That's the sort of thing that makes me believe that this team may be able to succeed.
When Deep Blue went up against Kasperov, who could it practice against? Nobody.
There are tens of thousands of Jeopardy! questions to go through before they start making up their own.
Well it did practice against other grandmasters, and it analyzed every game Kasparov had every played, where Kasparov went into the match blind.
Indeed. And Kasparov insisted that in violation of the rules that the programmers tweaked Deep Blue during the match in a way that they were not allowed to do. IBM refused all of Kasparov's requests to see games Deep Blue played prior to the match (although Deep Blue's programmers had access to games that Kasparov played) and to see the computer's log files. Further, IBM dismantled Deep Blue when Kasparov asked for a rematch. How convenient.
Having said the above, I do believe that computers are now superior to humans at playing chess and the only hope for a level playing field between humans and computers is to use Bobby Fischer's Random Chess proposal.
The original post should have said:
"The best case scenario is that you find these vessels early enough that you can get a US or French Navy ship detached to your location and let them handle the situation."
As we have recently learned, if you get help from any other country such as Canada or the Netherlands, they are "powerless" to do anything other than disarm the pirates, reprimand them for being bad, and send them on their way to return home, re-arm, and attack again. And who'd have thought that everybody else in NATO would be such wimps that France would look like Chuck Norris in comparison?
How to great to know that Russia is number #1 for 2 years in a row. Now we can all look forward to these kids having long and successful careers helping the Russian mafia steal money from other countries, helping the Russian government to destabilize it's former USSR neighbors, and other such "fun" things that we'll all have to deal with.
All I can say after reading a submission that says that teenagers should be considered as being adults (read the last 2 paragraphs in the submission) is that submitter Bennett Haselton not only has no teenagers of his own, he conveniently doesn't remember what it was like to be a teenager.
I am curious if this verdict was reached by a jury or by a judge or judges. As an American citizen, I have twice served on juries in the USA. I can tell you from personal experience that juries are essentially a big group of mostly morons. I last served on a jury almost 4 years ago and during that time some of the guys on the jury were actually bragging about how stupid they were with regards to technology. Some guys were honestly proud that they could barely read and send email. Fortunately, our case did not involve technology but was a criminal matter.
I've also noticed that on the juries I served on we had one person on each jury who was just obsessed with rules and they were determined to punish the "evildoers" in each case. Most jurors don't know anything about the concept of "jury nullification" and as we saw in the RIAA's one big win (since reversed), the jury in that case seemed to be obsessed with punishing a "thief". Juries are easily swayed with b.s. arguments because, again, most of the people on them just aren't very smart. So I could easily see that even though the prosecution seems to have botched the case that a jury would see it in very black and white terms of being a case about "stealing" and since we all know that stealing is wrong, you have your verdict right there. If judges decided it, maybe they just aren't smart enough to understand the technology involved and they just saw it in black and white "it's about stealing" terms like a jury would.
Only the most rabid Apple fanboy (who thinks NOTHING good should ever be said of MS, and Apple can do no wrong) would think there is anything even resembling a "pro-Microsoft press conspiracy" out there.
You have a point, but I'll give you a personal example of how sometimes "independent reports" aren't as independent as they claim. Earlier in this decade I worked in a US office of a wholly owned subsidiary of an EU telcom giant. I'd be surprised if more than 1 person out of 100 here even heard of us or knew that we were owned by our parent company. My company put out a supposedly independent report that showed that the total cost of ownership of a PC running Windows was lower than Linux. The report didn't get a lot of press, but it was out there. What nobody knew though was that Microsoft was one of our customers and I could drive to our data center and point out the Microsoft equipment that we hosted for them. Can you say "conflict of interest"? I'm not going to suggest that Microsoft encouraged my company to produce this report, but I definitely think that it was an attempt to suck up to one of our customers in the hopes that we could get more business out of them by saying how great they were. So when I see anything that says how great and cheap Microsoft is, I wonder if there's a secret business relationship going on behind the scenes like there was with my former employer.
What nobody will tell you is that to prevent some older, free ripping tools from working, some studios (mostly for DVDs released in region 1 - USA and Canada - but also sometimes seen elsewhere) use a copy protection method called ARCCOS or something similar to protect their DVDs. The only rippers I know of that can defeat this are DVDFab HD Decrypter (they have a free version available) and AnyDVD (don't know if there is a free version or only the commercial version). Both are updated regularly to deal with new variations in ARCCOS. ARCCOS uses deliberately placed bad sectors on the disc to thwart copying. It's quite complicated, but it relies on a difference between how standalone DVD players and PCs read discs to thwart copying attempts. DVDFab and AnyDVD get updated because they are produced in countries that are currently free from MPAA enslavement. I am unaware of any programs other than those that can correctly rip DVDs and those only work on Windows. I don't keep up with Handbrake as it's mostly for Mac fanboys (but they do have a Windows version), so I have no idea if Handbrake is actually able to deal with ARCCOS or not. The people I know who use it do not rip DVDs that I know to use ARCCOS, so I have no idea if Handbrake can even deal with ARCCOS correctly or not.
That's what I love about the Brits. Yes, we Yanks/Americans get all the crap for not speaking English properly. Yet somehow our Canadian friends to the north, who except for a few odd British spellings (colour) and a few strange words (ever sat on a Winchester? It's not a gun.) say almost the same thing as we do with an accent that's close to ours, yet they escape condemnation. And don't get me started on the Aussies, who would probably say some crap like this:
Apfo pan
and we'd be expected to know that means "April Fools is pants".
But I digress. Really, you have to love the Brits. According to one source I found, saying that something "is pants" means it's of poor quality. So instead of saying
April Fools is lame
or
April Fools' is tired (note the apostrophe because the day is April Fools' Day with an apostrophe)
they have to tell us that "it's pants", which somehow we non-Brits will all magically know.
For shizzle my nizzle.
*Whoosh*
He was a great man. He was a preacher and a political activist who played a pivotal role in the history of the US but I think he would be disturbed by this "worship" of him given that he was a humble man of faith. You act like someone was disrespecting a revered prophet or something. It's a joke. You are supposed to laugh.
