They actually did. The last five years were within their margins of error.
=== Do you remember your physics courses and the old story about the number of calories to convert water to ice? Converting humidity to snow must mean that you take heat out so that the snow forms, and then we need to dispose of the warmth. Ergo, the ice caps receive part of that warmth.
At least, that is what I conjecture. I also think that much of global warming is caused by deforestation. Trees are great for acting as wind-brakes. Trees may be stopping warm air from moving towards the polar caps. They also must help with cooling via evaporation from the leaves. (As an aside, my community is planting a few hundred trees to counter the hotspots).
On the rpmfusion.org website is a mention of rpmfusion spins. The most recent entry is a spin of Fedora 18, created in Russia. This spin has all the codecs that you would find with Ubuntu, includes chromium, flash player, and libdvdcss2 (ask about it). There are some extras too, in the way of tools for developers. I was a skeptic, but when I installed it last January 15th, 2012, I did not know what to expect. What I got was a super stable release, with everything in it that I needed for a desktop and laptop. http://rpmfusion.org/Spins and under it RFRemix
RFRemix is a Linux distribution developing in Russia and based on Fedora, RPM Fusion and Russian Fedora repositories. All codecs, flash and proprietary video drivers are available from the box. Your can download installable DVDs and LiveCDs with GNOME, KDE, XFCE and LXDE. DVD contains full language packs as in original Fedora. Default language for LiveCD is Russian, but it can be changed.
I selected the DVD which is in English, and after the installation was complete, I pointed Chromium to my preferred website(s). All Fedora operating system updates are from Fedora and rpmfusion.
Off course a pre-installed computer should come with UEFI secure boot enabled.
But it should not be a hindrance like we see now to later or right away install the OS of choice.
Even when keys are a necessity they should still be available to the rightful owner of the hardware, not some outsider like Microsoft.
You bought a computer with secure boot, disabling it is the wrong option.
=== should the hardware vendor provide a second level external software bios that the secure boot bios loads? This latter bios would contain the user managed security keys to allow the starting of any operating system. This bios, once its signature is validated would take over from the rom/eprom bios.
That would solve the problem of permitting any user operating system to boot. The risk, if there is one, is that your selected operating system may contaminate another operating system.
Bell and Telus aren't the same. Telus is what used to be Alberta Government Telephones and BC Tel. The former was privatized in 1991 and merged with the latter in 1998. It's an excellent example of why privatizing crowns is a bad idea.
Bell's other brand is Virgin and Telus has the brand Koodoo.
Where I live, if I call a plumber, I pay his bill, and federal and provincial taxes. Ditto for painter, electrician, I have to pay sales taxes. So what is the difference if the programmer works to build a website. Do you pay his invoice without paying sales taxes?
Sales tax is payable on goods, not services. Building a website is a service. You don't pay sales tax when you procure the services of a doctor or lawyer; why would web coders be any different?
Services will be taxed. Services add value and are therefore taxable in most countries. Why should that stop states from getting due revenu.
Doctors and dentists are in the medical field, and in almost every known area, there are no taxes for their services. There may be taxes on prescriptions, and most certainly, all non prescribed medications.
A programmer who builds a website is producing a product. One pays for the product via services, but it is nevertheless a product and should be taxed.
You will see the 50 states looking for tax dollars and having them go after services and internet sales.
Massachusetts' expertise at finding new things to tax is only surpassed by its ability to spend like drunken sailors. Case in point, the Central Artery/Tunnel Project in Boston, also known as Big Dig. The project, begun in the 1990s and completed in 2004, was the most expensive highway project in the U.S.
When construction began, the Big Dig's cost was estimated at $5.8 billion. Eventual cost overruns were so high that the chairman of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, James Kerasiotes, was fired in 2000.The total expenses eventually passed $15 billion. Interest brought this cost to $21.93 billion. So, almost a 400% cost overrun. Oh, and BTW, the tunnels have been falling apart lately. One person was already killed by falling ceiling panels, and remediation work has been flourishing.
=== Where I live, if I call a plumber, I pay his bill, and federal and provincial taxes. Ditto for painter, electrician, I have to pay sales taxes. So what is the difference if the programmer works to build a website. Do you pay his invoice without paying sales taxes?
Mass is discovering that they omitted this revenue stream. Thats all.
Yes, second that, I'm from the UK, white[ish] preppy type education, still don't feed the trolls.
On the subject, actually this is a big advantage for Linux in these settings anyway. I've set up a couple of drop-ins in the east end of London where there's a fair amount of random crime and I've used recycled computers and Linux. The computers have practically no resale value, so they are not worth stealing and they can be replaced pretty quickly and cheaply. Other projects with 'brand new' have, in fact, had trouble apart from being trashed by all the viruses associated with random downloading because they are Windows based projects. Ours have the problem that 'we can't teach Word' for example, this may not be a problem in your setting.
I wouldn't use the Rasberry or only have that as a small hardware hacking part of the mix, for reasons stated in other posts. I agree with LSTP idea, if power is going to be a problem, though it's harder than individual systems.
Finally we've always found sustaining the teaching to be more difficult than setting up and sustaining the infrastructure. The next project I start will include a heavyweight, teach the teachers element too.
=== I don't think I was a genius, and neither do my friends think that way either. In public school I found books about scientists and electricity, and at age 5, I bought two door bell buttons, two light fixtures, a length of wire and built a telegraph system between two rooms. Did-dah-dah, I had to learn the Morse code. Much later I learned that the more frequent letters in text were assigned the shortest key sequences. And yes, I nearly electrocuted my sister and myself. So kids can learn and master a subject at a very very young age. I see my grandkids with more abilities to learn, but where I played with electricity, they lose their time with computer games. Instead of increasing knowledge, the kids are just loosing time.
