Icelandic equivalent of FDIC kicked in and the banks were nationalized, but the key thing was that Iceland spent absolutely no cash on trying to bail out holders of stocks and bonds. It's that combination of socialism and capitalism that is not uncommon in European nations: The socialism is enough to ensure that you'll survive. The capitalism means that if you're invested in a big bank, or a CEO who's made some dumb decisions, you take your losses.
In Soviet Russia, new overlords welcome you.
Interestingly, your signature references "Soviet Russia". Iceland got a 4 billion Euro loan from Mother Russia. That helped. So did having a small population. It's much easier to fix problems when they are Iceland's than those of more populous countries like Greece and Portugal. Government officials in Portugal are actually encouraging Portuguese citizens to leave Portugal and move to their former colonies to find jobs. I don't think that's the kind of solution that most citizens are after.
I understand why the woman was upset, but state legislatures (generally the Republican controlled ones) still do not get it. You cannot preempt federal law by state legislation. TSA actions are governed at the federal level. States have no authority to tell them what they can and cannot do. Consider what could, in theory, happen if states could preempt federal law. Let's pretend that Mythonia (made up) is an American state and they legislate that only white male citizens over the age of 18 can vote. Then there is nothing the non-white citizens of Mythonia can do about it except try to change the law as the other 49 states and the federal government shrug their shoulders and say "Wish we could help".
I have seen amicable divorces but it's a rare thing.
My best friend (we went to college together) is an attorney. Back when he was first starting up his own practice he took a few (less than 5 I think) divorce cases just to make some money. The last one he did really shook him up. It's a long story, but to simplify it, his client (a woman) was devastated by the divorce and refused to listen to his advice to protect herself from the actions of her estranged husband and his attorney. He was really close to dropping her as a client when her estranged husband killed himself (he had his own issues) and thus ended the case. He told me "NOBODY wins in a divorce. NOBODY." and he has never taken another one. He simply refuses and refers them to other attorneys. He told me that he doesn't care how much money he is offered, he no longer has the desire to participate in divorces.
So we don't like these things. We don't want them to have to exist, but they do. And they've got to be moved around, which means over the roads we have.
Why do they have to be moved at all? I've yet to see an explanation of this. Is there a compelling reason for this or is it just another case of "We've always done it this way" and a reason that may have been valid 50-60 years ago no longer is but nobody questions it?
I can forgive airlines overbooking, to a degree. Most airlines only overbook a few seats, and it works out fine the majority of the time (I don't have exact numbers, but I'm a very frequent flier and rarely hear about people being bumped) And in the few case when it doesn't work out and too many people show up, the airlines go out of their way to accommodate people. They'll ask for volunteers, provide free upgrades, meal vouchers and anything else.
Fortunately the airlines have reduced overbooking a lot from the past and while it is true that they ask for volunteers when they have to bump someone, what is no longer true is that the compensation is worthwhile. Typically it's a credit towards a future flight and not a free flight, yet people remember how it was 20+ years ago and assume that the generous payments for self-volunteering still exist when in fact they do not. If you throw a fit you might get a crappy meal voucher that will buy you a hamburger and a coke. Upgrade? Unlikely unless the only empty seat on the next flight is one that's an upgrade for you and they have nowhere else to put you. The "compensation" is actually pretty bad most of the time but I guess if that $400 (or possibly less) credit towards a future flight is really useful to you, you might consider volunteering. Note that I am speaking of the USA and things may well be different in other countries.
But, I think Wikileaks is an equal opportunity embarasser of repressive states so I doubt they would partner with Russia or China.
Therein lies the problem. Until Wikileaks actually embarrasses some of the "bad guys" (for lack of a better term) the only evidence we have so far is that they are perfectly content in only embarrassing the USA. Unfortunately some rather unique circumstances made it possible for Bradley Manning to do what he did. I get that. But frankly I think Assange is crazy and I'm not sure that he personally is an equal opportunity embarrasser. He may simply just have it in for democratic societies and give a free pass to repressive ones. Or maybe not. But there's no evidence either way and given how oppressive regimes are usually quite good at maintaining their secrets there may not be any.
