Wait, better off sending it to Mars? Mars is a complete waste of time and effort. While we could plausibly establish a long-term manned presence on the moon in the foreseeable future, a trip to Mars would be purely for show. If we want to look for life on other plants, Mars is still a waste of time compared to Europa and Ganymede (you know, places where some of the water might still be liquid?).
The key here is that this was a ruling about copyright. Patents can protect ideas. Copyrights cannot. On the other hand, patents have a far shorter duration.
There are privacy settings where you can explicitly enable to disable facebook doing that with your photo. I have it disabled. She didn't. You can debate over the relative merits of opt in versus opt out, but the fact is the option is there.
Or is it lawyers, or New Yorkers, who you automatically lump into the pile of people you can't have sympathy for, no matter the situation? Not all lawyers are amoral bloodsuckers. Not all New Yorkers are (also possibly bloodsucking) investment bankers. Not all bloggers are vacuous.
Please, provide an explanation of your standards for who deserves sympathy for government invasion of privacy.
I don't use IE anyway (except to access my company's Sharepoint site, which doesn't play nice with other browsers... maybe MS should fix that first?), and I don't see that changing when I make the upgrade. I'd love to see Flash die, but I'd rather it wasn't this way.
Ubisoft has been making some really interesting-looking games lately, and here I am forced to boycott them.
As a software developer myself, I certainly understand the desire to be paid for your work. I don't pirate software. But neither to I buy software with intrusive measures of the type Ubisoft pursues. They're just insulting.
That, and they never seem to patch the many, many bugs in their games.
My reading of their statement is that IE was not designed as a cross-platform browser, and thus by implication is more optimized for Windows in terms of speed (even if that's not true based on benchmarks). This says nothing about the *content* being displayed as being not cross-platform. That HTML 5 is platform and browser agnostic doesn't mean that the browser needs to be platform agnostic.
IE 8 can't even run this benchmark without stopping every 3 seconds to tell you that it's running very slowly and are you sure you want to let it run to completion?
Interesting how this benchmark shows FF4 faster than chrome 6, whereas a third-party benchmark like Peacekeeper shows the opposite.
Even if you're getting the STOVL planes, catapults mean they can, with the same short runway, take off with a heavier load, or consuming less fuel in the take-off process, thus extending their range. Arrestor cables are a tricker proposition, as you need more deck length and pilot training to make good use of them, not to mention the extra wear and tear on the landing gear. Leaving out the F35/F18 issue (the main feature difference being stealth) I'd expect catapults would be a good investment.
As their case states, google took reasonable measures to provide a safe route. That means in legal speak that they're not liable for punitive damages. Maybe they figure that by not going "over the top" they're more likely to get something. It's an uncommon strategy for a reason, though.
.Net is one of the most popular languages in the buisness world. There were more job postings looking for c# developers than for Java developers last year. If any language should fade away into irrelevance, it should be the designed-by-committee one.
Here in the states, most responsible pet owners get the chips, because collars can slip off and we don't want our escaped pets ending up euthanised in a shelter because they can't figure out who is the guardian for the dog. Insurance, however, is just asking responsible pet owners to subsidize the irresponsible ones.
Google provides a service "free" to customers. End-users running searches and watching YouTube videos are customers. Websites wanting to be indexed by Google also count as customers. Yes, being a customer means paying for the bandwidth. This doesn't mean you're subsidizing Google. If anything, it's the other way around - they pay for their own bandwidth, which they use to serve you, the customer, free of charge (from them). Networks might complain that their customers use a lot of bandwidth because of Google, but it's not a legitimate complaint at all - if Google wasn't doing what it did, their customers wouldn't be willing to pay as much for access to a less-useful internet.
Calling those datacenters inefficient because they're located far away is also more than a little disingenuous. While there are costs to distance, they are fairly small compared to the economies of scale that large datacenters get. Otherwise google wouldn't do it. Google owns and operates a pretty significant private backbone network, after all.
If I set up a tourist attraction on an island with a toll bridge you owned, would I be asked to pay a share of the toll for every person using that bridge to come see what I'm showing? Don't be ridiculous. You should be thanking me for getting you more customers. If all that extra traffic generates more costs than it brings in with more tolls, your tolls need to be higher - simple as that.