I'm not being elitist here (well, perhaps I a little)... but most people can't code. They can't be taught to code, save for in a very limited manner.
The thing is... there are a billion people in china, and the same percentage will be able to code as are here.. You _cannot_ teach people to code if they cannot. It takes a slightly odd mindset, IMO.
ergo... there are always going to be more coders, or those with aptitude to code in China than in the west. I think it's just something we're going to have to deal with.
=== Coding brings a skill that is more than doing mechanical thinking. A programmer's mind is receiving training in logical and sequential problem solving. He knows to have an initialization, session, followed by a processing session and to produce results.
This structured learning by students serves them well. They are not lost when faced with a homework or research project. The thinking processes with programming carry over to solving challenges as teenagers and adults.
And of course, VietNam would like to compete with South Korea, a very major developer of hardware and software.
And in the USA and Canada, with absolute concentration on deficit reduction, the students are not getting what they need. It is "Slip, sliding away".
Computer programming teaches logic and rules. Learning a second language does that as well. For North American Students, I believe that children should start a second language, preferably Spanish, as early as kindergarten. Most kids can substitute a second language for programming.
(Why Spanish). There are 37.5 million Hispanics in the USA. Add to this number the populations of Mexico, Puerto-Rico, Cuba, Central and South America, and with 350 million Spanish speaking people, it makes good sense. In the next decade, much more trade will be a north-south hemisphere exchange, and it makes sense to be fluent and ready. Most of the Latinos are schooled with English as a second language.
By the way, my grandchildren are enrolled in a school where French immersion is the intent. From kindergarten to grade 4, all teaching and material is in French. The children learn "good French" well. In grade 4, they are switched to 50-50 French / English, and by grade eleven, 70% English in the courses. The kids speak, read, write both languages fluently. Language is in my view another way of learning to think logically, as does software application programming.
but there have been so many "IBM new revolutionary technologies" during the (recent) past years nobody has even been able to see in actual life, let's hope this one makes it up to the shops in a reasonably near future...
=== What was not mentioned was the switching speed. If the speed is in microseconds, then the technology could be used in SSD type devices. If it is in nanoseconds, then of course, it can be used for live memory.
Aka: you are doing it wrong. First think of backup: you have a machine, and you copy its contents to another drive. Ok. Easy. Now take a breath, and use OTFE for the original hard disk, and now add OTFE for the external drive/media. There. The backup has NOTHING to do with encryption. If you have forced yourself into a backup solution which requires encryption integration to the point that it only restores to a specific hardware, you are failing hard time, precisely for the reason backups are for when you don't have the original hardware.
Again, separate backup from encryption. I mean, next you will want an integrated internet/remote backup and you will cry us a river? Compartimentalize each function and then you can mix them freely.
If you are interested, here is an explanation of software I wrote to address encrypted backups or file transmissions. I wrpte a Linux based encryption software that I developed for backup and file transfers as well as for database field encryption. The concept is simple.
I maintain a table of keys (16 "8 byte" keys). I am using 3DES, but the concept is similar if you wish to use AES for encryption.
In the header of the encrypted file, maintain some signature to say it is your encrypted file. Then in four successive nibbles, each nibble serving as an index (counting from zero) to indicate the sequence of table entries that are needed to build the 3DES encryption/decryption/encryption keys. If using AES, the concatenation of the three (or 4 keys, if you want higher encryption sizes), creates the key to encrypt or decrypt. I also use cypher block chaining(CBC). CBC does mask repeat patterns. Here again, the CBC initial field can be an extract from another table. My file header looks like this "[Leslie]23F5" representing indexes 2,3,15 with cbc from entry 5 of another table. (counting from zero). The CBC field is from a different 16x9 table. CRC or md5sum can be used to ensure no transmission errors occurred. I was even considering basic ECC encoding to allow for correcting single bit errors. Now what is necessary is to keep the keytable copy in a "wallet" or TPM file. I also have an algorithm to generate the 16x8 hex table that is used for these keys. (Basically, no encryption table row is a duplicate of another row). I use 3DES because it is non algorithmic, and its a very lengthy trail and error exercise to determine the keys and it is used with or without the CBC. By the way, without a debugger, even I do not know how the keys are constructed or their key values. Once encryption or decryption has completed, I overwrite the control tables.
AES execution is built into the Intel hardware, and therefore speeds up the process of encrypting. It also speeds up the discovering of the encryption keys. That is why I discarded using AES. A second reason was that I wanted the smallest field that I could encrypt to be 8 characters. One use was to provide clients with the software. Each client would receive his encryption keys. His files, when received at a host server is re-encrypted to the internal set of keys in use by the institution. The architecture is to insure that internal employees could not transfer customer A's files to customer B or internal files to other than the encryption server. Customer A would be able to decrypt his files but noother. As well, critical database fields in multiples of 8 bytes can be encrypted.
PGP was discarded as my way to use encryption, because of the way many financial institutions work. For example, a bank with 15000 customers is often required to store several weeks or generations of reports that a client may wish to receive.
