It was more the irrelevant crap Facebook started pushing to keep your attention than anything else. And I found it increasingly creepy. Overall, I didn't find it a net positive in my life, and I didn't think it was particularly good for my mental health either.
Well, I can only speak for my own experience many months back. I'd certainly be interested to know if people who recently got a facebook begging email see the same thing.
I was shocked that when I received one of these facebook emails, that clicking on the link didn't prompt me for a login password. It took me straight into the account with zero authentication. I hadn't logged in in several years, so there were no cookies or anything local. Would not be hard to trawl for these and take over a lot of accounts?
I got one of these last year. It was a good reminder to log in and completely delete my account for good, after not using it for several years. I did the same for Google+ just last week. I came to the realisation that while superficially convenient, they weren't adding much value to my life and were in many respects a net negative. Facebook in particular had become a cesspool of irrelevant time-wasting nonsense. Finally deleting them all felt quite liberating. Like I'm no longer being spied on by super creepy people, though I'm sure they'll still try their best to track me.
It can certainly be overkill on low end systems. But its features are pretty great, and quite a few of them are useful even on a single disc/SSD setup. Like every filesystem, it makes a bunch of tradeoffs and you need to decide if they are acceptable or if another filesystem would be more appropriate for your needs. If you want to use some of those features, it can still make sense to use it. Lastly, the memory usage you mentioned is mainly an issue for ZFS on Linux where there's duplication in the page cache and the ARC; on FreeBSD it's much lower and is better integrated with the rest of the kernel memory management. You can tune it to use very little memory (with some performance tradeoffs, obviously).
The incompatibility is massively overblown. It's just another third-party kernel module, and isn't a big deal. Have a read of some of the previous discussions about it.
systemd was what pushed me into trying out FreeBSD seriously for the first time, three years ago, after 15+ years of Debian as a user and develop. So many stupid problems. FreeBSD was like a breath of fresh air, and I wish I'd tried it out years ago. Today, I'm using FreeBSD increasingly, contributing to the ports here and there, and finding it to be mostly pretty good. Not as polished as Debian in every respect, but the package manager is continually improving and it's on a par with apt at this point. And being able to install straight onto ZFS is huge; Debian and Ubuntu need to get this into their installers.
Have you seen how many bank branches have closed down entirely? In Scotland, the RBS have closed something like two thirds of their branches over the last couple of years, and the other banks are doing the same. On the street I work on, I've seen Clydesdale, RBS and Lloyds all vanish over the last year or so. With ATMs and online banking, their reason to exist is mostly gone. If I need to cash a cheque I need to travel to the one remaining branch in the city centre. Employment in banks was a dead end two decades ago, when ATMs removed most of the need to see a cashier, and it ceased to be a good career and became the same status as a supermarket checkout person. Now those jobs have finally been taken as well. Sucks to be a business with nowhere to deposit your takings.
Thanks for posting this. I've read through it all and you're absolutely right, it is damning. I hope that they win this case. Even if they don't, it serves to show that the workplace culture of Google is absolutely terrible, and that I'm glad they didn't offer me a job; I didn't get good vibes when I interviewed with them, some of the people were just weird. Why are all these people spending their work time pushing their left-wing progressive ideology in everyone's faces (I deliberately avoid calling it "liberal", because it's anything but). Why have so many places permitted politics and SJWs to become part of work life? Surely we are there to do our jobs, rather than engage in other people's politics?
I'm in a similar situation in the place I work. Allowing people to bring politics into the workplace, from co-workers, to direct managers and up, is deeply divisive and unpleasant. It leads to a workplace where one group has free reign to belittle, insult, marginalise and bully people in the other camp, all with the tacit approval of higher-ups. It doesn't make for a friendly environment. It's effectively sanctioned discrimination. As the indictment presents evidence in detail, in Google's case this was with the knowledge or HR and senior management, who turned a blind eye at best, and tacitly and overtly encouraged it at worst. It's bad, and Damore I think has good grounds for the legal proceedings based upon that. Discovery might produce even more.
