What's this "US giving people IP"? There's nothing in there about anyone passing IP on to anyone else. At all. All it says is that they'll ahve to agree to set their laws to US standards of copyright, patent, etc. Which means that although their country is doing just fine with copyright law as it is, and they may not have any particular wish to indulge in American culture (they have plenty of their own that they do just fine with), they are forced to have spectacularly culturally damaging laws forced into place. Doesn't mean the US has to give them anything. All it means is the new laws put brakes on them developing anything themselves, as they'd then have to comply with US law, which has been shown to have distinctly chilling effects on development and innovation. NOTHING in there says anything about the US giving anyone free IP. Stop making the assumption that it does.
Alas, the only reference I can find to this is the story "Big Brother Iron", which is solely held in the collected works "Toast: And other rusted futures". Seems to be out of print here in the UK, with a paperback at near £20, and the hardback between £50 and 75. I'll keep trawling, as that sounds like a very interesting story! Thanks for the heads up, and a new author to check out.
Of the way the world is heading. As I keep harping on about, and wish the politicians (and the police) would understand. Orwell's 1984 is a warning, not a "HOWTO manual". By the standard they've set on this, most of the populace should be under arrest by dint of the anti-terror laws, which over here in the UK are draconian, misguided and completely over the top. It really comes to something when we need to worry more about our own police and politicians than we ever would about a terror attack.
Actually, I think it says in general, the public are cheapskates AND the NYT has a non-viable business model. Still, in a world built on scientific principles, you need to make the odd experiment. NYT are about to experiment with a metered access system. If the results are worrying, then it's time to experiment with the next business model. There'll be one of three outcomes: They find one that works again, and it's business as usual, or they'll find that there's no business model available that lets them carry on as they are at the moment, so they'll cut corners until they have a compromise that works.. Or finally nothing seems to work, and they run out of money.
There's a reason that many cultures have a tradition of respecting the dead. While you're alive, you strive to do the best you can, because once you're gone, the only legacy you pass on is memories of you, in the people who knew you, and anything you've written or produced.
If it's all of a sudden allowable in the name of entertainment to say complete lies about you and pass it off as fact (well, apart from the fact that historians have been doing this for as long as history has been recorded), it adds in one more thing to worry about, and life's full enough of those as it is. How would your descendants would feel if, for example, someone wrote a movie, in which you were explicitly identified, and represented as a hard right wing mass murderer responsible for ethnic cleansing initiatives?
Yeah, I know, it's not a hard argument. There again, very little in ethics is a cut and dried matter. To be ethical, you should present the truth as closely as you can, in the spirit with which the person lived their life once they're gone. Your proposal blatantly doesn't do this, and most likely goes in direct opposition to what their wishes were. This is unethical.
Definitely agreed that skinning will be a far greater problem (unenforceable, but unethical against illegal, as celebrities own the rights to their own image).
On the Child Porn thing.. Hmm.. Very contentious.. I don't know enough about the effects on the active libido, and how that in turn affects the desire for real world satisfaction. I don't trust the politicians' voices on this, and the psychologists have to tread very very carefully while researching this.. I'll leave that one for scientific debate with people who get more of an idea of the real implications, backed up by hard data..
Could this be the start of the "Quick button click movie maker"? Something akin to a rather more advanced version of the game "The Movies", where you can set a scene from a variety of landscapes (similar to Vue D'Esprit, or some other landscape renderer), add actors (taken from stock modifiable ones, as per Poser, or similar), add in movements and pathing.. Voices taken from a modifiable bank.. Add in stock effects and so on.. And have the bulk of it in a nice GUI development tool.. I get the suspicion that it'll draw a lot of derision from the real movie makers, but as something that'll be the Visual Basic of the movie world.. Hmm.. This could dispense with a lot of the actors in low prices movies, and if it grows, even in big budget ones.. Though the quality will likely still be missing that 'human touch'.. Still in mass market, like with VB, mostly the only people who'll care will be the ones that really understand the skill and craftmanship behind it.. Your average guy on the street wouldn't care two hoots..
*Shrug* You can have whoever you want in any act role. Depends if you're going for historical accuracy, or put anyone into the role. By the same token, you could redo the stories of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and have them cast as a white skinhead with swastikas on his arm. I'm guessing that it'll detract from the canon of the story. Hey, much better idea. Why bother with rehashing the old stories, which have a vast amount of accepted roles behind them, and create NEW stories, where the hero is a particular person from a particular background? That's what art is supposed to be, creating new. There are a goodly many 'updates' to the Shakespearean plays, with all kinds of people playing the roles. And that works nicely.. Personally, I've seen Shakespearean plays with black leads, and they were good.. Have you watched any movies at all? There are a goodly many that spring to mind with white slaves (contemporary Human Trafficking stories, or older ones circa Roman Empire, and there were plenty).. Greedy white kings? Watch the news! There are still stories on that in real life, not to mention god alone knows how many movies.. No idea where you're getting this concept that all this can't happen in stories, movies and shows when it already does.. To be honest, I think people just need to get over this absolute obsession with race, and wondering why people of a colour skin can't do something (when they blatantly do), and just get on with putting the good people in the right places. That little rant aside, the mixing of various artforms is absolutely alive and vibrant out there.. Not for everyone, but it's good to see people experimenting with it.. Long may it continue!