Networks are trying to have it both ways. They want to charge their customers for the privilege of accessing google, and then they want to charge google for encouraging so many demands from their customers. If networks don't have enough bandwidth availible, we should all just go back to paying per gigabyte of bandwidth. The only reason the network cares where that bandwidth is coming from is because it's coming from someone they realize has deep pockets. Not a good excuse.
I don't believe it for a minute. Of course google wants the networks to just be infrastructure. Sure, there's plenty of room for innovation in infrastructure, but it's invisible to most people, and therefore not particularly profitable. I don't for a moment think that's an excuse for operators to artificially inflate the importance of the network so they can charge more.
It takes a much smaller investment to make a flashier innovation on the user-facing side, and that draws customers' dollars much more quickly, compared to network infrastructure improvements. Unfortunately for the operators, google is better than they are at coming up with impressive new user-facing innovations, and customers are difficult to court on the technical merits of the network's backbone infrastructure. If people suddenly started consuming and order of magnitude or two more data, then networks which had invested in more innovative infrastructure could charge a price premium. So someone will make the necessary infrastructure innovations. It just might go more slowly if it has to be driven by demand exterior, rather than internal strategy.
Lots of changes were made to the kernel and services in windows 7 which significantly improved battery life for most people. A few people might have config problems, but I'd put good money on most people who report these problems finding their battery life in windows 7 much better than in XP or Vista, if they dual-boot.
Certainly in XP at least I've found most of the batteries sold with big-name laptops die after a year or two. Certainly no more than that. Some of them (a four-letter word starting with D) even put re-certified batteries in new laptops, and then have their 3 or 4-year warranty only cover the battery for one year in the fine print.
As far as Microsoft's involvement, I'd say don't shoot the messenger, until you're sure the messenger is actually at fault.
Windows 7 has a "shim" system for preventing recurrence of certain kinds of bugs in user software. It's not a very new idea, but it needs to be handled very carefully, and as everyone has been pointing out, because of the halting problem it can only ever work on specifically limited classes of bugs.
Crimes committed by atheists are not automatically crimes committed in the name of (or because of) atheism, any more than crimes committed by catholics can automatically be blamed on Catholicism. While some crimes certainly are committed in the name of religions (or lacks thereof) that doesn't mean all are.
Besides, soviet communism was as much of a religion as anything that called itself as such by the time Stalin got done with it.
Physicists have been triggering lightning strikes for years as a way to study them. They do, unfortunately, still need a thundercloud, but by firing a rocket trailing a thin wire, then can cause a lightening strike to come down at a pre-determined location, which is critical for planning useful instrumentation. Now, being able to do it without a cloud would be a neat trick. But considerably more energy-intensive.
Our team was really looking to switching over soon, to take advantage of some of the new features (parallel programming in particular). Plus, from what we've seen of beta 2, it's already way faster than 2008...
A the risk of restating what others have already stated, free-space optical interconnect has been around for a long time now (like ClearMesh). It failed commercially because about the same time it became technologically viable, 802.11b took its market away. Militarily, while less susceptible to traditional jamming technology, it's more susceptible to stuff like, say, smoke. Of which there tends to be a lot of around a war zone as soon as things get interesting. So basically, move along, nothing to see here.
The attitude that net neutrality means no prioritization and low-bandwidth users subsidizing high-bandwidth users is just plain wrong. Nothing in the basic tenants of net neutrality says you can't charge by the megabyte, nor does it say you can't pay more for higher priority megabytes. It just says that the carrier can't charge based on the kind of traffic. If I for some silly reason want my http traffic to be high priority, I can pay for it to be high priority. If I don't care about a bad voip connection, I can refuse to pay for higher priority for it. If I want to download huge amounts of... something, I should be willing to pay for the bandwidth, but carriers shouldn't be allowed to care about what exactly it is I'm downloading. That's my business.
My vision of net neutrality is: get rid of flat-rate plans entirely. They just result in a tragedy of the commons scenario. Pay entirely by the byte, with different rates for different priority levels. Let each carrier publish those rates and see what happens. The vast majority of customers win, honest carriers (if there is such a thing) win, and no one stops anyone from developing new and innovative web services and protocols.
Comparing broadband to the interstate highway system is an excellent point. Of course, people only appreciate government services which they personally use (everything else is socialism) so it will never work.
Seriously, they've done a very good job of encouraging customer loyalty amongst knowledgeable buyers. And they have a good selection and a well-designed website. They never lost focus the way Amazon did.
