Microsoft, Apple, et al said to Google, "Hey Google, come on over and join our patent club. All you have to do is big on some Nortel patents with the rest of us and you're in."
Google said, "Fuck you guys and your patent club."
The patent club responded, "Fuck us? No, fuck you and your principles. This is business, not some fantasy land where what is just and right wins out in the end."
but frankly BPs response was quite responsible- they accepted fault, and accepted cleanup costs right from the off, there was no haggling, no bickering, they held their hands up and said "Yep, we'll accept fault" - now the investigations have largely concluded they are chasing money from the other parties responsible, but that's surely fair enough no?
Were you and I living in some sort of alternate reality? My recollection is that BP was allowed to setup a fund for some ridiculously small amount of money (about $8 billion I seem to recall) and shrug off all liability onto that fund. They were allowed to do that within the first week or two after the disaster happened. The total extent of the damage had not even been calculated yet, but BP's liability was limited to the value of the fund.
If you will recall, nobody was willing to go on the record with a realistic estimate of exactly how much oil was gushing out of the well. Just like the Japanese nuculear disaster, the official estimates of the extent of the leaks were constantly much lower than reality.
Without open and honest dialogue about the realities of the risks inherent with nuclear, and what must be done to mitigate them, nuclear will never be a viable option. The people who would conceal the risks and continually lower the safety standards are the societal outcasts. They are more focused on saving money and increasing profits than they are on running things safely and responsibly.
But if it is a real problem, the site mods can collect the data and analyze it. If there are truly hundreds(?) of mod point farming accounts out there then it should be pretty obvious when they become active. Some simple logic based around the difference between today's date and the last logged in date would be a good measure. If it is a centralized effort then odds are that there will be a small number of IP addresses logging into a large number of accounts. etc.
It should be easy enough to analyze and identify the accounts involved if that is happening. I know that there are a lot of out of work coders who frequent this site. One of them should take it up.
If you can't raise taxes how are you supposed to pay down the debt?
Cut spending. Lets say you have $10,000 in credit card debt. Lets say that every month you buy lunch on and it comes to $500 per month. Now you decide that you want to reduce your debt. Rather than buying lunch, you decide to go to the store and buy the raw materials to make your own lunch. That comes to $350 a month. Now you have an "extra" $150 per month to pay down the debt with.
Oooooo, magic! Was that really so hard to grasp? No taxes need to be raised. No additional revenue needs to be found. You simply spend less and divert what you "save" into debt reduction.
Of course, the reality is that we are engaged in economic warfare with the rest of the world. The best weapon that we have is inflation. Unfortunately that is a very complex topic. Go back to watching the media dog and pony show, and comparing the national debt to consumer credit cards and household debt.
The only problem with your conspiracy theory is that mod points are handed out semi-randomly. They also expire after about 48 hours. Above and beyond that, you have to contribute and have your posts modded up to get mod points (at least that has been my experience).
What are you proposing? That a bunch of astro-turfers were busy for the last two to three days posting Informative and Insightful comments, waiting for this subject to come up so that they could go through and mod everything down? Or perhaps "they" have a list of Slashdotters that they poll every day, figure out who has mod points, and then pay / encourage them to moderate in "their" favor?
As a Ron Paul supporter, I can assure you that I'm not a bot. If I had mod points, I'd mod you down. Not because I have some agenda, but because your post is -1 Flamebait. Odds are that similar things are happening in this thread. People with mod points read it, disagree and moderate accordingly.
If you don't like it, Meta-moderate. That is another way to get mod points. Contribute. Keep the mods in check if you feel so strongly about a particular slant.
So, is there any benefit to G+ and what level of privacy can I expect at Google today and in the future?
As it is right now, G+ seems more private than Facebook. Right off the bat, they do not have a million and one Zygna games and various other shady applications that your "friends" are playing. Those apps all seem to uniformly gain access to not just the accounts of those playing them, but also the "public" information of any accounts linked to the player's account.
G+ does not have the same sort of "Wall" that Facebook has. Where as Facebook has a default allow policy, Google seems to have a default deny. Unless you explicitly share content with Everyone, the content is not there to be mined by third parties.
On the other hand, all of your concerns about Google are concerns that I share. What prevents them from selling their data to insurance companies, Lexis Nexus, ChoicePoint, or any other data aggragator (sp) with the money to pay for it?
I'm on Google+ mostly for the Circles feature. Sure, Facebook has lists but Google made the circles very easy to use. I have my circles for my tech friends, my political friends, my WoW friends, etc. I can target my posts to the people who are interested in the content and not have to spam everyone else.
This is a huge gamble for AT&T. They are basically trying to buy a 4G network instead of building it themselves. They've made the gamble that they can buy T-Mobile and bribe regulators for less money than they would have to spend to build it themselves.
