I find retargeting creepy to the point that I installed an adblocker. The first time I noticed it, was when I booked a holiday to New Zealand and paid a deposit to hire a camper van online. Suddenly started noticing ads for that company everywhere online, where as previously I hadn't noticed any. Even after I came back they persisted for a while but eventually ceased. When in reality I'm unlikely to repurchase something like that for another 1-5 years.
You can set passwords for guest/root, so I think they might run mkisofs on the fly as you download. I'm sure they could cache the ISOs for more popular options without passwords though.
You can't claim that the Euro isn't a financial instrument just because you don't live in Europe. They are issued by the European Central Bank and national central banks of Eurosystem members, who in turn share the liability (explained briefly here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro#Issuing_modalities_for_ban...).
This makes the Euro a traditional currency which bitcoin isn't. That's not to say bitcoin is worthless, since its value is really whatever someone is willing to pay for it.
The only case that this makes sense for is the case of people borrowing money to access medical services (as per the original article). Though people shouldn't have to get into debt that they have no hope of repaying to access medical services. That's a problem with the health system, not something that fall under the debt market. Ultimately it seems that if you don't pay for health services through taxes, then you pay for it through other means (e.g. paying higher interest rates to the banks when you take out a loan to buy your house)
If you don't do anything physical at work then raking leaves might actually be good for you. It's exercise, fresh air and I find these kind of chores somewhat tranquillising to the mind. Same with other chores, but I'm sure there are ones I hate more than others. If there are physiological and psychological benefits of doing these chores, then it might be costing you more than the $10/hr of hiring someone else to do them. Sure you might be able to get some of the benefits by say going to the gym, but paying someone to do your gardening while you go to the gym to get the exercise you missed from doing the gardening seems a bit insane.
The four digit pin isn't to be confused with the passphrase that is used to encrypt/decrypt the keychain data. The pin is just an extra measure on top of your iCloud password to release your keychain data, along with SMS confirmation. A longer password or no password won't stop a government agency from being able to obtain the encrypted keychain data.
I just confirmed that the encryption key is different from the PIN by going into keychain and viewing a password in the iCloud chain. It is indeed my much longer pass phrase that decrypts the data.
Seems like a genuine joke to me. This is the guy behind it:
http://noqqe.de
"About
Florian Baumann (24). Arbeite bei der GfK SE und interessiere mich für allerhand Dinge unter anderem Debian, BSD, OpenSource, R, Statistik, Scripting, Hacks, Administration.
Was das alles so mit sich bringt schreibe ich manchmal hier auf. Manchmal nicht. Außerdem sammle ich hier ohne Sinn und Schema Zeug das ich nie wieder brauche."
Everyone's entitled to get out of their contract if the other party agrees to terminate it. Regardless of whether they knew he was a reporter or not, I wonder if they figured they'd already made a buck from this customer (he only had six months left or $200 to pay out) and perhaps they just have more to gain by keeping him happy by releasing him from his contract. Therefore increasing the chances that the customer will stay with them in the long run and perhaps even tell his friends about it.
Not everyone in Australia has the ability to earn $95K. There are the rare exceptions where you can get an unskilled mining job in a remote area, but that's every bogan's dream. Actually landing such a job is another matter.
That said, the minimum wage at $16.37/hr is much hire than other countries. In Melbourne at least, you'd probably gobble that up pretty quickly on living expenses.
"In relation to games, for example, the committee has not received any evidence which explains why it is almost invariably cheaper for Australian gamers to purchase and ship physical media from the United Kingdom to Australia than it is to purchase a digital copy of the same game."
Sometimed I wish I still had a dumb phone. I used to charge my phone once or twice a week, when it was just a basic GSM phone with voice and SMS. Now I have to charge my iPhone pretty much every night. I could probably get away with charging it every 1.5-2 days though running out of battery on the second day could be rather inconvenient. The biggest challenge is when I'm away from electricity for a few days. The irony is that I sometimes have to keep my phone switched off when I'm away on camping trips, so I end up being less connected than in the past.
If you read the article, it says that the NZ government 'amended the Education Act in 2011 to make it an offence to advertise or provide cheating services'. If it's happening on a large scale isn't it comparable to fraud?
On the contrary I found the internet more addictive on dial up. You waited so long for a webpage to load that the reward/payoff of finally getting what you wanted made you want to do it again. Along came broadband and an hours worth of browsing probably dropped to 15 minutes. Especially if you're looking for something very specific that involves lots of searching and narrowing your search based on information from other results.
With the NBN, the government is just a wholesaler. They just provide a physical medium and end users will still get a retail service from a private company. Besides the government has the same responsibility to adhere to privacy laws as any private company, in fact government have their own privacy requirements with additional channels to resolve complaints. Ethnically I don't see why a government that you vote for would have any less reason to respect privacy than a private company (who you pay money to). Finally, the government could just pass legislation to monitor/censor within a private network, so it doesn't really matter whether it is public or private from this perspective. It's more a matter of voting for the right representatives.