No, not at all. Ironic perhaps. Mostly rather Orwellian and scary. This type of situation is far from uncommon, this is just a high-profile one that made the news. The western world was for a long time a bastion for freedom of thought and expression. With certain opinions being suppressed like this, we seem to be on a path to the type of repression last seen on the other side of the Iron Curtain. His opinions here weren't even hateful or particularly controversial, but to the minority group of people who instigated his firing, they are to be stamped on at all costs. That isn't equality, and that isn't freedom. It's tyranny and suppression.
I think by using the term "toxic" you're already biasing any responses you might get. I would want any environment like aircraft design to be robust and challenging. Not all opinions and ideas have equal merit; some are bad, some are stupid and dangerous. When it comes to engineering, I'd want all proposals to be robustly criticised, irrespective of who was making them.
Unfortunately, the current climate would probably have people disciplined or fired for questioning someone's proposal if they were in a "protected class" of some sort, and felt upset that their poor ideas had been challenged, regardless of the empirical facts and rational thought. This topic right here is due to exactly that--someone being fired for writing a rational, fact-based paper which happened to upset the wrong people. When facts and logic play second fiddle to fuzzy feelings and identity politics, I can't help but feel things have regressed, badly. This isn't progress, and it's not equality either.
I've never seen one, ever. A co-worker's FitBit is about it. The market for smart watches and luxury watches is tiny. Who wears watches anymore? Not many people that I encounter.
There has been a lot of noise, and a lot of claims that evidence exists, but I've yet to see a single concrete bit of evidence. Can you point to some that's not anecdotal hearsay?
In my experience, it's good to drink from the cup right after serving from the espresso machine (but I don't get it from McDonalds...); it's hot but not near boiling point. Using a ceramic cup helps to dissipate the heat.
It's probably better to say, it's opaque to varying degrees, transmittance varying depending upon the wavelength and tissue type. You'll notice that the white light appears red; blue light is absorbed by several common molecules including aromatic amino acids, as is green light to a lesser extent. But even red light only makes it through the fingers, which is sufficient for an oximeter, while other parts of the body are too thick and absorb all of the incident light.
My university is currently replacing all of the network, and is putting them all over the entire campus both internally and externally to give comprehensive coverage. Outside, I see clusters of them giving directional coverage at every angle. Inside, they are in every office and corridor. I have at least four or five in direct line of sight in the semi-open-plan office I occupy, probably over a dozen if you include direct line of sight to all the cells in the adjacent building. While probably fine, it does make you wonder about the total sustained dosage you're receiving throughout the entire day while being washed with microwaves from every possible angle! Bring on LiFi, then we can worry about getting random epileptic fits instead (note: this is a joke, for the humour impaired).
At least for biological studies, in theory it should all be adequately controlled for in the experimental design. But there are always surprises there when we discover odd confounding factors we didn't know to control for.
Thanks for the informative and respectful answer.
It depends, doesn't it? Consider standing waves for a moment. If you put a chocolate bar into a microwave with the turntable taken out, you can see that you get a line of holes due to the standing wave emitted by the magnetron. Seriously, try it out, and you'll see exactly how a long wavelength can cause specific localised heating in a tiny area (and you can eat the hot and gooey experimental result after). Similarly, if you look at the radiation pattern for a microstrip patch antenna as used on most mobiles, it has a high directivity and while it does radiate in all directions, it radiates most strongly in one direction for common designs.
