You're not wrong. I bought a Samsung blu ray player and they put out a firmware update that knocked the audio out of sync. I waited for a fix which never came so I returned the player as faulty and they replaced it with another one which was fine until it did the same firmware update. Samsung had moved on to another model and weren't updating their previous player so I was stuck with a 6 month old player that didn't work.
This is roughly my experience as well, only mine never had a firmware version that really worked. There were spots in playback (perhaps at each layer switch?) where the audio invariably dropped out on one of them, and the other one had problems with audio dropouts at the DVD layer switch. I ended up switching to LG and never had a problem after that. Unfortunately, in my case, by the time I started finding discs that each player couldn't deal with, I had owned them for a year or more, and was stuck with them.
And my Samsung TV isn't much better. Though it lasted many years, what eventually killed it was capacitor plague. In most of the industry, this was fixed by 2005. Not Samsung. They kept using junk until at *least* August of 2007. And as soon as I fixed that, I had another failure a few months later, this time caused by the T-Con board being bad. No big deal, I thought. I'll just buy a replacement board. And that one was bad. And then I replaced that, and got another bad one. It turns out that this board fails so often that "working pulls" from existing equipment are approximately *never* actually working. Fortunately, this part is used by multiple companies (presumably by anybody that ships a Samsung panel in their TVs), so there's a manufacturer that actually builds new replacement T-Con boards. But it took about a month before I got TV was working again, all because (at least according to the working theory) these chips are so sensitive to thermal stress that they end up slightly damaged when they solder them onto the boards, and as a result, they fail prematurely a few years later, without warning.
Samsung is, at this point, basically on my blacklist, right alongside companies whose products nearly started fires, had dead shorts across power pins, and other nightmares.
If you're suggesting they can induce criticality by poking debris with a claw, you're dumber than I give you credit for.
Of course you can induce criticality that way. You can hit a small chunk of uranium with a hammer and reach criticality, at least for a moment. U-235 can reach criticality with a mass as small as 780 g under the right circumstances. And the presence of water, potentially
with some amount of uranium in solution, greatly raises the risk. Of course, it would only remain critical while compressed, and so such a small criticality event would likely be a risk only to the robots, because it would be small and self-contained.
Perhaps you meant that it cannot cause a nuclear explosion (which requires not just enough material and moderation to sustain a reaction, but also for it to increase exponentially and not burn itself out in a fraction of a second).
And the only reason they got money back was they did something in previous tax years that the government wanted them to do (build and grow) and in return for doing that got to depreciate assets (probably) over x years of taxes possibly leading to refunds if the credits and depreciation exceeded income. Have we benefited from Amazon getting as big as it has and thus having a negative income tax rate at certain times. Most would argue yes.
No, I don't think we have benefitted. What we basically have created is a single company, Amazon, as a near-monopoly on all online sales of everything. Their next competitor, I believe, is Wal-Mart, whose online sales are less than a tenth that of Amazon. We have benefitted from letting Amazon become a broad company that sells everything, but at some point, those benefits started being matched by equal downsides, and that happens at about ten or fifteen percent of a given market. Amazon is now at 49.1% of all online sales. They are simply way, way too big.
More importantly, the sheer market power resulting from that online dominance means that traditional retail is basically dying en masse, with Sears, K-Mart, J.C. Penney, and Macy's all just barely surviving, if that. It won't be long before 49.1% of online sales become 49.1% of all sales. And at that point, it will be too late to fix the problem.
Tax incentives to encourage good behavior are fine. But for personal income tax, there are limits to how much you can do that. If you get below a certain threshold and you're a high wage earner, you get hit with an alternative minimum tax that effectively caps nearly all of those deductions. And the threshold has crept further and further into middle-class territory in parts of the country that have a high cost of living. Meanwhile, there is no equivalent for the richest corporations, which are principally responsible for causing that high cost of living. This is ethically and morally wrong.
We need to bring back the corporate AMT, raise the individual AMT so that it reflects current cost of living, and index it to the consumer price index or some other sensible metric. We also need to treat personal capital gains above... let's say $100k per year as ordinary income, taxed in the usual way. We need to bring back income tax deductibility, because right now, people are being effectively taxed by the federal government on money that was never theirs to begin with (because it was owed to the state), and the result is that people in high-income areas are now demanding even higher income, creating even more income disparity between rich and poor parts of the country, solely to try to make up for the colossal tax increase that President Trump passed last year (which was actually the largest personal income tax increase in American history, despite being billed as a tax "cut").
Doesn't matter unless those other taxes are higher as a result of them paying less corporate taxes and that increase is enough to more than offset the negative corporate income tax. We're still effectively paying those other taxes because Amazon is paying negative income tax.
No, you misunderstand. Instead of paying the government their corporate income tax, they're getting money BACK. They're actually paying NEGATIVE income tax. That means we're literally paying for some portion of their other tax liability.