I suppose since Slashdot has a wide variety of readers from different countries that your post is correct in saying specifically why Slashdot readers might oppose such a mission, but since people in Europe, Australia, etc. are not US citizens it might be more relevant to talk about why Americans oppose such things too. The general argument goes like this - "How can we pay for _____________ (insert anything space related) when we still have problems in this country that we haven't solved?" Back in the day it was easy to sell the American public on space missions because they were exciting and there was also a fear that "If we don't do it first, the Russkies will use it to destroy us". Geez, back in the late 1960s the movie "2001 A Space Odyssey" pictured a working space station and lunar bases in 2001. The old "UFO" TV show from the early 1970s had a small lunar base in the 1980s. Here it is 2012 and we can't even get enough enthusiasm up to even go back just one more time to the moon, let alone do anything interesting or useful there. What it is going to take is a president and Congress who want to make it a priority and they basically say "Screw it. We're paying for it. End of story." We'll never go back until the Chinese put their own base up if we wait for the American public to get on board with this. I believe for various reasons that the Russians are quite sincere about wanting to find partners, but you could probably just substitute "European" for "American" in my post and you'd have the same result. Sorry Ivan, but if you want a partner for a lunar base you're probably going to need to talk to Beijing. Sigh.
The US Civil War was fought specifically to answer that question. The USA is not Canada. There is no way to leave the union. Period. That question has an answer. While certain ignorant politicians like Rick Perry like to talk tough about seceding from the USA, there is no constitutional mechanism to allow this. There's no reason to conclude that the US wouldn't just simply use military force to preserve the union if it came down to it like they did in the Civil War. It's difficult to imagine that California, which is the economic engine of the USA, would simply be allowed to leave with a shrug of the shoulders as the other 49 states watch the US economy tumble to perhaps being on par with Italy or worse without California. I'd like to point out too that California basically feeds the USA as well. Their agricultural output is vast. They're not leaving without a fight.
While I do expect some languages to simply disappear due to lack of relevance, expecting languages like Russian, French, German and Japanese, just to name a few, to disappear is not realistic. Languages that will disappear will be languages that are already endangered. People in human history have show a willingness to kill over language issues. 100 years from now for all practical purposes we'll have just as many languages with over 100,000 speakers as we do today.
Obama's advisors came out against it
on
House Kills SOPA
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· Score: 3, Informative
With the House in majority Republican control and Cantor killing the bill, it doesn't really matter what the Senate does. This happens all the time when the Senate and the House are controlled by different parties. One will pass legislation that the other will never even take up just to be able to tell their voters "we passed a bill on X but those evil guys in the other party in the other side of Congress thwarted us". The only reason the White House was against it is that Obama listened to several of his top IT advisors who strongly came out against it. But in general Congress isn't really smart enough to understand what the legislation is about. It just became so toxic for a variety of reasons (a lot of big contributors on the IT side probably threatened to cut donations if it passed) that it wasn't worth the fight. Democrats have traditionally been more pro-entertainment industry and pro-lawyers than Republicans so I have to admit to being surprised that the White House didn't back it anyway. Plenty of Republicans back the entertainment industry too, they're just slightly less inclined to do so.
By the way, one of my former co-workers said that he did contact his representative in Congress. He did not say who his representative was (most likely it's a Republican) but he said that it was clear that his representative really did not understand the bill at all and was framing it in the simplistic "Let's stop evil job stealing piracy!" terms that the entertainment industry has used to sell it to Congress.
Slashdot Mirror
the bosses aren't the problem, the problem is the amount of product
i like most rock from the mid 60s to present day. there are so many good bands to listen to that its impossible to buy it all on CD. too expensive.
recorded music is your advertising and you should be making money on live performances from the real fans
This is quite right in my opinion. Roughly 2 years ago I read an article on the BBC's website where they interviewed Mick Jagger. He shocked them with what he had to say. This is not in any way, shape or form an accurate word for word account of what was said but my paraphrase covering the main points.
BBC: So what do you think of digital music such as MP3 files?
Jagger: It's not a problem for me. (note: The Stones were on iTunes long before the Beatles were and were serious about their web presence earlier too.)
BBC: (stunned) You don't think you're being ripped off by illegal downloads?
Jagger: Look. The truth is that for all of our years in the industry, for very few of them did we really make good money just from the music. There was a period of about 10 years from the 1980s into the 90s where we got paid a lot of money, but for most of my career the actual royalties from music sales have not really been all that good. We have always made the majority of our income from touring.