Until I read this post, I didn't get that it was a joke, but now I understand that you're right. Unfortunately British humour (spelling it in the British way for all you Brits out there) doesn't always translate well for Americans. Honestly, I can now understand that it's a joke, but I don't think it's particularly funny.
Yes, I do like Monty Python and Rowan Atkinson's various projects, but as a general rule I'm not sure I'd say that just being British means you have a leg up in the funny department.
Probably more likely that its people from abroad, especially the EU, who really don't want to move to the US with its much less protective legislation. A smart US based IBM employee should be signing up for the move to France, Germany or Scandanavia, better healthcare, that isn't linked to your employer, better food (in France anyway) and a chance to completely change your perspective on life.
Now it would be interesting what the odds are on IBM allowing a US to France transfer.
The article in the main post has a link to another article that names the countries involved. They are:
India, China, Brazil, Mexico, the Czech Republic, Russia, South Africa, Nigeria, and the United Arab Emirates.
Not any of the desirable countries you listed. And I used to work for a large French company I probably should not name, but we had some American employees who thought it would be "fun" to accept jobs with the company in France. Every single one of them that I knew returned somewhat disillusioned about living in France. There are good things and bad things about living anywhere, but the French are not always friendly to outsiders and it can take quite a while to make friends with them.
However, this same French employer outsourced our jobs in my department to Brazil. One of my co-workers offered to move to Brazil and pay 100% of the relocation costs himself if they would let him work there and they refused. IBM doesn't want to necessarily move Americans to those countries, although they will do so. They are basically hoping that natives (ie. Indians) will want to return home and work for IBM there rather than expecting Americans to move overseas for a gigantic pay cut.
I looked at the article (imagine that) and it says that what happened in Ukraine was that in the 2004 presidential elections, an authorized computer was secretly placed at vote headquarters and it gave out bogus returns. I'm not surprised, but I hadn't heard that before.
I was in Ukraine during the Orange Revolution. I had not planned on being there during this, it just sort of happened while I was already there. I remember seeing voting returns on TV and everybody knew that the announced results were fraudulent. One of the most populous oblasts (this is basically the Ukrainian version of an American state) said that 99% of the voters voted for Yanukovich, the guy who ended up losing the eventual re-vote. Imagine if you will that in the 2008 elections if California said that 99% of voters voted for Obama or if Texas had reported that 99% of its voters voted for McCain and you have an idea of crazy the fraud was. It wasn't even believable. Basically whoever tried to cheat knew that Yanukovich could not win a fair election, so they turned in impossible vote totals for him in the oblasts where he was expected to win and so that when all the votes were counted, he would have the most votes. It's generally considered that Ukraine now has honest elections as a result of the 2004 election fraud.
You've actually been given some good advice on what to do from a CYA standpoint. You can try those suggestions. The odds are that nobody will fink on your company, but if your company has a disgruntled former employee, those odds will suddenly increase.
Do note that nobody will like this. Management will get mad that you are "rocking the boat" and spending money that they hadn't budgeted because the previous guy didn't tell them that they were such a situation. The employees will get mad because there is a chance that what they were using may go away or be replaced with something else. Change is bad to a lot of people.
To give you an idea of how crazy this fear is, my best friend is an attorney. His practice includes his wife (also an attorney) and at any given time 2 or 3 employees. He doesn't retain people well because the jobs he has don't pay well, so there's a lot of turnover in his staff. He lives in fear that a former employee will sic the BSA on him, so he makes sure that everything he has on all the PCs is legit. In fact, he will not use FOSS at all because he is afraid that somehow this will run afoul of the BSA (I have tried and failed to convince him otherwise). He also tends to pay full price for everything he buys because he is afraid too that if buys something at a discount, it might not be legal and he'll be screwed. Heck, he's been known to even buy multiple copies of a program that he may only need 1 copy of just to be absolutely sure that he's in compliance and with all of this, he is still worried that somehow, someway, the BSA will one day come calling and arbitrarily decide that he's out of compliance and screw him over. While I know that this is an extreme example, it does illustrate that some people, including small businesses, take software compliance very seriously.
I remember about 9 years ago when IBM bought out Sequent Computer Systems . My employer at the time was a Sequent customer and I knew people who worked at Sequent's corporate office. They were at first all gung ho about joining IBM, but the reality that set in wasn't pretty. As often happens in business, a big company buys a competitor simply to shut the competitor down. Click on the Wikipedia link provided to get some more info on the deal and alternative explanations for the decision to close down Sequent. If I worked for Sun, I wouldn't hold my breath that this would be a good deal for me, but the stock holders and upper management at Sun may come out well from this.
The same thing happened in 1979 with Battlestar Galactica. The network green lighted the show. Heavily promoted it and it was doing well. The demographics were great. Show with the most college graduates watching had the under 35 crowd going for it. So why did it have to die?
In a word, production costs. An hour of Galactica could cost 1 million dollars which would bring in 2 million dollars. Thus a 1 million dollar profit. On the other hand 30 minutes of Happy Days and 30 minutes of Mork and Mindy would cost the network a total of $250,000. But it would bring in 2.5 million.
So do the math. Decent sci-fi show 1 dollar out for every dollar in. Cheap but good rated comedy gives us 2.25 dollars out for every dollar in.
I'm not at all disputing this, but I do want to point out something not mentioned. Keep in mind that at this time TV was very different from how it is now. Ratings were everything at this time. Yes I am quite sure that you are right that it lost out because of costs compared to comedies, but the network used "declining ratings" (without admitting that it was still winning its time slot even while going down in the ratings) to justify the decision. Why? Simple. Higher rated shows charged more for advertising and brought in more revenue. When BG became, I guess, a top 20 or top 30 show instead of top 10 (I am presuming what happened here), it surely lost advertising money so that $1 million dollars of profit quickly became $0.75 million dollars of profit and looked like it was going down even more.
