How? Gerrymandering have made 90% of the seats "safe", so it will be always red or blue. In most such districts, the Congress man could start to piss on main street and he would get reelected anyway.
All airlines mis-route luggage, and it is fairly rare to lose lose, as in never see it again.
Yes, the issue here is delayed luggage is in many ways, lost. Depending on the content, the delay and where your destination is (when returning home, more things don't need immediate replacement), you need to replace the not-lost-but-delayed luggage content.
Considering that luggage claiming often takes over an hour, every routine commuter knows to stick to pure carry-ons if at all possible.
Hint: Being a contractor, in most places, is not a completely trivial thing to do => legal, tax,... considerations.
E.g. most employees, in most places pay their income tax via payroll deduction. Just taking one invoice as a contractor means that you have to handle that year as a contractor, declaring and paying income tax.
Furthermore, depending on employment laws, e.g. German version comes to mind, as a full time employee you are by default forbidden to have other "work". So you might go home and work on an OSS project, which is fine, but if you make "legal" work out of it you can be fired for cause.
Plus, invoicing without known for what gets in really fast in in all kind of IRS (who has what income, and is it deductible business expense for the receiver, e.g. there are really few business that can claim to be buying console games for the business) DA (money laundering, fraud => the persons that tried to make you invoice almost certainly are not formally authorized to discuss business, especially if it can be seen as loss to their company),...
So, no, "baseless" invoices are a very restricted construct, certainly not one I'd accept from somebody calling the first time.
Plus, many if not all OSS projects are not setup to do business. Plus they are quite often setup internationally, which raises even more funny tax-related questions. (In reality, taxes are the most important part here: The $20K left over are budgeted as business cost. So you can only use them up for something that is really business related, following IRS guidelines, or the company gets issues with the IRS. If it's not used for what it was budgeted, you can still get into inner-company problems, e.g. the company deciding that you've defrauded them,...)
Well, by setting up the system where the big guys are forced to allow small guys to use their infrastructure at a fair (decided by a 3rd party) price.
Basically you need regulations and you need actively to tilt the playing field to create competition. Works in most of Europe. Has worked also for some time, I remember times where my roaming phone was cheaper than the local American counterparts, resulting in some curious situations.
To finish the thought, an app that silently decides to do a MMS instead of a SMS is very near to fraud. (MMS costing roughly a magnitude more, plus potentially triggering data roaming, again a costly experience)
Worse is that disabling MMS is not even an option, so one needs to disable the MMS APN:(
Actually in some markets, Europe comes to mind, MMS are so expensive as to be practically unused, actually I'm not aware of any local plan that would make it financially plausible to use MMS.
So as the tech guy around here, for some time disabling the MMS APN has been part of the phone setup to avoid bad surprises money wise.
1993 means in Linux terms: - compiling your own kernels (e.g. SLS/Slackware come with a number of different boot discs that had incomptible drivers compiled in, so one usually ended up compiling your own after install). - severely limited driver support, e.g. for a number of hardware device classes there have been no concept for access (e.g. no scanner support) - severely limited office software situation. (I switched to Linux as primary desktop in 1995, and that one was irritiating, only the fact that in an university student environment using LaTeX get one going) - XFree86 setup that included calculating ModeLines, and dead (or at least temporarily producing weird noises) CRT monitors if you miscalculated.
So Linux has been clearly highly hardcore geeky stuff in it's first years.
OTOH, I've been using Linux now nearly two decades in day-to-day usage, and I've had some experience with normal users, and in the 90's Linux was useable for "normal" users mostly in closed environments, and only in the end of the 90's, after 2000 general desktop usage for non-hardcore users might have been plausible
- depending upon source the numbers are 10:90 or 20:80 but the effect is the same: Writing a system that works reasonably if not perfectly is relatively easy, but fixing all the tiny bugs can take quite a bit of effort. Most project managers/customers like to forget this, if you pay by the hour, you need to have factored in a multiple of the development costs for bugfixing/maintenance in the first year.
- If you pay by deliverable, you need to provide a heap of specs, and everything that is unclear or missing in the spec, will be used against you. Depending upon how much you squeezed out your supplier and other factors expect more or less culant handling of your issues.
- As contracting for a deliverable moves quite a bit of risk onto the supplier, expect higher rates plus padded time estimates.