Back when I was a kid (in the 70s), half the fun of life (being a geek, even back then) was playing with electronics, chemistry and whatever came to hand.. I make all kinds of things that went bang quite effectively, made funny coloured smoke, and had wires coming from all angles. In my secondary school (in the 80s), my teachers would actually take an interest in the weird things I'd created, and made suggestions on doing it better.. This nurtured my creative side quite nicely.. I still get the soldering iron out now and then if I need devices that aren't generally available, but I'm capable of making myself.. This approach still holds true in China, Russia, and really most of the countries out there apart from US/UK and a few of the other Western countries.. This means they're getting better scope to broaden their horizons and invent from an early age. Given a broader scope of inventive populace, and a greater comfort with the learning, methinks it's only a matter of time until we legislate and worry ourselves into being second rate nations due to lack of the next bright and creative generation..
You forgot to put the "tastes better" so you've got more chances of repeated sexual encounters too (and if word gets out, though a wider swathe of the population to boot!).
For some games, I can see that there's no need for an ending (the 'arena' styles). For many (personally, I'm an RPG fan, and love story), there needs to be an end. Or at least a 'volume end', where you can say a subplot has finished, though the world goes on. With DLC, I think it may well be that the world does carry on, and producers will make the longer episodic content where the 'end' of the main story still has the characters with 'loose ends' to tie up, and hints that more will be going on.. That will allow greater engine and world reuse, giving more content per release, and longer story arcs than possible with individual releases. 'Ends' meet a nice psychological satisfaction point. You've seen the trials, tribulations and interplay that creates an end point, and you get to reap the rewards of your endeavours (so, multiple endings should be de-facto these days; play the way you want, and get the reward you deserve). You get the 'payoff' that keeps people striving for something. Nothing wrong with having sequential 'ends' and ongoing subplots, but in a lot of games, certainly for the story minded (which is quite a few), I don't think true 'endless' games, especially in single player, would work that well in the long term..
This will be a huge boon to me.. One of my hobbies is underwater photography, and as anyone who does that will testify, you always have a nervous moment when you immerse the camera and housing at the start of a dive.. This is because you have to seal the camera in a housing, sealed by a multitude of o-rings, each of which need to be cleaned and re-greased every time you open the housing. When you put the o-rings back in place, you have to look carefully for a hair, or a speck of grit or dirt, or anything that could compromise the seal in any way. If you mess up (even a single hair can cause a seal failure), you'll have a lovely view of rising water in your camera housing, and you camera will be so much junk (and you may kill the electronics in the housing too, which is expensive as well!).. This can really put a crimp in a holiday (no more photography for you! And you did have it insured, didn't you??).. There are really only two common reasons to crack a housing open.. To take the memory card out and back it up, and to recharge the camera/strobe batteries after a dive.. As you need to recharge after most dives, nobody's really bothered much with wireless data transmission, but if you can wirelessly recharge, it's simple to add wireless data transfer too, so you'll not have to crack the case 'till you want to change the lens (which isn't too common most of the time) or strip it for cleaning (you could probably get away with once or twice a holiday, if that).. Much safer!
The day Wikileaks decided to publish private members addresses of political parties, they stopped (in my eyes) being part of the 'Freedom of Speech' movement, and part of the system that prevents speech they don't approve of. When they became unethical, I stopped being interested in supporting them..
For the rest of your post, it'll give me some fun reading to follow up on! Looks interesting..
If you have the resources to vet the code without draining resources, then it may be useful for you to do it. If you use closed source code, you just have to trust that (and maybe black box test it). At a minimum, test everything to the same standard. If you barely have the resources to cobble together a quick and dirty IT system, then trying to security test open source software may not be the best way to grow your company (unless that's what you're intending to do as your business, in which case, you'll probably need more than the quick and dirty IT system). If you rely on being as secure as possible, and any breach would be the end of you, and you also have loads of spare cash rattling around (*Cough* Financials *cough*), then having an extra possibility of vetting is never something to be sniffed at. Get a bunch of people to pore over it. If they find holes, submit patches and patch internally as required. Still, you're only as secure as the bunch you hire to vet the code.. If you give it to 'a person' to vet, and they happen to put in a back door.. It really all depends on where you think the biggest risks are, and who you choose to trust. But it's still nice to have the extra chance to at least look if it worries you.
All I can say to this is Belle de Jour..
It's not too uncommon a thing; I know of a couple of lasses that have worked lapdancing/poledancing/stripping to obtain the fast money to either get themselves through courses, or simply give them extra spending cash for the good things in life while they're following a normal career or their studies. Know one that went the dominatrix route, and she earned a pretty penny (she also worked in tech support for a rather large international networking equipment company as a day job).