Having lived through this era, although being in high school at the time, I remember that networks were quick to pull the trigger on anything that looked like it was losing in the ratings. You got one year usually, at best, to justify yourself and if you didn't do so, you were gone. End of story. It wasn't until the early 80s that things changed forever for the better and for that we can thank Brandon Tartikoff. He had a Thursday night lineup that included such classic shows as Hill Street Blues and Cheers and nobody except me and a few others were watching. He believed that these were strong shows that could enable NBC to win the ratings, but they just needed time to find an audience. So NBC kept them on, even after mostly disastrous first season ratings and just plugged them all the time and talked about how these shows won the Emmys and were the best shows on TV. Finally America got interested and he was right. The Thursday night lineup started by shows like Cheers and Hill Street Blues formed the basis of a strong network that nobody could compete with and even to this day NBC still operates on a position of strength on Thursday nights as a result. So Tartikoff taught us all that good shows can find their audiences if you stick with them.
For all the criticism of Fox, and a lot of it is well deserved, keep in mind that in the early days Fox also pioneered something that nobody else did. While Tartikoff was the genius who realized that quality could win, do keep in mind that I believe that the ratings began to go his way by year 2 of Cheers. At the time had the ratings continued to be low, he probably would have been forced to pull the shows, probably by year 3. Fox was the first network to realize that you don't have to win the time slot. If you pull in a desirable demographic (ie. men between 18-35) and finish high in that desirable target audience, you can sell enough advertising to people who want to target that group that you can make money on the shows. Nobody, not even Tartikoff, figured out that one earlier than Fox.
Shows like Married With Children and The Simpsons survived quite simply because they quickly found a desirable demographic for advertising even though the ratings were poor at first. We can thank Fox for that pioneering effort. Yes, Fox has truly botched a lot of shows, no doubt, but give them credit for Arrested Development. I really don't know what else they could have done. F
Fox doesn't deserve Futurama; if they aren't contractually obligated to bring it back to Fox, West should sell the rights to Adult Swim or Comedy Central.
The fact that you think that Billy West owns the rights means that you really do not understand what you are talking about. West is simply an employee of the production company and nothing more.
Can you imagine even half of the network admins in the united states changing the passwords on their routers and shutting them down until Childs is released?
Yeah, I can't either.
I can't either, but probably for different reasons than you.
1. Such actions could cost employers to lose money and might subject those responsible to criminal charges (quite possibly felony charges) similar to Terry Childs.
2. Your suggestion fails to take into account that the legal system (judges, lawyers and police) is mostly comprised of people with extremely limited technical knowledge. Do you really want such people deciding whether you might have a point to this protest? I'm thinking "no". Also, the legal system might be seriously unimpressed with such stunts and look to make examples of everyone who engages in this kind of protest simply to keep it from happening again in the future. Remember, back in the 1980s that President Reagan told the air traffic controllers if they went on strike (which was illegal) that he would fire them all. They went on strike and he did fire them. Nobody in the federal government has been on strike since then.
I read the articles linked to in the main post and I'm still unconvinced that Childs is a "victim". At best he's an idiot for not realizing that the passwords were not his to protect, they were his employer's. At worst he deliberately tried to sabotage the network and is now trying to weasel out of jail time and fines.
Keep in mind that Childs himself now says it wasn't worth it. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that when your employers says "Give me the passwords" that you do that. It's not his job as a network admin to worry about what will happen to those passwords.
"The Plan" won't work in the USA. Here's why.
1) When you buy drugs outside of the USA, the FDA flips out and says that the drugs weren't subjected to "rigorous testing" or some such blather and (they do have a point here) without such testing, you have no way to know if you are really getting the drug you think you bought or a weakened version or a placebo. In a worst case scenario, you die from tainted medicine (remember China and the "milk"?)
2) Federal law limits the amount of drugs that can legally be brought in, so doing whatever is necessary to try to import them legally brings you back to #1. Rinse and repeat.
Actually, this is a pretty good post. Unfortunately by posting anonymously, you've managed to get some useless responses to what appears to good, serious question.
Wikipedia has some good explanations of various VMware products and some differences between them. Some of them have more functionality than others. The free ones always do less than the pay versions, although what the free ones can do may be enough for some people.
Our VMware expert told me that at his previous job one of the VMware products was only available as a commercial product (no free version at that time - don't remember if that's still true) and although nowhere in their website did they say this, if you tried to buy it, VMware would refuse to sell it to you unless you bought support for it and the support contract cost more than the software did. He said that VMware was infamous for upselling required support and whatever you thought you were going to pay to buy stuff from VMware, in his experience it always cost more in reality. To be fair, this isn't true for everything they have though. We bought a lot of copies of Fusion at work and didn't have to pay for any support of them, just Fusion itself.
3. It's about time Russia asserted itself internationally. For nearly a decade and a half, Russia did exactly as IMF and Washington DC told it. Needless to say, neither of the two had Russia's interests in mind.
Questions?
Yes, I have questions. Do not change the subject by talking about what America does. What I want to know from you, since you seem to think you are an expert is...
How does this "reassertion" benefit non-Russians?
Is there more to this reassertion than simply supporting noxious dictators (ie. Sudan, Cuba) and stealing territory from other countries (ie. Georgia)?
I'm not going to deny that Russia benefited little from doing what it was told to do, mostly because President Bush was too idiotic to understand the concept of "quid pro quo", but I fail to see how this new, proud Russia is really any better than the old Soviet one, which also supported noxious dictators and stole land (end of WWII for example).
Refusal to execute an order in the military is a life altering decision in the best of places. During wartime, it can be a life ending decision.
Yes. Many posters cannot conceive of what it's like for soldiers in this situation. Let's suppose that Private Jones does have King Kong sized testicles and bravery beyond the call of duty to refuse to torture. What can he expect for saying "No"? Well, at a minimum he might expect to get sent to the brig. He could get busted in rank AND pay and both of those are really big deals in the military. He could get shipped to an incredibly dangerous job by his superiors who know that he'll likely die as a result.
Keep in mind too that many of these "victims" are very very bad people. It's kind of hard to feel righteous indignation at the torture of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. Frankly it just may not be all that hard to comply when you think the guy is just getting his just deserts anyway AND the alternative (see my previous paragraph) is pretty distasteful. Although the US military hasn't shot anybody since WWII for disobeying orders, they have indeed done it in the past (see Private Slovik on Wikipedia, although he was not disobeying an unlawful order).