The music companies hate this because they don't make money from touring so they are still trying to make the old models work in a world that rejects them. Paul McCartney can't sell CDs any more like he used to but whenever he feels like playing a concert he regularly sells out 50,000 seat or larger stadiums throughout the world and I've not once heard him bemoaning the current state of the industry.
I am not claiming to personally be the greatest expert on Slashdot of the ex-USSR. However, I do speak Russian reasonably well and I have traveled in the ex-USSR so I do think it's fair to say that I'm more familiar with the CIS countries and the people that live there than most people. I admit to being a bit puzzled to read that Armenia jailed someone. Armenia is seemingly uninterested in joining NATO and the EU and as far as I know they get along pretty well with Mother Russia. Outside of the Baltic Countries (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia) who are fully integrated into the EU and NATO, laws are weak and corruption is high. I was wondering "Why would Armenia bother to prosecute this guy and jail him, given that in the past the entire CIS has basically never been interested in such?". There doesn't seem to be any political reason (ie. no sucking up to the EU or NATO) at work here. Surely this guy would have been smart enough to just bribe his way out of trouble. Then I noticed this in the article:
One of the attacks that Avanesov was found guilty of instrumenting took place on Oct. 1, 2010, and targeted a Russian telecommunication company called Macomnet.
Ah. He foolishly attacked Mother Russia. Now I understand why he was convicted.
US is a corporately own and run state, pretty much fascist at this point.
That's not fascist. Fascism is where the state dictates to private industry so that what they do serves the nation and in some cases takes over from private industry if it serves the national interest. I agree with you that US corporations are running the show in the USA, but that's not fascism.
While perhaps you deserved better than you got, this is one of those "If you have to ask how to do it, then you can't do it yourself" kind of things in life. However, you do deserve some criticism for not being honest enough to admit to your potential client that you were out of your league and for not trying to refer him to someone who actually could do the job for him. I really do not get why you seem unwilling to understand and accept your own limits.
Myspace? Seriously??? Everybody has given up on this. Even my nephew who a few years ago was basically addicted to it rarely visits it. I never used Myspace so I am not an expert but I do know that somehow my nephew used it to get copies of music files that, ahem, some might argue he was not entitled to have. My nephew is not my kid so it's easy for me to be a critic, but I can tell you that his parents have rarely disciplined him. I can't help but wonder if some of this is because your client has lost control over his own kids and is trying to use this as a substitute for real parenting by going to the kids whenever he finds something objectionable going on. If your client has to resort to technology to enforce household decisions he needs to make as a parent, I can tell you that the battle is already over and technology can't save the day.
As an IT professional with over 25 years of industry experience, I can tell you that if you outsource you need to be very explicit about what you expect them to do and what deadlines there are. VERY explicit. You can expect no thinking outside the box. I'm going to give you an example. Let's say that due to some mistake on your part that you asked them to build you a car that blows up and kills everyone inside when you turn on the ignition. You would hope that if you did that that the outsourcing party would contact you and say "Did you REALLY want us to build a car that blows up when you turn on the ignition and kills everybody inside? Because that is exactly what you asked for." They won't. They'll either shrug their shoulders and build your death car or they simply will assume that maybe you have a very good reason for asking for a death car and it's not their job to question it.
The quality of work you get from outsourcing is arguable. I work for a Fortune 300 company who I am unwilling to name, but I can tell you that we outsource some programming to our employees in India. We're pretty selective about what we give them, but they do good work. However, the vast majority of the workforce there is not given our most crucial tasks to implement and those continue to be done in our US office. I would say that easily less than 10% of the programmers we have who actually live in India are allowed to work on truly critical tasks for us. Finally, do note that if your software needs are proprietary and a competitor might pay to have access to your code, there is absolutely nothing you can do if someone in a common outsourcing county is willing to sell dumps of your code for cash. Laws are very weak in those countries and they are always in favor of the locals rather than "rich foreigners". In a worst case you'd actually have to outbribe the judges in the country to get any justice.
Yes but they were going on history; an executive branch that was breathtaking in its brazen power-grabs.