Yes, there are the "Party Girls" in the trade, and quite a few of them.. But there's also quite a few with definite ideas about where they're going. I treat them as the "know where you're going" until they prove otherwise..
There are too few men working in nurseries. When you remove the feeding, nursing, the nappy changing and the fluffy toys, more men were happy working in the environment. Where's the group that says this is global across all kinds of comp sci? Was this a group that was primarily interested in design and light coding? Was this a hardcore real time systems course? What segment of the computing professional demographic was this (or, was it simply lumping a group of people in a room to "work on computers" and putting random posters around the room?). There's little there that says there's any detailed methodology. Without detailed methodology you can't exactly repeat the experiment to verify the results. If you can't verify the results, it isn't science. Also, what happened to the mix of people when presented with a variety of other jobs in exactly the same room? Were more women drawn to the traditionally female biased work (communications based, biological, nursing/doctor)? There seems to me to be little in the way of a verifiable hypothesis in this, simply a "We believe we can state this, can we put together a scenario that'll give us the results we want to say"?
Really, if I want a job, I'll put up with environments. I'm sure homeless hostels would attract a lot more cleaners if they weren't full of needles, and excrement where the stoners couldn't use the toilet properly, but hey.. People who needs jobs still do that (I did when I needed the cash as a student, and that's exactly the conditions you can find). Yes, I'd have preferred not to.. But the realities of life are that you have to get on and just do the job, if it's one you want to do. If you feel you'd prefer to do other jobs.. Then you do.. Which is why women tend not to work in computing.. They simply prefer to do other things. Strangely, many of those other things are ones men prefer not to do.
What gets me is that Labour still keep chanting "Beware the Conservatives, they're the bogeyman. Evil. They'll take your rights away and make you miserable.". All the while, they're taking your rights away. There's a whole load of stuff going down that just makes me wince (the whole register you need to be on if you have contact with anyone's kids more than once a week, otherwise you end up with a huge fine and jail time just as an example)... This government we now have has been the most abusive, totalitarian nightmare that I can remember (and I'm 40, so can actually remember a fair bit)..
Why the concentration on hardware? Most software runs on an OS. The OS deals with abstraction. If you need a certain performance on hardware (i.e. graphics card), then you state that it requires that power or greater. On the whole, you don't need a lot of hardware testing across the board. If things don't work, that'll be an issue with the driver, and as such, it's an OS/Vendor problem. The API you use on the OS is stated to work in a particular fashion, and if it doesn't, you nag the OS vendor to nag the hardware vendor to provide somethign that works according to the spec, so that it works as advertised. If you leave that way of working, you end up with software that deals with raw devices, and needs to code in drivers for every piece of hardware on the market (and won't work with new ones, unless they're compatible with the old methods). When you have 'Stable' software, it's meant to be stable on an OS. The OS is meant to abstract the hardware away from applications. The Hardware vendors are supposed to provide drivers that allow the OS to talk to the hardware. As long as each step in the chain is correct, it works. The biggest problems are having the drivers and OS working correctly, and then software houses release software that consistently crashes, has memory leaks, doesn't use APIs correctly and so forth, with the codebase in a largely untested state (hey, it worked for a few guys we have on big machines downstairs, so it must be ok, though they've not played with the whole app). Because they have the whole "Ooo.. Piracy, you may have copied it" thing sewn up in the courts, there is currently no incentive for them to produce a reliable product. It says in most EULAs that you take your chances, and if it doesn't work.. Tough.
The small company should be responsible for their side of the bargain (to at least the areas of the OS they interface to). They then need to work out what the capacity plan is for the machine (must have spec of at least x), and test it in anger on a couple of very different hardware configs, just to prove your hardware independance assumptions.
No idea how you got the flamebait tag, but it's definitely not deserved. Never been to Russia yet (though my sister spent extensive time there, and I spent a couple of years dating a Russian lass who was absolutely great! Refreshing and pragmatic outlook on life) and had a few Russian friends along the way. I have however been to both China and the US (and spent a fair bit of time in both, though I'm from neither, and have friends in both). In general, they're all proud of the way their culture does things.. They're most interested in living a day to day life of their own.. And fully agreed; Hollywood does so love to stir up the propaganda (not that surprising really, considering its funding in the US, and primary target being US and the west).. Coupled with the politicians' messages (be scared of.. Be wary of.. Look out for.. Just don't look at us!), it does tend to skew perceptions.. Unless you're a politician (in which case, you're largely paid to be scum of the earth, screw someone over to benefit yourself, and maybe help out some of the people who vote for you so they'll do it again next time), most of the time, people are just people.. Big differences in outlook between the three cultures (Russian, Chinese and American), but all have their valid points, and personally, I think they're complementary. Hopefully someone mods you up, as flamebait that comment is not (seen a fair bit of mis-modding recently).
The EVIL P2P. If you're downloading something through a P2P client (which Limewire is), then you're making it available for distribution while you download it. At least, that's going to be a lawyer's argument who wants to completely screw you over as badly as possible.