The military and various governments like to say that you must disobey unlawful orders, but in reality this is just CYA stuff to justify the Nuremberg Trials. Military men all expect their orders to be obeyed without question. Note that none, not one, of the higher ups who ordered the torture has been brought to trail. It has all been on enlisted men and maybe 1 or 2 low ranking officers.
It's nice to see DivX (the company) back Matroska, but does anyone really use DivX (the codec) anymore? Their ASP codec is consistently inferior to Xvid, and so my faith that they will be able to develop a new AVC codec that bests x264 is not terribly strong.
Yes, people still use Divx. Go to the alt.* groups on Usenet to see how many. I watch a foreign TV that is unavailable in the USA and I watch it via Divx encodes that people who live in the broadcast country make and place on Usenet.
As far as "inferiority" to Xvid goes, that was true years ago, but today I doubt that you'd be able to tell any difference between Xvid encoded material and stuff correctly encoded with the commerical Divx codec.
I have to agree with another poster that I'm not surprised at the amount of anti-America bashing this generated. However, those of you who live outside the USA and are not American citizens should probably consider the following.
1. Most Americans never travel outside of North America and have no desire to do so.
2. The US government regards everybody except Canadians as potential illegal immigrants. Yes, even you EU guys and gals. Trust me when I tell you that while there are certainly American businesses that do want your money, my government really doesn't care if nobody comes over to visit.
3. Probably less than 1% of Americans know the visa requirements for foreigners to come here. Almost everybody I've talked to in the USA had no idea how difficult to impossible it is for citizens of non-Visa Waiver countries to get visas to come here. Almost all Americans think that Mexicans and others need only apply for visas to come here legally and they are simply too lazy to do so. I've seen shocked expressions on the faces of many people when they found out how difficult it truly can be to even visit here as a tourist. I've known of cases of legal immigrants who were unable to get tourist visas for family members to come here to visit.
So if you non-USA people expect us to "fix" our broken system, well, good luck with that because the truth is that almost nobody knows how it really works and almost nobody cares if it discourages you from coming here. That is reality. If you don't want to fill out an online form to come neither my government nor the vast majority of my fellow citizens care if you don't come because you don't like the rules. If you think this is some sort of meaningful protest, you are mistaken.
The correct pronunciation of the word "Woodge" is something like the Polish pronunciation of "Lodz".
This should be modded "Insightful" but certainly not "Funny". gnick is quite right. I studied Russian and I know just a little about Polish. The proper spelling of the town uses an "L" with a slashed line through the middle of it, an "o" with an acute accent, a "d" and a "z" with an acute accent on it. I tried to put it in my post but Slashdot turned it to garbage. If you search for "Lodz" on Wikipedia, you can see the proper spelling in Polish.
Note the slashed line right in the middle of the "L". That means it's pronounced like a "W" in English. Leave it to those crazy Poles to spell "W" with an "L":-)
The only ones hurt by the Beatles not being on iTunes and other services are the remaining members.
I don't think they're going to be hurt.
The Beatles have the biggest selling back catalogue in the world. The #2 seller AC DC are also not on iTunes.
Both bands think they make more money selling Albums than singles & selling singles on iTunes would cannibalise their album sales.
Not sure if I agree or not, but they've certainly got numbers (huge album sales) on their side.
Hmm...
Whether your statement is correct for AC/DC, I have no idea. It might be. To be honest with you, I really could not care less. It's wrong about the Beatles though. This is all about money. Basically their label, EMI, wants a bigger piece of the pie than the Beatles+widows will give them. EMI sees this as their last chance to milk the Beatles' catalog and the Beatles+widows realize that EMI is a dinosaur fighting extinction and if they hold firm, EMI will eventually have to give in as a smaller piece of the pie is better than no pie at all. But this is 100% about money.
AC/DC are computerphobes to an extreme and their decision is because they don't understand the technology and they fear it. The solo Beatles recordings are almost all available via iTunes or similar services and there is no resistance at all from the surviving members and widows to digital downloads.
To say the internet may have stopped Hitler may very well be an understatement. A Russian classmate of mine informed me that in some Eastern European countries, there are memorials for German soldiers who fought and died against the Russians. "But I thought they were Nazis!" I remember saying. And he laughed and asked me if I really thought that tens of millions of soldiers--some with Jewish friends/relatives--were really all killing Jews or knew of the extent of the camps. He told me that some soldiers had convinced the local people they were intending on liberating areas from Russian threat. What followed certainly did seem like a Russian threat... Despite what I was told as a child, he assured me that very few German infantry fighting abroad were full fledged Nazis. He claimed there is evidence these soldiers with Jewish ties were moved away from the homeland for this purpose.
So, just because "a Russian classmate" says something, you accept it as 100% correct and factual? My gullible young friend, you need to learn something. People in the ex-USSR talk more b.s. than anybody on the planet. They believe all rumors they hear. It's quite common to hear urban legend stories repeated as happening to the husband of a friend of my cousin and so on.
Can you name exactly ONE of those supposed memorials to German troops? Whether there are any or not depends on what you mean by the term "Eastern European". If that means Austria, OK, maybe. If that means any of the Warsaw Pact countries, then that is almost certainly untrue. The USSR suffered horribly in WWII, partly from the Germans and partly from Stalin, but they blame all of it on the Germans. I feel pretty confident in telling you that Soviet authorities would not have allowed memorials to stand to German troops. There's just too many hard feelings.
It's certainly true that many places welcomed German troops - at first. Ukraine suffered horribly under Stalin prior to the war and they did welcome Germans as liberators. What they didn't know was that Hitler viewed all Slavic people as fit only for extermination. After a few years, the Soviet Union looked better to these people and they started partisan movements to fight the Nazis. At least under the Soviet Union they wouldn't all die. Stalin was crazy, but he was not Pol Pot. A former girlfriend of mine is from Ukraine and one grandmother had both of her parents killed in front of her by Nazi troops. One grandfather had both of his parents killed in front of him by Stalin's henchmen. There's plenty of blame for both sides. And this story about German Jewish soldiers being allowed to serve elsewhere, well, I find that improbable given the irrational hatred of Jews in Nazi Germany. But that's typically a Russian story for you - nobody is as bad as they really were. I'm sure your classmate has glowing things to say about Stalin, who in my opinion exceeded even Hitler in being evil.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the sort of thing that makes me believe that this team may be able to succeed.