Previous presidents have fought various battles against the other branches of government. It's not like George W. Bush. was the first. Lincoln tried to suspend the right of habeas corpus until the Supreme Court slapped him down for it. The thing that amazed me about the crazy liberals (not all liberals are crazy by the way) who believed that W was going to suspend the elections was that the Bush presidency never disobeyed any Supreme Court decisions, not even ones they didn't like. If the court said "You can't do X" then they stopped doing X. I think by the end of his 2nd term that W really wanted out of the job and he wanted the next guy to have to make the hard decisions he was unable and unwilling to do while still in office, such as deciding on when to leave Iraq and Afghanistan.
However, anonymous coward does have a point that Obama has done many things that 5+ years ago were considered Republican ideas. The Democrats had little to offer in the 2004 election except "We hate Bush" and they failed to win the presidency. The Republicans' current "We hate Obama" campaign will also fail as campaigns devoid of any real ideas always do when running for the presidency. You have to have more to offer than "I'm the anti-incumbent" to win. Ronald Reagan knew that. Bill Clinton knew that too.
I don't read a lot in my spare time, but one author I like is William Poundstone. I was going on an international trip and I wanted a book to take with me to read to kill time, so I bought his book _Fortune's Formula_. Essentially the book is about some Bell Labs geniuses who came up with mathematical models that allowed them first to make money at casinos and then to exploit weaknesses in the US stock market to make money. Scholes is featured in the book, but he's not a main character. I offer the following 2 quotes directly from the book which are on this very subject.
"LTCM was simply in the position of a gambler who goes to a casino where the pit boss gives him unlimited credit." (page 283) Note that LTCM was the fund that Scholes helped run. The book further goes on to state that in real life, nobody gets truly "unlimited credit". A casino will not loan more money than they can collect. But LTCM's business model depended on credit never running out to them.
"Warren Buffet marveled at how 'ten or 15 guys with an average IQ of maybe 170' could get themselves 'into a position where they can lose all their money.'" (page 291) It's a big simplification, but basically LTCM got burned by the Russian currency collapse which started a chain of events that killed them.
It's worth pointing out that all bets are off once the jury leaves to reach a decision. I last served on a jury in 2005 in the most populated county of a major metropolitan area in the USA. I mention that so you understand that I was not on some backwoods jury in some rural underpopulated area. Again - biggest county in one of the USA's major metropolitan areas. One morning while we waited in the jury room to go to court for the day's testimony, three guys on my jury got into what I will call a "stupid contest" where they argued with each other over who knew less about computers. Each of the three insisted that he was far stupider than the other two in this contest and cited examples of his own stupidity to support his claim. These are the kinds of people you get on juries. If even one person on the jury has the background to understand correctly the testimony at the trial, I will be amazed. And very likely nobody will listen to that person in the jury room anyway as the jurors with the loudest voices will carry the day with their half-baked understanding and assumptions of what they heard in the trial. What the jurors perceive to have been said in the trial and what was actually said are likely to be very different. I have no idea which way this will go, but I can assure you that the jury reaching the decision will have no grasp at all of what they are deciding and a coin flip would be about as thoughtful.
I really do not see any chance of the suggestions in this article happening. All it would take is one suicidal terrorist whose goal is simply to bring down a plane and kill all its passengers to scuttle it. I do not think the American public will view this is "acceptable", especially if it turns out that what brought down the plane in my mythical scenario was something that the current screening methods would likely have caught.
I really do not know what to think of the article's suggestions on liquids. I've read where various chemistry experts essentially say that terrorists cannot construct liquid bombs that will work at all without having to basically use chemistry equipment, ice baths, lengthy mixing sessions that no one could possibly ignore, etc. Yet here the former TSA head insists that there is a very real risk here. Who is right? Does the former TSA head know something that chemistry experts have somehow missed? Or is the former TSA head working on crap information? I sure don't know but that's one question I'd like resolved.
My experience has been that the people who bitch the most about screening are those who travel the least. I'm not saying that there aren't regular travelers who don't complain. Not at all. But in my circle of acquaintances, the people I know who just completely and utterly cannot talk about this subject without getting completely bent out of shape about it simply do not travel by plane. One of them hasn't been on a plane in more than 5 years. He's likely to travel by plane less than 5 more times in his lifetime. The other guy I know actually gets the most worked up about this. He hasn't been on a plane since before 9/11 and he is extremely unlikely to ever travel by plane again in his life, yet this whole subject of TSA screenings is some kind of hot button issue to him.