Interesting that a comment on the limitations of openness, and how it is related to blackmail, and how you may just want to not keep saying the plain truth all the time gets modded offtopic..
Turn round to your significant other before a really important romantic evening, and say "Yes, your ass looks big in that, no, the makeup doesn't hide the wrinkles at the corners or your eyes and the cut of the dress makes you look pregnant." There, you have your honest and open world. Do you want to live in it?
Interesting that you say it's only "newsworthy" and things that people want to know.
Recently, they published the entire private membership of the British National Party (yes, heavily right wing party).
They then published a second one a while later, with even more names (there seems to be a fair bit of controversy on this second one, as many of the entries have been rumoured not to match up to the real list, as they're actually nothing to do with the party).
Now this document is publishing the private information of individuals, such as their names and contact details.
This, to me, is exactly what Redwatch have been doing (they're an ultra right group of Neo Nazis) on the web. At the point they pulled this stunt on individuals, they lost all credibility for me. I now lump them in with a bunch of nutters, which is sad. Originally, they opened up bad doings at companies, and exposed real stories. Not private individuals for membership of a legal (though disliked) party.
Respect, once gone, is very, very difficult to get back. My respect for Wikileaks has gone out the window. Deviousness and being a little 'fast and loose' with the law is one thing. Throwing ethics out of the window is another.
That's only part of the story. A LOT of systems are put in by heads of medical departments who engage directly with vendors, who tell them this system will cure all their ills and make the world a better place. They then buy in this system without asking anybody, and turn up at IT saying "We've bought this, put it in now please". Most hospital directorates back the clinicians (politics, gotta love it) and force IT to support this, even though it may duplicate information held elsewhere, or not be able to communicate with anything else. This crucifies efforts to create an enterprise class architecture. That being said, there are (in the NHS) many moves towards having everything standardised and digital (PACS, for example, works nicely; Dicom imagery across all hospitals connected to the NHS network. That's your XRay and MRI imagery right there).
The problem is that very few places take IT seriously. It's viewed as a "wave a magic wand and things happen" discipline. Few want to hire system admins, let alone systems architects. And without people to actually work at integrating IT to the business, and without them having the remit to be able to affect business processes to help this symbiotic relationship take hold, then places will continue to scrabble ineffectually. If you're building a house, hire an architect. If you're building an IT system to prop up your business correctly, hire a systems architect. You could, of course, be happy with your IT system being the logical equivalent of a house built on mud with 22 windows on one side of it (never facing the sun) and no stairs to the upper floor that can be used.. But hey. You choose the path you walk.
Wow, in the hospital where I work, the doctors frequently turn up to the IT department saying how they've just bought in a new system and they need it supported. If they get told 'no', they complain to the directorate that IT aren't supporting a system based on IT. The directorate lean on IT (with not so veiled threats) until IT support a system they'd have vetoed if they'd be involved in procurement..
The problem that has been evaluated is that the research was done on an organisation with no true enterprise architecture (at the business silo stage at best). In other words, somewhere that hasn't invested in IT (and likely has the doctors doing what they feel like, with 'homegrown' Access databases and applications, trusting what the vendors say when they produce shiny pamphlets, and either not hiring people who understand how business and tech should map, or not giving them the clout to be able to change the way the organisation works to successfully be able to change things so that they do).
I think this could rebound terribly (and rightfully) on the insurer. The worst thing for a clinical depression is to stay closeted away. In the UK, there is no "social prescribing", where a GP may decide that the root of your troubles are a social disconnection. This disconnect raises stress, and is a sizable aspect in depression. Rather than pump people full of antidepressants, they prescribe you a visit to a local social group that is ratified as being suitable for this (can be activity groups, plain social groups, heading to a gym, or whatever would best fit the person that's available). This has had marked benefits to many that use the service. Depression is always a fight, and when you fight it best, there's always a time that you smile. It may not last for long, but every point you can laugh and be brought out is an absolute gem. And there's no surprise that mates will take a pic of you when you're smiling and paste it on Facebook, rather than ones of you looking glum and disconnected. One of those gems, for me, was years ago, just after my brother had had a massive car smash that left him on life support. One of my friends had first been blunt (there's nothing you can do, so get on with life while this goes on and things work themselves out), then actually managed to get me out and make me laugh. For just a minute; epic effort on his part, but it gave me a moment's respite, for which I'm eternally grateful. Now, if anyone had dared to say to me in that minute or two of respite that I wasn't upset, torn up and terrified, I'd have torn them several new ones, and stomped on the pieces until the men in white coats dragged me off. Smiling pictures of a depressive are not evidence they're not depressed. They're evidence that they have a good support network of people who are prepared to do the heavy emotional lifting to keep them going.. Cutting the insurance is going to make anyone depressive (or recovering depressive) fall far back down the treatment path.. Wouldn't be surprised to find this one in litigation sometime soon.
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What's this "US giving people IP"?