When Deep Blue went up against Kasperov, who could it practice against? Nobody.
There are tens of thousands of Jeopardy! questions to go through before they start making up their own.
Well it did practice against other grandmasters, and it analyzed every game Kasparov had every played, where Kasparov went into the match blind.
Indeed. And Kasparov insisted that in violation of the rules that the programmers tweaked Deep Blue during the match in a way that they were not allowed to do. IBM refused all of Kasparov's requests to see games Deep Blue played prior to the match (although Deep Blue's programmers had access to games that Kasparov played) and to see the computer's log files. Further, IBM dismantled Deep Blue when Kasparov asked for a rematch. How convenient.
Having said the above, I do believe that computers are now superior to humans at playing chess and the only hope for a level playing field between humans and computers is to use Bobby Fischer's Random Chess proposal.
The original post should have said: "The best case scenario is that you find these vessels early enough that you can get a US or French Navy ship detached to your location and let them handle the situation."
As we have recently learned, if you get help from any other country such as Canada or the Netherlands, they are "powerless" to do anything other than disarm the pirates, reprimand them for being bad, and send them on their way to return home, re-arm, and attack again. And who'd have thought that everybody else in NATO would be such wimps that France would look like Chuck Norris in comparison?
How to great to know that Russia is number #1 for 2 years in a row. Now we can all look forward to these kids having long and successful careers helping the Russian mafia steal money from other countries, helping the Russian government to destabilize it's former USSR neighbors, and other such "fun" things that we'll all have to deal with.
All I can say after reading a submission that says that teenagers should be considered as being adults (read the last 2 paragraphs in the submission) is that submitter Bennett Haselton not only has no teenagers of his own, he conveniently doesn't remember what it was like to be a teenager.
I am curious if this verdict was reached by a jury or by a judge or judges. As an American citizen, I have twice served on juries in the USA. I can tell you from personal experience that juries are essentially a big group of mostly morons. I last served on a jury almost 4 years ago and during that time some of the guys on the jury were actually bragging about how stupid they were with regards to technology. Some guys were honestly proud that they could barely read and send email. Fortunately, our case did not involve technology but was a criminal matter.
I've also noticed that on the juries I served on we had one person on each jury who was just obsessed with rules and they were determined to punish the "evildoers" in each case. Most jurors don't know anything about the concept of "jury nullification" and as we saw in the RIAA's one big win (since reversed), the jury in that case seemed to be obsessed with punishing a "thief". Juries are easily swayed with b.s. arguments because, again, most of the people on them just aren't very smart. So I could easily see that even though the prosecution seems to have botched the case that a jury would see it in very black and white terms of being a case about "stealing" and since we all know that stealing is wrong, you have your verdict right there. If judges decided it, maybe they just aren't smart enough to understand the technology involved and they just saw it in black and white "it's about stealing" terms like a jury would.
Only the most rabid Apple fanboy (who thinks NOTHING good should ever be said of MS, and Apple can do no wrong) would think there is anything even resembling a "pro-Microsoft press conspiracy" out there.
You have a point, but I'll give you a personal example of how sometimes "independent reports" aren't as independent as they claim. Earlier in this decade I worked in a US office of a wholly owned subsidiary of an EU telcom giant. I'd be surprised if more than 1 person out of 100 here even heard of us or knew that we were owned by our parent company. My company put out a supposedly independent report that showed that the total cost of ownership of a PC running Windows was lower than Linux. The report didn't get a lot of press, but it was out there. What nobody knew though was that Microsoft was one of our customers and I could drive to our data center and point out the Microsoft equipment that we hosted for them. Can you say "conflict of interest"? I'm not going to suggest that Microsoft encouraged my company to produce this report, but I definitely think that it was an attempt to suck up to one of our customers in the hopes that we could get more business out of them by saying how great they were. So when I see anything that says how great and cheap Microsoft is, I wonder if there's a secret business relationship going on behind the scenes like there was with my former employer.
What nobody will tell you is that to prevent some older, free ripping tools from working, some studios (mostly for DVDs released in region 1 - USA and Canada - but also sometimes seen elsewhere) use a copy protection method called ARCCOS or something similar to protect their DVDs. The only rippers I know of that can defeat this are DVDFab HD Decrypter (they have a free version available) and AnyDVD (don't know if there is a free version or only the commercial version). Both are updated regularly to deal with new variations in ARCCOS. ARCCOS uses deliberately placed bad sectors on the disc to thwart copying. It's quite complicated, but it relies on a difference between how standalone DVD players and PCs read discs to thwart copying attempts. DVDFab and AnyDVD get updated because they are produced in countries that are currently free from MPAA enslavement. I am unaware of any programs other than those that can correctly rip DVDs and those only work on Windows. I don't keep up with Handbrake as it's mostly for Mac fanboys (but they do have a Windows version), so I have no idea if Handbrake is actually able to deal with ARCCOS or not. The people I know who use it do not rip DVDs that I know to use ARCCOS, so I have no idea if Handbrake can even deal with ARCCOS correctly or not.
Stop it. Please. April Fools is pants.
That's what I love about the Brits. Yes, we Yanks/Americans get all the crap for not speaking English properly. Yet somehow our Canadian friends to the north, who except for a few odd British spellings (colour) and a few strange words (ever sat on a Winchester? It's not a gun.) say almost the same thing as we do with an accent that's close to ours, yet they escape condemnation. And don't get me started on the Aussies, who would probably say some crap like this:
Apfo pan
and we'd be expected to know that means "April Fools is pants".
But I digress. Really, you have to love the Brits. According to one source I found, saying that something "is pants" means it's of poor quality. So instead of saying
April Fools is lame
or
April Fools' is tired (note the apostrophe because the day is April Fools' Day with an apostrophe)
they have to tell us that "it's pants", which somehow we non-Brits will all magically know. For shizzle my nizzle.
*Whoosh* He was a great man. He was a preacher and a political activist who played a pivotal role in the history of the US but I think he would be disturbed by this "worship" of him given that he was a humble man of faith. You act like someone was disrespecting a revered prophet or something. It's a joke. You are supposed to laugh.