I've told this joke to some friends I know who live in China and they thinks it's hilarious. This is a joke from the Soviet Union, but of course it's translated into English.
An American man went on a tour of Moscow and he was talking to his Intourist guide.
American: I want you to know that in America, we have freedom of speech. Why, any time I feel like it, I can stand outside the White House and say that the American president is a very bad man and nobody will arrest me.
Guide: It is exactly the same here. Any time I want, I also can stand outside the Kremlin and say that the American president is a very bad man and nobody will arrest me.
I'm not saying that this is the number one problem, but the English speaking world - and I mean all of it (the USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the Caribbean) - needs to learn more about grammar. Here is but a sampling of the nonsense I see all the time from people from all of those countries:
1) There's a mistaken belief that "prolly" is a real word instead of "probably". I asked my nephew, a college student and a better than average student, why he keeps writing "prolly" on Facebook instead of "probably". He insisted that he had never seen "probably" in his life and that "prolly" was the only way he had even seen this "word" spelled. This is a big time education failure when a graduate doesn't know a real, common word and only knows a made up one.
2) Many people think that magically putting 's on the end of any word magically makes it a plural when in fact, the number of English plurals that truly can be made this way is extremely low. It's so low that when in doubt, you should leave it out as you'll probably be right not to use 's any more.
3) Many people conversely do not understand how to correctly express possession in English and just put s at the end of words instead of 's. For example, you might see someone write "Johns car is over there".
4) Many people do not understand contractions and confuse words like there, their and they're, it's and its, etc.
5) Question mark punctuation has completely gone off the rails in the past year or two. Now everybody, and I'm talking about people old enough to have learned better in school and not just recent graduates, puts ? at the end of anything that puzzles or surprises them. So now we have "questions" like this:
That was the biggest dog I ever saw?
I can't believe your mother won't let you go?
If you are under 30 and in the USA, believe me, I get it that the educational system failed you. I'm sorry about that, but I get it. However, I now see people over 40 who learned better in school are writing this way. I even seen foreigners who learned English as a 2nd language do it. That last one just amazes me as they really should know better.
I have talked to recent graduates of US high schools (this is what we call the final years of public school up to age 18) and they all tell me that their last grammar classes were around ages 13 or 14. I had my last grammar classes at age 16 and by then, I was old enough to understand it very well and those lessons got through and for the most part stuck with me. It seems to me that if we continue down this path of ignorance that in about 10 years it's going to be perfectly acceptable at the high school level and maybe even college to write sentences like this: "Mi nam iz Michael. I m 17 yrz uld. I lik 2 pla bezball n mi spar tim. I alzo lik 2 wach TV. Famulee Gi iz mi favrit sho on TV."
My gut feeling is that Win 8 is going to be a spectacular failure like Vista. People who buy PCs with Win 8 loaded are going to throw a fit and demand a downgrade to Win 7. Microsoft will survive because no matter how much they screw up, the competition can't really take their place. So it's not necessarily a bad gamble for Microsoft. It might work. I doubt it, but I could be wrong. If I'm right then after it fails and they get burned by the "not gonna buy it" and "I demand a downgrade from this crap" crowd, they'll quickly re-design WIn 9 to look like Win 7 with some added features and put that out.
Korea? The only reason action was taken in Korea was that the Soviets boycotted the session in question, avoiding a Security Council veto. The UNC structure and DMZ are still there, 60 years on. All of the allied nations have fled except the US. There's a rousing success story.
South Korea has about 49 million people living in it. Depending on how you count it, they have the 12th or 15th highest GDP in the world . I think 49 million people would argue that it is a rousing success story. Moron. However, I do agree with your general point that the UN is mostly a legacy of failure, but your cited example of South Korea is a big time fail.
Will the video distributors ever offer DRM-free files that you own?
It is the position of the movie industry that you are renting viewing rights with any movie purchase and nothing more. So no, they will never, ever offer files that consumers "own". Some people will actually take them up on this "offer" but it won't be very many.
I mean -- 20 years for a simple financial fraud thing. In other countries, murder is less.
No wonder you have a considerable fraction of your population in jail.