There's nothing in there about anyone passing IP on to anyone else. At all. All it says is that they'll ahve to agree to set their laws to US standards of copyright, patent, etc.
Which means that although their country is doing just fine with copyright law as it is, and they may not have any particular wish to indulge in American culture (they have plenty of their own that they do just fine with), they are forced to have spectacularly culturally damaging laws forced into place.
Doesn't mean the US has to give them anything. All it means is the new laws put brakes on them developing anything themselves, as they'd then have to comply with US law, which has been shown to have distinctly chilling effects on development and innovation.
NOTHING in there says anything about the US giving anyone free IP. Stop making the assumption that it does.
Alas, the only reference I can find to this is the story "Big Brother Iron", which is solely held in the collected works "Toast: And other rusted futures". Seems to be out of print here in the UK, with a paperback at near £20, and the hardback between £50 and 75.
I'll keep trawling, as that sounds like a very interesting story! Thanks for the heads up, and a new author to check out.
Of the way the world is heading. As I keep harping on about, and wish the politicians (and the police) would understand. Orwell's 1984 is a warning, not a "HOWTO manual".
By the standard they've set on this, most of the populace should be under arrest by dint of the anti-terror laws, which over here in the UK are draconian, misguided and completely over the top.
It really comes to something when we need to worry more about our own police and politicians than we ever would about a terror attack.
Actually, I think it says in general, the public are cheapskates AND the NYT has a non-viable business model.
Still, in a world built on scientific principles, you need to make the odd experiment. NYT are about to experiment with a metered access system. If the results are worrying, then it's time to experiment with the next business model.
There'll be one of three outcomes: They find one that works again, and it's business as usual, or they'll find that there's no business model available that lets them carry on as they are at the moment, so they'll cut corners until they have a compromise that works.. Or finally nothing seems to work, and they run out of money.
There's a reason that many cultures have a tradition of respecting the dead.
While you're alive, you strive to do the best you can, because once you're gone, the only legacy you pass on is memories of you, in the people who knew you, and anything you've written or produced.
If it's all of a sudden allowable in the name of entertainment to say complete lies about you and pass it off as fact (well, apart from the fact that historians have been doing this for as long as history has been recorded), it adds in one more thing to worry about, and life's full enough of those as it is. How would your descendants would feel if, for example, someone wrote a movie, in which you were explicitly identified, and represented as a hard right wing mass murderer responsible for ethnic cleansing initiatives?
Yeah, I know, it's not a hard argument. There again, very little in ethics is a cut and dried matter. To be ethical, you should present the truth as closely as you can, in the spirit with which the person lived their life once they're gone. Your proposal blatantly doesn't do this, and most likely goes in direct opposition to what their wishes were. This is unethical.
Definitely agreed that skinning will be a far greater problem (unenforceable, but unethical against illegal, as celebrities own the rights to their own image).
On the Child Porn thing.. Hmm.. Very contentious.. I don't know enough about the effects on the active libido, and how that in turn affects the desire for real world satisfaction. I don't trust the politicians' voices on this, and the psychologists have to tread very very carefully while researching this.. I'll leave that one for scientific debate with people who get more of an idea of the real implications, backed up by hard data..
Could this be the start of the "Quick button click movie maker"? Something akin to a rather more advanced version of the game "The Movies", where you can set a scene from a variety of landscapes (similar to Vue D'Esprit, or some other landscape renderer), add actors (taken from stock modifiable ones, as per Poser, or similar), add in movements and pathing.. Voices taken from a modifiable bank.. Add in stock effects and so on.. And have the bulk of it in a nice GUI development tool..
I get the suspicion that it'll draw a lot of derision from the real movie makers, but as something that'll be the Visual Basic of the movie world.. Hmm.. This could dispense with a lot of the actors in low prices movies, and if it grows, even in big budget ones.. Though the quality will likely still be missing that 'human touch'.. Still in mass market, like with VB, mostly the only people who'll care will be the ones that really understand the skill and craftmanship behind it.. Your average guy on the street wouldn't care two hoots..
*Shrug* You can have whoever you want in any act role. Depends if you're going for historical accuracy, or put anyone into the role.
By the same token, you could redo the stories of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and have them cast as a white skinhead with swastikas on his arm. I'm guessing that it'll detract from the canon of the story.
Hey, much better idea. Why bother with rehashing the old stories, which have a vast amount of accepted roles behind them, and create NEW stories, where the hero is a particular person from a particular background? That's what art is supposed to be, creating new. There are a goodly many 'updates' to the Shakespearean plays, with all kinds of people playing the roles. And that works nicely..
Personally, I've seen Shakespearean plays with black leads, and they were good.. Have you watched any movies at all? There are a goodly many that spring to mind with white slaves (contemporary Human Trafficking stories, or older ones circa Roman Empire, and there were plenty).. Greedy white kings? Watch the news! There are still stories on that in real life, not to mention god alone knows how many movies.. No idea where you're getting this concept that all this can't happen in stories, movies and shows when it already does.. To be honest, I think people just need to get over this absolute obsession with race, and wondering why people of a colour skin can't do something (when they blatantly do), and just get on with putting the good people in the right places.