Moreover, even if it didn't, that still wouldn't make nuclear inherently dangerous. After all, building a hydroelectric dam in a fault zone with people living downstream is also potentially a colossally bad idea.
Q: So who is paying for their employees' Social Security and SSI disability?
A: We are.
I'm more than a little bit tired of the wealthiest corporations and individuals paying proportionally less in taxes than even people in the bottom tax bracket. Giving tax breaks to help small businesses grow makes sense. Giving huge tax breaks to help one of the largest businesses in the world grow does not.
It's time for a tax revolution at the ballot box. Vote only for politicians who declare a willingness to make our tax code more fair and less protective of the wealthy. Raise capital gains taxes. Phase out corporate tax exemptions for companies earning more than 100M annually or add a business version of the alternative minimum tax. Make our tax system fair.
Meh. This has been studied to death, and study after study concludes that there is no causation. How many studies does it take before people stop being utterly terrified of letting young people do things that they consider fun, out of some bizarre puritanical fear that playing video games will somehow scar them for life?
No, they're actually kind of horrifying in many cases, in a manner that is subtle and creepy.
It looks like the algorithm is basically combining two people's faces algorithmically, using the upper half of one and the lower half of another. They might be picking one skin tone and mapping it across the other part, or they might just always pick people whose skin tone is close enough be plausible. I can't really tell.
The problem is, their algorithm isn't always combining pictures taken from exactly the same angle. As a result, the upper half of the face is just far enough off from the bottom half to put the resulting face squarely in the uncanny valley.
They are all almost plausible, but only a few of them are close enough to not cause cognitive dissonance. When I look at most of them, my eye shifts from one part to the other trying to figure out the perspective, unable to do so. They quite literally give me a headache.
I would propose a 1USD for each account that has been breached. That way small companies pay small amounts and large companies pay large amounts.
The risk is that some companies will treat this not as a fine, but rather as a fee, with small companies saying, "Yeah, but we can just pay a buck per account, and we're good," and large companies being the only ones to take security seriously.
I think it would be better for the fine to be proportional to how much effort the company spent on ensuring that your information is secure.
If the company didn't encrypt passwords when stored on disk, it should be a million dollars per account. End the company once and for all, even if they only have ten customers.
If the company had an amazing security infrastructure with multiple layers of well-thought-out crypto and somebody managed to inject JavaScript code into the client using some clever user-provided CSS that didn't quite get sanitized completely, the fine should be fractions of a cent per customer.
That way, the penalty matches the crime.
Of course, if prosecutors aren't willing to press charges, having the law won't do any good. They almost certainly could go after many of these companies under existing law, but rarely do, so it's not clear whether additional laws would make any difference.
The best to give this money to is the NSA. Hear me out. They will have an incentive to breach companies and the companies will have an incentive to make their data secure against attacks of governements world-wide.
No. Just no. I mean, I get what you're saying, but we really don't need the NSA to increase their focus on internal stuff like this, because that will necessarily draw their focus away from other, more important intelligence gathering, like routing out terrorist cells. Instead, the money should go to fund a nonprofit organization whose goal is to provide support for small companies who want to improve their security, kind of like tobacco taxes fund tobacco education campaigns.
Austin, TX has the distinct advantage of not being geographically constrained, being mostly just hilly (semi-flat) and not on any major fault lines. By contrast, the Bay Area has mountains surrounding it, plus major earthquakes that limit how high you can safely build.
Without compromising safety, IMO, it really doesn't mater how much you deregulate the Bay Area. Unless you go so far as to allow a developer to buy an entire mountain range, nuke it, and push the resulting debris off into the Pacific Ocean as an artificial peninsula, you aren't going to bring the cost of living down even close to Austin levels.
Note that if you look up Bay Area density, you may be misled. The density measurements for the Bay Area include mountainous areas that are not really suitable for high-density construction. If you take those out of the picture, the Bay Area has anywhere from 1.5x to 8x the average density of Austin, TX. If Austin starts to even approach Bay Area density, your cost of living will probably be high, too. But it won't ever do that, because it isn't land-locked.:-)
I think this is a great idea. I've been saying for years that the best way to end this data-harvesting and brokering industry is to give everyone automatic intellectual property over their personally identifiable information. If the big boys can't take it without entering into a royalties contract with you, it should be illegal and you should be able to sue them for piracy.
That's fine. Just be prepared to go back to paying actual money for every phone call, text message, chat app message, web search, and email message you send or receive. Right now, all those ads and all the data collection to support those ads are being shown to you in exchange for actual goods and services, from that website you browsed to the email you sent.
Put another way, the people of California are already getting a *HUGE* data dividend. The problem is that our elected politicians are too technologically clueless to understand it.
I'm fully in agreement with the first part — that consumers should know what is being collected, why it is being collected, and how it is being used, to the maximum extent practical. But taxing the data collection? At best, this will be noise, and at worst, it will raise the cost of advertising, thus lowering the number of advertisers and reducing the amount of ad income for websites that are already struggling to break even. Want to completely kill the newspaper industry? Well, this is a really quick way to do it.