If the customer loses his system and his private key, the bank would have to rerun the applications that were used to generate those reports in order to recreate them, with the exercise to generate new client public/private keys and re-encrypt files to the new keys. This would be and is horribly expensive, as a client population of 15000, always
So...carriers...you signed a contract. It's something you can't get out of because it's something you NEED to have to succeed. But...the prices are exorbitant, you're being bent over and pounded from behind, and you feel you have no recourse, no matter how much you bitch and whine? Congratulations! Now you know how every single one of your customers feels on a daily basis. You're not going to get one iota of sympathy from me.
=== But if you want their service, you will have to pay for the Apple portion as well as what you think they are doing to their customers
All versions of products from all regions, often stripped of any artificial lock-down, are available on a host of file sharing networks.
Saying that, I'm pretty certain that stating "Buy from the US" can be viewed as a blessing on the Grey Import business. Thanks, Adobe!
=== Some arguments about cost differentials is the cost of support. For the American continent, the 7am to 8pm Eastern time support hours are covering a great many licences. For Australia / New Zealand, you are 12 hours off, and a lost smaller license base. That market has to finance support. That is the way Adobe and other companies see it.
And if they really try, there are many open source Linux based alternatives.
Monstor cabels are a marketing gimmick to lighten the weight of the consumers wallet. If you took the local Dollarama store cables ($#2.00) vs the Monstor cables, the only difference you would measure would be the gullibility of the consumerr and the greed of the vendors.
In fact, analog audio is not carried on the cables, but digital signals. Digital signals are clocked ones and zeros. When would the signal propagation in a 6 foot cable be serious enough damaged by skewing to prevent the signal being being reachedand decoded by the TV or monitor. Digital sigals are faithful, unless there is a flaw in the connection. (broken connection). Gold plating is great if you are tansporting kilowatts of power as 60 cycle 120 volt residential connections and dont want the wire to get warm. Copport is the preferred conductor.
To kill digital signals, put in a low frewquency bandpass filter, considting of choke coils and filter capacitors...
Is an internet company responsible to the country that it operates from, or is it responsible to every country that they can be reached from?
The second would be a remarkably scary result.
This stuff has already gone to court. Google execs were charged with crimes in italy for YouTube videos showing bullying. Google ignored it and Italy couldn't do anything. If Internet was ruled by every law in every country then it wouldn't exist. Sorry France you lose.
What you are saying is that if a person robs a bank in France, and flees to Germany or USA, then that person is free to continue, as long as he does not rob banks in his own country.
Sorry, I don't agree with your "sorry". I could also argue that every message, no matter how big or small that is created in a country, is owned by that country. Exporting the message without permission is stealing it. And I bet the courts would agree with my statement. The analogy might be that you make cars, and I expropriate a few because I collect them. I only have rights to the car if a) you give them to me b) I pay the appropriate taxes and export licenses, and on receipt, pay my government the import duties.
If the rule works for cars, it should be applicable to the internet.
For the France population, the interfaces, advertisements and other references are localized to their country. If the anti'semetic (hate postings) originated in France, or directed against Frech citizens, then they do and should have that right to bring the hate posters to trial. If Twitter thinks that they can penetrate a market without respecting the laws of that merketplace, they are wrong.
Now, twitter knows the origin of the pate postings, and if they were from outside of France, (USA) then I have not the ideas about what to comment. Perhaps it has to be as followsÑ a) Twitter indicates the countries of origin of the hate postings b) The country approaches the legal system of the poster's country and via the courts, lays charges or places other legal action. c) The courts will advise twitter via suppeana to deliver the ID of the resident user Ids d) Hatemail must not be allowed. It festers other abuses.
This whole thing still shows even Congress doesn't grasp the basic laws at work.
Sales Tax is almost always owed by the PURCHASER. That's why all the stores in my state have a LICENSE to COLLECT that tax and sent it on your behalf to the State. So if I buy something via mail order in Michigan from a business only in Iowa THAT BUSINESS has no obligation to MICHIGAN to collect anything. I still have the obligation to PAY MICHIGAN its USE TAX because I LIVE in that state.
That's the only issue, that a state cannot tell people in OTHER STATES to follow its laws. Not to mention, complying with ONE state tax where your physical store is located is hard... Why should an online business have to collect for 50 states?
Why don't states force BUSINESSES to pay the Sales Tax on what they sell? Because taxing sales BETWEEN THE STATES is illegal for any state to do. It's illegal for Ohio to force a business shipping into Ohio to pay ANY tax to do so. It's illegal for Michigan to COLLECT any tax from Michigan business on an item sold to Ohio. That keeps states from starting trade wars with each other.
So either the FEDS need to enact a federal clearinghouse that allows Internet businesses to only file one form per customer, or they need to compel the BANKS and other financial services located IN EACH STATE to collect taxes based on their accounts mailing address. That's the closest to "constitutional" because you receive and pay your Visa at a bank licensed to your state, and you receive the bill at your postal mailing address. So each statement would only have to account for ONE sales tax per customer.
Does it matter which state you live in for your Federal taxes? All congress has to do is say that your purchase is taxable at the federal level. The feds can forward the money to the state.
They don't? Then what was Canonical's handing over Kubuntu ownership to Blue Systems about? I thought that all the ubuntus - Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, et al were owned by Canonical. Which is how they get simultaneously released.
=== I would say that Canonical owns the trademarks for the *buntus. I bet that from A to Z, there are a lot of missing letters that were also added to the buntu to make up a trademark.
Ubuntu is an African verb, so it is only trademarkable thus far as a Linux distribution.
Anyone can "fork" a Linux distribution. That is what Mint14 is about, or Centos, or Scientific Linux, for examples.
Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
=== For the first 9 years of their life, my kids drank fluoridated water. They had no teeth problems and that benefit even though fluoridated water stopped due to political pressure. The dentists in the community were for fluoridated water, they did not need extra cavities to fill, but....
My sons and daughter, now age 40, 39, and 32 have no cavities, not one. My wife and I have minor cavities, as we were adults when we moved into that community. We use fluoridated toothpaste, but that is full of crap, I don't think it works.
Fluoridated water does provide benefits. The actual percentage of fluoride is so low that boiling water to reduce the amount of liquid by 10, will still not bring the concentration level anywhere near a concern level. You would have to reduce the water by 100 times before you would worry. And no, you would not drink 100 glasses of water at one sitting. Sigh. Sometimes we listen to fear-mongering. One argument was that the machine putting in the 5-10 drops of flouride in the municipal filtration system could error and deposit 1000 times more. We had to show that the bottle of flouride only held the days supply, but even so, we lost the fight.
Locally we cant find fluoridated water or tablets to add to a pitcher of water. Our grandkids drink bottled water with their lunches or when they are out on the sports field. Our bottled water is sold to the bottler by the city. It sells it to the bottler and is it is provided directly from the municipalities filtration system. The bottler, has one filtration level additional to insure no particle could get into one of the bottles. Sometimes they add an ounce of spring water to 1000 gallons of tap water to indicate that the plastic bottle of water contains spring water.
Give him the source code. Have him go over it. If he has any specific questions, answer then succinctly and accurately. But keep in mind that as a contractor you have no obligation to share any of your coding "secrets" with anyone, or teach anyone else how to code. Don't let your ego and desire to brag about how clever your coding solutions are make you forget that you are under no obligation to train anyone to take your place (no matter how much junior may flatter you).
You've given them the deliverables, you've presumably fulfilled your contract. Nowhere in said contract does it say anything about training other coders, I presume. Be professional and polite (don't refuse to answer questions they have about the code, for example). But also be firm about the limitations of your contract (it doesn't include answering questions like "Hey, can you teach me how to do this neat trick like you did?" and "Can you teach me how to do good memory management?").
=== Your system knowledge, coding secrets and development knowledge are your skills to keep for yourself. Do not give anything away. Do not put your value as a skilled developer aside because you like the college grad, (which happens often).
Here is the analogy. You have a pizza business, and your customer comes along and asks you to train a person who will learn your business in order to open up a competing pizza business. That business that opens will undercut you. That training will impact your livelihood. So, you know you have to say no, and leave on good terms.
will not stop the publishers from making DMCA requests / filling strikes that can cost you $35 a pop.
=== As far as I understood, these were not copies, but legal copies, sold at Thai prices. The students paid for the books, and then resold them on Ebay, of course, they may have photocopied the entire book for personal use first. In this case, my sentiments go with the publisher. He and the author deserve compensation for the costs of production, and commissions. The author did not publish the book for his health, did he?
anyone on the other side of the pond know if this is a real attempt to push OSS software or if it's just another attempt to get discounted Microsoft software?
==== I believe your conjecture is very wrong. With the cyberfraud, the keyloggers and all kinds of espionage, the governments will insist on using open source and in doing the final inspections and compiles. The security of the critical infrastructures, such as electrical grid, water, etc. is too important to not know what is in the code that is executing.
Open Source does not necessarily mean free source.
And with the proliferation of software due to Apple, Google (Android) and everyone else, document interchange will become the norm. Microsoft will just be one of the vendors, and not the exclusive vendor.
CFLs? Every Slashdotter needs to walk into a room and instantly have 6500K light or people... will... die !
Fluorescent lights give me a headache. I don't care if this is supposed to be medically possible, since it happens to me. They all do it, though some are substantially worse than others. So-called "daylight" fluorescents are the worst, e.g. ott-lite. Those give me a headache in record time.
Solar panels? Take more energy to make than they'll ever produce, and it lowers property values to have free electricity.
Only idiots believe that solar panels take more energy to make than they will produce, which has been false since the 1970s.
IGPs? Sure, I only play cheesy online Flash solitaire, but I NEED A quad 7990 and an external 3KW PSU just to feed it.
My problem with IGPs is that they are from intel in which case they really are shit (I actually play games in 3d, this is no longer a corner case since the majority of the population of the USA plays video games) or from AMD in which case the drivers are shit. I've owned several systems with embedded nVidia graphics. That's in the chipset, though.
Electric cars? They "had to" push it home on that show with the car guys. And Elon Musk eats Christian babies.
There's at least as much support for EVs here as against.
And LED bulbs? Still new enough that you have the uninformed Luddites bitching that they cost $60 each, despite the fact that you can now buy them for under $20 regularly and around $10 on sale
How many $20 LED lamps have you bought? How many $10 ones? ALL SHIT. You must spend real money on an LED lamp to get one that even has current limiting, let alone power regulation.
=== Last week at our local Costco, the lights were on sale for $4.00 for a 850 lumen led array. That was the price with a coupon from our electric company. Montreal is a city that 95% of all homes and establishments are electrically heated. My electricity rate varies from 4 per kwh to 7.2 With those rates, gas, and oil cannot compete. We are not allowed to burn wood in our fireplaces, because of the polution. I am happy to live in a city where the snow is white from the time it falls until the spring when it melts. LEDs were available in strips at IKEA, and I bought some for the kitchen counter lighting. I never turn them off as I calculated my electrical costs at $1.84 per year. Interestingly, the bulk price of a single LED before soldering in place is in the fraction of a penny.
Slashdot Mirror
They actually did. The last five years were within their margins of error.