In america what they did would be completely legal. That doesn't mean it wouldn't upset a lot of people. Speech which doesn't offend anyone doesn't need to be protected, but our first amendment protects all speech (though not all contexts for speech, like the classic shouting fire in a crowded theater and so on). However, it certainly doesn't mean we have to protect people who did it in a country where it isn't legal.
Now why it isn't legal in Britain is another story. Not being British I'm going to avoid conjecture.
are unreasonable. Basically, whether it's defined benefit or defined contribution, the company has to take the salary contributions of its employees and put them in a pension fund, which is then invested in such a way as to pay out the benefits in perpetuity. The differences with defined benefits are 1.) if you die soon after retirement, your family gets shafted (your benefit/contribution ration makes assumptions about your lifetime) and 2.) if the market fails, the company gets screwed.
Sure, the company with a defined-benefits pension fund which got wiped out by a market crash could have invested in very conservative funds with low volatility, but those also get low returns, so more of the employees salary would have to be siphoned off into the pension fund. Isn't it better to give the employees a choice of what to invest in? Whether to accept low returns for low risk, or to take bigger risks for bigger returns? Basically, there are companies which are supposed to know how to turn defined contributiosn into defined benefits - we call them mutual funds. If they screw up, at least they don't take innocent employees' jobs with them when they fail. Why should a company like IBM be forced to be involved in that business?
Isn't Amazon's headquarters in California? I'm sure they also have warehouses in CA. I'm not sure how they get away with not paying sales tax here... do warehouses and office buildings somehow not count as "physical presence"?
Regardless of how you feel about taxation in general, I think it's fair to say that tax evasion is morally unjustifiable, and Amazon is definitely aiding and abetting.
That said, asking online resellers to enforce these rules is difficult, as even within the state of California there's a ridiculous patchwork of sales tax rules on the local level. Maybe states should be forced to develop a common API for a "what's my sales tax?" web service to mitigate the administrative costs. Just throwing the idea out there.
is full of crock. Especially their "performance" claim. When I run the benchmarks, chrome comes out 350% faster, and let me tell you, I most definitely can tell the difference without "slow motion video".
How can the EU really feel it's reasonable to force MS to become distributer of other people's software? This is like saying every book that's sold should be required to include a forward written by a random stranger, and the author of the book proper gets no editorial rights on said forward.
Just because MS used to do some questionable things doesn't mean it's fair to treat them this way for the rest of eternity - they've paid their debt to society already. These days the things Apple does (I'm not talking about Safari, I'm mostly talking about the iTunes/iPod linkage) are far worse than anything Microsoft did even at its worst.
"This is about creating American jobs - not Chinese jobs"
And what's wrong with creating crummy assembly-line manufacturing jobs for Chinese people as a side effect of creating skilled construction and engineering jobs for Americans?
It's an expert system. Still an impressive feat, but calling it a search engine is just an attempt to jam it into the current fad about what computers should be spending their time on. It's not a way to interact with the internet at all.
Speech that doesn't offend anyone doesn't need to be protected. I hate to see people saying this stuff, but I'll still defend their right to say it.
I'll also defend my right to, for example, deny employment to people who join such a group - free speech doesn't mean no consequences. In that context, I'd rather have these people out of the closet, so to speak.
Bono's bill is designed to save such users from themselves
No, not really. It's designed to take away one of the more successful excuses for file sharing used to defend against RIAA suits in the past. That is, it's not protecting users, it's protecting the content holders from users who claim incompetence.
I have a feeling this is a thankless job for IBM. It's a very, very hard problem, and the majority of the population probably doesn't understand just how hard a problem this is for a computer to solve. When the computer does respectably, but doesn't totally dominate the game, most people will probably laugh at the computer.
The article didn't mention whether the data was encrypted. The point is when you're dealing with information that could spell life or death to operatives, it doesn't matter - you have to assume that encryption can and will be broken eventually, especially if there's any chance that the loss was not an accident.
Overuse isn't just bad from a civil liberties / legal standpoint. It also increases the odds that someone will figure out how it works. This has come up before, but it seems obvious that no antivirus vendor worth their salt could leave the door open for this spyware, government sanctioned or not. So they need to keep it low enough profile that it doesn't get noticed by security vendors.