True enough. The difference is that it was the stated aim of the Nazi government to wipe out the Jews around the world, whereas wiping out large numbers of Poles and Russians was more a side effect of wanting their territory coupled with racism that made them not see the conquered people as fully human. Both behaviors were malicious, and both were racist; one was just more overtly so.:-)
That was actually a long awaited product. If Apple was able to get that made, it would had been the first mass produced 64bit laptop. But it seems the Power PC development started to seriously lag behind Intel.
That's not quite accurate. They were behind in the mobile space, but not in the desktop space. The first Intel-based machine that could match the Quad G5's floating-point performance wasn't released until five or six years after the last PowerPC-based Mac was built. The main reason for the Intel transition was that IBM and Freescale (formerly Motorola) didn't really care about what Apple needed, whereas Intel was willing to go out of their way to get the contract.
Freescale and IBM weren't willing to do much custom work for Apple. To them, Apple was a minor customer, and they basically wanted Apple to buy whatever parts they were making, off-the-shelf, as they came. None of their existing products were competitive choices for laptops, so that was a non-starter.
Freescale knew how to build low-power devices, but their main goal was to build low-power devices for gaming consoles, with lots of special-purpose GPU-like hardware, but only mediocre G3-class or slower CPUs that couldn't compete in the real world. Apple obviously couldn't use those in laptops. And Freescale also built some chips for automotive use, but those were even less capable, and even less competitive with Intel's offerings.
IBM wanted to build more powerful hardware, because their goal was to put Power*-architecture hardware into every server in the world. Unfortunately, they had neither the technical knowledge nor the inclination to build devices with lower power budgets, because after all, why would anybody care about how much power a server uses? It stays plugged into a wall outlet all day. That would have been fine for Apple's desktops, but Apple knew that the future of personal computing was mobile, and that continuing to let their laptop offerings fall further and further behind would be a losing strategy.
So Apple basically had two choices for remaining on PowerPC: Build their own CPUs or get something from P.A. Semi. Unfortunately P.A. Semi didn't ship the PA6T-1682M until 2007, by which time Apple had already fully moved to Intel. If P.A. had been able to deliver their hardware a couple of years sooner, there's a decent chance that Apple would be on PowerPC, including the iPhone, rather than a mixture of Intel and ARM. (Then again, some aspects of PowerPC performance were so abysmal (some combination of Mach messaging speed and Objective-C runtime optimization) that they might have moved anyway. Hard to say.
On the flip side, when Apple bought P.A. Semi in 2008, they got a group of people who managed to achieve G5 performance in a mobile-capable package, and that talent is likely a big part of the reason why Apple's ARM chips are staying so far out ahead of the pack.
Either way, the Freescale/IBM situation stood in stark contrast with Intel. From talking to people who were involved just above the hardware team, Intel's engineers were absolutely thrilled to work with Apple, and to improve their chips as part of that effort. For decades, their hardware had basically only been used by Windows and Linux, neither of which really were trying to push the envelope in terms of what the hardware could do. Apple, by contrast, kept asking them for new hardware features (debug counters, timers, etc.) to help them improve performance and battery life on the platform as a whole. It was an entirely different dynamic.
So basically, the reason for the Intel transition was that IBM and Freescale weren't willing to spend the effort to keep PowerPC viable as a mobile device architecture, and as a result, Apple switched to a company that was willing to build usable laptop chips.
Give the exact same phone as the 6S plus with a longer battery and a faster CPU and I'll buy it before it ships. But no headphone jack and no touch ID is a deal breaker. I'm simply no wasting money on a phone which removes features. iPhone 6S Plus was the best phone Apple ever made. I'll keep repairing the one I have until Apple makes a legitimate replacement.
I'd argue that the iPhone SE was the best phone Apple ever made, and that the 6S is a little too big, but either way, we're basically talking about the same phone. I, too, will keep using a 6S for the foreseeable future.
Lack of USB-C is a dealbreaker for me. When an iPhone model supports that, wired headphones will once again be interoperable between current iPhones and my Mac without plugging and unplugging a dongle. Until then, I'll keep using the last version of iOS hardware that meets my minimum requirements, which is the 6S.
Face ID - nice feature, but doesn't actually add convenience.
Much less convenient, IMO. You have to look at it to authenticate, which rules out all sorts of casual glance uses. Most of the time, by the time I actually take a look at my phone, I've already signed in with my thumb and tapped the home button, then double-tapped it to get back to the first home screen. That same action requires at least five seconds of extra staring at the device with Face ID.
Wireless charging - useless feature since I can't charge while watching the phone.
Not entirely useless, but very nearly so. And it is certainly not worth using a third again more electricity. My power bill is high enough as it is.
Edge to edge screen - means I can't use a protective cover to avoid breaking the glass and still be able to reach all parts of the screen. Also, holding the phone from the sides becomes difficult as it interferes with the text.