===
Do you remember your physics courses and the old story about the number of calories to convert water to ice? Converting humidity to snow must mean that you take heat out so that the snow forms, and then we need to dispose of the warmth. Ergo, the ice caps receive part of that warmth.
At least, that is what I conjecture. I also think that much of global warming is caused by deforestation. Trees are great for acting as wind-brakes. Trees may be stopping warm air from moving towards the polar caps. They also must help with cooling via evaporation from the leaves.
(As an aside, my community is planting a few hundred trees to counter the hotspots).
On the rpmfusion.org website is a mention of rpmfusion spins. The most recent entry is a spin of Fedora 18, created in Russia.
This spin has all the codecs that you would find with Ubuntu, includes chromium, flash player, and libdvdcss2 (ask about it).
There are some extras too, in the way of tools for developers.
I was a skeptic, but when I installed it last January 15th, 2012, I did not know what to expect. What I got was a super stable release, with everything in it that I needed for a desktop and laptop.
http://rpmfusion.org/Spins and under it
RFRemix
RFRemix is a Linux distribution developing in Russia and based on Fedora, RPM Fusion and Russian Fedora repositories. All codecs, flash and proprietary video drivers are available from the box. Your can download installable DVDs and LiveCDs with GNOME, KDE, XFCE and LXDE. DVD contains full language packs as in original Fedora. Default language for LiveCD is Russian, but it can be changed.
I selected the DVD which is in English, and after the installation was complete, I pointed Chromium to my preferred website(s).
All Fedora operating system updates are from Fedora and rpmfusion.
Withdraw from Tome to using FREE CELL or Spider -- does not require the web
So then, what is absurd?
Off course a pre-installed computer should come with UEFI secure boot enabled.
But it should not be a hindrance like we see now to later or right away install the OS of choice.
Even when keys are a necessity they should still be available to the rightful owner of the hardware, not some outsider like Microsoft.
You bought a computer with secure boot, disabling it is the wrong option.
===
should the hardware vendor provide a second level external software bios that the secure boot bios loads? This latter bios would contain the user managed security keys to allow the starting of any operating system. This bios, once its signature is validated would take over from the rom/eprom bios.
That would solve the problem of permitting any user operating system to boot. The risk, if there is one, is that your selected operating system may contaminate another operating system.
Bell and Telus aren't the same. Telus is what used to be Alberta Government Telephones and BC Tel. The former was privatized in 1991 and merged with the latter in 1998. It's an excellent example of why privatizing crowns is a bad idea.
Bell's other brand is Virgin and Telus has the brand Koodoo.
===
You forgot Rogers and Chat-R
Sales tax is payable on goods, not services. Building a website is a service. You don't pay sales tax when you procure the services of a doctor or lawyer; why would web coders be any different?
Services will be taxed. Services add value and are therefore taxable in most countries. Why should that stop states from getting due revenu.
Doctors and dentists are in the medical field, and in almost every known area, there are no taxes for their services. There may be taxes on prescriptions, and most certainly, all non prescribed medications.
A programmer who builds a website is producing a product. One pays for the product via services, but it is nevertheless a product and should be taxed.
You will see the 50 states looking for tax dollars and having them go after services and internet sales.
Massachusetts' expertise at finding new things to tax is only surpassed by its ability to spend like drunken sailors. Case in point, the Central Artery/Tunnel Project in Boston, also known as Big Dig. The project, begun in the 1990s and completed in 2004, was the most expensive highway project in the U.S.
When construction began, the Big Dig's cost was estimated at $5.8 billion. Eventual cost overruns were so high that the chairman of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, James Kerasiotes, was fired in 2000.The total expenses eventually passed $15 billion. Interest brought this cost to $21.93 billion. So, almost a 400% cost overrun. Oh, and BTW, the tunnels have been falling apart lately. One person was already killed by falling ceiling panels, and remediation work has been flourishing.
===
Where I live, if I call a plumber, I pay his bill, and federal and provincial taxes. Ditto for painter, electrician, I have to pay sales taxes.
So what is the difference if the programmer works to build a website. Do you pay his invoice without paying sales taxes?
Mass is discovering that they omitted this revenue stream. Thats all.
Yes, second that, I'm from the UK, white[ish] preppy type education, still don't feed the trolls.
On the subject, actually this is a big advantage for Linux in these settings anyway. I've set up a couple of drop-ins in the east end of London where there's a fair amount of random crime and I've used recycled computers and Linux. The computers have practically no resale value, so they are not worth stealing and they can be replaced pretty quickly and cheaply. Other projects with 'brand new' have, in fact, had trouble apart from being trashed by all the viruses associated with random downloading because they are Windows based projects. Ours have the problem that 'we can't teach Word' for example, this may not be a problem in your setting.
I wouldn't use the Rasberry or only have that as a small hardware hacking part of the mix, for reasons stated in other posts. I agree with LSTP idea, if power is going to be a problem, though it's harder than individual systems.
Finally we've always found sustaining the teaching to be more difficult than setting up and sustaining the infrastructure. The next project I start will include a heavyweight, teach the teachers element too.
===
I don't think I was a genius, and neither do my friends think that way either. In public school I found books about scientists and electricity, and at age 5, I bought two door bell buttons, two light fixtures, a length of wire and built a telegraph system between two rooms. Did-dah-dah, I had to learn the Morse code. Much later I learned that the more frequent letters in text were assigned the shortest key sequences. And yes, I nearly electrocuted my sister and myself.