- Last but not least, having worked as a contractor/consultant for quite a bit, my experience is that "at will" work works best. As long as both sides of the contract are happy, everything works out well. The moment the customer feels that he is not getting his money, you've got a problem, that's why it's important to explain the situation to the customer well and often enough; OTOH, if I'm stuck in a project where I feel underpaid, I tend to get less productive, look for an alternative contract,...
- And btw if you consider the above rule that implementing/fixing the last bits is the most costly of a project, keeping back 10-15% of the contract sum won't motivate the developer either.
The rough version is there, it's called (quite missleadingly) a second battery plus a charger that can charge batteries externally. Been using that setup for years now and it can charge a phone in seconds, as long the phone has a changeable battery.
Guess companies might be able to fine tune it, e.g. make batteries easier to eject and insert, plus add a capacitor (a normal one, that keeps the phone live for say 30s), and you've got instant charging, today.
Well, the problem is that European privacy guidelines are a completely foreign concept to US data collection practices.
Ok, let's detour slightly: A typical US american has a couple of "fundamental rights", and the moment someone threatens them, get up in arms. E.g. most jurisdictions have at least a little weaker Freedom of Speech rights. Now Germany considers Privacy (and a number of related concepts releveant to IT) a fundamental Human right. As in, your data is yours. And by default companies (and even the public administration) are required to do their business by recording the minimal amount of data possible. And as long a company has no business relationship with you, they ought to record NOTHING that can be traced back to you.
Now how's that relevant? I mean Germany is just but one country. Well, the EU legal framework around Privacy usually trails the German concepts by one iteration. (The EU usually uses laws that need to be enacted into local law by local member countries, and they usually define only the framework).
The next interesting tidbit is that German courts have been usually in the fore when it comes to protecting privacy, so Apple should not hope to appeal this away, the higher Courts are usually even more stringent on privacy and citizen rights.
Last but not least, Germany has a curious legal setup, including a number of constitutional provisions that are eternal, as in they cannot be ammended away, you have to go the route of replacing the whole constitution, which is practically means that the traditional "Rent-a-Politician" route works only up to a certain level, the Constitutional Court has been kicking in governmental teeth all the time.
The Segway has been to expensive, plus had usefulness issues, e.g. many jurisdictions banning them from public usage.
A decade ago, reading an ebook on a tiny electronic display was clearly very nerdy, and a couple of people wondered how I managed to walk with the head in the tiny thing, without crashing into the surroundings all the time.
Today, it's common place. Because being able to read an ebook everywhere without carrying around dead wood. Checking on your electronic communication on the way to the office is useful.
Now for Google Glass the first question is price. The developer preview seem to be a little bit pricey, but if Google wants they could push it probably down far enough. Now the question is how useful it will be.
One issue would be input for me. If Google glasses require e.g. voice input, they are setup for semi-failure. (Hint: Siri&Co might be basically useable for English-speaking people, but voice input does fail badly the moment you want to support international customers. Plus voice input has the drawback that the fallback is way worse than hacking in a word unknown to your display keyboard char by char)
I mean, sorry, yeah, it's a felony, but we've authorized our people to do this. No we won't extradite our police officers to you,...
What makes me really wonder about this in the context of the EU warrant, I mean, compromising computer security is a felony everywhere, so by the rules of the EU warrant the NL would be required to extradite their own police officers?
Well, that depends on the jurisdiction technically.
E.g. prosecutors in Austria need to fulfill the requirements that judges need, both career path do not involve being a lawyer. Germany OTOH, has basically one generic exam for the classical legal career paths.
I guess someone should tell this guy that conditions of Internetaccess vary strongly, as a small sample:
- I've got 100mb/s cable service - the guy sitting next to me got only 3G service that get really expensive beyond 5GB monthly usage. - and my inlaws living in the countryside manage around 2mbit/s DSL
Latency vary by connection and by daytime, and can go eerywhere between 20ms to >300ms for a ping roundtrip to nearest google server
So I guess if MS is willing to provide quality broadband service in all the places that normal ISPs consider to uninteresting commercially.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, secret arrests are explicitly allowed by the PATRIOT act, aren't they?
Lookup Gerrymandering.
How? Gerrymandering have made 90% of the seats "safe", so it will be always red or blue. In most such districts, the Congress man could start to piss on main street and he would get reelected anyway.
Well, technically speaking running a static page does cost the electricity too?
The fun part is, that in such situations, the employees you want to keep, are usually first gone.
All airlines mis-route luggage, and it is fairly rare to lose lose, as in never see it again.