Strongly agreed. I wouldn't mind less top and bottom bezel, but reducing the side bezels mostly just makes the phone harder to hold.
With that said, Apple could solve those problems in a matter of minutes. All they would have to do is add an adjustable bezel mode with a user-controllable toggle in Control Center/Settings. If the user wants to use the full screen, let the app see the full screen. If the user prefers a bezel, tell the app that the screen size is smaller, disable the outer pixels, and shrink the usable screen space.
Even better, they could make the device be smart about it, and learn the user's bezel mode preferences on a per-app, per-orientation basis. When you're watching Netflix and holding it differently, you might disable the bezel and use the full screen (or shrunk, if desired, to avoid the notch). When you're using an app where the sides of the screen matter, enable the bezel and get slightly less screen real estate wrapped in black bars on the sides.
That's what annoys me most about the new Apple designs. It isn't just that their design changes are problematic, but also that lately, they're completely failing to mitigate the negative impact of those changes, even when the solutions to those problems should be glaringly obvious and relatively trivial.
Swiping gestures to replace the home - means you have to swipe either side of the phone. If I use the phone right handed, I can manage this, but left handed, I end up dropping it all the time.
Yeah. Anybody who has ever tried to do an edge swipe on a phone in a protective case knows why that design change was a really, really bad idea. Edge swipes are a hopelessly clumsy gesture, and a very poor substitute for a physical button. But that, too, would also be improved greatly if you could make the bezel bigger in software. It still won't be eyes-free like the physical home button is, and thus it will always be inferior, but a software-adjustable bezel would at least make it usable.
The real rationale is that moving to USB-C won't encourage enough people to get an iPhone that it's worth losing the lock-in of Lightning and creating confusion with another port switch. I remember the switch from 30-pin to Lightning and how many end-users were and still are confused by that: "The box says 'iPhone compatible' so why does it not work?".
You're close. The real rationale is that Apple makes $4 off of every (properly licensed) Lightning cable sold. That's a lot of bucks.
Actually, it's very much the other way around, in my experience. Standard Lightning connectors are physically too small to allow for cables with a usable wire gauge. As a result, you have a choice between noncompliant Lightning cables with oversized connectors that don't fit through the holes in many popular iPhone cases or flimsy cables that don't last nearly as long as USB-C cables (or 30-pin iPhone cables).
Also, I've had lots of problems with the authentication chip in Lightning cables failing, resulting in devices refusing to recognize them. I've never experienced similar failures with USB-C cables (even though they contain similar chips). My suspicion is that this is caused by so many Lightning cables being unauthorized knock-offs that try to mimic the behavior of the official chips, whereas USB-C is an open standard, and there are proper, authorized implementations of the authentication chip that are readily available. However, this could just be a different manifestation of the wires inside the cable breaking from being too thin. It's hard to say.
Either way, I've found USB-C to be consistently better than Lightning in every measurable way. Maybe you're confusing USB-C with micro-USB?
Yeah, USB-C combines all the benefits of not knowing what your cable does with the freedom to plug it into whatever you want and have it silently fail to do what you expect.
Great connector, abysmally poor planning.
I really have to wonder what kinds of bizarre garbage hardware folks are buying where they constantly have problems with USB-C not working. From what I've seen, everything is either a cell phone charger that only works with some subset of cell phones or a laptop charger that works with anything.
Just throw away the Quick Charge junk and stick with standards-compliant hardware, and you basically won't encounter any problems, in my experience, or at least not significant problems. Devices might not charge quite as fast in certain combinations, but that's not the same thing as not working, and that's usually good enough 99% of the time. And of course, if you're buying hardware, it isn't really all that hard to buy stuff that works at fully speed with your device.
iPads and MacBooks use USB-C now, so even if you are a 100% Apple person you will need to carry two chargers/cables.
Not to mention that for those of us who prefer wired headphones (for any of a hundred reasons), you can use the same USB-C wired headphones with your Mac and any Android phone, but you'll need a dongle if you use a Mac and an iPhone.
The user experience resulting from keeping the iPhone line on Lightning while the Mac and iPad line move to USB-C is downright bad, and getting worse by the day. Apple should have dumped Lightning for USB-C on the iPhone at least three (and arguably four) years ago. At this point, they're so far behind the technology curve that I'm starting to wonder if Apple's management decisions are being made by Magic-8-Ball. Instead of innovating, the iPhone is playing catch-up, and losing. Not good.
They might have, but doing so wouldn't have avoided the problem -- even with a ptr+length scheme, you're still dealing with pointer artihmentic, and so it's still quite easy to mess up and read/write outside of your buffer's bounds, if you aren't careful.
Yeah, but other languages that existed at the time (Pascal) had run-time bounds checking, and there's no reason C couldn't have done that too, with the addition of a slightly richer string syntax. Though they couldn't have anticipated the long-term security implications of that decision, the folks who created C knew that it was a tradeoff. They chose a slightly smaller footprint (no length bytes) and slightly better performance over robustness.