Until I read this post, I didn't get that it was a joke, but now I understand that you're right. Unfortunately British humour (spelling it in the British way for all you Brits out there) doesn't always translate well for Americans. Honestly, I can now understand that it's a joke, but I don't think it's particularly funny.
Yes, I do like Monty Python and Rowan Atkinson's various projects, but as a general rule I'm not sure I'd say that just being British means you have a leg up in the funny department.
Probably more likely that its people from abroad, especially the EU, who really don't want to move to the US with its much less protective legislation. A smart US based IBM employee should be signing up for the move to France, Germany or Scandanavia, better healthcare, that isn't linked to your employer, better food (in France anyway) and a chance to completely change your perspective on life.
Now it would be interesting what the odds are on IBM allowing a US to France transfer.
The article in the main post has a link to another article that names the countries involved. They are:
India, China, Brazil, Mexico, the Czech Republic, Russia, South Africa, Nigeria, and the United Arab Emirates.
Not any of the desirable countries you listed. And I used to work for a large French company I probably should not name, but we had some American employees who thought it would be "fun" to accept jobs with the company in France. Every single one of them that I knew returned somewhat disillusioned about living in France. There are good things and bad things about living anywhere, but the French are not always friendly to outsiders and it can take quite a while to make friends with them.
However, this same French employer outsourced our jobs in my department to Brazil. One of my co-workers offered to move to Brazil and pay 100% of the relocation costs himself if they would let him work there and they refused. IBM doesn't want to necessarily move Americans to those countries, although they will do so. They are basically hoping that natives (ie. Indians) will want to return home and work for IBM there rather than expecting Americans to move overseas for a gigantic pay cut.
I looked at the article (imagine that) and it says that what happened in Ukraine was that in the 2004 presidential elections, an authorized computer was secretly placed at vote headquarters and it gave out bogus returns. I'm not surprised, but I hadn't heard that before.
I was in Ukraine during the Orange Revolution. I had not planned on being there during this, it just sort of happened while I was already there. I remember seeing voting returns on TV and everybody knew that the announced results were fraudulent. One of the most populous oblasts (this is basically the Ukrainian version of an American state) said that 99% of the voters voted for Yanukovich, the guy who ended up losing the eventual re-vote. Imagine if you will that in the 2008 elections if California said that 99% of voters voted for Obama or if Texas had reported that 99% of its voters voted for McCain and you have an idea of crazy the fraud was. It wasn't even believable. Basically whoever tried to cheat knew that Yanukovich could not win a fair election, so they turned in impossible vote totals for him in the oblasts where he was expected to win and so that when all the votes were counted, he would have the most votes. It's generally considered that Ukraine now has honest elections as a result of the 2004 election fraud.
You've actually been given some good advice on what to do from a CYA standpoint. You can try those suggestions. The odds are that nobody will fink on your company, but if your company has a disgruntled former employee, those odds will suddenly increase.
Do note that nobody will like this. Management will get mad that you are "rocking the boat" and spending money that they hadn't budgeted because the previous guy didn't tell them that they were such a situation. The employees will get mad because there is a chance that what they were using may go away or be replaced with something else. Change is bad to a lot of people.
To give you an idea of how crazy this fear is, my best friend is an attorney. His practice includes his wife (also an attorney) and at any given time 2 or 3 employees. He doesn't retain people well because the jobs he has don't pay well, so there's a lot of turnover in his staff. He lives in fear that a former employee will sic the BSA on him, so he makes sure that everything he has on all the PCs is legit. In fact, he will not use FOSS at all because he is afraid that somehow this will run afoul of the BSA (I have tried and failed to convince him otherwise). He also tends to pay full price for everything he buys because he is afraid too that if buys something at a discount, it might not be legal and he'll be screwed. Heck, he's been known to even buy multiple copies of a program that he may only need 1 copy of just to be absolutely sure that he's in compliance and with all of this, he is still worried that somehow, someway, the BSA will one day come calling and arbitrarily decide that he's out of compliance and screw him over. While I know that this is an extreme example, it does illustrate that some people, including small businesses, take software compliance very seriously.
I remember about 9 years ago when IBM bought out Sequent Computer Systems . My employer at the time was a Sequent customer and I knew people who worked at Sequent's corporate office. They were at first all gung ho about joining IBM, but the reality that set in wasn't pretty. As often happens in business, a big company buys a competitor simply to shut the competitor down. Click on the Wikipedia link provided to get some more info on the deal and alternative explanations for the decision to close down Sequent. If I worked for Sun, I wouldn't hold my breath that this would be a good deal for me, but the stock holders and upper management at Sun may come out well from this.
The same thing happened in 1979 with Battlestar Galactica. The network green lighted the show. Heavily promoted it and it was doing well. The demographics were great. Show with the most college graduates watching had the under 35 crowd going for it. So why did it have to die?
In a word, production costs. An hour of Galactica could cost 1 million dollars which would bring in 2 million dollars. Thus a 1 million dollar profit. On the other hand 30 minutes of Happy Days and 30 minutes of Mork and Mindy would cost the network a total of $250,000. But it would bring in 2.5 million.
So do the math. Decent sci-fi show 1 dollar out for every dollar in. Cheap but good rated comedy gives us 2.25 dollars out for every dollar in.
I'm not at all disputing this, but I do want to point out something not mentioned. Keep in mind that at this time TV was very different from how it is now. Ratings were everything at this time. Yes I am quite sure that you are right that it lost out because of costs compared to comedies, but the network used "declining ratings" (without admitting that it was still winning its time slot even while going down in the ratings) to justify the decision. Why? Simple. Higher rated shows charged more for advertising and brought in more revenue. When BG became, I guess, a top 20 or top 30 show instead of top 10 (I am presuming what happened here), it surely lost advertising money so that $1 million dollars of profit quickly became $0.75 million dollars of profit and looked like it was going down even more.