Many companies here in the states, such as GE, have always had a business-as-usual policy of firing the bottom 3% of employees every year. Even if you assume a zero-sum game, if every business is doing that, then all that happens is these people get shuffled around until they find a job they're decent at (or keep getting shuffled around indefinitely because they're incompetent and unwilling to reduce their expectations). It's only in countries that have a hard time firing people (like France, for example) that the risk involved in hiring someone who's been fired before is so high that being fired once means you'll stay unemployed for a long time.
Granted, in an economy like today's, getting fired is a much bigger deal. Which might be why they decided to do 3.5% this year instead of the 5% they claim is their usual. Really, this isn't worth reporting unless you have previous years numbers to compare too. Certainly it's ridiculous to accuse them of simply trying to avoid severance costs if you don't include previous year's numbers.
yes, and as soon as enough people start using password hasher, the password crackers will start running their passwords through the same hasher. It is, after all, just a hash. Much better to use a random password (as opposed to a hash, which only appears random to humans) and an app like PasswordSafe. Or better yet, public key login, which can be made arbitrarily secure by simply lengthening the key (modulo client security concerns. Yes, the private key password is still a concern, but if the attacker has access to the private key file you've already got problems).
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114 posts • joined Friday 28th July 2006 17:32 GMT
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Re: Cold water alert
Wait, better off sending it to Mars? Mars is a complete waste of time and effort. While we could plausibly establish a long-term manned presence on the moon in the foreseeable future, a trip to Mars would be purely for show. If we want to look for life on other plants, Mars is still a waste of time compared to Europa and Ganymede (you know, places where some of the water might still be liquid?).
Re: oh if only...
The key here is that this was a ruling about copyright. Patents can protect ideas. Copyrights cannot. On the other hand, patents have a far shorter duration.
Re: James Cameron on board, hmmm?
Pretty sure Futurama already did that plot.
Privacy settings
There are privacy settings where you can explicitly enable to disable facebook doing that with your photo. I have it disabled. She didn't. You can debate over the relative merits of opt in versus opt out, but the fact is the option is there.
Toshiba's
Toshiba's seems to preempt the Apple patent issue.
Impressive
"...passengers who try to sneak shooters and shanks onto planes hidden in their nuts."
Fitting a plane in there would be a trick for most of us.
What do you have against bloggers?
Or is it lawyers, or New Yorkers, who you automatically lump into the pile of people you can't have sympathy for, no matter the situation? Not all lawyers are amoral bloodsuckers. Not all New Yorkers are (also possibly bloodsucking) investment bankers. Not all bloggers are vacuous.
Please, provide an explanation of your standards for who deserves sympathy for government invasion of privacy.
I'd probably buy it if it didn't use SecuROM.
Meh
I don't use IE anyway (except to access my company's Sharepoint site, which doesn't play nice with other browsers... maybe MS should fix that first?), and I don't see that changing when I make the upgrade. I'd love to see Flash die, but I'd rather it wasn't this way.
I'm annoyed
Ubisoft has been making some really interesting-looking games lately, and here I am forced to boycott them.
As a software developer myself, I certainly understand the desire to be paid for your work. I don't pirate software. But neither to I buy software with intrusive measures of the type Ubisoft pursues. They're just insulting.
That, and they never seem to patch the many, many bugs in their games.
I don't really see the contradiction
My reading of their statement is that IE was not designed as a cross-platform browser, and thus by implication is more optimized for Windows in terms of speed (even if that's not true based on benchmarks). This says nothing about the *content* being displayed as being not cross-platform. That HTML 5 is platform and browser agnostic doesn't mean that the browser needs to be platform agnostic.
Ironic
So now Java is going to get DirectX support, shortly after .NET lost it?
IE 8 Fail
IE 8 can't even run this benchmark without stopping every 3 seconds to tell you that it's running very slowly and are you sure you want to let it run to completion?
Interesting how this benchmark shows FF4 faster than chrome 6, whereas a third-party benchmark like Peacekeeper shows the opposite.
California is broke
Thus our judicial system is broken. We couldn't raise the tax revenues to keep her locked up even if we wanted to.
Catapults are a good idea
Even if you're getting the STOVL planes, catapults mean they can, with the same short runway, take off with a heavier load, or consuming less fuel in the take-off process, thus extending their range. Arrestor cables are a tricker proposition, as you need more deck length and pilot training to make good use of them, not to mention the extra wear and tear on the landing gear. Leaving out the F35/F18 issue (the main feature difference being stealth) I'd expect catapults would be a good investment.