Of course the consumer will get screwed in the deal. Rather than having two 4G networks to choose from, we will be left with one over subscribed 4G network and thousands of fewer jobs once AT&T gets finished digesting T-Mobile and jettisoning the remaining workers. The merger is a complete FAIL for everyone other than AT&T. The fact that Congress is evening considering letting it happen just shows how dysfunctional our government is.
Of course the "indie" developers are whining. That is what "indie" people do. They whine about how everything is not good enough and how they could do it better. Maybe some indie developer can come up with a revolutionary game where you ride around on a Vespa and go to poetry readings at various coffee shops.
I burned all my mod points yesterday. Please +5 this post. It is the most insightful thing I've seen in a while.
Off-topic, but the same also applies to drug laws. We do not need a whole slew of laws to deal with the problems that come from drug abuse. Someone who is high beats someone up? Charge them with assault. They steal from you to finance their drug habit. Charge them with theft. They're high and they crash into someone, driving under the influence. That person dies? Manslaughter (or worse).
Have you bought anything on Amazon lately? The last time I purchased something, every single seller on the list EXCEPT Amazon had tax figured out. They were all going to charge me tax on my purchase. Why is it that every other reseller that is selling through Amazon can figure out tax, but Amazon can't?
It is a competitive advantage for Amazon to not collect tax. If a consumer does not want to pay shipping, they can eat the cost of gas and vehicle maintenance to drive to whatever local store carries what they want. If they do not want to eat those costs, they can pay for shipping. The reseller on the other hand saves a lot of money by not having to have a brick and mortar store. They might have to maintain a website, but website costs != physical store costs.
The cloud is a decent option for the ultra small and the ultra large companies out there. Anyone in between and it's still very much up in the air as to whether it is cheaper or not.
Anyone doing IT should be doing some sort of "cloud" setup. By that I mean (mostly) virtualized, SAN backed and replicated to a backup site. The question most people have to consider is whether or not it is more affordable to do it yourself, or to lease resources from someone else (a "cloud" provider).
A few terabytes of space in the cloud will also cost a pretty penny.
Storage is what it comes down to for us. I'm running about 75TB worth of storage and bringing hundreds of gigabytes of new data online every week. One of the vendors that we use for Citrix support is transitioning into being a cloud provider. We talked about using them to host our environment for all of five minutes. Once they figured out that our SaaS environment is almost as big as their entire cloud environment, the discussion was over.
You're confusing the subject. What you described is hosting. If a company is in the business of hosting applications, they are probably already in some sort of cloud or hybrid-cloud setup.
Your average small business that is moving "into the cloud" is not in the business of hosting their own applications. They only redundancy that they need is another internet feed. Even a cheap-o Sonicwall can handle fail-over.
As much as people whine about how complex and expensive these setups are, they really aren't. For $30,000 a month we get 192 sq/ft of data center space, power, 20MB commit / 100MB burstable feed with FULL redundancy (incoming feeds, firewalls, load balancers and switches). $30,000 is nothing compared to the revenue that we are able to generate, and honestly, we're paying a little bit more than we should be. When the contracts are up for renegotiation, we will be paying even less.
IT pandered to the "think of the children" policy. IT gave the impression that people were no longer ressponsible for controlling parts of their life, and instead there shoudl be support groups/laws and insitutions to do best.
As an IT professional, I completely agree. I am all about "think(ing) of the children" and I block porn with my web filters for that exact reason. I cannot have my users looking at naked children at work, they can do that crap at home.
I also give my users the impression that they are not responsible for controlling parts of their lives. That is what I am for. I own them, and their workstations.
When your largest competitor is charging for data, you have no incentive to give it away for free. In fact in this day and age, you might even open yourself up to share holder lawsuits for fiscal mismanagement (giving away for free what you could be generating revenue on). As a customer, your only recompense to being price gouged is to take your business elsewhere. When there is no where else to take your business, or everyone else who you would take your business to is also gouging you, you are stuck. That dynamic is what gave Verizon the green light to ditch their unlimited data plans.
I was 15 when I went to the first Defcon at the Sands. Children have a natural curiosity about what makes things work and it makes perfect sense to expose to "hacking" and other out of the box ways to think about things. My experiences in the computer underground paved the way for my current career in IT.
Slashdot Mirror
It can be summarized much more simply.
Microsoft, Apple, et al said to Google, "Hey Google, come on over and join our patent club. All you have to do is big on some Nortel patents with the rest of us and you're in."
Google said, "Fuck you guys and your patent club."
The patent club responded, "Fuck us? No, fuck you and your principles. This is business, not some fantasy land where what is just and right wins out in the end."
but frankly BPs response was quite responsible- they accepted fault, and accepted cleanup costs right from the off, there was no haggling, no bickering, they held their hands up and said "Yep, we'll accept fault" - now the investigations have largely concluded they are chasing money from the other parties responsible, but that's surely fair enough no?