Around 70 percent of all the vulnerabilities in Microsoft products... are memory safety issues.
They can't remember how to code safely.:-)
Not at all. They have a huge legacy codebase. Rewriting all those strcpy and strncpy calls to strlcpy takes time.
And except for modern C++, C and C++ historically lacked reference counting, which gives you the additional joy of debugging use-after-free violations. These bugs are remarkably easy to cause and remarkably hard to detect until something just randomly crashes.
Like me, the next time someone "forgets" about the other Holocaust casualties, politely remind them about the 14million blacks, the gypsies, and the gays. We can never forget.
That's kind of a misleading statement. Jews were the largest group, followed by Soviet civilians, then Soviet POWs, then Poles, then Serbs, but those other four groups at least arguably weren't genocide, because they were rounded up and targeted as part of stealing the land that they owned, rather than because of their race/religion/ethnicity specifically.
The three groups you mentioned were, but they made up a very small percentage of the total. There's only record of one person of African descent being a victim of the holocaust, and only 20 imprisoned. Romani holocaust victims numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Homosexual victims numbered only a few thousand (estimated 5-15K).
So it's not that we forget the other victims so much as that it is a whole lot easier to describe the holocaust generically as an attempt to exterminate a race than add a footnote that says "along with a few other minority populations that each made up a tiny fraction of a percent of the population". It waters down the message without adding anything meaningful to the overall point, which is that discriminating against people based on race or religion is bad, and that the Nazis took that horror to a whole new level.
Slashdot Mirror
Barely less than 50%. Amazon gets the bulk of the traffic, and all the other companies are left fighting over the scraps.
This is roughly my experience as well, only mine never had a firmware version that really worked. There were spots in playback (perhaps at each layer switch?) where the audio invariably dropped out on one of them, and the other one had problems with audio dropouts at the DVD layer switch. I ended up switching to LG and never had a problem after that. Unfortunately, in my case, by the time I started finding discs that each player couldn't deal with, I had owned them for a year or more, and was stuck with them.
And my Samsung TV isn't much better. Though it lasted many years, what eventually killed it was capacitor plague. In most of the industry, this was fixed by 2005. Not Samsung. They kept using junk until at *least* August of 2007. And as soon as I fixed that, I had another failure a few months later, this time caused by the T-Con board being bad. No big deal, I thought. I'll just buy a replacement board. And that one was bad. And then I replaced that, and got another bad one. It turns out that this board fails so often that "working pulls" from existing equipment are approximately *never* actually working. Fortunately, this part is used by multiple companies (presumably by anybody that ships a Samsung panel in their TVs), so there's a manufacturer that actually builds new replacement T-Con boards. But it took about a month before I got TV was working again, all because (at least according to the working theory) these chips are so sensitive to thermal stress that they end up slightly damaged when they solder them onto the boards, and as a result, they fail prematurely a few years later, without warning.
Samsung is, at this point, basically on my blacklist, right alongside companies whose products nearly started fires, had dead shorts across power pins, and other nightmares.
Of course you can induce criticality that way. You can hit a small chunk of uranium with a hammer and reach criticality, at least for a moment. U-235 can reach criticality with a mass as small as 780 g under the right circumstances. And the presence of water, potentially with some amount of uranium in solution, greatly raises the risk. Of course, it would only remain critical while compressed, and so such a small criticality event would likely be a risk only to the robots, because it would be small and self-contained.
Perhaps you meant that it cannot cause a nuclear explosion (which requires not just enough material and moderation to sustain a reaction, but also for it to increase exponentially and not burn itself out in a fraction of a second).
No, I don't think we have benefitted. What we basically have created is a single company, Amazon, as a near-monopoly on all online sales of everything. Their next competitor, I believe, is Wal-Mart, whose online sales are less than a tenth that of Amazon. We have benefitted from letting Amazon become a broad company that sells everything, but at some point, those benefits started being matched by equal downsides, and that happens at about ten or fifteen percent of a given market. Amazon is now at 49.1% of all online sales. They are simply way, way too big.
More importantly, the sheer market power resulting from that online dominance means that traditional retail is basically dying en masse, with Sears, K-Mart, J.C. Penney, and Macy's all just barely surviving, if that. It won't be long before 49.1% of online sales become 49.1% of all sales. And at that point, it will be too late to fix the problem.
Tax incentives to encourage good behavior are fine. But for personal income tax, there are limits to how much you can do that. If you get below a certain threshold and you're a high wage earner, you get hit with an alternative minimum tax that effectively caps nearly all of those deductions. And the threshold has crept further and further into middle-class territory in parts of the country that have a high cost of living. Meanwhile, there is no equivalent for the richest corporations, which are principally responsible for causing that high cost of living. This is ethically and morally wrong.
