People of Quebec, take a look at the previous story: http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...

You can figure out a way if they really manage to get ISPs to block the gambling sites.

It's a done deal. Both Obama and GOP are supporting it. Most Democrats too. But for Warren and may be Sanders there is no opposition. It is going to pass.

Any career choice is a bundle of pros and cons. Choose the one that suits your temperament and talent.

You can't get MBA's pay if you avoid meetings like a techie. You can have the freedom to work on what is interesting to you only when you are an academic working for wages far below prevailing industry wages.

If you have some skill/talent where programming/coding acts as force multiplier, you are set. You can be techie all your life. If your only skill is generic programming, be prepared to ward of the young and unwashed masses gunning for your job, try to move out of the way to management.

What the New York company should do is to create a foreign shell corporation. Then sell the "Work Better" franchise to its own wholly owned foreign subsidiary. Now that foreign investor has standing to sue the federal government for the "loss of potential profits". Best of all the suit will be arbitrated by a council of lawyers, one selected by its cronies in Washington, one by the foreign subsidiary and the third by mutual consent. The same panelists might work as lawyers for other trade disputes at the same time. The lawyers pleading before them could be sitting in other arbitration panels where these panelists are pleading as lawyers. It is all done in a chummy atmosphere with clinking of champagne glasses, silver cutlery on bone china dishes and with Chef Anatole doling out Migonette de poulet petit Duc and Neige aux perles des Alpes with Salade d'endive et de celeri

You can't lose a case there if you tried. And it is not reviewable or appealable to any court in the USA including the Supreme Court.

You think it is a parody from The Onion? It is what TPP does. Only foreign investors can sue the federal government seeking compensation for any change in the law or its implementation by any body (federal, state or local). They can demand compensation for not just actual losses, but for loss of hypothetical future profits their business plan assumed.

Instead these dim wits are appealing to US patent and trade mark office as a domestic investor. Such pointy haired bosses bring shame to all MBAs.

Thanks.

When it comes to standards, agreement to follow the standard is as important, sometimes more important than what the standard is. Width of twin beds, or diameters of hose pipes etc, half in inch? or 12 mm? INBD. In more complex products, be it engine lubricant temperature vs viscosity profile or HDTV protocol, we need some impartial body which has no dog in the race to set the standard. SAE for lubricants, ACM for ASCII codes, or IEEE for communication protocols. Further the standards should be free, as in beer, unburdened by IP/patent liability.

What Microsoft did in OO-XML was to encapsulate its old binary data files inside XML tags. Some of the old Word file formats do not have any explicitly defined structure or behavior. If you feed that binary data to old Word executable, what it does is what the standard is. No one else can implement that data without having the actual old Word binary executables. Even if Microsoft agrees to release all the old binary executables for all to use, it still would not run in Linux. Microsoft has lost its original source code, and it could not be recompiled in linux, it looks like. Even Microsoft is not able to get a fully compliant MsOffice for Linux.

It is completely to wrong to claim OO-XML is a "standard" in any definition of "standard" we engineers have come to understand. But Microsoft muddied the well, employed very articulate lawyers to confuse the issue. It was all pointy haired bosses and lawyer talk.

Those days it was difficult to believe that Microsoft could be tamed. But eventually it was

According to TPP pushed by Obama and supported by GOP, if foreign company invested in these medallions and they lose value because of some change in the law/regulation they can sue the federal government for compensation. This bail out is not available for domestic investors. Only foreign investors can do this. And only the foreign investor has the standing to sue, not unions, not labor activists, not local governments. And they will be judged by fellow lawyers who could be representing other parties at the same time.

When you condense a couple of PhD theses into four lines ... something will be lost. As others pointed out simple design, not loading it up crap, aggressively fighting link spammers, typo squatters, etc kept it up.

No they were not as good as google in the old days.

It is not mysterious once the algorithm has been explained.

It was significantly different from what others were doing.

If you searched for "battle of midway" in all other engines, they would count how many times the phrase "battle of midway" appears in a web page and rank it based on that number. Google would search all the links in all the web pages that have the phrase "battle of midway" and find the most referred to site for that phrase. That is how it ranked a site. This was radically different. It earned Ph Ds for the founders. That was why Google's "I am feeling lucky" hit was better than first 100 results returned by Altavista.

Back in 2000-2005, Microsoft looked invincible. The shenanigans they pulled, deliberately creating OO-XML to dilute OpenOffice. Claimed there should be competition in standards too, conflated issues. It was a trying time, it was frustrating time. I could not imagine how it could lose, having sewn up the corporate market up.

Eventually it was cut down to size. It did not go bankrupt or anything, it still produces enormous cash flow, but somehow it could not mess up the market as it was able to earlier. At this point, even I don't care about Microsoft.

In the technology world, the title King-Of-The-Hill is quite fleeting. There are serious competitors to Google, especially in the overseas market.

Then users will slowly realize that the Google's search results are not trustworthy and they will move away from Google as the search engine. The market will correct itself.

Greatest asset Google has is the trust it has earned over the years. If it misuses it it will lose the trust and the company will lose. I am not saying Google will not engage in such behavior. All I am saying is, there are natural constraints and market feedback against abuse. So we do not need any serious government action to correct it. All that government sanction and fines and browser selection dialog did not cut Microsoft down to size. A competitor did. Google has good competition from Facebook, Twitter and other social media muscling into the internet ad business and search business. That will keep Google in check more than any remedy proposed by a professor, or a lobbyist, or a judge or a legislator.

The value of 1.5 is equal to 2 for small values of 2.0

I thought the conductor just waved a baton in some strange patterns and got paid handsomely for that. He is so ashamed for getting paid so much for doing so little he does not dare show his face to the audience, and turns his back to them. Never knew it was his job to tune all the instruments of the entire orchestra before the concert.

Right now as it stands, electric cars do not make financial sense, for the same price you could get a much nicer gasoline car. That much is true.

But the IC engine tech and transmission technologies are essentially tapped out. They have been refined for so long, there is not much of cost savings you could squeeze there. Same is true for electric motors, they are 100 years old, but they are new for automobile traction application. Some small savings and fine tuning can be expected. And electric motors are inherently cheaper and more versatile than IC engine+transmission. The battery technology has just started and it is still in the exponential cost reduction phase. So electric cars are going to get much cheaper in the future.

The IC engine based car market has some inertia working for it. Lots of drivers, whose usage profile does not warrant 300 mile range and 10 minute fill up are still buying IC engine cars due to inertial, marketing, range anxiety etc. 90% of the cars put in less than 100 miles a day for 360 days out a year. They would be better of renting gasoline cars for the few days they do need it. But their traditional thinking and risk aversion if subsidizing and amortizing the IC engine market fixed costs.

This is not a pretty place to be from market share stand point for the IC engines. Market could just collapse rapidly. Remember the collapse of steam locomotives market to diesel electric in mere 10 years. Recall the collapse of public transit trolley and street car systems.

As people start taking up electric cars, the fixed costs of IC engine market will be borne by lesser and lesser number of people. Traction battery market would benefit by swelling ranks of new users.

It is reasonable to ban them from roller coaster rides. But the whole park? What gives?

Insurance rates of cars and home are high in high crime areas, there is no federally subsidized flood insurance counterparts to high crime areas.