Were you and I living in some sort of alternate reality? My recollection is that BP was allowed to setup a fund for some ridiculously small amount of money (about $8 billion I seem to recall) and shrug off all liability onto that fund. They were allowed to do that within the first week or two after the disaster happened. The total extent of the damage had not even been calculated yet, but BP's liability was limited to the value of the fund.
If you will recall, nobody was willing to go on the record with a realistic estimate of exactly how much oil was gushing out of the well. Just like the Japanese nuculear disaster, the official estimates of the extent of the leaks were constantly much lower than reality.
and nuclear COULD BE that type of source.
FTFY
Without open and honest dialogue about the realities of the risks inherent with nuclear, and what must be done to mitigate them, nuclear will never be a viable option. The people who would conceal the risks and continually lower the safety standards are the societal outcasts. They are more focused on saving money and increasing profits than they are on running things safely and responsibly.
This may be a dumb question, but why haven't you invested in a few UPS units to condition the power so that you don't keep destroying gear?
But if it is a real problem, the site mods can collect the data and analyze it. If there are truly hundreds(?) of mod point farming accounts out there then it should be pretty obvious when they become active. Some simple logic based around the difference between today's date and the last logged in date would be a good measure. If it is a centralized effort then odds are that there will be a small number of IP addresses logging into a large number of accounts. etc.
It should be easy enough to analyze and identify the accounts involved if that is happening. I know that there are a lot of out of work coders who frequent this site. One of them should take it up.
If you can't raise taxes how are you supposed to pay down the debt?
Cut spending. Lets say you have $10,000 in credit card debt. Lets say that every month you buy lunch on and it comes to $500 per month. Now you decide that you want to reduce your debt. Rather than buying lunch, you decide to go to the store and buy the raw materials to make your own lunch. That comes to $350 a month. Now you have an "extra" $150 per month to pay down the debt with.
Oooooo, magic! Was that really so hard to grasp? No taxes need to be raised. No additional revenue needs to be found. You simply spend less and divert what you "save" into debt reduction.
Of course, the reality is that we are engaged in economic warfare with the rest of the world. The best weapon that we have is inflation. Unfortunately that is a very complex topic. Go back to watching the media dog and pony show, and comparing the national debt to consumer credit cards and household debt.
The only problem with your conspiracy theory is that mod points are handed out semi-randomly. They also expire after about 48 hours. Above and beyond that, you have to contribute and have your posts modded up to get mod points (at least that has been my experience).
What are you proposing? That a bunch of astro-turfers were busy for the last two to three days posting Informative and Insightful comments, waiting for this subject to come up so that they could go through and mod everything down? Or perhaps "they" have a list of Slashdotters that they poll every day, figure out who has mod points, and then pay / encourage them to moderate in "their" favor?
As a Ron Paul supporter, I can assure you that I'm not a bot. If I had mod points, I'd mod you down. Not because I have some agenda, but because your post is -1 Flamebait. Odds are that similar things are happening in this thread. People with mod points read it, disagree and moderate accordingly.
If you don't like it, Meta-moderate. That is another way to get mod points. Contribute. Keep the mods in check if you feel so strongly about a particular slant.
So, is there any benefit to G+ and what level of privacy can I expect at Google today and in the future?
As it is right now, G+ seems more private than Facebook. Right off the bat, they do not have a million and one Zygna games and various other shady applications that your "friends" are playing. Those apps all seem to uniformly gain access to not just the accounts of those playing them, but also the "public" information of any accounts linked to the player's account.
G+ does not have the same sort of "Wall" that Facebook has. Where as Facebook has a default allow policy, Google seems to have a default deny. Unless you explicitly share content with Everyone, the content is not there to be mined by third parties.
On the other hand, all of your concerns about Google are concerns that I share. What prevents them from selling their data to insurance companies, Lexis Nexus, ChoicePoint, or any other data aggragator (sp) with the money to pay for it?
I'm on Google+ mostly for the Circles feature. Sure, Facebook has lists but Google made the circles very easy to use. I have my circles for my tech friends, my political friends, my WoW friends, etc. I can target my posts to the people who are interested in the content and not have to spam everyone else.
This is a huge gamble for AT&T. They are basically trying to buy a 4G network instead of building it themselves. They've made the gamble that they can buy T-Mobile and bribe regulators for less money than they would have to spend to build it themselves.
Of course the consumer will get screwed in the deal. Rather than having two 4G networks to choose from, we will be left with one over subscribed 4G network and thousands of fewer jobs once AT&T gets finished digesting T-Mobile and jettisoning the remaining workers. The merger is a complete FAIL for everyone other than AT&T. The fact that Congress is evening considering letting it happen just shows how dysfunctional our government is.
there are no vital organs in the leg, so an injury there is less likely to be lethal.