We need to bring back the corporate AMT, raise the individual AMT so that it reflects current cost of living, and index it to the consumer price index or some other sensible metric. We also need to treat personal capital gains above... let's say $100k per year as ordinary income, taxed in the usual way. We need to bring back income tax deductibility, because right now, people are being effectively taxed by the federal government on money that was never theirs to begin with (because it was owed to the state), and the result is that people in high-income areas are now demanding even higher income, creating even more income disparity between rich and poor parts of the country, solely to try to make up for the colossal tax increase that President Trump passed last year (which was actually the largest personal income tax increase in American history, despite being billed as a tax "cut").
Doesn't matter unless those other taxes are higher as a result of them paying less corporate taxes and that increase is enough to more than offset the negative corporate income tax. We're still effectively paying those other taxes because Amazon is paying negative income tax.
No, you misunderstand. Instead of paying the government their corporate income tax, they're getting money BACK. They're actually paying NEGATIVE income tax. That means we're literally paying for some portion of their other tax liability.
Moreover, even if it didn't, that still wouldn't make nuclear inherently dangerous. After all, building a hydroelectric dam in a fault zone with people living downstream is also potentially a colossally bad idea.
Q: So who is paying for their employees' Social Security and SSI disability?
A: We are.
I'm more than a little bit tired of the wealthiest corporations and individuals paying proportionally less in taxes than even people in the bottom tax bracket. Giving tax breaks to help small businesses grow makes sense. Giving huge tax breaks to help one of the largest businesses in the world grow does not.
It's time for a tax revolution at the ballot box. Vote only for politicians who declare a willingness to make our tax code more fair and less protective of the wealthy. Raise capital gains taxes. Phase out corporate tax exemptions for companies earning more than 100M annually or add a business version of the alternative minimum tax. Make our tax system fair.
"It was a dark and stormy night."
Not just the kind of dark and stormy night that you read about in books, but the sort of messy, murky night that ends with a body count on the 405.
Meh. This has been studied to death, and study after study concludes that there is no causation. How many studies does it take before people stop being utterly terrified of letting young people do things that they consider fun, out of some bizarre puritanical fear that playing video games will somehow scar them for life?
No, they're actually kind of horrifying in many cases, in a manner that is subtle and creepy.
It looks like the algorithm is basically combining two people's faces algorithmically, using the upper half of one and the lower half of another. They might be picking one skin tone and mapping it across the other part, or they might just always pick people whose skin tone is close enough be plausible. I can't really tell.
The problem is, their algorithm isn't always combining pictures taken from exactly the same angle. As a result, the upper half of the face is just far enough off from the bottom half to put the resulting face squarely in the uncanny valley.
They are all almost plausible, but only a few of them are close enough to not cause cognitive dissonance. When I look at most of them, my eye shifts from one part to the other trying to figure out the perspective, unable to do so. They quite literally give me a headache.
The risk is that some companies will treat this not as a fine, but rather as a fee, with small companies saying, "Yeah, but we can just pay a buck per account, and we're good," and large companies being the only ones to take security seriously.
I think it would be better for the fine to be proportional to how much effort the company spent on ensuring that your information is secure.
That way, the penalty matches the crime.
Of course, if prosecutors aren't willing to press charges, having the law won't do any good. They almost certainly could go after many of these companies under existing law, but rarely do, so it's not clear whether additional laws would make any difference.
No. Just no. I mean, I get what you're saying, but we really don't need the NSA to increase their focus on internal stuff like this, because that will necessarily draw their focus away from other, more important intelligence gathering, like routing out terrorist cells. Instead, the money should go to fund a nonprofit organization whose goal is to provide support for small companies who want to improve their security, kind of like tobacco taxes fund tobacco education campaigns.
There is slightly more to it. If people are going to sleep before sunset, you'll need to block out the light from the windows. :-)
Austin, TX has the distinct advantage of not being geographically constrained, being mostly just hilly (semi-flat) and not on any major fault lines. By contrast, the Bay Area has mountains surrounding it, plus major earthquakes that limit how high you can safely build.
Without compromising safety, IMO, it really doesn't mater how much you deregulate the Bay Area. Unless you go so far as to allow a developer to buy an entire mountain range, nuke it, and push the resulting debris off into the Pacific Ocean as an artificial peninsula, you aren't going to bring the cost of living down even close to Austin levels.
Note that if you look up Bay Area density, you may be misled. The density measurements for the Bay Area include mountainous areas that are not really suitable for high-density construction. If you take those out of the picture, the Bay Area has anywhere from 1.5x to 8x the average density of Austin, TX. If Austin starts to even approach Bay Area density, your cost of living will probably be high, too. But it won't ever do that, because it isn't land-locked. :-)
That's fine. Just be prepared to go back to paying actual money for every phone call, text message, chat app message, web search, and email message you send or receive. Right now, all those ads and all the data collection to support those ads are being shown to you in exchange for actual goods and services, from that website you browsed to the email you sent.
Put another way, the people of California are already getting a *HUGE* data dividend. The problem is that our elected politicians are too technologically clueless to understand it.