So kids can learn and master a subject at a very very young age. I see my grandkids with more abilities to learn, but where I played with electricity, they lose their time with computer games. Instead of increasing knowledge, the kids are just loosing time.
I'm not being elitist here (well, perhaps I a little)... but most people can't code. They can't be taught to code, save for in a very limited manner.
The thing is... there are a billion people in china, and the same percentage will be able to code as are here.. You _cannot_ teach people to code if they cannot. It takes a slightly odd mindset, IMO.
ergo... there are always going to be more coders, or those with aptitude to code in China than in the west. I think it's just something we're going to have to deal with.
===
Coding brings a skill that is more than doing mechanical thinking. A programmer's mind is receiving training in logical and sequential problem solving. He knows to have an initialization, session, followed by a processing session and to produce results.
This structured learning by students serves them well. They are not lost when faced with a homework or research project. The thinking processes with programming carry over to solving challenges as teenagers and adults.
And of course, VietNam would like to compete with South Korea, a very major developer of hardware and software.
And in the USA and Canada, with absolute concentration on deficit reduction, the students are not getting what they need. It is "Slip, sliding away".
Computer programming teaches logic and rules. Learning a second language does that as well. For North American Students, I believe that children should start a second language, preferably Spanish, as early as kindergarten. Most kids can substitute a second language for programming.
(Why Spanish). There are 37.5 million Hispanics in the USA. Add to this number the populations of Mexico, Puerto-Rico, Cuba, Central and South America, and with 350 million Spanish speaking people, it makes good sense. In the next decade, much more trade will be a north-south hemisphere exchange, and it makes sense to be fluent and ready. Most of the Latinos are schooled with English as a second language.
By the way, my grandchildren are enrolled in a school where French immersion is the intent. From kindergarten to grade 4, all teaching and material is in French. The children learn "good French" well. In grade 4, they are switched to 50-50 French / English, and by grade eleven, 70% English in the courses. The kids speak, read, write both languages fluently. Language is in my view another way of learning to think logically, as does software application programming.
but there have been so many "IBM new revolutionary technologies" during the (recent) past years nobody has even been able to see in actual life, let's hope this one makes it up to the shops in a reasonably near future...
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What was not mentioned was the switching speed. If the speed is in microseconds, then the technology could be used in SSD type devices. If it is in nanoseconds, then of course, it can be used for live memory.
Does this law mean that MacDonalds, Subways, Coffee shops, and other eateries, and libraries must not provide free internet service?
Aka: you are doing it wrong. First think of backup: you have a machine, and you copy its contents to another drive. Ok. Easy. Now take a breath, and use OTFE for the original hard disk, and now add OTFE for the external drive/media. There. The backup has NOTHING to do with encryption. If you have forced yourself into a backup solution which requires encryption integration to the point that it only restores to a specific hardware, you are failing hard time, precisely for the reason backups are for when you don't have the original hardware.
Again, separate backup from encryption. I mean, next you will want an integrated internet/remote backup and you will cry us a river? Compartimentalize each function and then you can mix them freely.
If you are interested, here is an explanation of software I wrote to address encrypted backups or file transmissions.
I wrpte a Linux based encryption software that I developed for backup and file transfers as well as for database field encryption. The concept is simple.
I maintain a table of keys (16 "8 byte" keys). I am using 3DES, but the concept is similar if you wish to use AES for encryption.
In the header of the encrypted file, maintain some signature to say it is your encrypted file. Then in four successive nibbles, each nibble serving as an index (counting from zero) to indicate the sequence of table entries that are needed to build the 3DES encryption/decryption/encryption keys. If using AES, the concatenation of the three (or 4 keys, if you want higher encryption sizes), creates the key to encrypt or decrypt. I also use cypher block chaining(CBC). CBC does mask repeat patterns. Here again, the CBC initial field can be an extract from another table. My file header looks like this "[Leslie]23F5" representing indexes 2,3,15 with cbc from entry 5 of another table. (counting from zero). The CBC field is from a different 16x9 table. CRC or md5sum can be used to ensure no transmission errors occurred. I was even considering basic ECC encoding to allow for correcting single bit errors. Now what is necessary is to keep the keytable copy in a "wallet" or TPM file. I also have an algorithm to generate the 16x8 hex table that is used for these keys. (Basically, no encryption table row is a duplicate of another row). I use 3DES because it is non algorithmic, and its a very lengthy trail and error exercise to determine the keys and it is used with or without the CBC. By the way, without a debugger, even I do not know how the keys are constructed or their key values. Once encryption or decryption has completed, I overwrite the control tables.
AES execution is built into the Intel hardware, and therefore speeds up the process of encrypting. It also speeds up the discovering of the encryption keys. That is why I discarded using AES. A second reason was that I wanted the smallest field that I could encrypt to be 8 characters.
One use was to provide clients with the software. Each client would receive his encryption keys. His files, when received at a host server is re-encrypted to the internal set of keys in use by the institution. The architecture is to insure that internal employees could not transfer customer A's files to customer B or internal files to other than the encryption server. Customer A would be able to decrypt his files but noother. As well, critical database fields in multiples of 8 bytes can be encrypted.
PGP was discarded as my way to use encryption, because of the way many financial institutions work. For example, a bank with 15000 customers is often required to store several weeks or generations of reports that a client may wish to receive.