Organs no, but those arteries are a real bitch.
Used to be a slashvertisement post about second life roughly every other day, perhaps a decade ago up to about five years ago..
I remember those. They were usually followed by the meme, "Get a first life!"
Of course the "indie" developers are whining. That is what "indie" people do. They whine about how everything is not good enough and how they could do it better. Maybe some indie developer can come up with a revolutionary game where you ride around on a Vespa and go to poetry readings at various coffee shops.
I burned all my mod points yesterday. Please +5 this post. It is the most insightful thing I've seen in a while.
Off-topic, but the same also applies to drug laws. We do not need a whole slew of laws to deal with the problems that come from drug abuse. Someone who is high beats someone up? Charge them with assault. They steal from you to finance their drug habit. Charge them with theft. They're high and they crash into someone, driving under the influence. That person dies? Manslaughter (or worse).
I look at it like this. I can do my work without NetFlix. I can't do my work without caffeine. Ergo, caffeine > NetFlix.
Have you bought anything on Amazon lately? The last time I purchased something, every single seller on the list EXCEPT Amazon had tax figured out. They were all going to charge me tax on my purchase. Why is it that every other reseller that is selling through Amazon can figure out tax, but Amazon can't?
It is a competitive advantage for Amazon to not collect tax. If a consumer does not want to pay shipping, they can eat the cost of gas and vehicle maintenance to drive to whatever local store carries what they want. If they do not want to eat those costs, they can pay for shipping. The reseller on the other hand saves a lot of money by not having to have a brick and mortar store. They might have to maintain a website, but website costs != physical store costs.
The cloud is a decent option for the ultra small and the ultra large companies out there. Anyone in between and it's still very much up in the air as to whether it is cheaper or not.
Anyone doing IT should be doing some sort of "cloud" setup. By that I mean (mostly) virtualized, SAN backed and replicated to a backup site. The question most people have to consider is whether or not it is more affordable to do it yourself, or to lease resources from someone else (a "cloud" provider).
A few terabytes of space in the cloud will also cost a pretty penny.
Storage is what it comes down to for us. I'm running about 75TB worth of storage and bringing hundreds of gigabytes of new data online every week. One of the vendors that we use for Citrix support is transitioning into being a cloud provider. We talked about using them to host our environment for all of five minutes. Once they figured out that our SaaS environment is almost as big as their entire cloud environment, the discussion was over.
You're confusing the subject. What you described is hosting. If a company is in the business of hosting applications, they are probably already in some sort of cloud or hybrid-cloud setup.
Your average small business that is moving "into the cloud" is not in the business of hosting their own applications. They only redundancy that they need is another internet feed. Even a cheap-o Sonicwall can handle fail-over.
As much as people whine about how complex and expensive these setups are, they really aren't. For $30,000 a month we get 192 sq/ft of data center space, power, 20MB commit / 100MB burstable feed with FULL redundancy (incoming feeds, firewalls, load balancers and switches). $30,000 is nothing compared to the revenue that we are able to generate, and honestly, we're paying a little bit more than we should be. When the contracts are up for renegotiation, we will be paying even less.
But please don't try to pretend it's "compatible" with software that's not at least Vista-aware, okay?
It is not truly compatible, but you can sandbox your XP apps inside the built in VM.
IT pandered to the "think of the children" policy. IT gave the impression that people were no longer ressponsible for controlling parts of their life, and instead there shoudl be support groups/laws and insitutions to do best.
As an IT professional, I completely agree. I am all about "think(ing) of the children" and I block porn with my web filters for that exact reason. I cannot have my users looking at naked children at work, they can do that crap at home.
I also give my users the impression that they are not responsible for controlling parts of their lives. That is what I am for. I own them, and their workstations.
IT is the problem. Muwhahahahahaaaa.
When your largest competitor is charging for data, you have no incentive to give it away for free. In fact in this day and age, you might even open yourself up to share holder lawsuits for fiscal mismanagement (giving away for free what you could be generating revenue on). As a customer, your only recompense to being price gouged is to take your business elsewhere. When there is no where else to take your business, or everyone else who you would take your business to is also gouging you, you are stuck. That dynamic is what gave Verizon the green light to ditch their unlimited data plans.
10 gold is a lot of gold for a level 20 character to accumulate. Most of the low level quests only give a couple of silver.
Like giving her a copy of "Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion"
I was 15 when I went to the first Defcon at the Sands. Children have a natural curiosity about what makes things work and it makes perfect sense to expose to "hacking" and other out of the box ways to think about things. My experiences in the computer underground paved the way for my current career in IT.
Peanuts... until you have 50 users at a site with a 5Mb internet feed and they are all trying to review files.