Well then that leaves the monetary incentive route - if you can't bully someone to your point of view there's a pretty good chance you can bribe them to it (either monetary incentives to the country or, more likely, the promise of juicy contracts to current government officials once they leave office).
While I think they're doing the right thing, I think GP is right about their motives. It's easy to see the value of sharing a resource until you reach the point that you're the primary producer of said resource, at which point the temptation is to slam the walls in place and maximise your position. Even as a producer of IP, Brazil doesn't come close to the US and would benefit far more from a relaxing of US-based IP than a tightening of Brazillian-IP, so it's to their advantage to apply a loose interpretation. Of course, the richer IP-led countries will then try and counter that either with incentives or embargoes.
It does come across as incredibly desperate, and I'm surprised they even released it. Anyone who's done even a little coding will doubtless look at this and thing variations on the theme of "meh". Maybe it's the kind of thing you can use in court to try and fudge the opinions of judge and jury (although a reasonably competent technical expert would shoot it down in short order), but releasing it to the general public is just going to expose their desperation on a much wider scale (although maybe at this point they feel there's nothing to lose).
Indeed, one of the only things I regret about updating from my old Nokia N95 is that the camera on that was fantastic. It was "only" 5MP, but the picture quality was amazing, certainly better than a lot of actual cameras I've seen. Unless you're wanting to blow the photos up to huge sizes, a better quality lense with a sensible MP limit will almost always produce better results - so many of the 10MB cameras have such shocking lenses that the photos are atrocious.
My GF's iPhone (3GS) drops calls all the time. Not that we attributed that to the phone, we just assumed it was the network (actually we initially assumed it was my phone, since I always had poor coverage and she usually had full "bars", however, since changing my phone and my network and now having much better signal strength, we still get dropped calls). I guess it could be a phone issue, or it might be the issue reported recently with the phones displaying a better signal strength than they actually had making it appear that she had a better signal than was the case, but most likely her network coverage is rubbish.
Agreed - I'm more confused about why we don't know more about the issue. If it's fully replicable (as suggested in TFS) so long as you don't reboot the phone, i.e. it happens on every call after the first time you notice it, surely someone could have used this to track down the exact issue by now. I'm interested mainly in whether it's a HTC specific thing or whether it's a wider Android issue (being an Adroid owner AND an HTC owner, albeit a different model, it would be nice to know if this is something that might affect me and if someone knows what the issue is and is working towards a fix).
I can't say how this works in the US, but in the UK they have to treat every call as a real emergency, even when it's obviously someone pranking. That means even if some idiot prank caller dials them up and stays on the line for an hour talking gibberish, they have to stay on the line and log everything and treat it as if it were a real emergency. Given they're prepared to take that approach with obviously fake calls, I can't imagine they'd be any less stringent with an ambiguous call where they hear only silence (there are any number of real emergency situations where this might be the norm, someone passed out, phone damaged in an accident, an intruder in your home and you want to alert the authorities without making a sound and alerting the intruder, etc).
More importantly, structure your questions in such a way that, even if someone can look up the information, they need to understand it properly to answer. After all, most of what's considered "cheating" could be research. If your test is simple enough that regurgitating what's on Wikipedia will answer it, that's what people will do. Challenge them to use that information in ways that's not readily available and suddenly it doesn't matter where they got the information so much as how they apply it. Hell, I read law and it seemed at least 50% of the marks awarded were on being able to memorise case names and the names of specific laws, stuff you never need to do in practice when you can just go look it up. I have a crap memory, luckily I made up the marks in the other 50% which is how you apply that information. If tests weren't always structured in such a way that someone with access to a list of keywords (and yes, we were told even if you can't answer in full, at least try and bullet-point some keywords on the subject and they might be worth some credit) could reliably pass, you'd get a lot less cheating and a lot more people trying to understand (of course the flip side is you need more money for lecturers/tutors to feed this new desire for knowledge).
Of course, if they cared just a bit more they'd spend all the money they're using to catch cheats on helping struggling/lazy students so they didn't need to cheat in the first place.
Consider we're probably less than a decade away from having all kind of tech built into a pair of spectacles and the issue becomes deeper. Next we'll be forcing people to have eye tests before their real tests. Maybe we should all test naked, just in case. Come to think of it, overhead cameras and female students sound like a recipe for all kinds of lawsuit-based fun.