They're not the only ones
Carnegie Mellon Univeristy in the united states has pursuing similar technology for years now: http://nano.phys.cmu.edu/
Not puzzling at all
As their case states, google took reasonable measures to provide a safe route. That means in legal speak that they're not liable for punitive damages. Maybe they figure that by not going "over the top" they're more likely to get something. It's an uncommon strategy for a reason, though.
Irrelevance?
.Net is one of the most popular languages in the buisness world. There were more job postings looking for c# developers than for Java developers last year. If any language should fade away into irrelevance, it should be the designed-by-committee one.
Ok on the chips, but...
Here in the states, most responsible pet owners get the chips, because collars can slip off and we don't want our escaped pets ending up euthanised in a shelter because they can't figure out who is the guardian for the dog. Insurance, however, is just asking responsible pet owners to subsidize the irresponsible ones.
Don't see the problem
Microsoft is the only maker of closed-source technology, right?
What's the problem here?
Google provides a service "free" to customers. End-users running searches and watching YouTube videos are customers. Websites wanting to be indexed by Google also count as customers. Yes, being a customer means paying for the bandwidth. This doesn't mean you're subsidizing Google. If anything, it's the other way around - they pay for their own bandwidth, which they use to serve you, the customer, free of charge (from them). Networks might complain that their customers use a lot of bandwidth because of Google, but it's not a legitimate complaint at all - if Google wasn't doing what it did, their customers wouldn't be willing to pay as much for access to a less-useful internet.
Calling those datacenters inefficient because they're located far away is also more than a little disingenuous. While there are costs to distance, they are fairly small compared to the economies of scale that large datacenters get. Otherwise google wouldn't do it. Google owns and operates a pretty significant private backbone network, after all.
If I set up a tourist attraction on an island with a toll bridge you owned, would I be asked to pay a share of the toll for every person using that bridge to come see what I'm showing? Don't be ridiculous. You should be thanking me for getting you more customers. If all that extra traffic generates more costs than it brings in with more tolls, your tolls need to be higher - simple as that.
Networks are trying to have it both ways. They want to charge their customers for the privilege of accessing google, and then they want to charge google for encouraging so many demands from their customers. If networks don't have enough bandwidth availible, we should all just go back to paying per gigabyte of bandwidth. The only reason the network cares where that bandwidth is coming from is because it's coming from someone they realize has deep pockets. Not a good excuse.
Sure, Eric. Whatever you say.
I don't believe it for a minute. Of course google wants the networks to just be infrastructure. Sure, there's plenty of room for innovation in infrastructure, but it's invisible to most people, and therefore not particularly profitable. I don't for a moment think that's an excuse for operators to artificially inflate the importance of the network so they can charge more.
It takes a much smaller investment to make a flashier innovation on the user-facing side, and that draws customers' dollars much more quickly, compared to network infrastructure improvements. Unfortunately for the operators, google is better than they are at coming up with impressive new user-facing innovations, and customers are difficult to court on the technical merits of the network's backbone infrastructure. If people suddenly started consuming and order of magnitude or two more data, then networks which had invested in more innovative infrastructure could charge a price premium. So someone will make the necessary infrastructure innovations. It just might go more slowly if it has to be driven by demand exterior, rather than internal strategy.
Not a general Windows 7 flaw, either
Lots of changes were made to the kernel and services in windows 7 which significantly improved battery life for most people. A few people might have config problems, but I'd put good money on most people who report these problems finding their battery life in windows 7 much better than in XP or Vista, if they dual-boot.
Certainly in XP at least I've found most of the batteries sold with big-name laptops die after a year or two. Certainly no more than that. Some of them (a four-letter word starting with D) even put re-certified batteries in new laptops, and then have their 3 or 4-year warranty only cover the battery for one year in the fine print.
As far as Microsoft's involvement, I'd say don't shoot the messenger, until you're sure the messenger is actually at fault.
This sounds familiar
Windows 7 has a "shim" system for preventing recurrence of certain kinds of bugs in user software. It's not a very new idea, but it needs to be handled very carefully, and as everyone has been pointing out, because of the halting problem it can only ever work on specifically limited classes of bugs.