Having lived through this era, although being in high school at the time, I remember that networks were quick to pull the trigger on anything that looked like it was losing in the ratings. You got one year usually, at best, to justify yourself and if you didn't do so, you were gone. End of story. It wasn't until the early 80s that things changed forever for the better and for that we can thank Brandon Tartikoff. He had a Thursday night lineup that included such classic shows as Hill Street Blues and Cheers and nobody except me and a few others were watching. He believed that these were strong shows that could enable NBC to win the ratings, but they just needed time to find an audience. So NBC kept them on, even after mostly disastrous first season ratings and just plugged them all the time and talked about how these shows won the Emmys and were the best shows on TV. Finally America got interested and he was right. The Thursday night lineup started by shows like Cheers and Hill Street Blues formed the basis of a strong network that nobody could compete with and even to this day NBC still operates on a position of strength on Thursday nights as a result. So Tartikoff taught us all that good shows can find their audiences if you stick with them.
For all the criticism of Fox, and a lot of it is well deserved, keep in mind that in the early days Fox also pioneered something that nobody else did. While Tartikoff was the genius who realized that quality could win, do keep in mind that I believe that the ratings began to go his way by year 2 of Cheers. At the time had the ratings continued to be low, he probably would have been forced to pull the shows, probably by year 3. Fox was the first network to realize that you don't have to win the time slot. If you pull in a desirable demographic (ie. men between 18-35) and finish high in that desirable target audience, you can sell enough advertising to people who want to target that group that you can make money on the shows. Nobody, not even Tartikoff, figured out that one earlier than Fox. Shows like Married With Children and The Simpsons survived quite simply because they quickly found a desirable demographic for advertising even though the ratings were poor at first. We can thank Fox for that pioneering effort. Yes, Fox has truly botched a lot of shows, no doubt, but give them credit for Arrested Development. I really don't know what else they could have done. F
Fox doesn't deserve Futurama; if they aren't contractually obligated to bring it back to Fox, West should sell the rights to Adult Swim or Comedy Central.
The fact that you think that Billy West owns the rights means that you really do not understand what you are talking about. West is simply an employee of the production company and nothing more.
Can you imagine even half of the network admins in the united states changing the passwords on their routers and shutting them down until Childs is released? Yeah, I can't either.
I can't either, but probably for different reasons than you.
1. Such actions could cost employers to lose money and might subject those responsible to criminal charges (quite possibly felony charges) similar to Terry Childs.
2. Your suggestion fails to take into account that the legal system (judges, lawyers and police) is mostly comprised of people with extremely limited technical knowledge. Do you really want such people deciding whether you might have a point to this protest? I'm thinking "no". Also, the legal system might be seriously unimpressed with such stunts and look to make examples of everyone who engages in this kind of protest simply to keep it from happening again in the future. Remember, back in the 1980s that President Reagan told the air traffic controllers if they went on strike (which was illegal) that he would fire them all. They went on strike and he did fire them. Nobody in the federal government has been on strike since then.
I read the articles linked to in the main post and I'm still unconvinced that Childs is a "victim". At best he's an idiot for not realizing that the passwords were not his to protect, they were his employer's. At worst he deliberately tried to sabotage the network and is now trying to weasel out of jail time and fines.
Keep in mind that Childs himself now says it wasn't worth it. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that when your employers says "Give me the passwords" that you do that. It's not his job as a network admin to worry about what will happen to those passwords.
"The Plan" won't work in the USA. Here's why.
1) When you buy drugs outside of the USA, the FDA flips out and says that the drugs weren't subjected to "rigorous testing" or some such blather and (they do have a point here) without such testing, you have no way to know if you are really getting the drug you think you bought or a weakened version or a placebo. In a worst case scenario, you die from tainted medicine (remember China and the "milk"?)
2) Federal law limits the amount of drugs that can legally be brought in, so doing whatever is necessary to try to import them legally brings you back to #1. Rinse and repeat.
Actually, this is a pretty good post. Unfortunately by posting anonymously, you've managed to get some useless responses to what appears to good, serious question.
Wikipedia has some good explanations of various VMware products and some differences between them. Some of them have more functionality than others. The free ones always do less than the pay versions, although what the free ones can do may be enough for some people.
Our VMware expert told me that at his previous job one of the VMware products was only available as a commercial product (no free version at that time - don't remember if that's still true) and although nowhere in their website did they say this, if you tried to buy it, VMware would refuse to sell it to you unless you bought support for it and the support contract cost more than the software did. He said that VMware was infamous for upselling required support and whatever you thought you were going to pay to buy stuff from VMware, in his experience it always cost more in reality. To be fair, this isn't true for everything they have though. We bought a lot of copies of Fusion at work and didn't have to pay for any support of them, just Fusion itself.
3. It's about time Russia asserted itself internationally. For nearly a decade and a half, Russia did exactly as IMF and Washington DC told it. Needless to say, neither of the two had Russia's interests in mind.
Questions?
Yes, I have questions. Do not change the subject by talking about what America does. What I want to know from you, since you seem to think you are an expert is... How does this "reassertion" benefit non-Russians?
Is there more to this reassertion than simply supporting noxious dictators (ie. Sudan, Cuba) and stealing territory from other countries (ie. Georgia)?
I'm not going to deny that Russia benefited little from doing what it was told to do, mostly because President Bush was too idiotic to understand the concept of "quid pro quo", but I fail to see how this new, proud Russia is really any better than the old Soviet one, which also supported noxious dictators and stole land (end of WWII for example).
Refusal to execute an order in the military is a life altering decision in the best of places. During wartime, it can be a life ending decision.
Yes. Many posters cannot conceive of what it's like for soldiers in this situation. Let's suppose that Private Jones does have King Kong sized testicles and bravery beyond the call of duty to refuse to torture. What can he expect for saying "No"? Well, at a minimum he might expect to get sent to the brig. He could get busted in rank AND pay and both of those are really big deals in the military. He could get shipped to an incredibly dangerous job by his superiors who know that he'll likely die as a result.
Keep in mind too that many of these "victims" are very very bad people. It's kind of hard to feel righteous indignation at the torture of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. Frankly it just may not be all that hard to comply when you think the guy is just getting his just deserts anyway AND the alternative (see my previous paragraph) is pretty distasteful. Although the US military hasn't shot anybody since WWII for disobeying orders, they have indeed done it in the past (see Private Slovik on Wikipedia, although he was not disobeying an unlawful order).