Probably the contrary - I think a lot of sex happens than would otherwise be the case specifically when people meet under poor lighting conditions (bars, clubs, concerts, sidewalks), so the ones who can see better in the dark are no doubt excluding themselves from the evolutionary process...
I wonder, is there any reason they're a solid block and not a grid of bars or something instead - that way they help with draining and would surely alleviate the explosive build up situation too, which might mean you can secure them even better (I guess half the reason they're not that secure is because at the moment you want them to act as a vent if there's an explosive build up, at least the damage then happens in a location you can guarantee easy access to as opposed to under someone's home).
Yeah, I've never heard of anything like this either (UK here). It seems like a recipe for disaster in a country where litigation famously isn't capped by actual loss, surely no matter how much it costs to separate these would be offset by avoiding the first couple of multi-million dollar lawsuits.
So if I check out at 10am, some guy comes in and trashes the place, steals everything not nailed down and bails, the hotel are going to automatically charge my credit card and let me sort out the fallout? Surely a better system would be for them to, I don't know, check my room as I leave. When I get a hire car they always check over the vehicle with me when I hand the keys back, they don't leave it a few hours and if someone clips it with their 4x4 on the way out of the car park, just charge my credit card. Of course, such a system would require hotels to have plenty of staff available, which means they'd have to make less profit. Much better to shift all the responsibility onto the customer.
I guess he means planning a time when both he and his friend can take time off, from work or family committments or whatever - for many of us these days it's not simple to just drop everything and head off into the woods for a few days, and that's probably half the problem.
This is about the difference between the people who had 2 hours to wander around the city and the people who had 2 hours to wander around the forest and the increased benefits of the latter. That's not to say you wouldn't get some benefit if you only have 2 hours a week, or ten minutes a day. I guess for city dwellers it's a reason to lobby for more green space, for those already lucky enough to have green spaces nearby but not taking advantage, it's useful knowledge.
They're refitting the kitchens at work, so no easy access to caffeine for the next two weeks. I feel your pain. Seriously, we're developers, why even have us come into the office with no develper-fuel to make us work?
Probably massively exposed on day one and your immune system went crazy. I dare say if you'd done as suggested in TFA, spending a few hours here and there in between your normal daily routine, over the course of a few weeks you would gradually acclimatise. It's the difference between being cold and jumping straight into a hot bath, or climing into a luke warm bath and adding more hot water - the highest temperature is the same but your body has more time to adjust.
Again, this is not about building immunities (why do so many/.ers seem to have the impression that forests are diease ridden filth holes where you go to expose yourself to nasty germs?), and I don't think you really need to worry on the hand sanitiser front. It seems to me that kids will always find a way to get messy and share their germs around, no matter how much you try to prevent it (trust me, I don't have kids but my GF is a children's theatre nurse, she encounters them in surgery - the cleanest possible environment, and she still manages to bring back every imaginable bug and virus and immediately share it with me).
Possible, however, from reading TFS (I'll admit I'm not about to RTFA, it's almost time to bail) it sounds like it's also possibly these very groups who are gaining benefit from this practice, and it's got to promote better mental health - which is a big factor in physical health - to just get out of the city once in a while.
This is nothing to do with increased exposure to foreign elements building up a stronger immune system. If you want that, the best place to get it is staying in your air conditioned office and sharing everyone else's germs. This is about time spent in a more natural environment promoting a healthy mental state, which in turn helps the body fight off illness and counters the effects of disease. What illnesses are you expecting to be exposed to in a forest that will boost your immune system? Illnesses that affect humans tend to be prevalent in areas more densely populated by humans, not in the middle of nowhere. It might, however, help reduce instances of allergies (pollen exposure, etc) - since I moved to the city I seem to suffer greater and longer bouts of hayfever each year, something I never once experienced as a child living in a semi-rural area.
How do you know it was unnecessary and he wasn't contracting the sentence "Likely the one is crawling up into your urethra or anus"? Now, I'm not sure why he'd be suggesting Neo would do such a thing, but it's possible that's what he meant.
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Well then that leaves the monetary incentive route - if you can't bully someone to your point of view there's a pretty good chance you can bribe them to it (either monetary incentives to the country or, more likely, the promise of juicy contracts to current government officials once they leave office).