When it comes to visible light/UV/IR, I'm reasonably well informed (it's a large part of my previous research and current job), but I'm not an RF expert. However, I'll just say that if there's one thing my PhD taught me, it was how little I truly know in any area, least of all my own areas of expertise. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss things just because the answer *seems* clear and obvious. The theory might be obvious for the general case, but often there are subtleties we don't appreciate or understand for specific situations, and when it comes to the subtle interactions of EM radiation with living tissue, we don't yet know the full story. When you look at previous animal experiments to determine if mobile emissions are harmful, many of them aren't even close to modelling the effect of holding a phone to the ear, or sitting in a pocket, for extended periods. Personally, I'll be reserving judgement until we have more information; but it might take a while to get enough data to draw statistically meaningful correlations given the low incidence. While on the face of it the concerns look unlikely to be true, I would not be at all surprised if we eventually identify e.g. specific combinations of transmitter designs (or unit-specific defects) and usage patterns which are problematic over an extended period.
You're thinking about "heat" too generally. Suppose you raise the temperature by a degree in a bulk volume, and that's survivable. But what about highly-localised but larger increases in small volumes such as a few cubic micrometres? Such as you might get if an EM source was present in a fixed position for an extended period. While the inverse square law has been mentioned a few times in other comments, this is only true... in a vacuum. Structures in the body can scatter, focus, absorb and reflect EM radiation in all sorts of different ways. It's incredibly easy to give a glib answer, but the body is a vastly complex set of structures and so assuming it's equally true here is I think a bit naive and simplistic. We actually use some of these properties to do label-free imaging of collagen, for example; I've done it with a multi-photon microscope using a tuneable Ti-Sapphire mode-locked femtosecond pulsed laser and it can image living skin structures beautifully using second-order harmonics. If you switch from a raster scan to a fixed point you can see the cell contents start to convect from the heating, before they boil away and the sample is ruined. That's under extreme artificial conditions, but it does make one wonder if similar processes can occur in the real world. By the way, while cells can survive temperature drops all the way to freezing point without much ill effect (cellular processes slow down), rises are a different matter since it increases the instability of all sorts of protein, DNA and RNA structures--folding and inter-molecular associations. It only needs a transient increase in the wrong place at the wrong time to disrupt something critical, and then it's all a matter of probability. There's a large correlation between temperature and throat cancer incidence in drinkers of hot beverages such as tea and coffee vs cold for example, with higher temperatures (tea without milk) having a higher correlation. What does that imply for heating induced by other methods? I don't know, but I do know that "1-2 degrees of extra heat is not going to cause cancer" as you wrote is not something that I would be confident in stating since biology is never that black and white.
The L and S bands used for mobile communications are classed as microwaves. But it's not really that important. Both microwaves and lower frequency RF are energy inputs which can impart energy (heating) to a system even if the precise mechanisms differ. What about second- and third-order harmonic generation in ordered structures such as collagen connective tissue in the skin? When you have a transmitter sitting still in close proximity to the body, it's important to consider the effects it might have. Just like you get a hotspot in the centre of a microwave even with a stirrer, is there a focus adjacent to the phone antenna? Also note that even if the chances of disregulation are exceedingly unlikely, it only needs to happen once in a single cell. And while I'm no genius, I do have a PhD and spent some time working on cancer-related projects in a pharma company; I'm not stupid as you claim. General heating doesn't cause much damage; the body can detect it and respond with heat-shock proteins to cope. But what about sustained and highly-localised energy inputs? Is it sufficient to unfold or permanently denature some critical regulatory protein? Terahertz radiation can unwind DNA, as can raising the temperature; the helix is stabilised primarily through dipole interactions and it's easy to disrupt (see: PCR). Can that also extend to repressed genes in heterochromatin? It isn't stupid to ask such questions, though it's very hard to answer them experimentally.
Cancer is caused by far more than ionising radiation. Is it within the realm of possibility that localised heating of cell contents by microwaves could cause damage to cell machinery for replication control? Or cause localised unwinding of DNA to expose repressed genes for transcription? Both are possible.
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PayPal was the primary reason I didn't use eBay for over 15 years. As well as all the other reasons.
It was more the irrelevant crap Facebook started pushing to keep your attention than anything else. And I found it increasingly creepy. Overall, I didn't find it a net positive in my life, and I didn't think it was particularly good for my mental health either.