That little rant aside, the mixing of various artforms is absolutely alive and vibrant out there.. Not for everyone, but it's good to see people experimenting with it.. Long may it continue!
Back when I was a kid (in the 70s), half the fun of life (being a geek, even back then) was playing with electronics, chemistry and whatever came to hand.. I make all kinds of things that went bang quite effectively, made funny coloured smoke, and had wires coming from all angles. In my secondary school (in the 80s), my teachers would actually take an interest in the weird things I'd created, and made suggestions on doing it better.. This nurtured my creative side quite nicely.. I still get the soldering iron out now and then if I need devices that aren't generally available, but I'm capable of making myself..
This approach still holds true in China, Russia, and really most of the countries out there apart from US/UK and a few of the other Western countries.. This means they're getting better scope to broaden their horizons and invent from an early age. Given a broader scope of inventive populace, and a greater comfort with the learning, methinks it's only a matter of time until we legislate and worry ourselves into being second rate nations due to lack of the next bright and creative generation..
You forgot to put the "tastes better" so you've got more chances of repeated sexual encounters too (and if word gets out, though a wider swathe of the population to boot!).
For some games, I can see that there's no need for an ending (the 'arena' styles). For many (personally, I'm an RPG fan, and love story), there needs to be an end. Or at least a 'volume end', where you can say a subplot has finished, though the world goes on.
With DLC, I think it may well be that the world does carry on, and producers will make the longer episodic content where the 'end' of the main story still has the characters with 'loose ends' to tie up, and hints that more will be going on.. That will allow greater engine and world reuse, giving more content per release, and longer story arcs than possible with individual releases.
'Ends' meet a nice psychological satisfaction point. You've seen the trials, tribulations and interplay that creates an end point, and you get to reap the rewards of your endeavours (so, multiple endings should be de-facto these days; play the way you want, and get the reward you deserve). You get the 'payoff' that keeps people striving for something. Nothing wrong with having sequential 'ends' and ongoing subplots, but in a lot of games, certainly for the story minded (which is quite a few), I don't think true 'endless' games, especially in single player, would work that well in the long term..
This will be a huge boon to me.. One of my hobbies is underwater photography, and as anyone who does that will testify, you always have a nervous moment when you immerse the camera and housing at the start of a dive..
This is because you have to seal the camera in a housing, sealed by a multitude of o-rings, each of which need to be cleaned and re-greased every time you open the housing. When you put the o-rings back in place, you have to look carefully for a hair, or a speck of grit or dirt, or anything that could compromise the seal in any way. If you mess up (even a single hair can cause a seal failure), you'll have a lovely view of rising water in your camera housing, and you camera will be so much junk (and you may kill the electronics in the housing too, which is expensive as well!)..
This can really put a crimp in a holiday (no more photography for you! And you did have it insured, didn't you??)..
There are really only two common reasons to crack a housing open.. To take the memory card out and back it up, and to recharge the camera/strobe batteries after a dive..
As you need to recharge after most dives, nobody's really bothered much with wireless data transmission, but if you can wirelessly recharge, it's simple to add wireless data transfer too, so you'll not have to crack the case 'till you want to change the lens (which isn't too common most of the time) or strip it for cleaning (you could probably get away with once or twice a holiday, if that).. Much safer!
The day Wikileaks decided to publish private members addresses of political parties, they stopped (in my eyes) being part of the 'Freedom of Speech' movement, and part of the system that prevents speech they don't approve of.
When they became unethical, I stopped being interested in supporting them..
For the rest of your post, it'll give me some fun reading to follow up on! Looks interesting..
If you have the resources to vet the code without draining resources, then it may be useful for you to do it. If you use closed source code, you just have to trust that (and maybe black box test it). At a minimum, test everything to the same standard.
If you barely have the resources to cobble together a quick and dirty IT system, then trying to security test open source software may not be the best way to grow your company (unless that's what you're intending to do as your business, in which case, you'll probably need more than the quick and dirty IT system).
If you rely on being as secure as possible, and any breach would be the end of you, and you also have loads of spare cash rattling around (*Cough* Financials *cough*), then having an extra possibility of vetting is never something to be sniffed at. Get a bunch of people to pore over it. If they find holes, submit patches and patch internally as required.
Still, you're only as secure as the bunch you hire to vet the code.. If you give it to 'a person' to vet, and they happen to put in a back door..
It really all depends on where you think the biggest risks are, and who you choose to trust. But it's still nice to have the extra chance to at least look if it worries you.
All I can say to this is Belle de Jour..
It's not too uncommon a thing; I know of a couple of lasses that have worked lapdancing/poledancing/stripping to obtain the fast money to either get themselves through courses, or simply give them extra spending cash for the good things in life while they're following a normal career or their studies. Know one that went the dominatrix route, and she earned a pretty penny (she also worked in tech support for a rather large international networking equipment company as a day job).