I'm fully in agreement with the first part — that consumers should know what is being collected, why it is being collected, and how it is being used, to the maximum extent practical. But taxing the data collection? At best, this will be noise, and at worst, it will raise the cost of advertising, thus lowering the number of advertisers and reducing the amount of ad income for websites that are already struggling to break even. Want to completely kill the newspaper industry? Well, this is a really quick way to do it.
True enough. The difference is that it was the stated aim of the Nazi government to wipe out the Jews around the world, whereas wiping out large numbers of Poles and Russians was more a side effect of wanting their territory coupled with racism that made them not see the conquered people as fully human. Both behaviors were malicious, and both were racist; one was just more overtly so. :-)
That's not quite accurate. They were behind in the mobile space, but not in the desktop space. The first Intel-based machine that could match the Quad G5's floating-point performance wasn't released until five or six years after the last PowerPC-based Mac was built. The main reason for the Intel transition was that IBM and Freescale (formerly Motorola) didn't really care about what Apple needed, whereas Intel was willing to go out of their way to get the contract.
Freescale and IBM weren't willing to do much custom work for Apple. To them, Apple was a minor customer, and they basically wanted Apple to buy whatever parts they were making, off-the-shelf, as they came. None of their existing products were competitive choices for laptops, so that was a non-starter.
Freescale knew how to build low-power devices, but their main goal was to build low-power devices for gaming consoles, with lots of special-purpose GPU-like hardware, but only mediocre G3-class or slower CPUs that couldn't compete in the real world. Apple obviously couldn't use those in laptops. And Freescale also built some chips for automotive use, but those were even less capable, and even less competitive with Intel's offerings.
IBM wanted to build more powerful hardware, because their goal was to put Power*-architecture hardware into every server in the world. Unfortunately, they had neither the technical knowledge nor the inclination to build devices with lower power budgets, because after all, why would anybody care about how much power a server uses? It stays plugged into a wall outlet all day. That would have been fine for Apple's desktops, but Apple knew that the future of personal computing was mobile, and that continuing to let their laptop offerings fall further and further behind would be a losing strategy.
So Apple basically had two choices for remaining on PowerPC: Build their own CPUs or get something from P.A. Semi. Unfortunately P.A. Semi didn't ship the PA6T-1682M until 2007, by which time Apple had already fully moved to Intel. If P.A. had been able to deliver their hardware a couple of years sooner, there's a decent chance that Apple would be on PowerPC, including the iPhone, rather than a mixture of Intel and ARM. (Then again, some aspects of PowerPC performance were so abysmal (some combination of Mach messaging speed and Objective-C runtime optimization) that they might have moved anyway. Hard to say.
On the flip side, when Apple bought P.A. Semi in 2008, they got a group of people who managed to achieve G5 performance in a mobile-capable package, and that talent is likely a big part of the reason why Apple's ARM chips are staying so far out ahead of the pack.
Either way, the Freescale/IBM situation stood in stark contrast with Intel. From talking to people who were involved just above the hardware team, Intel's engineers were absolutely thrilled to work with Apple, and to improve their chips as part of that effort. For decades, their hardware had basically only been used by Windows and Linux, neither of which really were trying to push the envelope in terms of what the hardware could do. Apple, by contrast, kept asking them for new hardware features (debug counters, timers, etc.) to help them improve performance and battery life on the platform as a whole. It was an entirely different dynamic.
So basically, the reason for the Intel transition was that IBM and Freescale weren't willing to spend the effort to keep PowerPC viable as a mobile device architecture, and as a result, Apple switched to a company that was willing to build usable laptop chips.
I'd argue that the iPhone SE was the best phone Apple ever made, and that the 6S is a little too big, but either way, we're basically talking about the same phone. I, too, will keep using a 6S for the foreseeable future.
Lack of USB-C is a dealbreaker for me. When an iPhone model supports that, wired headphones will once again be interoperable between current iPhones and my Mac without plugging and unplugging a dongle. Until then, I'll keep using the last version of iOS hardware that meets my minimum requirements, which is the 6S.
Much less convenient, IMO. You have to look at it to authenticate, which rules out all sorts of casual glance uses. Most of the time, by the time I actually take a look at my phone, I've already signed in with my thumb and tapped the home button, then double-tapped it to get back to the first home screen. That same action requires at least five seconds of extra staring at the device with Face ID.
Not entirely useless, but very nearly so. And it is certainly not worth using a third again more electricity. My power bill is high enough as it is.
Strongly agreed. I wouldn't mind less top and bottom bezel, but reducing the side bezels mostly just makes the phone harder to hold.
With that said, Apple could solve those problems in a matter of minutes. All they would have to do is add an adjustable bezel mode with a user-controllable toggle in Control Center/Settings. If the user wants to use the full screen, let the app see the full screen. If the user prefers a bezel, tell the app that the screen size is smaller, disable the outer pixels, and shrink the usable screen space.