Well, I can only speak for my own experience many months back. I'd certainly be interested to know if people who recently got a facebook begging email see the same thing.
I was shocked that when I received one of these facebook emails, that clicking on the link didn't prompt me for a login password. It took me straight into the account with zero authentication. I hadn't logged in in several years, so there were no cookies or anything local. Would not be hard to trawl for these and take over a lot of accounts?
I got one of these last year. It was a good reminder to log in and completely delete my account for good, after not using it for several years. I did the same for Google+ just last week. I came to the realisation that while superficially convenient, they weren't adding much value to my life and were in many respects a net negative. Facebook in particular had become a cesspool of irrelevant time-wasting nonsense. Finally deleting them all felt quite liberating. Like I'm no longer being spied on by super creepy people, though I'm sure they'll still try their best to track me.
Pretty trivial to dump the screen RAM and then tweak it before taking a photograph. Copying the digits out of another dump isn't hard.
It can certainly be overkill on low end systems. But its features are pretty great, and quite a few of them are useful even on a single disc/SSD setup. Like every filesystem, it makes a bunch of tradeoffs and you need to decide if they are acceptable or if another filesystem would be more appropriate for your needs. If you want to use some of those features, it can still make sense to use it. Lastly, the memory usage you mentioned is mainly an issue for ZFS on Linux where there's duplication in the page cache and the ARC; on FreeBSD it's much lower and is better integrated with the rest of the kernel memory management. You can tune it to use very little memory (with some performance tradeoffs, obviously).
The incompatibility is massively overblown. It's just another third-party kernel module, and isn't a big deal. Have a read of some of the previous discussions about it.
systemd was what pushed me into trying out FreeBSD seriously for the first time, three years ago, after 15+ years of Debian as a user and develop. So many stupid problems. FreeBSD was like a breath of fresh air, and I wish I'd tried it out years ago. Today, I'm using FreeBSD increasingly, contributing to the ports here and there, and finding it to be mostly pretty good. Not as polished as Debian in every respect, but the package manager is continually improving and it's on a par with apt at this point. And being able to install straight onto ZFS is huge; Debian and Ubuntu need to get this into their installers.
Have you seen how many bank branches have closed down entirely? In Scotland, the RBS have closed something like two thirds of their branches over the last couple of years, and the other banks are doing the same. On the street I work on, I've seen Clydesdale, RBS and Lloyds all vanish over the last year or so. With ATMs and online banking, their reason to exist is mostly gone. If I need to cash a cheque I need to travel to the one remaining branch in the city centre. Employment in banks was a dead end two decades ago, when ATMs removed most of the need to see a cashier, and it ceased to be a good career and became the same status as a supermarket checkout person. Now those jobs have finally been taken as well. Sucks to be a business with nowhere to deposit your takings.
Thanks for posting this. I've read through it all and you're absolutely right, it is damning. I hope that they win this case. Even if they don't, it serves to show that the workplace culture of Google is absolutely terrible, and that I'm glad they didn't offer me a job; I didn't get good vibes when I interviewed with them, some of the people were just weird. Why are all these people spending their work time pushing their left-wing progressive ideology in everyone's faces (I deliberately avoid calling it "liberal", because it's anything but). Why have so many places permitted politics and SJWs to become part of work life? Surely we are there to do our jobs, rather than engage in other people's politics? I'm in a similar situation in the place I work. Allowing people to bring politics into the workplace, from co-workers, to direct managers and up, is deeply divisive and unpleasant. It leads to a workplace where one group has free reign to belittle, insult, marginalise and bully people in the other camp, all with the tacit approval of higher-ups. It doesn't make for a friendly environment. It's effectively sanctioned discrimination. As the indictment presents evidence in detail, in Google's case this was with the knowledge or HR and senior management, who turned a blind eye at best, and tacitly and overtly encouraged it at worst. It's bad, and Damore I think has good grounds for the legal proceedings based upon that. Discovery might produce even more.