Yes, there are the "Party Girls" in the trade, and quite a few of them.. But there's also quite a few with definite ideas about where they're going. I treat them as the "know where you're going" until they prove otherwise..
There are too few men working in nurseries. When you remove the feeding, nursing, the nappy changing and the fluffy toys, more men were happy working in the environment.
Where's the group that says this is global across all kinds of comp sci? Was this a group that was primarily interested in design and light coding? Was this a hardcore real time systems course? What segment of the computing professional demographic was this (or, was it simply lumping a group of people in a room to "work on computers" and putting random posters around the room?).
There's little there that says there's any detailed methodology. Without detailed methodology you can't exactly repeat the experiment to verify the results. If you can't verify the results, it isn't science.
Also, what happened to the mix of people when presented with a variety of other jobs in exactly the same room? Were more women drawn to the traditionally female biased work (communications based, biological, nursing/doctor)?
There seems to me to be little in the way of a verifiable hypothesis in this, simply a "We believe we can state this, can we put together a scenario that'll give us the results we want to say"?
Really, if I want a job, I'll put up with environments. I'm sure homeless hostels would attract a lot more cleaners if they weren't full of needles, and excrement where the stoners couldn't use the toilet properly, but hey.. People who needs jobs still do that (I did when I needed the cash as a student, and that's exactly the conditions you can find).
Yes, I'd have preferred not to.. But the realities of life are that you have to get on and just do the job, if it's one you want to do. If you feel you'd prefer to do other jobs.. Then you do.. Which is why women tend not to work in computing.. They simply prefer to do other things. Strangely, many of those other things are ones men prefer not to do.
What gets me is that Labour still keep chanting "Beware the Conservatives, they're the bogeyman. Evil. They'll take your rights away and make you miserable.".
All the while, they're taking your rights away. There's a whole load of stuff going down that just makes me wince (the whole register you need to be on if you have contact with anyone's kids more than once a week, otherwise you end up with a huge fine and jail time just as an example)...
This government we now have has been the most abusive, totalitarian nightmare that I can remember (and I'm 40, so can actually remember a fair bit)..
Why the concentration on hardware? Most software runs on an OS. The OS deals with abstraction. If you need a certain performance on hardware (i.e. graphics card), then you state that it requires that power or greater.
On the whole, you don't need a lot of hardware testing across the board. If things don't work, that'll be an issue with the driver, and as such, it's an OS/Vendor problem. The API you use on the OS is stated to work in a particular fashion, and if it doesn't, you nag the OS vendor to nag the hardware vendor to provide somethign that works according to the spec, so that it works as advertised. If you leave that way of working, you end up with software that deals with raw devices, and needs to code in drivers for every piece of hardware on the market (and won't work with new ones, unless they're compatible with the old methods).
When you have 'Stable' software, it's meant to be stable on an OS. The OS is meant to abstract the hardware away from applications. The Hardware vendors are supposed to provide drivers that allow the OS to talk to the hardware.
As long as each step in the chain is correct, it works.
The biggest problems are having the drivers and OS working correctly, and then software houses release software that consistently crashes, has memory leaks, doesn't use APIs correctly and so forth, with the codebase in a largely untested state (hey, it worked for a few guys we have on big machines downstairs, so it must be ok, though they've not played with the whole app).
Because they have the whole "Ooo.. Piracy, you may have copied it" thing sewn up in the courts, there is currently no incentive for them to produce a reliable product. It says in most EULAs that you take your chances, and if it doesn't work.. Tough.
The small company should be responsible for their side of the bargain (to at least the areas of the OS they interface to). They then need to work out what the capacity plan is for the machine (must have spec of at least x), and test it in anger on a couple of very different hardware configs, just to prove your hardware independance assumptions.
No idea how you got the flamebait tag, but it's definitely not deserved.
Never been to Russia yet (though my sister spent extensive time there, and I spent a couple of years dating a Russian lass who was absolutely great! Refreshing and pragmatic outlook on life) and had a few Russian friends along the way. I have however been to both China and the US (and spent a fair bit of time in both, though I'm from neither, and have friends in both). In general, they're all proud of the way their culture does things.. They're most interested in living a day to day life of their own..
And fully agreed; Hollywood does so love to stir up the propaganda (not that surprising really, considering its funding in the US, and primary target being US and the west).. Coupled with the politicians' messages (be scared of.. Be wary of.. Look out for.. Just don't look at us!), it does tend to skew perceptions..
Unless you're a politician (in which case, you're largely paid to be scum of the earth, screw someone over to benefit yourself, and maybe help out some of the people who vote for you so they'll do it again next time), most of the time, people are just people.. Big differences in outlook between the three cultures (Russian, Chinese and American), but all have their valid points, and personally, I think they're complementary.
Hopefully someone mods you up, as flamebait that comment is not (seen a fair bit of mis-modding recently).
The EVIL P2P. If you're downloading something through a P2P client (which Limewire is), then you're making it available for distribution while you download it.