Those who would give up Essential Liberty
to purchase a little Temporary Safety for their iCrap deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
I still have a problem with that
Crimes committed by atheists are not automatically crimes committed in the name of (or because of) atheism, any more than crimes committed by catholics can automatically be blamed on Catholicism. While some crimes certainly are committed in the name of religions (or lacks thereof) that doesn't mean all are.
Besides, soviet communism was as much of a religion as anything that called itself as such by the time Stalin got done with it.
The tech exists
Physicists have been triggering lightning strikes for years as a way to study them. They do, unfortunately, still need a thundercloud, but by firing a rocket trailing a thin wire, then can cause a lightening strike to come down at a pre-determined location, which is critical for planning useful instrumentation. Now, being able to do it without a cloud would be a neat trick. But considerably more energy-intensive.
Disappointing
Our team was really looking to switching over soon, to take advantage of some of the new features (parallel programming in particular). Plus, from what we've seen of beta 2, it's already way faster than 2008...
Sounds messy
If they're literally submerging motherboards in oil, I don't want to be the one who has to swap out a bad DIMM.
Freespace optical interconnecct
A the risk of restating what others have already stated, free-space optical interconnect has been around for a long time now (like ClearMesh). It failed commercially because about the same time it became technologically viable, 802.11b took its market away. Militarily, while less susceptible to traditional jamming technology, it's more susceptible to stuff like, say, smoke. Of which there tends to be a lot of around a war zone as soon as things get interesting. So basically, move along, nothing to see here.
This attitude upsets me.
The attitude that net neutrality means no prioritization and low-bandwidth users subsidizing high-bandwidth users is just plain wrong. Nothing in the basic tenants of net neutrality says you can't charge by the megabyte, nor does it say you can't pay more for higher priority megabytes. It just says that the carrier can't charge based on the kind of traffic. If I for some silly reason want my http traffic to be high priority, I can pay for it to be high priority. If I don't care about a bad voip connection, I can refuse to pay for higher priority for it. If I want to download huge amounts of... something, I should be willing to pay for the bandwidth, but carriers shouldn't be allowed to care about what exactly it is I'm downloading. That's my business.
My vision of net neutrality is: get rid of flat-rate plans entirely. They just result in a tragedy of the commons scenario. Pay entirely by the byte, with different rates for different priority levels. Let each carrier publish those rates and see what happens. The vast majority of customers win, honest carriers (if there is such a thing) win, and no one stops anyone from developing new and innovative web services and protocols.
I like that analogy at the end
Comparing broadband to the interstate highway system is an excellent point. Of course, people only appreciate government services which they personally use (everything else is socialism) so it will never work.
Great!
Let's invent even more non-standard tags and fragment the browser design space further! This is exactly what the world needs now!
I spend so much with them
Maybe soon I can get some back as dividends...
Seriously, they've done a very good job of encouraging customer loyalty amongst knowledgeable buyers. And they have a good selection and a well-designed website. They never lost focus the way Amazon did.
Free speech
In america what they did would be completely legal. That doesn't mean it wouldn't upset a lot of people. Speech which doesn't offend anyone doesn't need to be protected, but our first amendment protects all speech (though not all contexts for speech, like the classic shouting fire in a crowded theater and so on). However, it certainly doesn't mean we have to protect people who did it in a country where it isn't legal.
Now why it isn't legal in Britain is another story. Not being British I'm going to avoid conjecture.
Defined benefits plans
are unreasonable. Basically, whether it's defined benefit or defined contribution, the company has to take the salary contributions of its employees and put them in a pension fund, which is then invested in such a way as to pay out the benefits in perpetuity. The differences with defined benefits are 1.) if you die soon after retirement, your family gets shafted (your benefit/contribution ration makes assumptions about your lifetime) and 2.) if the market fails, the company gets screwed.
Sure, the company with a defined-benefits pension fund which got wiped out by a market crash could have invested in very conservative funds with low volatility, but those also get low returns, so more of the employees salary would have to be siphoned off into the pension fund. Isn't it better to give the employees a choice of what to invest in? Whether to accept low returns for low risk, or to take bigger risks for bigger returns? Basically, there are companies which are supposed to know how to turn defined contributiosn into defined benefits - we call them mutual funds. If they screw up, at least they don't take innocent employees' jobs with them when they fail. Why should a company like IBM be forced to be involved in that business?
California
Isn't Amazon's headquarters in California? I'm sure they also have warehouses in CA. I'm not sure how they get away with not paying sales tax here... do warehouses and office buildings somehow not count as "physical presence"?