If the customer loses his system and his private key, the bank would have to rerun the applications that were used to generate those reports in order to recreate them, with the exercise to generate new client public/private keys and re-encrypt files to the new keys. This would be and is horribly expensive, as a client population of 15000, always
So...carriers...you signed a contract. It's something you can't get out of because it's something you NEED to have to succeed. But...the prices are exorbitant, you're being bent over and pounded from behind, and you feel you have no recourse, no matter how much you bitch and whine? Congratulations! Now you know how every single one of your customers feels on a daily basis. You're not going to get one iota of sympathy from me.
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But if you want their service, you will have to pay for the Apple portion as well as what you think they are doing to their customers
All versions of products from all regions, often stripped of any artificial lock-down, are available on a host of file sharing networks.
Saying that, I'm pretty certain that stating "Buy from the US" can be viewed as a blessing on the Grey Import business. Thanks, Adobe!
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Some arguments about cost differentials is the cost of support. For the American continent, the 7am to 8pm Eastern time support hours are covering a great many licences. For Australia / New Zealand, you are 12 hours off, and a lost smaller license base. That market has to finance support. That is the way Adobe and other companies see it.
And if they really try, there are many open source Linux based alternatives.
Monstor cabels are a marketing gimmick to lighten the weight of the consumers wallet. If you took the local Dollarama store cables ($#2.00) vs the Monstor cables, the only difference you would measure would be the gullibility of the consumerr and the greed of the vendors.
In fact, analog audio is not carried on the cables, but digital signals. Digital signals are clocked ones and zeros. When would the signal propagation in a 6 foot cable be serious enough damaged by skewing to prevent the signal being being reachedand decoded by the TV or monitor. Digital sigals are faithful, unless there is a flaw in the connection. (broken connection). Gold plating is great if you are tansporting kilowatts of power as 60 cycle 120 volt residential connections and dont want the wire to get warm. Copport is the preferred conductor.
To kill digital signals, put in a low frewquency bandpass filter, considting of choke coils and filter capacitors. ..
Is an internet company responsible to the country that it operates from, or is it responsible to every country that they can be reached from?
The second would be a remarkably scary result.
This stuff has already gone to court. Google execs were charged with crimes in italy for YouTube videos showing bullying. Google ignored it and Italy couldn't do anything. If Internet was ruled by every law in every country then it wouldn't exist. Sorry France you lose.
What you are saying is that if a person robs a bank in France, and flees to Germany or USA, then that person is free to continue, as long as he does not rob banks in his own country.
Sorry, I don't agree with your "sorry". I could also argue that every message, no matter how big or small that is created in a country, is owned by that country. Exporting the message without permission is stealing it. And I bet the courts would agree with my statement. The analogy might be that you make cars, and I expropriate a few because I collect them. I only have rights to the car if a) you give them to me b) I pay the appropriate taxes and export licenses, and on receipt, pay my government the import duties.
If the rule works for cars, it should be applicable to the internet.
For the France population, the interfaces, advertisements and other references are localized to their country. If the anti'semetic (hate postings) originated in France, or directed against Frech citizens, then they do and should have that right to bring the hate posters to trial. If Twitter thinks that they can penetrate a market without respecting the laws of that merketplace, they are wrong.
Now, twitter knows the origin of the pate postings, and if they were from outside of France, (USA) then I have not the ideas about what to comment.
Perhaps it has to be as followsÑ
a) Twitter indicates the countries of origin of the hate postings
b) The country approaches the legal system of the poster's country and via the courts, lays charges or places other legal action.
c) The courts will advise twitter via suppeana to deliver the ID of the resident user Ids
d) Hatemail must not be allowed. It festers other abuses.
This whole thing still shows even Congress doesn't grasp the basic laws at work.
Sales Tax is almost always owed by the PURCHASER. That's why all the stores in my state have a LICENSE to COLLECT that tax and sent it on your behalf to the State. So if I buy something via mail order in Michigan from a business only in Iowa THAT BUSINESS has no obligation to MICHIGAN to collect anything. I still have the obligation to PAY MICHIGAN its USE TAX because I LIVE in that state.
That's the only issue, that a state cannot tell people in OTHER STATES to follow its laws. Not to mention, complying with ONE state tax where your physical store is located is hard... Why should an online business have to collect for 50 states?
Why don't states force BUSINESSES to pay the Sales Tax on what they sell? Because taxing sales BETWEEN THE STATES is illegal for any state to do. It's illegal for Ohio to force a business shipping into Ohio to pay ANY tax to do so. It's illegal for Michigan to COLLECT any tax from Michigan business on an item sold to Ohio. That keeps states from starting trade wars with each other.
So either the FEDS need to enact a federal clearinghouse that allows Internet businesses to only file one form per customer, or they need to compel the BANKS and other financial services located IN EACH STATE to collect taxes based on their accounts mailing address. That's the closest to "constitutional" because you receive and pay your Visa at a bank licensed to your state, and you receive the bill at your postal mailing address. So each statement would only have to account for ONE sales tax per customer.
Does it matter which state you live in for your Federal taxes? All congress has to do is say that your purchase is taxable at the federal level. The feds can forward the money to the state.
What is meant by proportional force? The killing of a hacker by hacking his site or killing him?
They don't? Then what was Canonical's handing over Kubuntu ownership to Blue Systems about? I thought that all the ubuntus - Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, et al were owned by Canonical. Which is how they get simultaneously released.
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I would say that Canonical owns the trademarks for the *buntus. I bet that from A to Z, there are a lot of missing letters that were also added to the buntu to make up a trademark.
Ubuntu is an African verb, so it is only trademarkable thus far as a Linux distribution.
Anyone can "fork" a Linux distribution. That is what Mint14 is about, or Centos, or Scientific Linux, for examples.
Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
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For the first 9 years of their life, my kids drank fluoridated water. They had no teeth problems and that benefit even though fluoridated water stopped due to political pressure. The dentists in the community were for fluoridated water, they did not need extra cavities to fill, but....
My sons and daughter, now age 40, 39, and 32 have no cavities, not one. My wife and I have minor cavities, as we were adults when we moved into that community. We use fluoridated toothpaste, but that is full of crap, I don't think it works.
Fluoridated water does provide benefits. The actual percentage of fluoride is so low that boiling water to reduce the amount of liquid by 10, will still not bring the concentration level anywhere near a concern level. You would have to reduce the water by 100 times before you would worry. And no, you would not drink 100 glasses of water at one sitting. Sigh. Sometimes we listen to fear-mongering. One argument was that the machine putting in the 5-10 drops of flouride in the municipal filtration system could error and deposit 1000 times more. We had to show that the bottle of flouride only held the days supply, but even so, we lost the fight.
Locally we cant find fluoridated water or tablets to add to a pitcher of water. Our grandkids drink bottled water with their lunches or when they are out on the sports field. Our bottled water is sold to the bottler by the city. It sells it to the bottler and is it is provided directly from the municipalities filtration system. The bottler, has one filtration level additional to insure no particle could get into one of the bottles. Sometimes they add an ounce of spring water to 1000 gallons of tap water to indicate that the plastic bottle of water contains spring water.
Give him the source code. Have him go over it. If he has any specific questions, answer then succinctly and accurately. But keep in mind that as a contractor you have no obligation to share any of your coding "secrets" with anyone, or teach anyone else how to code. Don't let your ego and desire to brag about how clever your coding solutions are make you forget that you are under no obligation to train anyone to take your place (no matter how much junior may flatter you).
You've given them the deliverables, you've presumably fulfilled your contract. Nowhere in said contract does it say anything about training other coders, I presume. Be professional and polite (don't refuse to answer questions they have about the code, for example). But also be firm about the limitations of your contract (it doesn't include answering questions like "Hey, can you teach me how to do this neat trick like you did?" and "Can you teach me how to do good memory management?").
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Your system knowledge, coding secrets and development knowledge are your skills to keep for yourself. Do not give anything away. Do not put your value as a skilled developer aside because you like the college grad, (which happens often).
Here is the analogy. You have a pizza business, and your customer comes along and asks you to train a person who will learn your business in order to open up a competing pizza business. That business that opens will undercut you. That training will impact your livelihood. So, you know you have to say no, and leave on good terms.
will not stop the publishers from making DMCA requests / filling strikes that can cost you $35 a pop.
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As far as I understood, these were not copies, but legal copies, sold at Thai prices. The students paid for the books, and then resold them on Ebay, of course, they may have photocopied the entire book for personal use first.
In this case, my sentiments go with the publisher. He and the author deserve compensation for the costs of production, and commissions. The author did not publish the book for his health, did he?
anyone on the other side of the pond know if this is a real attempt to push OSS software or if it's just another attempt to get discounted Microsoft software?
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I believe your conjecture is very wrong. With the cyberfraud, the keyloggers and all kinds of espionage, the governments will insist on using open source and in doing the final inspections and compiles. The security of the critical infrastructures, such as electrical grid, water, etc. is too important to not know what is in the code that is executing.
Open Source does not necessarily mean free source.
And with the proliferation of software due to Apple, Google (Android) and everyone else, document interchange will become the norm. Microsoft will just be one of the vendors, and not the exclusive vendor.
CFLs? Every Slashdotter needs to walk into a room and instantly have 6500K light or people... will... die !
Fluorescent lights give me a headache. I don't care if this is supposed to be medically possible, since it happens to me. They all do it, though some are substantially worse than others. So-called "daylight" fluorescents are the worst, e.g. ott-lite. Those give me a headache in record time.
Solar panels? Take more energy to make than they'll ever produce, and it lowers property values to have free electricity.
Only idiots believe that solar panels take more energy to make than they will produce, which has been false since the 1970s.
IGPs? Sure, I only play cheesy online Flash solitaire, but I NEED A quad 7990 and an external 3KW PSU just to feed it.
My problem with IGPs is that they are from intel in which case they really are shit (I actually play games in 3d, this is no longer a corner case since the majority of the population of the USA plays video games) or from AMD in which case the drivers are shit. I've owned several systems with embedded nVidia graphics. That's in the chipset, though.
Electric cars? They "had to" push it home on that show with the car guys. And Elon Musk eats Christian babies.
There's at least as much support for EVs here as against.
And LED bulbs? Still new enough that you have the uninformed Luddites bitching that they cost $60 each, despite the fact that you can now buy them for under $20 regularly and around $10 on sale
How many $20 LED lamps have you bought? How many $10 ones? ALL SHIT. You must spend real money on an LED lamp to get one that even has current limiting, let alone power regulation.
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Last week at our local Costco, the lights were on sale for $4.00 for a 850 lumen led array. That was the price with a coupon from our electric company. Montreal is a city that 95% of all homes and establishments are electrically heated. My electricity rate varies from 4 per kwh to 7.2 With those rates, gas, and oil cannot compete. We are not allowed to burn wood in our fireplaces, because of the polution. I am happy to live in a city where the snow is white from the time it falls until the spring when it melts.
LEDs were available in strips at IKEA, and I bought some for the kitchen counter lighting. I never turn them off as I calculated my electrical costs at $1.84 per year. Interestingly, the bulk price of a single LED before soldering in place is in the fraction of a penny.