No, not at all. Ironic perhaps. Mostly rather Orwellian and scary. This type of situation is far from uncommon, this is just a high-profile one that made the news. The western world was for a long time a bastion for freedom of thought and expression. With certain opinions being suppressed like this, we seem to be on a path to the type of repression last seen on the other side of the Iron Curtain. His opinions here weren't even hateful or particularly controversial, but to the minority group of people who instigated his firing, they are to be stamped on at all costs. That isn't equality, and that isn't freedom. It's tyranny and suppression.
I think by using the term "toxic" you're already biasing any responses you might get. I would want any environment like aircraft design to be robust and challenging. Not all opinions and ideas have equal merit; some are bad, some are stupid and dangerous. When it comes to engineering, I'd want all proposals to be robustly criticised, irrespective of who was making them. Unfortunately, the current climate would probably have people disciplined or fired for questioning someone's proposal if they were in a "protected class" of some sort, and felt upset that their poor ideas had been challenged, regardless of the empirical facts and rational thought. This topic right here is due to exactly that--someone being fired for writing a rational, fact-based paper which happened to upset the wrong people. When facts and logic play second fiddle to fuzzy feelings and identity politics, I can't help but feel things have regressed, badly. This isn't progress, and it's not equality either.
I've never seen one, ever. A co-worker's FitBit is about it. The market for smart watches and luxury watches is tiny. Who wears watches anymore? Not many people that I encounter.
There has been a lot of noise, and a lot of claims that evidence exists, but I've yet to see a single concrete bit of evidence. Can you point to some that's not anecdotal hearsay?
In my experience, it's good to drink from the cup right after serving from the espresso machine (but I don't get it from McDonalds...); it's hot but not near boiling point. Using a ceramic cup helps to dissipate the heat.
Did you actually read the contents in detail, because the "tested processors" are not all equally vulnerable.
If you need to use a pseudonym to protect yourself from the wonderful and inclusive Rust community, then there is something very, very wrong with it.
It's probably better to say, it's opaque to varying degrees, transmittance varying depending upon the wavelength and tissue type. You'll notice that the white light appears red; blue light is absorbed by several common molecules including aromatic amino acids, as is green light to a lesser extent. But even red light only makes it through the fingers, which is sufficient for an oximeter, while other parts of the body are too thick and absorb all of the incident light.
My university is currently replacing all of the network, and is putting them all over the entire campus both internally and externally to give comprehensive coverage. Outside, I see clusters of them giving directional coverage at every angle. Inside, they are in every office and corridor. I have at least four or five in direct line of sight in the semi-open-plan office I occupy, probably over a dozen if you include direct line of sight to all the cells in the adjacent building. While probably fine, it does make you wonder about the total sustained dosage you're receiving throughout the entire day while being washed with microwaves from every possible angle! Bring on LiFi, then we can worry about getting random epileptic fits instead (note: this is a joke, for the humour impaired). At least for biological studies, in theory it should all be adequately controlled for in the experimental design. But there are always surprises there when we discover odd confounding factors we didn't know to control for.
Thanks for the informative and respectful answer. It depends, doesn't it? Consider standing waves for a moment. If you put a chocolate bar into a microwave with the turntable taken out, you can see that you get a line of holes due to the standing wave emitted by the magnetron. Seriously, try it out, and you'll see exactly how a long wavelength can cause specific localised heating in a tiny area (and you can eat the hot and gooey experimental result after). Similarly, if you look at the radiation pattern for a microstrip patch antenna as used on most mobiles, it has a high directivity and while it does radiate in all directions, it radiates most strongly in one direction for common designs. When it comes to visible light/UV/IR, I'm reasonably well informed (it's a large part of my previous research and current job), but I'm not an RF expert. However, I'll just say that if there's one thing my PhD taught me, it was how little I truly know in any area, least of all my own areas of expertise. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss things just because the answer *seems* clear and obvious. The theory might be obvious for the general case, but often there are subtleties we don't appreciate or understand for specific situations, and when it comes to the subtle interactions of EM radiation with living tissue, we don't yet know the full story. When you look at previous animal experiments to determine if mobile emissions are harmful, many of them aren't even close to modelling the effect of holding a phone to the ear, or sitting in a pocket, for extended periods. Personally, I'll be reserving judgement until we have more information; but it might take a while to get enough data to draw statistically meaningful correlations given the low incidence. While on the face of it the concerns look unlikely to be true, I would not be at all surprised if we eventually identify e.g. specific combinations of transmitter designs (or unit-specific defects) and usage patterns which are problematic over an extended period.