Yes, the issue here is delayed luggage is in many ways, lost. Depending on the content, the delay and where your destination is (when returning home, more things don't need immediate replacement), you need to replace the not-lost-but-delayed luggage content.
Considering that luggage claiming often takes over an hour, every routine commuter knows to stick to pure carry-ons if at all possible.
Hint: Being a contractor, in most places, is not a completely trivial thing to do => legal, tax, ... considerations.
E.g. most employees, in most places pay their income tax via payroll deduction. Just taking one invoice as a contractor means that you have to handle that year as a contractor, declaring and paying income tax.
Furthermore, depending on employment laws, e.g. German version comes to mind, as a full time employee you are by default forbidden to have other "work". So you might go home and work on an OSS project, which is fine, but if you make "legal" work out of it you can be fired for cause.
Plus, invoicing without known for what gets in really fast in in all kind of IRS (who has what income, and is it deductible business expense for the receiver, e.g. there are really few business that can claim to be buying console games for the business) DA (money laundering, fraud => the persons that tried to make you invoice almost certainly are not formally authorized to discuss business, especially if it can be seen as loss to their company), ...
So, no, "baseless" invoices are a very restricted construct, certainly not one I'd accept from somebody calling the first time.
Plus, many if not all OSS projects are not setup to do business. Plus they are quite often setup internationally, which raises even more funny tax-related questions. ...)
(In reality, taxes are the most important part here: The $20K left over are budgeted as business cost. So you can only use them up for something that is really business related, following IRS guidelines, or the company gets issues with the IRS. If it's not used for what it was budgeted, you can still get into inner-company problems, e.g. the company deciding that you've defrauded them,
Lol, with punishment being usually so tiny payments, that the big players just consider a cost of doing business. A deterrent only for the small guys.
Well, by setting up the system where the big guys are forced to allow small guys to use their infrastructure at a fair (decided by a 3rd party) price.
Basically you need regulations and you need actively to tilt the playing field to create competition. Works in most of Europe. Has worked also for some time, I remember times where my roaming phone was cheaper than the local American counterparts, resulting in some curious situations.
To finish the thought, an app that silently decides to do a MMS instead of a SMS is very near to fraud. (MMS costing roughly a magnitude more, plus potentially triggering data roaming, again a costly experience)
Worse is that disabling MMS is not even an option, so one needs to disable the MMS APN :(
And MMS are certainly a complete different beast, money wise.
Actually in some markets, Europe comes to mind, MMS are so expensive as to be practically unused, actually I'm not aware of any local plan that would make it financially plausible to use MMS.
So as the tech guy around here, for some time disabling the MMS APN has been part of the phone setup to avoid bad surprises money wise.
Nope, it makes it a "fake currency" to keep the analogy correct :)
Actually, there is a German version with the graphics "fixed".
Hint, there are quite a bit of different ways to signal troubles to access the Internet.
Actually, your cable/DSL modem can be quite online, and you cannot access anything because your ISP managed to mess up the routing.
In other news, horse buggy this year are still strong (although nearly all these sales comes from the subcategory "motor vehicle").
Sorry, but tablets are clearly distinct from PCs, they are manufactured mostly by other companies, run different software and so on.
So if you want to have relevant and comparable numbers, either drop the tablets from the count, OR count only Windows 8 tablets.
Somehow I doubt 1993 for primary desktop usage.
1993 means in Linux terms:
- compiling your own kernels (e.g. SLS/Slackware come with a number of different boot discs that had incomptible drivers compiled in, so one usually ended up compiling your own after install).
- severely limited driver support, e.g. for a number of hardware device classes there have been no concept for access (e.g. no scanner support)
- severely limited office software situation. (I switched to Linux as primary desktop in 1995, and that one was irritiating, only the fact that in an university student environment using LaTeX get one going)
- XFree86 setup that included calculating ModeLines, and dead (or at least temporarily producing weird noises) CRT monitors if you miscalculated.
So Linux has been clearly highly hardcore geeky stuff in it's first years.
OTOH, I've been using Linux now nearly two decades in day-to-day usage, and I've had some experience with normal users, and in the 90's Linux was useable for "normal" users mostly in closed environments, and only in the end of the 90's, after 2000 general desktop usage for non-hardcore users might have been plausible
Some thoughts:
- depending upon source the numbers are 10:90 or 20:80 but the effect is the same: Writing a system that works reasonably if not perfectly is relatively easy, but fixing all the tiny bugs can take quite a bit of effort. Most project managers/customers like to forget this, if you pay by the hour, you need to have factored in a multiple of the development costs for bugfixing/maintenance in the first year.