At least, that's going to be a lawyer's argument who wants to completely screw you over as badly as possible.
Interesting that a comment on the limitations of openness, and how it is related to blackmail, and how you may just want to not keep saying the plain truth all the time gets modded offtopic..
Turn round to your significant other before a really important romantic evening, and say "Yes, your ass looks big in that, no, the makeup doesn't hide the wrinkles at the corners or your eyes and the cut of the dress makes you look pregnant."
There, you have your honest and open world. Do you want to live in it?
Interesting that you say it's only "newsworthy" and things that people want to know. Recently, they published the entire private membership of the British National Party (yes, heavily right wing party).
They then published a second one a while later, with even more names (there seems to be a fair bit of controversy on this second one, as many of the entries have been rumoured not to match up to the real list, as they're actually nothing to do with the party).
Now this document is publishing the private information of individuals, such as their names and contact details.
This, to me, is exactly what Redwatch have been doing (they're an ultra right group of Neo Nazis) on the web. At the point they pulled this stunt on individuals, they lost all credibility for me. I now lump them in with a bunch of nutters, which is sad. Originally, they opened up bad doings at companies, and exposed real stories. Not private individuals for membership of a legal (though disliked) party.
Respect, once gone, is very, very difficult to get back. My respect for Wikileaks has gone out the window. Deviousness and being a little 'fast and loose' with the law is one thing. Throwing ethics out of the window is another.
That's only part of the story. A LOT of systems are put in by heads of medical departments who engage directly with vendors, who tell them this system will cure all their ills and make the world a better place.
They then buy in this system without asking anybody, and turn up at IT saying "We've bought this, put it in now please". Most hospital directorates back the clinicians (politics, gotta love it) and force IT to support this, even though it may duplicate information held elsewhere, or not be able to communicate with anything else. This crucifies efforts to create an enterprise class architecture.
That being said, there are (in the NHS) many moves towards having everything standardised and digital (PACS, for example, works nicely; Dicom imagery across all hospitals connected to the NHS network. That's your XRay and MRI imagery right there).
The problem is that very few places take IT seriously. It's viewed as a "wave a magic wand and things happen" discipline. Few want to hire system admins, let alone systems architects.
And without people to actually work at integrating IT to the business, and without them having the remit to be able to affect business processes to help this symbiotic relationship take hold, then places will continue to scrabble ineffectually.
If you're building a house, hire an architect. If you're building an IT system to prop up your business correctly, hire a systems architect.
You could, of course, be happy with your IT system being the logical equivalent of a house built on mud with 22 windows on one side of it (never facing the sun) and no stairs to the upper floor that can be used.. But hey. You choose the path you walk.
Wow, in the hospital where I work, the doctors frequently turn up to the IT department saying how they've just bought in a new system and they need it supported. If they get told 'no', they complain to the directorate that IT aren't supporting a system based on IT. The directorate lean on IT (with not so veiled threats) until IT support a system they'd have vetoed if they'd be involved in procurement..
The problem that has been evaluated is that the research was done on an organisation with no true enterprise architecture (at the business silo stage at best). In other words, somewhere that hasn't invested in IT (and likely has the doctors doing what they feel like, with 'homegrown' Access databases and applications, trusting what the vendors say when they produce shiny pamphlets, and either not hiring people who understand how business and tech should map, or not giving them the clout to be able to change the way the organisation works to successfully be able to change things so that they do).
I think this could rebound terribly (and rightfully) on the insurer.
The worst thing for a clinical depression is to stay closeted away. In the UK, there is no "social prescribing", where a GP may decide that the root of your troubles are a social disconnection. This disconnect raises stress, and is a sizable aspect in depression.
Rather than pump people full of antidepressants, they prescribe you a visit to a local social group that is ratified as being suitable for this (can be activity groups, plain social groups, heading to a gym, or whatever would best fit the person that's available).
This has had marked benefits to many that use the service.
Depression is always a fight, and when you fight it best, there's always a time that you smile. It may not last for long, but every point you can laugh and be brought out is an absolute gem. And there's no surprise that mates will take a pic of you when you're smiling and paste it on Facebook, rather than ones of you looking glum and disconnected.
One of those gems, for me, was years ago, just after my brother had had a massive car smash that left him on life support. One of my friends had first been blunt (there's nothing you can do, so get on with life while this goes on and things work themselves out), then actually managed to get me out and make me laugh. For just a minute; epic effort on his part, but it gave me a moment's respite, for which I'm eternally grateful.
Now, if anyone had dared to say to me in that minute or two of respite that I wasn't upset, torn up and terrified, I'd have torn them several new ones, and stomped on the pieces until the men in white coats dragged me off.
Smiling pictures of a depressive are not evidence they're not depressed. They're evidence that they have a good support network of people who are prepared to do the heavy emotional lifting to keep them going..
Cutting the insurance is going to make anyone depressive (or recovering depressive) fall far back down the treatment path..
Wouldn't be surprised to find this one in litigation sometime soon.