Even better, they could make the device be smart about it, and learn the user's bezel mode preferences on a per-app, per-orientation basis. When you're watching Netflix and holding it differently, you might disable the bezel and use the full screen (or shrunk, if desired, to avoid the notch). When you're using an app where the sides of the screen matter, enable the bezel and get slightly less screen real estate wrapped in black bars on the sides.
That's what annoys me most about the new Apple designs. It isn't just that their design changes are problematic, but also that lately, they're completely failing to mitigate the negative impact of those changes, even when the solutions to those problems should be glaringly obvious and relatively trivial.
Yeah. Anybody who has ever tried to do an edge swipe on a phone in a protective case knows why that design change was a really, really bad idea. Edge swipes are a hopelessly clumsy gesture, and a very poor substitute for a physical button. But that, too, would also be improved greatly if you could make the bezel bigger in software. It still won't be eyes-free like the physical home button is, and thus it will always be inferior, but a software-adjustable bezel would at least make it usable.
You're close. The real rationale is that Apple makes $4 off of every (properly licensed) Lightning cable sold. That's a lot of bucks.
Actually, it's very much the other way around, in my experience. Standard Lightning connectors are physically too small to allow for cables with a usable wire gauge. As a result, you have a choice between noncompliant Lightning cables with oversized connectors that don't fit through the holes in many popular iPhone cases or flimsy cables that don't last nearly as long as USB-C cables (or 30-pin iPhone cables).
Also, I've had lots of problems with the authentication chip in Lightning cables failing, resulting in devices refusing to recognize them. I've never experienced similar failures with USB-C cables (even though they contain similar chips). My suspicion is that this is caused by so many Lightning cables being unauthorized knock-offs that try to mimic the behavior of the official chips, whereas USB-C is an open standard, and there are proper, authorized implementations of the authentication chip that are readily available. However, this could just be a different manifestation of the wires inside the cable breaking from being too thin. It's hard to say.
Either way, I've found USB-C to be consistently better than Lightning in every measurable way. Maybe you're confusing USB-C with micro-USB?
Yeah, USB-C combines all the benefits of not knowing what your cable does with the freedom to plug it into whatever you want and have it silently fail to do what you expect.
Great connector, abysmally poor planning.
I really have to wonder what kinds of bizarre garbage hardware folks are buying where they constantly have problems with USB-C not working. From what I've seen, everything is either a cell phone charger that only works with some subset of cell phones or a laptop charger that works with anything.
Just throw away the Quick Charge junk and stick with standards-compliant hardware, and you basically won't encounter any problems, in my experience, or at least not significant problems. Devices might not charge quite as fast in certain combinations, but that's not the same thing as not working, and that's usually good enough 99% of the time. And of course, if you're buying hardware, it isn't really all that hard to buy stuff that works at fully speed with your device.
Not to mention that for those of us who prefer wired headphones (for any of a hundred reasons), you can use the same USB-C wired headphones with your Mac and any Android phone, but you'll need a dongle if you use a Mac and an iPhone.
The user experience resulting from keeping the iPhone line on Lightning while the Mac and iPad line move to USB-C is downright bad, and getting worse by the day. Apple should have dumped Lightning for USB-C on the iPhone at least three (and arguably four) years ago. At this point, they're so far behind the technology curve that I'm starting to wonder if Apple's management decisions are being made by Magic-8-Ball. Instead of innovating, the iPhone is playing catch-up, and losing. Not good.
Yeah, but other languages that existed at the time (Pascal) had run-time bounds checking, and there's no reason C couldn't have done that too, with the addition of a slightly richer string syntax. Though they couldn't have anticipated the long-term security implications of that decision, the folks who created C knew that it was a tradeoff. They chose a slightly smaller footprint (no length bytes) and slightly better performance over robustness.
Around 70 percent of all the vulnerabilities in Microsoft products ... are memory safety issues.
They can't remember how to code safely. :-)
Not at all. They have a huge legacy codebase. Rewriting all those strcpy and strncpy calls to strlcpy takes time.
And except for modern C++, C and C++ historically lacked reference counting, which gives you the additional joy of debugging use-after-free violations. These bugs are remarkably easy to cause and remarkably hard to detect until something just randomly crashes.
That's kind of a misleading statement. Jews were the largest group, followed by Soviet civilians, then Soviet POWs, then Poles, then Serbs, but those other four groups at least arguably weren't genocide, because they were rounded up and targeted as part of stealing the land that they owned, rather than because of their race/religion/ethnicity specifically.
The three groups you mentioned were, but they made up a very small percentage of the total. There's only record of one person of African descent being a victim of the holocaust, and only 20 imprisoned. Romani holocaust victims numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Homosexual victims numbered only a few thousand (estimated 5-15K).
So it's not that we forget the other victims so much as that it is a whole lot easier to describe the holocaust generically as an attempt to exterminate a race than add a footnote that says "along with a few other minority populations that each made up a tiny fraction of a percent of the population". It waters down the message without adding anything meaningful to the overall point, which is that discriminating against people based on race or religion is bad, and that the Nazis took that horror to a whole new level.