The military and various governments like to say that you must disobey unlawful orders, but in reality this is just CYA stuff to justify the Nuremberg Trials. Military men all expect their orders to be obeyed without question. Note that none, not one, of the higher ups who ordered the torture has been brought to trail. It has all been on enlisted men and maybe 1 or 2 low ranking officers.
It's nice to see DivX (the company) back Matroska, but does anyone really use DivX (the codec) anymore? Their ASP codec is consistently inferior to Xvid, and so my faith that they will be able to develop a new AVC codec that bests x264 is not terribly strong.
Yes, people still use Divx. Go to the alt.* groups on Usenet to see how many. I watch a foreign TV that is unavailable in the USA and I watch it via Divx encodes that people who live in the broadcast country make and place on Usenet.
As far as "inferiority" to Xvid goes, that was true years ago, but today I doubt that you'd be able to tell any difference between Xvid encoded material and stuff correctly encoded with the commerical Divx codec.
I have to agree with another poster that I'm not surprised at the amount of anti-America bashing this generated. However, those of you who live outside the USA and are not American citizens should probably consider the following.
1. Most Americans never travel outside of North America and have no desire to do so.
2. The US government regards everybody except Canadians as potential illegal immigrants. Yes, even you EU guys and gals. Trust me when I tell you that while there are certainly American businesses that do want your money, my government really doesn't care if nobody comes over to visit.
3. Probably less than 1% of Americans know the visa requirements for foreigners to come here. Almost everybody I've talked to in the USA had no idea how difficult to impossible it is for citizens of non-Visa Waiver countries to get visas to come here. Almost all Americans think that Mexicans and others need only apply for visas to come here legally and they are simply too lazy to do so. I've seen shocked expressions on the faces of many people when they found out how difficult it truly can be to even visit here as a tourist. I've known of cases of legal immigrants who were unable to get tourist visas for family members to come here to visit.
So if you non-USA people expect us to "fix" our broken system, well, good luck with that because the truth is that almost nobody knows how it really works and almost nobody cares if it discourages you from coming here. That is reality. If you don't want to fill out an online form to come neither my government nor the vast majority of my fellow citizens care if you don't come because you don't like the rules. If you think this is some sort of meaningful protest, you are mistaken.
Maybe I can help.
The correct pronunciation of the word "Woodge" is something like the Polish pronunciation of "Lodz".
This should be modded "Insightful" but certainly not "Funny". gnick is quite right. I studied Russian and I know just a little about Polish. The proper spelling of the town uses an "L" with a slashed line through the middle of it, an "o" with an acute accent, a "d" and a "z" with an acute accent on it. I tried to put it in my post but Slashdot turned it to garbage. If you search for "Lodz" on Wikipedia, you can see the proper spelling in Polish.
:-)
Note the slashed line right in the middle of the "L". That means it's pronounced like a "W" in English. Leave it to those crazy Poles to spell "W" with an "L"
The only ones hurt by the Beatles not being on iTunes and other services are the remaining members.
I don't think they're going to be hurt.
The Beatles have the biggest selling back catalogue in the world. The #2 seller AC DC are also not on iTunes.
Both bands think they make more money selling Albums than singles & selling singles on iTunes would cannibalise their album sales.
Not sure if I agree or not, but they've certainly got numbers (huge album sales) on their side.
Hmm... Whether your statement is correct for AC/DC, I have no idea. It might be. To be honest with you, I really could not care less. It's wrong about the Beatles though. This is all about money. Basically their label, EMI, wants a bigger piece of the pie than the Beatles+widows will give them. EMI sees this as their last chance to milk the Beatles' catalog and the Beatles+widows realize that EMI is a dinosaur fighting extinction and if they hold firm, EMI will eventually have to give in as a smaller piece of the pie is better than no pie at all. But this is 100% about money.
AC/DC are computerphobes to an extreme and their decision is because they don't understand the technology and they fear it. The solo Beatles recordings are almost all available via iTunes or similar services and there is no resistance at all from the surviving members and widows to digital downloads.
To say the internet may have stopped Hitler may very well be an understatement. A Russian classmate of mine informed me that in some Eastern European countries, there are memorials for German soldiers who fought and died against the Russians. "But I thought they were Nazis!" I remember saying. And he laughed and asked me if I really thought that tens of millions of soldiers--some with Jewish friends/relatives--were really all killing Jews or knew of the extent of the camps. He told me that some soldiers had convinced the local people they were intending on liberating areas from Russian threat. What followed certainly did seem like a Russian threat ... Despite what I was told as a child, he assured me that very few German infantry fighting abroad were full fledged Nazis. He claimed there is evidence these soldiers with Jewish ties were moved away from the homeland for this purpose.
So, just because "a Russian classmate" says something, you accept it as 100% correct and factual? My gullible young friend, you need to learn something. People in the ex-USSR talk more b.s. than anybody on the planet. They believe all rumors they hear. It's quite common to hear urban legend stories repeated as happening to the husband of a friend of my cousin and so on.
Can you name exactly ONE of those supposed memorials to German troops? Whether there are any or not depends on what you mean by the term "Eastern European". If that means Austria, OK, maybe. If that means any of the Warsaw Pact countries, then that is almost certainly untrue. The USSR suffered horribly in WWII, partly from the Germans and partly from Stalin, but they blame all of it on the Germans. I feel pretty confident in telling you that Soviet authorities would not have allowed memorials to stand to German troops. There's just too many hard feelings.
It's certainly true that many places welcomed German troops - at first. Ukraine suffered horribly under Stalin prior to the war and they did welcome Germans as liberators. What they didn't know was that Hitler viewed all Slavic people as fit only for extermination. After a few years, the Soviet Union looked better to these people and they started partisan movements to fight the Nazis. At least under the Soviet Union they wouldn't all die. Stalin was crazy, but he was not Pol Pot. A former girlfriend of mine is from Ukraine and one grandmother had both of her parents killed in front of her by Nazi troops. One grandfather had both of his parents killed in front of him by Stalin's henchmen. There's plenty of blame for both sides. And this story about German Jewish soldiers being allowed to serve elsewhere, well, I find that improbable given the irrational hatred of Jews in Nazi Germany. But that's typically a Russian story for you - nobody is as bad as they really were. I'm sure your classmate has glowing things to say about Stalin, who in my opinion exceeded even Hitler in being evil.