A was referring to harmonics generated when an EM source interacts with ordered biological structures. They aren't emitted by the phone.
You're thinking about "heat" too generally. Suppose you raise the temperature by a degree in a bulk volume, and that's survivable. But what about highly-localised but larger increases in small volumes such as a few cubic micrometres? Such as you might get if an EM source was present in a fixed position for an extended period. While the inverse square law has been mentioned a few times in other comments, this is only true... in a vacuum. Structures in the body can scatter, focus, absorb and reflect EM radiation in all sorts of different ways. It's incredibly easy to give a glib answer, but the body is a vastly complex set of structures and so assuming it's equally true here is I think a bit naive and simplistic. We actually use some of these properties to do label-free imaging of collagen, for example; I've done it with a multi-photon microscope using a tuneable Ti-Sapphire mode-locked femtosecond pulsed laser and it can image living skin structures beautifully using second-order harmonics. If you switch from a raster scan to a fixed point you can see the cell contents start to convect from the heating, before they boil away and the sample is ruined. That's under extreme artificial conditions, but it does make one wonder if similar processes can occur in the real world. By the way, while cells can survive temperature drops all the way to freezing point without much ill effect (cellular processes slow down), rises are a different matter since it increases the instability of all sorts of protein, DNA and RNA structures--folding and inter-molecular associations. It only needs a transient increase in the wrong place at the wrong time to disrupt something critical, and then it's all a matter of probability. There's a large correlation between temperature and throat cancer incidence in drinkers of hot beverages such as tea and coffee vs cold for example, with higher temperatures (tea without milk) having a higher correlation. What does that imply for heating induced by other methods? I don't know, but I do know that "1-2 degrees of extra heat is not going to cause cancer" as you wrote is not something that I would be confident in stating since biology is never that black and white.
The L and S bands used for mobile communications are classed as microwaves. But it's not really that important. Both microwaves and lower frequency RF are energy inputs which can impart energy (heating) to a system even if the precise mechanisms differ. What about second- and third-order harmonic generation in ordered structures such as collagen connective tissue in the skin? When you have a transmitter sitting still in close proximity to the body, it's important to consider the effects it might have. Just like you get a hotspot in the centre of a microwave even with a stirrer, is there a focus adjacent to the phone antenna? Also note that even if the chances of disregulation are exceedingly unlikely, it only needs to happen once in a single cell. And while I'm no genius, I do have a PhD and spent some time working on cancer-related projects in a pharma company; I'm not stupid as you claim. General heating doesn't cause much damage; the body can detect it and respond with heat-shock proteins to cope. But what about sustained and highly-localised energy inputs? Is it sufficient to unfold or permanently denature some critical regulatory protein? Terahertz radiation can unwind DNA, as can raising the temperature; the helix is stabilised primarily through dipole interactions and it's easy to disrupt (see: PCR). Can that also extend to repressed genes in heterochromatin? It isn't stupid to ask such questions, though it's very hard to answer them experimentally.
Cancer is caused by far more than ionising radiation. Is it within the realm of possibility that localised heating of cell contents by microwaves could cause damage to cell machinery for replication control? Or cause localised unwinding of DNA to expose repressed genes for transcription? Both are possible.