He doesn't come across as the smartest cookie by any means (making non-strategic comments to the media), though that shouldn't deprive anyone of fair justice.
Wages are only part (I've heard 50% before) of the cost of hiring. There are other expenses like training, desk space, insurance, etc. So I can't imagine that it'd be much easier getting an unpaid position as a paid one. At the very least there'd have to be some expectation that you'd offer a return on any training you receive. If you've got the potential, they'd probably just pay you. There's nothing stopping them from employing casually or on a short term contract to alleviate risk. Taking people on for free might even violate labour laws in some jurisdictions.
Volunteering for a not-for-profit is a different matter of course.
You could allow invites, then use subsequent content to determine spam vs non-spam. Block content when its spam and notify the user, blacklist the JID where it came from and eventually domains where there is a high proportion of spam. Also allow users to report spammers. You could possibly even get clever and learn to recognise patterns in the JIDs and domains chosen by spammers, but this is bound to block legitimate content as well.
You could perhaps increase the requirements for sending invites, such as having the recipients server send a CAPTCHA, although spammers seem to be able to get around CAPTCHAs anyway. Perhaps there would be some other solutions that I haven't thought of.
Sure the world may get by, but federated IM should be the future of online communications, possibly even more so than email. People love to chat online, SMS, iMessage, etc. But these systems shouldn't be so fragmented into isolated little islands. Apple's iMessage shouldn't even exist and should just redirect people to an XMPP service, while SMS should just be seen as a legacy.
Not very useful at all. To accurately measure temperature you really need a Stevenson screen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen). But furthermore, this needs to be located in a good location with attributes such as good air circulation, lack of buildings, concrete, trees, etc. It's often impossible to meet all these conditions in an urban area, which means you're really measuring a micro climate. While there are some sites that crowd-source data from personal weather stations, there's really no guarantee that people have followed good guide lines with the placement and installation of their weather station. It's sometimes obvious when this is occurring because you see some pretty large variations in temperature in more or less the same neighbourhood.
The barometer gives you better resolution on the Z pos. So it's useful for measuring changes in altitude and the like, provided the weather conditions don't change (resulting in a change in atmospheric pressure). Though without some kind of calibration, you can't determine your altitude from the barometer alone. It can also be useful to calibrate when enough GPS satellites are visible, then continue providing the altitude, even when there aren't enough satellites in view.
You can put controls on public monopolies that you can't with private ones, such as making them accountable to the voting public. Even the free market is regulated by the government in an attempt to create a level playing field. When it comes to telecommunications though, it's a natural monopoly since it's not really economical to connect each house to multiple underground fibre networks (though the redundancy would be nice :D).
Your assessment that it's social conditioning and not an inherent disadvantage is consistent with my own observations. The fact that different countries have vastly different percentage make up of females suggest it is purely a cultural thing.
Unfortunately once such a pattern is established it's hard to break. I myself find the lack of diversity in the field to be off putting. I can't imagine what it'd be like for females.
This doesn't surprise me. In Europe it's not uncommon to find women in computer science or engineering. In the US it's not unheard of. In Australia it's extremely rare and most of those that you do find were born overseas.
This thinking that people should be happy to work at a token wage than not at all worries me a bit. It might be okay for some teenagers who live at home with their parents and have their basic needs covered, but what about people who won't cover their cost of living with such a small amount?
Where I live the minimum wage is $15.96 an hour and it is not really even possible to live on that and have any quality of life.
I live in a metric country so I agree with everything you say, though a metric only tape measure is possibly less important. Actually I have two tape measures handy, one is metric only and the other has metric and imperial units. I think you'd expect to see both units for quite some time after conversion. Interestingly the one that is metric only is a style that tradesmen often have. I gather if you are measuring things all the time, you'd only want to deal with one set of units. So perhaps the option of having a metric only tape measure is still useful.
I wonder if the Gimli glider incident had anything to do with imperial units being the preferred unit in the US. In any case I think the aviation industry would be well across this issue by now, given they would have to deal with conversion all the time on international flights between the US and metric countries. There is the benefit of hindsight with the Gimli incident, so the same mistakes need not be repeated.
How about 5ft7 vs 170cm. The later seems easier to express to me. If only rough accuracy is required then you only really need to take note of the first two digits. Incidentally converting between the two is quite messy; first you must learn that 1ft = 12 inches, then multiply the 5 by 12 then add 7 then multiply by 2.54. Where as to convert a metric figure to imperial, it does not matter so much whether you are starting out in metres or centimetres.