Scary.
As an American, I am not suggesting that our system of justice is perfect. But... if you do something "really bad" (ie. murder, rape, etc.) there's a pretty good chance you'll be locked away for a long time here. Maybe you will never get out or you'll get the death penalty. In a lot of countries they look at criminals as being the real victims because they lose their freedom. There are reasons why people like those failed London bomber idiots from some years ago fled to Italy and begged for a trial in Italian courts. In Brazil you could commit genocide and kill over a million people. Care to guess what your maximum possible sentence would be? 29 years. One of the problems in the US is that we criminalized drug use and if we had a more reasonable approach to this issue it would reduce the population somewhat. But America is a violent place and we hold people accountable for their violence instead of acting like the pussy countries I named who feel like we all need to feel sorry for criminals as they are the ones who truly suffer when they kill people.
It wasn't quite "allowing the banks to fail" in the sense that the Icelandic equivalent of FDIC kicked in and the banks were nationalized, but the key thing was that Iceland spent absolutely no cash on trying to bail out holders of stocks and bonds. It's that combination of socialism and capitalism that is not uncommon in European nations: The socialism is enough to ensure that you'll survive. The capitalism means that if you're invested in a big bank, or a CEO who's made some dumb decisions, you take your losses.
In Soviet Russia, new overlords welcome you.
Interestingly, your signature references "Soviet Russia". Iceland got a 4 billion Euro loan from Mother Russia. That helped. So did having a small population. It's much easier to fix problems when they are Iceland's than those of more populous countries like Greece and Portugal. Government officials in Portugal are actually encouraging Portuguese citizens to leave Portugal and move to their former colonies to find jobs. I don't think that's the kind of solution that most citizens are after.
I understand why the woman was upset, but state legislatures (generally the Republican controlled ones) still do not get it. You cannot preempt federal law by state legislation. TSA actions are governed at the federal level. States have no authority to tell them what they can and cannot do. Consider what could, in theory, happen if states could preempt federal law. Let's pretend that Mythonia (made up) is an American state and they legislate that only white male citizens over the age of 18 can vote. Then there is nothing the non-white citizens of Mythonia can do about it except try to change the law as the other 49 states and the federal government shrug their shoulders and say "Wish we could help".
I have seen amicable divorces but it's a rare thing.
My best friend (we went to college together) is an attorney. Back when he was first starting up his own practice he took a few (less than 5 I think) divorce cases just to make some money. The last one he did really shook him up. It's a long story, but to simplify it, his client (a woman) was devastated by the divorce and refused to listen to his advice to protect herself from the actions of her estranged husband and his attorney. He was really close to dropping her as a client when her estranged husband killed himself (he had his own issues) and thus ended the case. He told me "NOBODY wins in a divorce. NOBODY." and he has never taken another one. He simply refuses and refers them to other attorneys. He told me that he doesn't care how much money he is offered, he no longer has the desire to participate in divorces.
So we don't like these things. We don't want them to have to exist, but they do. And they've got to be moved around, which means over the roads we have.
Why do they have to be moved at all? I've yet to see an explanation of this. Is there a compelling reason for this or is it just another case of "We've always done it this way" and a reason that may have been valid 50-60 years ago no longer is but nobody questions it?
I can forgive airlines overbooking, to a degree. Most airlines only overbook a few seats, and it works out fine the majority of the time (I don't have exact numbers, but I'm a very frequent flier and rarely hear about people being bumped) And in the few case when it doesn't work out and too many people show up, the airlines go out of their way to accommodate people. They'll ask for volunteers, provide free upgrades, meal vouchers and anything else.
Fortunately the airlines have reduced overbooking a lot from the past and while it is true that they ask for volunteers when they have to bump someone, what is no longer true is that the compensation is worthwhile. Typically it's a credit towards a future flight and not a free flight, yet people remember how it was 20+ years ago and assume that the generous payments for self-volunteering still exist when in fact they do not. If you throw a fit you might get a crappy meal voucher that will buy you a hamburger and a coke. Upgrade? Unlikely unless the only empty seat on the next flight is one that's an upgrade for you and they have nowhere else to put you. The "compensation" is actually pretty bad most of the time but I guess if that $400 (or possibly less) credit towards a future flight is really useful to you, you might consider volunteering. Note that I am speaking of the USA and things may well be different in other countries.