- If you pay by deliverable, you need to provide a heap of specs, and everything that is unclear or missing in the spec, will be used against you. Depending upon how much you squeezed out your supplier and other factors expect more or less culant handling of your issues.
- As contracting for a deliverable moves quite a bit of risk onto the supplier, expect higher rates plus padded time estimates.
- Last but not least, having worked as a contractor/consultant for quite a bit, my experience is that "at will" work works best. As long as both sides of the contract are happy, everything works out well. The moment the customer feels that he is not getting his money, you've got a problem, that's why it's important to explain the situation to the customer well and often enough; OTOH, if I'm stuck in a project where I feel underpaid, I tend to get less productive, look for an alternative contract, ...
- And btw if you consider the above rule that implementing/fixing the last bits is the most costly of a project, keeping back 10-15% of the contract sum won't motivate the developer either.
The rough version is there, it's called (quite missleadingly) a second battery plus a charger that can charge batteries externally. Been using that setup for years now and it can charge a phone in seconds, as long the phone has a changeable battery.
Guess companies might be able to fine tune it, e.g. make batteries easier to eject and insert, plus add a capacitor (a normal one, that keeps the phone live for say 30s), and you've got instant charging, today.
Well, the problem is that European privacy guidelines are a completely foreign concept to US data collection practices.
Ok, let's detour slightly: A typical US american has a couple of "fundamental rights", and the moment someone threatens them, get up in arms. E.g. most jurisdictions have at least a little weaker Freedom of Speech rights. Now Germany considers Privacy (and a number of related concepts releveant to IT) a fundamental Human right. As in, your data is yours. And by default companies (and even the public administration) are required to do their business by recording the minimal amount of data possible. And as long a company has no business relationship with you, they ought to record NOTHING that can be traced back to you.
Now how's that relevant? I mean Germany is just but one country. Well, the EU legal framework around Privacy usually trails the German concepts by one iteration. (The EU usually uses laws that need to be enacted into local law by local member countries, and they usually define only the framework).
The next interesting tidbit is that German courts have been usually in the fore when it comes to protecting privacy, so Apple should not hope to appeal this away, the higher Courts are usually even more stringent on privacy and citizen rights.
Last but not least, Germany has a curious legal setup, including a number of constitutional provisions that are eternal, as in they cannot be ammended away, you have to go the route of replacing the whole constitution, which is practically means that the traditional "Rent-a-Politician" route works only up to a certain level, the Constitutional Court has been kicking in governmental teeth all the time.
Two aspects: price and usefulness.
The Segway has been to expensive, plus had usefulness issues, e.g. many jurisdictions banning them from public usage.
A decade ago, reading an ebook on a tiny electronic display was clearly very nerdy, and a couple of people wondered how I managed to walk with the head in the tiny thing, without crashing into the surroundings all the time.
Today, it's common place. Because being able to read an ebook everywhere without carrying around dead wood. Checking on your electronic communication on the way to the office is useful.
Now for Google Glass the first question is price. The developer preview seem to be a little bit pricey, but if Google wants they could push it probably down far enough. Now the question is how useful it will be.
One issue would be input for me. If Google glasses require e.g. voice input, they are setup for semi-failure. (Hint: Siri&Co might be basically useable for English-speaking people, but voice input does fail badly the moment you want to support international customers. Plus voice input has the drawback that the fallback is way worse than hacking in a word unknown to your display keyboard char by char)
I mean, sorry, yeah, it's a felony, but we've authorized our people to do this. No we won't extradite our police officers to you, ...
What makes me really wonder about this in the context of the EU warrant, I mean, compromising computer security is a felony everywhere, so by the rules of the EU warrant the NL would be required to extradite their own police officers?
Well, that depends on the jurisdiction technically.
E.g. prosecutors in Austria need to fulfill the requirements that judges need, both career path do not involve being a lawyer. Germany OTOH, has basically one generic exam for the classical legal career paths.
I guess someone should tell this guy that conditions of Internetaccess vary strongly, as a small sample:
- I've got 100mb/s cable service
- the guy sitting next to me got only 3G service that get really expensive beyond 5GB monthly usage.
- and my inlaws living in the countryside manage around 2mbit/s DSL
Latency vary by connection and by daytime, and can go eerywhere between 20ms to >300ms for a ping roundtrip to nearest google server
So I guess if MS is willing to provide quality broadband service in all the places that normal ISPs consider to uninteresting commercially.