Regardless of how you feel about taxation in general, I think it's fair to say that tax evasion is morally unjustifiable, and Amazon is definitely aiding and abetting.
That said, asking online resellers to enforce these rules is difficult, as even within the state of California there's a ridiculous patchwork of sales tax rules on the local level. Maybe states should be forced to develop a common API for a "what's my sales tax?" web service to mitigate the administrative costs. Just throwing the idea out there.
"Microsoft Software Removal Tool"
That would be a shiny new Ubuntu CD, right?
That comparison site
is full of crock. Especially their "performance" claim. When I run the benchmarks, chrome comes out 350% faster, and let me tell you, I most definitely can tell the difference without "slow motion video".
This is totally unreasonable
How can the EU really feel it's reasonable to force MS to become distributer of other people's software? This is like saying every book that's sold should be required to include a forward written by a random stranger, and the author of the book proper gets no editorial rights on said forward.
Just because MS used to do some questionable things doesn't mean it's fair to treat them this way for the rest of eternity - they've paid their debt to society already. These days the things Apple does (I'm not talking about Safari, I'm mostly talking about the iTunes/iPod linkage) are far worse than anything Microsoft did even at its worst.
"This is about creating American jobs - not Chinese jobs"
And what's wrong with creating crummy assembly-line manufacturing jobs for Chinese people as a side effect of creating skilled construction and engineering jobs for Americans?
Trade protectionism is always ugly.
Site preview
You could use Bing, or you could install Snap's plugin for Firefox. It's not a particularly original feature.
It's not a search engine
It's an expert system. Still an impressive feat, but calling it a search engine is just an attempt to jam it into the current fad about what computers should be spending their time on. It's not a way to interact with the internet at all.
Freedom of speech
Speech that doesn't offend anyone doesn't need to be protected. I hate to see people saying this stuff, but I'll still defend their right to say it.
I'll also defend my right to, for example, deny employment to people who join such a group - free speech doesn't mean no consequences. In that context, I'd rather have these people out of the closet, so to speak.
Bono's bill is designed to save such users from themselves
No, not really. It's designed to take away one of the more successful excuses for file sharing used to defend against RIAA suits in the past. That is, it's not protecting users, it's protecting the content holders from users who claim incompetence.
Hard problem
I have a feeling this is a thankless job for IBM. It's a very, very hard problem, and the majority of the population probably doesn't understand just how hard a problem this is for a computer to solve. When the computer does respectably, but doesn't totally dominate the game, most people will probably laugh at the computer.
Re: Encryption
The article didn't mention whether the data was encrypted. The point is when you're dealing with information that could spell life or death to operatives, it doesn't matter - you have to assume that encryption can and will be broken eventually, especially if there's any chance that the loss was not an accident.
Overuse
Overuse isn't just bad from a civil liberties / legal standpoint. It also increases the odds that someone will figure out how it works. This has come up before, but it seems obvious that no antivirus vendor worth their salt could leave the door open for this spyware, government sanctioned or not. So they need to keep it low enough profile that it doesn't get noticed by security vendors.
Why so shocked?
Many companies here in the states, such as GE, have always had a business-as-usual policy of firing the bottom 3% of employees every year. Even if you assume a zero-sum game, if every business is doing that, then all that happens is these people get shuffled around until they find a job they're decent at (or keep getting shuffled around indefinitely because they're incompetent and unwilling to reduce their expectations). It's only in countries that have a hard time firing people (like France, for example) that the risk involved in hiring someone who's been fired before is so high that being fired once means you'll stay unemployed for a long time.
Granted, in an economy like today's, getting fired is a much bigger deal. Which might be why they decided to do 3.5% this year instead of the 5% they claim is their usual. Really, this isn't worth reporting unless you have previous years numbers to compare too. Certainly it's ridiculous to accuse them of simply trying to avoid severance costs if you don't include previous year's numbers.
Re: Password Hasher
yes, and as soon as enough people start using password hasher, the password crackers will start running their passwords through the same hasher. It is, after all, just a hash. Much better to use a random password (as opposed to a hash, which only appears random to humans) and an app like PasswordSafe. Or better yet, public key login, which can be made arbitrarily secure by simply lengthening the key (modulo client security concerns. Yes, the private key password is still a concern, but if the attacker has access to the private key file you've already got problems).
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