While I think they're doing the right thing, I think GP is right about their motives. It's easy to see the value of sharing a resource until you reach the point that you're the primary producer of said resource, at which point the temptation is to slam the walls in place and maximise your position. Even as a producer of IP, Brazil doesn't come close to the US and would benefit far more from a relaxing of US-based IP than a tightening of Brazillian-IP, so it's to their advantage to apply a loose interpretation. Of course, the richer IP-led countries will then try and counter that either with incentives or embargoes.
It does come across as incredibly desperate, and I'm surprised they even released it. Anyone who's done even a little coding will doubtless look at this and thing variations on the theme of "meh". Maybe it's the kind of thing you can use in court to try and fudge the opinions of judge and jury (although a reasonably competent technical expert would shoot it down in short order), but releasing it to the general public is just going to expose their desperation on a much wider scale (although maybe at this point they feel there's nothing to lose).
Indeed, one of the only things I regret about updating from my old Nokia N95 is that the camera on that was fantastic. It was "only" 5MP, but the picture quality was amazing, certainly better than a lot of actual cameras I've seen. Unless you're wanting to blow the photos up to huge sizes, a better quality lense with a sensible MP limit will almost always produce better results - so many of the 10MB cameras have such shocking lenses that the photos are atrocious.
My GF's iPhone (3GS) drops calls all the time. Not that we attributed that to the phone, we just assumed it was the network (actually we initially assumed it was my phone, since I always had poor coverage and she usually had full "bars", however, since changing my phone and my network and now having much better signal strength, we still get dropped calls). I guess it could be a phone issue, or it might be the issue reported recently with the phones displaying a better signal strength than they actually had making it appear that she had a better signal than was the case, but most likely her network coverage is rubbish.
Agreed - I'm more confused about why we don't know more about the issue. If it's fully replicable (as suggested in TFS) so long as you don't reboot the phone, i.e. it happens on every call after the first time you notice it, surely someone could have used this to track down the exact issue by now. I'm interested mainly in whether it's a HTC specific thing or whether it's a wider Android issue (being an Adroid owner AND an HTC owner, albeit a different model, it would be nice to know if this is something that might affect me and if someone knows what the issue is and is working towards a fix).
This is what happens when we eschew the tried an tested car analogy in favour of caves.
I can't say how this works in the US, but in the UK they have to treat every call as a real emergency, even when it's obviously someone pranking. That means even if some idiot prank caller dials them up and stays on the line for an hour talking gibberish, they have to stay on the line and log everything and treat it as if it were a real emergency. Given they're prepared to take that approach with obviously fake calls, I can't imagine they'd be any less stringent with an ambiguous call where they hear only silence (there are any number of real emergency situations where this might be the norm, someone passed out, phone damaged in an accident, an intruder in your home and you want to alert the authorities without making a sound and alerting the intruder, etc).
[...] having to reboot is not a "fix".
Clearly you've never done tech support.
More importantly, structure your questions in such a way that, even if someone can look up the information, they need to understand it properly to answer. After all, most of what's considered "cheating" could be research. If your test is simple enough that regurgitating what's on Wikipedia will answer it, that's what people will do. Challenge them to use that information in ways that's not readily available and suddenly it doesn't matter where they got the information so much as how they apply it. Hell, I read law and it seemed at least 50% of the marks awarded were on being able to memorise case names and the names of specific laws, stuff you never need to do in practice when you can just go look it up. I have a crap memory, luckily I made up the marks in the other 50% which is how you apply that information. If tests weren't always structured in such a way that someone with access to a list of keywords (and yes, we were told even if you can't answer in full, at least try and bullet-point some keywords on the subject and they might be worth some credit) could reliably pass, you'd get a lot less cheating and a lot more people trying to understand (of course the flip side is you need more money for lecturers/tutors to feed this new desire for knowledge).
Of course, if they cared just a bit more they'd spend all the money they're using to catch cheats on helping struggling/lazy students so they didn't need to cheat in the first place.
Consider we're probably less than a decade away from having all kind of tech built into a pair of spectacles and the issue becomes deeper. Next we'll be forcing people to have eye tests before their real tests. Maybe we should all test naked, just in case. Come to think of it, overhead cameras and female students sound like a recipe for all kinds of lawsuit-based fun.