But, I think Wikileaks is an equal opportunity embarasser of repressive states so I doubt they would partner with Russia or China.
Therein lies the problem. Until Wikileaks actually embarrasses some of the "bad guys" (for lack of a better term) the only evidence we have so far is that they are perfectly content in only embarrassing the USA. Unfortunately some rather unique circumstances made it possible for Bradley Manning to do what he did. I get that. But frankly I think Assange is crazy and I'm not sure that he personally is an equal opportunity embarrasser. He may simply just have it in for democratic societies and give a free pass to repressive ones. Or maybe not. But there's no evidence either way and given how oppressive regimes are usually quite good at maintaining their secrets there may not be any.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Clinton was impeached. Impeach != removed from office
You may consult dictionary.com if you do not know the correct meaning of the word "impeach".
I suppose since Slashdot has a wide variety of readers from different countries that your post is correct in saying specifically why Slashdot readers might oppose such a mission, but since people in Europe, Australia, etc. are not US citizens it might be more relevant to talk about why Americans oppose such things too. The general argument goes like this - "How can we pay for _____________ (insert anything space related) when we still have problems in this country that we haven't solved?" Back in the day it was easy to sell the American public on space missions because they were exciting and there was also a fear that "If we don't do it first, the Russkies will use it to destroy us". Geez, back in the late 1960s the movie "2001 A Space Odyssey" pictured a working space station and lunar bases in 2001. The old "UFO" TV show from the early 1970s had a small lunar base in the 1980s. Here it is 2012 and we can't even get enough enthusiasm up to even go back just one more time to the moon, let alone do anything interesting or useful there. What it is going to take is a president and Congress who want to make it a priority and they basically say "Screw it. We're paying for it. End of story." We'll never go back until the Chinese put their own base up if we wait for the American public to get on board with this. I believe for various reasons that the Russians are quite sincere about wanting to find partners, but you could probably just substitute "European" for "American" in my post and you'd have the same result. Sorry Ivan, but if you want a partner for a lunar base you're probably going to need to talk to Beijing. Sigh.
The US Civil War was fought specifically to answer that question. The USA is not Canada. There is no way to leave the union. Period. That question has an answer. While certain ignorant politicians like Rick Perry like to talk tough about seceding from the USA, there is no constitutional mechanism to allow this. There's no reason to conclude that the US wouldn't just simply use military force to preserve the union if it came down to it like they did in the Civil War. It's difficult to imagine that California, which is the economic engine of the USA, would simply be allowed to leave with a shrug of the shoulders as the other 49 states watch the US economy tumble to perhaps being on par with Italy or worse without California. I'd like to point out too that California basically feeds the USA as well. Their agricultural output is vast. They're not leaving without a fight.
While I do expect some languages to simply disappear due to lack of relevance, expecting languages like Russian, French, German and Japanese, just to name a few, to disappear is not realistic. Languages that will disappear will be languages that are already endangered. People in human history have show a willingness to kill over language issues. 100 years from now for all practical purposes we'll have just as many languages with over 100,000 speakers as we do today.
With the House in majority Republican control and Cantor killing the bill, it doesn't really matter what the Senate does. This happens all the time when the Senate and the House are controlled by different parties. One will pass legislation that the other will never even take up just to be able to tell their voters "we passed a bill on X but those evil guys in the other party in the other side of Congress thwarted us". The only reason the White House was against it is that Obama listened to several of his top IT advisors who strongly came out against it. But in general Congress isn't really smart enough to understand what the legislation is about. It just became so toxic for a variety of reasons (a lot of big contributors on the IT side probably threatened to cut donations if it passed) that it wasn't worth the fight. Democrats have traditionally been more pro-entertainment industry and pro-lawyers than Republicans so I have to admit to being surprised that the White House didn't back it anyway. Plenty of Republicans back the entertainment industry too, they're just slightly less inclined to do so.
By the way, one of my former co-workers said that he did contact his representative in Congress. He did not say who his representative was (most likely it's a Republican) but he said that it was clear that his representative really did not understand the bill at all and was framing it in the simplistic "Let's stop evil job stealing piracy!" terms that the entertainment industry has used to sell it to Congress.