Probably the contrary - I think a lot of sex happens than would otherwise be the case specifically when people meet under poor lighting conditions (bars, clubs, concerts, sidewalks), so the ones who can see better in the dark are no doubt excluding themselves from the evolutionary process...
Although in practice most people will just keep one tuned to normal vision and one to the pr0n channel.
I wonder, is there any reason they're a solid block and not a grid of bars or something instead - that way they help with draining and would surely alleviate the explosive build up situation too, which might mean you can secure them even better (I guess half the reason they're not that secure is because at the moment you want them to act as a vent if there's an explosive build up, at least the damage then happens in a location you can guarantee easy access to as opposed to under someone's home).
Yeah, I've never heard of anything like this either (UK here). It seems like a recipe for disaster in a country where litigation famously isn't capped by actual loss, surely no matter how much it costs to separate these would be offset by avoiding the first couple of multi-million dollar lawsuits.
So if I check out at 10am, some guy comes in and trashes the place, steals everything not nailed down and bails, the hotel are going to automatically charge my credit card and let me sort out the fallout? Surely a better system would be for them to, I don't know, check my room as I leave. When I get a hire car they always check over the vehicle with me when I hand the keys back, they don't leave it a few hours and if someone clips it with their 4x4 on the way out of the car park, just charge my credit card. Of course, such a system would require hotels to have plenty of staff available, which means they'd have to make less profit. Much better to shift all the responsibility onto the customer.
I guess he means planning a time when both he and his friend can take time off, from work or family committments or whatever - for many of us these days it's not simple to just drop everything and head off into the woods for a few days, and that's probably half the problem.
This is about the difference between the people who had 2 hours to wander around the city and the people who had 2 hours to wander around the forest and the increased benefits of the latter. That's not to say you wouldn't get some benefit if you only have 2 hours a week, or ten minutes a day. I guess for city dwellers it's a reason to lobby for more green space, for those already lucky enough to have green spaces nearby but not taking advantage, it's useful knowledge.
They're refitting the kitchens at work, so no easy access to caffeine for the next two weeks. I feel your pain. Seriously, we're developers, why even have us come into the office with no develper-fuel to make us work?
Probably massively exposed on day one and your immune system went crazy. I dare say if you'd done as suggested in TFA, spending a few hours here and there in between your normal daily routine, over the course of a few weeks you would gradually acclimatise. It's the difference between being cold and jumping straight into a hot bath, or climing into a luke warm bath and adding more hot water - the highest temperature is the same but your body has more time to adjust.
Again, this is not about building immunities (why do so many /.ers seem to have the impression that forests are diease ridden filth holes where you go to expose yourself to nasty germs?), and I don't think you really need to worry on the hand sanitiser front. It seems to me that kids will always find a way to get messy and share their germs around, no matter how much you try to prevent it (trust me, I don't have kids but my GF is a children's theatre nurse, she encounters them in surgery - the cleanest possible environment, and she still manages to bring back every imaginable bug and virus and immediately share it with me).
Possible, however, from reading TFS (I'll admit I'm not about to RTFA, it's almost time to bail) it sounds like it's also possibly these very groups who are gaining benefit from this practice, and it's got to promote better mental health - which is a big factor in physical health - to just get out of the city once in a while.
This is nothing to do with increased exposure to foreign elements building up a stronger immune system. If you want that, the best place to get it is staying in your air conditioned office and sharing everyone else's germs. This is about time spent in a more natural environment promoting a healthy mental state, which in turn helps the body fight off illness and counters the effects of disease. What illnesses are you expecting to be exposed to in a forest that will boost your immune system? Illnesses that affect humans tend to be prevalent in areas more densely populated by humans, not in the middle of nowhere. It might, however, help reduce instances of allergies (pollen exposure, etc) - since I moved to the city I seem to suffer greater and longer bouts of hayfever each year, something I never once experienced as a child living in a semi-rural area.
How do you know it was unnecessary and he wasn't contracting the sentence "Likely the one is crawling up into your urethra or anus"? Now, I'm not sure why he'd be suggesting Neo would do such a thing, but it's possible that's what he meant.